OPINION: The world's gone wild with stupid horsepower figures – 300's all you need

Circa 300PS (220kW) is enough to give even a sorted chassis a thorough workout – you don't step out of a Honda Civic Type R and immediately think ''needs more grunt'' – but it's also slow enough to allow you to experience the joy of acceleration, like a tasting menu that delivers multiple tiny delicious morsels, stretching a 20-minute meal into a three-hour flavour epic.

The Taycan Turbo GT does 0-62mph in 2.2 seconds, and this, to me, seems utterly pointless. What do you do after the 2.2 seconds are over? Brake to a crawl just so you can experience the explosive performance again?

I've found myself doing this in high-powered EVs while at the same time having the nagging thought at the back of my head that A. it's a bit puerile, and B. acceleration this savage isn't actually enjoyable.

Clearly, Grand Prix drivers don't stretch elastic bands with their heads for no reason; they do it to prepare their neck muscles for the ordeal of withstanding, among other things, serious accelerative Gs. Taycan drivers have no such preparation.

But I won't reserve my pointless horsepower moan for EVs; petrol cars can be just as frustrating. A V10 Audi R8 is one of the finest things to grace this earth, and accelerating through its gears will leave every part of your body tingling.

But on a daily grind run up the M6, the R8 turns into a master antagonist. Noisy and uncompromising, it has a boatload of power you can never really use, and heavy fuel consumption is the only sign of the multi-cylinder masterpiece lurking under the engine cover. This is the reason most people buy 911s.

And anyway, while driving a properly fast car – properly fast – on the UK roads may well be exciting at the time, you can bet you'll be wide-eyed later that night, terrified that a letter from Plod will be dropping on your doormat sometime in the intervening fortnight.

And when was the last time you got a clear enough road to drive fast? If you live in London (or within a 50-mile circumference), you need to get pretty early to have a decent go at having fun, only to spend the rest of your day feeling frazzled due to too much coffee and not enough sleep.

There is one place where more power is (almost) always better, and that's on track. A perfect surface and featureless runoffs can negate the feeling of speed from the fastest supercars and, I'm willing to admit, can make a 300-horsepower hot hatch feel like a bumbling shopping trolley on a wide, high-speed course.

But everywhere else, give me a lowish 300 horses in a compact car with a sorted chassis and a manual gearbox, and I doubt I'll be happier in anything else. 

Of course, there is one car that torpedoes this theory and that's the Toyota GT86. It was a fantastic car that showed us that stupid horsepower, big capacity engines and high-tech chassis trickery are not the only route to fun – in fact, all we needed was a cheap, rear-wheel drive sports car with an LSD and Prius tyres and did we buy it? Of course we didn't. Its replacement, the GR86, changed in only one notable way – it had more power.