2000s

Which decade has the greatest driver's cars? Which era best encapsulates the thrill of driving?

- by JOHN BARKER

In this five-part series we're tracing the trajectory of the performance car, from the 1980s through the ensuing decades right up to the present day. Our aim: to find the absolute evo sweetspot, the era when all the stars aligned for those who enjoy the thrill of driving: technology, road conditions, running costs, car culture, and of course the cars themselves. This month we've reached the 2000s, the decade that saw a wave of brilliant new cars, from BMW's inspired reinvention of the Mini to the thunderous Lamborghini Murciélago

IT WAS THE BEST OF TIMES, IT WAS THE WORST OF TIMES.... we had everything before us, we had nothing before us...' The opening line from Charles Dickens' novel A Tale of Two Cities.

The 2000s promised to be the best of times. Here at evo, as the '90s came to a close we'd just celebrated our first birthday, a significant publishing milestone, and we were very much looking forward to the next decade. However, we were on the cusp of not just a new decade but a new millennium, and for months a mixture of experts and weirdos had been predicting chaos when the clocks struck midnight on December 31, 1999, all because many electronic counters represented years with just two digits. The doom-mongers predicted that this would lead to the crash of banking systems, aeroplanes falling from the sky and, even worse, that we'd have to reset the clock on the cooker.