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We regularly bang on about winter tyres and their merits so we've put our money where our mouths are this year and fitted a set of Bridgestone winter rubber to all four wheels of the CompleteCar.ie Golf BlueMotion. It gave us an excuse to have the car cleaned again too. It's so easy to take one of the few permanent cars in the household for granted when there are so many shiny new models passing through our hands.

Have to admit that the clean has really brought up the paintwork and though the Golf…

Alright, I admit that winter tyres may not have been necessary as yet, though I did feel vilified in having them fitted to our long term test Golf when the temperature plummeted to zero in the middle of December. Then it decided to come back up to a balmier 14 degrees around Christmas Day...

Still, it's only the first week of January and many are predicting cold weather and snow for later this month.

However, I'm not as ready as I was, as one of the tyres suffered a puncture before the holidays. Annoyingly,…

Hopefully you've already seen our first drive of the BMW M5? There's no debate; it's a five-star car. Paddy actually wanted to award it six out of five... Anyway, following the publication of the first drive we got to bring the car to the Ascari Race Resort in Spain to see what it could do at and beyond the limits. I know it's pretty irrelevant given that few buyers of this €132,000 saloon are ever going to dare take it on a circuit, but it does help understand the car's…

There's no doubt that, if fuel economy is your top priority and you're a high-mileage driver, then the BlueMotion version of the Golf is the car for you. The official combined consumption figure is 3.8 litres/100km (74.3mpg) and it gets pretty close to that. We're consistently amazed by its ability to avoid fill-ups, even when confined to the environs of Dublin. On the motorway it's peerless.

Though it's not quite peerless, as Volkswagen offers the same 1.6-litre TDI engine in the rest of the Golf range. Sure, you do without a list of further…

We've got hold of a Volkswagen Golf for a few months to live with it every day. In some ways it's a more realistic test of a car than our usual week-long loans. Paddy will be the 'owner' of the car most of the time, but I'll be getting behind the wheel regularly too to give a second opinion.

Our car is the BlueMotion model, which is the most fuel efficient Golf available. It's not difficult to spot some of the modifications made in the name of efficiency. It sits lower for a start…

I was fortunate enough to get to try out the new 'M1' when it was still in development back in October. I did my best to remain aloof and professional about it all, but let's face it; even the most hardened motoring critic is going to get excited about a 'baby M3'. That drive was on lovely smooth German roads and there was no doubt in my mind that the 1 Series M Coupé would live up to the hype.

Last week I…

Let's catch up on the rest of yesterday's news first. The most interesting titbit was the revealing of one of Nissan's stars at the Geneva Motor Show. Called the Invitation, this concept clearly paves the way for a new production model and that'd be the replacement for the Note compact MPV.

It's a cracking looking car by all accounts, and we'd be hopeful that much of the Invitation's look will be carried through to the showroom in 2013. In some ways it's closer in style to a conventional five-door hatchback, though we'd expect plenty…