I have never been to France, which I feel is an important fact with which to begin this article. I have no experience of the French, other than the tourists I served in my waitering days and those I’ve seen in the media and film. But I think it’s a fair assumption that the French see themselves as different. They still have a language council which decides on new words, like ordinateur, meaning computer, for instance. We had one of those in apartheid.

They are a breed slightly apart, I feel. French women eat whatever they like and don’t seem to put on weight. There’s even a book about it, entitled Why French Women Don’t Get Fat. The name of their bubbly is somehow protected by this unwritten law that prevents anyone else on Earth from calling it you-know-what, and the president is married to certifiable hottie and former nude model/singer, Carla Bruni. Whether she sang nude I can’t confirm.

One of the reasons I love driving cars from all over the world is that I wrongly or rightly approach the vehicle with the stereotype of the people who made it clouding my judgement. It’s fun. German cars are very serious, and very brilliantly engineered. That’s an obvious one. Italian cars have always been beautiful but were as reliable as investing in the Zimbabwean Stock Exchange. So they got the Germans to build most of them, and now we have Lamborghini’s that don’t break. Win win, I say.

Japanese cars are frenetic, generally smaller, enthusiastic cars that never seem to give up and never seem keen to show you what they can actually do. Until you really provoke them. This, I imagine, is the same reason why we’ve never had a Japanese Formula 1 champion. I could write an essay on American cars so let’s leave that for another day and skip straight to the French.

Recently we drove a Citroen C4 with a new, automatic gearbox. It’s sole purpose in life was to change gears, which it failed at, miserably. Citroen insisted that we call it a manual, but there was no gearlever. Well actually there was a gearlever, but it was the size and shape of one of those things that keep your leftover wine fresh. My take on this is: Am I changing gears? No. Is the car changing gears? Yes. Then it’s an automatic.

The Citroen's hysterical attempt at reinventing gearboxes.

What the Citroen engineers had done was look at manual gearboxes, then look at automatic ones, decided they were both shit and had a crack at a new technology. As my partner in crime Gavin Williams said, every time it changed gear it felt like you had driven through a shed. Not a shed sturdy enough to stop you, but you knew it was there. It was hilariously rubbish.

We have a C4 on test with a proper manual, and I’m happy to report that it’s wonderful. But the interior – here we go. For a start, the owner’s manual does not fit in the cubby hole. It’s not that the cubby hole is tiny, it’s just that it is a weird shape. Like the guest loo in an old French chateaux. So the owner’s manual lives in the door side pocket storage area thingy.

There is a button on the steering wheel, one of many, which has a diamond symbol. I pressed this a few times and thought it achieved precisely nothing. But it turns out that it turns on all the lights inside the car. The French symbol for lights must be a diamond. Who knew.

We also have a Renault Megane GT at the moment, one of the C4’s many competitors. It has the most counter-intuitive infotainment system I have ever encountered. Again, as Gavin pointed out, that’s mostly because counter-intuitive is another word for French. For some godforsaken reason, every motoring journalist in South Africa cranks up the bass and treble in these test cars, so that the sound system crackles and distorts like the PA system at an old age home. Good luck trying to adjust the bass and treble in the Megane. It’s very nearly impossible.

I must point out though that all this Frenchness is finally starting to pay off when it comes to the actual driving. Sporting a 1.4litre turbo engine, the Megane’s size makes it seem like it should be slow, boring and witless. But it is massively fun to drive. My favourite road to test a car’s handling is The Glen, the road that connects the Table Mountain traffic circle to the top of Clifton. I gave the Renault an absolute kick up and down the Glen, and it surprised me so much I started making involuntary noises. I might have hollered a bit. Apologies.

What a well sorted car. It’s one of the best handling cars I’ve driven to date, and I can only  presume it borrows from the exceptional Cup Megane at the top of the range, which I am now desperate to get my hands on. The Citroen is slightly more lumpy, more laid back, mostly because while Renault were winning Formula One World Championships, Citroen were still building lounge suites that moved. I know they do particularly well on the World Rally stage, but it doesn’t seem to translate.

The new Citroen C4. Very luxurious for this segment. Has massage seats.

In this segment of the motoring market, in which many of you will buy, you have a plethora of models to choose from. The BMW 1 Series, Audi A3, Ford Focus, Opel Astra, VW Golf, Alfa Romeo Guiletta, Fiat Bravo, Toyota Auris and Mazda 3 are all similarly priced, similarly sized, with a range of engines that are all just variations of the same thing.

Having driven most of them, I think the French contenders here make an interesting alternative. They’re distinctive, that’s for sure. And because these manufacturers really are trying to get your attention, the Megane and the C4 come with loads of options as standard, some of which you will have to fork out for elsewhere, especially if you go German. The Megane comes with SatNav as standard,  for instance.

The wonderful thing about car journalism is that no matter what I recommend, you, the motorist, will still go out and buy a car for some reason that neither you or I can explain. Your dad had one. Or maybe you’ve always seen yourself as a Mercedes person. Or you think you’ll look good in a Audi. Whatever. Just give the French a go. They really are on it at the moment.

*Headline inspired by Seth Rotherham’s brilliant, scathing opinion pieces on cellphone etiquette.