There’s been a lot of talk lately about flying cars, but if you ask us nothing beats the romance of the road. Which is why in this issue we honour the dreamiest of dream machines made for the tarmac, in our annual Car of the Year awards.

Elsewhere, while our intrepid traveller Mark Johanson did not have a Norton 500 motorcycle on hand, he did use an e-bike and a perfectly good pair of feet to reprise Che Guevara’s classic travelogue The Motorcycle Diaries and cross the unknown wilderness of Chilean Patagonia.

If your preferred adventure is more of the retail variety and all roads lead to the nearest luxury boutique, we also have plenty of haute horology and fashion for men and women on offer. And for the auto-phobes in our midst, our resident back-page humourist Ben Widdicombe explains why he has zero interest being behind the wheel. Like the rest of us, he’s probably waiting for his AI-piloted flying car.