KEY POINTS:
Bertha Benz looked pretty good for a 160-year-old.
She and I were cruising around the square next to the Frankfurt motor show, our transport an 1886 Benz motorised tricycle of the type she drove 180km from Mannheim to Pforzheim, and back again, in 1888.
The Benz's single-cylinder engine
chuffed every 10 yards or so as Bertha recounted the tale of the world's first long-distance car drive, undertaken without her husband Karl's knowledge to prove that his invention really worked.
The only tools needed were a hatpin to unblock the carburettor and a garter to insulate a bare wire; benzine was bought at a chemist's en route.
OK, so the Benz was a replica, as was Bertha.
But it was a fine advertisement for the world's oldest carmaker at its home show, contrasting nicely with the Mercedes-Benz F700, a concept car neatly encapsulating much of what has happened in the 121 years since Benz's tricycle.
The F700 is a large luxury saloon, a kind of future S-class, but powered by a four-cylinder engine of just 1.8 litres.
It's a Diesotto engine, which runs on petrol but, under light loads, causes the petrol to self-ignite under pressure, as diesel fuel does.
Add a two-stage turbocharger and a hybrid electric-drive system, and you have a spectacularly clean, economical saloon with the pace of an S350 or an S320 CDI.
It also has Pre-Scan suspension, which uses laser scanners to analyse the road ahead.
In theory, this should provide the perfect ride.
This is almost the stuff of sci-fi.
There was more such optimistic futurism to be found among the "plug-in", mains-rechargeable hybrid concept cars on show, ranging from a new version of the Toyota Prius with extra battery capacity, through the handsome, six-door Opel Flextreme to perhaps the most intriguing of all, the Volvo ReCharge.
Based on the C30 hatchback, this Volvo has an electric motor within each wheel and no separate brakes n that task being performed by the motors themselves.
It has a lithium-polymer battery back tolerant of overcharging, which fits nicely with what is emerging as a significant benefit of plug-in hybrids.
Power stations have to generate electricity all the time, but at night a lot of the energy goes to waste.
So plug-in hybrid cars could be used as energy-storage devices that could feed electricity back in to the national grid during the day if they are not being used.
Owners could be paid for this returned electricity, which could be offset against the cost of the electricity used to power the car n one full charge of which can power the Volvo for 160km at 100km/h without involving the 1.6-litre petrol/bioethanol engine.
"We could have a car like this in production by 2015," says its engineering director, Ichiro Sugioka.
"The harder part is to work out the costs and benefits with the energy suppliers and tax authorities."You will have guessed by now that there was a very strong green theme at Frankfurt.
Even BMW's imminent X6, a kind of fastback coupE version of the X5 SUV, was revealed as a hybrid, while Audi's new A4 also appeared with a hybrid version in attendance.
But only Peugeot showed a near-production-ready example of what seems, to the European mind, the most obvious idea of all: a diesel hybrid.
So far, hybrids have had a strong American and Japanese flavour, markets that up to now haven't favoured diesels.
But in European high-speed motorway use, a petrol/electric hybrid emits as much CO2 as a good diesel car, and its green advantage is lost.
Combine a diesel engine with hybrid electric drive, however, and extraordinary efficiency is possible: Peugeot claims average CO2 emissions of just 90g/km for its 308 HybridHDI.
A very different sort of 308 was the RCZ two-seater coupE, a good-looking rival for Audi's TT and likely to reach production.
Renault's coupe version of its Laguna is even closer to reality; as striking as the Laguna hatchback is underwhelming, it will be on the market within a year and all versions will have four-wheel steering.
BMW showed the new coupe version of its 1-series, too.
Back to greenery, and it was a great year for small cars.
Ford's Verve concept showed how next year's new Fiesta will look with a rising waistline and a visual excitement absent from the current car.
Its underpinnings are similar to the new Mazda 2's, but the production car will have a higher roof than the Verve and will lack the concept car's frameless door windows.
Its arch-rival, Opel/Vauxhall, revealed a tall, curvy, new Agila, to be built in Hungary and sold also as the Suzuki Splash, and, two years on from the Countryman concept's first show appearance, Mini launched the production version, the Clubman.
This Mini estate car has a narrow rear passenger door on the right-hand side only, which has angered those of us who think that a car with a British badge, a British ancestry and which is built in a British factory should be optimised for right-hand drive, not left-hand drive.
But BMW, the parent company, reckons there are advantages either way n besides which, the fuel filler's position (on the left) is the immutable, deciding factor.
The Clubman is very big for a "small" car, and not very mini at all.
The real mini-cars were the concepts shown by VW and Toyota: the up! and the iQ.
The first of these is the car the Smart ForFour should have been, a square-tailed, snub-nosed, deeply appealing four-seater with a rear-mounted three-cylinder engine and a boot space in the right-hand half of the nose.
It's more than a flight of fancy; production is a strong possibility, and your correspondent spent quite a lot of time answering market research questions when cornered on the stand.
Toyota's iQ is an even shorter car, under three metres long and nominally a two-seater, although an extra adult and child could be squeezed in.
Designed in France, on the principles of "vibrant clarity" and "perfect imbalance", the iQ is a cute idea.
But out of the two, my money's on the up! (no humour intended).
At motoring's opposite end, Jaguar's shapely new XFs drew the most crowds of any Frankfurt show stand while nearby, Aston Martin's DBS - all 510bhp of it - split opinion as to whether it looked fabulously racy or merely a DB9 with an excess of bodykit.
Its visual extravagance couldn't compete with that of the Lamborghini Reventon, though, a A1m reinterpretation of the V12 Murcielago of which all 20 examples have been sold.
Its artfully creased carbon fibre body, finished in satin-finish sparkly grey, is said to be inspired by an F16 fighter.
One final note on inspiration.
The Chinese company Shuanghuan showed an SUV called CEO and a smaller one called UFO, inspired respectively by the BMW X5 and Toyota RAV4.
So great was the inspiration that they were near-perfect copies n and on BMW's home turf, too.
The lawyers are limbering up right now.
- THE INDEPENDENT
