It’s all well and good having eleventy million horsepower and more onboard software than an IBM server farm. W… wait a minute – no, it isn’t. It’s patently useless. Real fun doesn’t come from a car’s computers doing 250mph (402kph) while you sit in the cockpit and puff out your chest – it comes from holding a Burt Reynolds-approved powerslide, with two fistfuls of opposite lock, at about a tenth of that speed. 

And that, as we’ve said until even the people listening are blue in the face, is the genius of the GT86 – real driving thrills at speeds that won’t turn you into a ballistic missile should anything go wrong. And all of this is available at the merest fraction of the cost of the modern breed of sports car.

It’s a pretty tall order to be reliably good. More often than not, brilliance – like Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours – immediately precedes bitter disappointment (we’re looking at you, Tusk). 

But the Fiesta ST won TG’s coveted Car of the Year award in 2013, then backed it up with the new model in 2018. And why wouldn’t it? The ST manages to be small, practical, efficient, affordable, insurable and comfortable – i.e. most everything you could want in the real world – while also being resolutely driver-focused, an expert handler and a bastion of easy-access, always-on fun.

More than anything else, the i8 proved that supercars didn’t have to tear the planet apart just to get around it. 

The i8 has pretty much all of the supercar tropes – a mid-engined layout, hundreds of horsepowers and steering so sublime that you wish the satnav had a ‘use only squiggly roads’ setting. But it’s missing that one, central supercar tenet: that speed can only be achieved with a massive V-something, huffing petrol at a rate of gallons per mile, not miles per gallon.

So, for considered, not conspicuous, consumption, the i8 gets our guilt-free nod.

You could say we love the QV because we like nothing better than a walk down memory lane in our favourite pair of rose-tinted glasses. Or maybe it’s because Alfa’s our all-time favourite underdog: characterful, fatally flawed but capable of absolute brilliance. 

But, in the dulcet phrasing of Australians, nah, stuff that. 

It’s because Alfa, seemingly out of nowhere, built a super saloon that kicked all kinds of derriere. The Giulia QV is a sporting four-door that you’d buy, not because you have a lingering affinity for Alfa, but because it’s every bit as good as an AMG or an M car in the ways that matter every day, and even better in the one thing that really counts in the Top Gear Guide to Living Well: fun.

Sometimes, a brief point means more than lyrical waxing. To that end, we leave you with a direct quote from TG.com’s Stephen Dobie: 

“It’s the best car I’ve driven, and will probably ever drive.”

If the Tesla Model S finally made electric cars interesting and, dare we say it, cool, the holy trinity was irrefutable proof that hybrids could be properly entertaining. And terrifying, depending on your frame of reference. 

It’s impossible to refer to one without immediately invoking its peers – each as incredibly expensive, mind-scramblingly complex and brain-bendingly fast as the others.

These three marked the apotheosis of what that hybrid cars could achieve: a blend of engine blocks and battery packs exploited not so much for economy, but tectonic levels of shove. Just don’t ask about running costs. 

Track cars make poor road cars. They’re too hard, too focused, too much about going fast at Pflanzgarten, rather than fun on the roads around Farnborough. 

But, as the original Cayman GT4 said, “Hold my Weissbier”. This was a sports car every bit as adept – and, crucially, enjoyable – on the road as on the track. 

McLarens have never had a problem with speed. Great big daubs of it have accompanied anything with a McLaren badge since the 1960s. The problem, at least for its cars during the tenure of Ron Dennis, had an air of being numerically superior, but about as emotionally charged as a Michael Bay movie.  

The 675LT, on the other hand, proved McLarens might actually be made by humans with emotions, rather than Ron-robots. It had the speed required by the McLaren badge (and its buyers), just paired with a bounding, exuberant personality.

One of Top Gear’s maxims has to do with brute force: if it doesn’t work, you’re just not using enough. 

This, we feel, may have been the guiding principle for the SLS Black, an object lesson in the art of excess. Yes, we malign modern sports cars for being too wide, too brutish, too focused on power – and the SLS AMG was certainly wide, brutish and powerful – but the SLS had an ace in the hole: acres and acres of personality. Oh, and perhaps the best V8 ever built. 

Yep, this little oversteering oddball is the coolest M car of the past decade. A passion project, built on a shoestring budget and cobbled together from a parts bin, it’s the sheer ambition and ability of its creators – and the bountiful nature of the BMW M Division parts bin – that catapulted this tail-happy terror straight into the heart of even the most curmudgeonly of car lovers. 

OK, so BMW building a rear-driven, straight-six-powered coupe wasn’t going to break any particular moulds, the sheer brilliance of this genuine pocket rocket made us want to steal that particular mould for ourselves. Or, y’know, buy. That’s always an option. 

If you’ve been anywhere near this site in the past two years, you’ll never have been more than ten clicks away from one of us banging on ad infinitum about how the Alpine A110 proves that light is right, how it’s so much more fun to play with a small, moderately powerful but perfectly sorted car than any of the new breed of hulking road dominators, how the A110 is the closest approximation we have to the second coming of Christ himself and we’re willing to sacrifice tyres in his name. 

For reminding us of what’s lost when it’s buried under technology and power, for reacquainting us with the simple pleasure of a lightweight sports car, for using a feather touch to deliver a bloody nose to Porsche – PORSCHE – the Alpine A110 remains one of our all-time favourites.

How the electric revolution so thoroughly wrong-footed the major car makers still flummoxes us to this day. But Tesla absolutely beat the big boys to the punch, leaving them to relearn everything they thought they knew about what electricity could do – and, crucially, what buyers wanted. 

We’ve had big-player electric cars from Jag, Mercedes and Audi, but the Jag was rushed to market, while Merc and Audi’s electric car debuts were tepid, blubberous and instantly forgettable.

Leave it to Porsche to get this one right. While they were relearning their own business – as was everyone – they learned that high voltage was the way forward. Higher, in fact, than anyone else on the market. So the Taycan runs an 800V system, allowing for faster charging, more regen under braking, and thinner, lighter wiring (because more volts means fewer amps). 

This is just one example of where Porsche’s boffins went over the electric-car playbook and decided that it could be better. Now imagine a whole car’s worth of that, and you’ll see why it’s our 2019 Car of the Year and one of the best of the decade. 

Notice a bit of a trend here? Just being fast won’t cut it. True greatness comes from thinking differently, from ingenuity, idiosyncrasy, passion and dedication. And it helps if the finished product is as fun as a jumping castle full of husky puppies.

Enter the Nomad: a tube-frame off-roader that’s ready for the end of days, and just as ready to help you laugh your way through every day until then.

“Oh, look, Top Gear’s favourite cars of the decade all cost as much as a semi-detached house and travel at speeds reserved for commercial airliners,” you’ve probably thought by this point. 

Well, consider this a little bit of balance: the Up is one of the best cars of the past decade. 

It’s a wonderfully thought out little car, a modern reflection of the original big-space-in-small-dimensions masterclass that is the original Mini. It manages to be smaller than a Fiat Panda, but it has a bigger boot. You also stand a chance of walking away from a crash in the Up; less so in the Panda. 

It’s the right size for cities, it’s cheap, well made and can even fit drivers up to 6’4” tall. We know. We’ve tried. 

Yes, VW named it the ‘Up!’, including a grammatically infuriating and entirely useless exclamation mark, but that’s roughly the only black mark against this otherwise perfect city car. 

When the 911R became little more than an income spinner for cynical speculators, we wept. 

Because the 911R was everything we wanted from a modern Porsche – a lightweight body, barely containing the rasping fury of Porsche’s naturally aspirated, 4.0-litre flat six. Combine that with demure exterior styling and a six-speed manual – no PDK gearboxes here, thanks – and it’s a recipe for greatness. 

Porsche clearly agreed, and so set about creating the very best 911 since… well, we were still in school uniform, at the very least. The GT3 Touring was everything the 911R was, just less frenetic and less expensive. And, hopefully, enough to give those cynical speculators a few sleepless nights with their “£500,000” 911R. 

Figures don’t tell the whole story. But figures like 1,479bhp, 1,986Nm ft and 250mph (402kph) definitely give you the broad strokes of what the Regera is about. 

From there, it just gets weirder. Case in point? The Regera doesn’t have a gearbox. It also runs an 800V electrical system (hmmm… wonder where Porsche got the idea for the Taycan?) but does without a limited-slip diff. Electric power alone is responsible for 700bhp, or roughly a Tesla Model S’s worth. 

If all of this sounds like the recipe for a catastrophic accident, you’re not alone. And yet Christian von Koenigsegg’s team has resolved these unique, disparate and downright bonkers elements to create perhaps the rarest-groove supercar we can think of. And one of the best.