AS THE dust settles from the opening media days at the world’s biggest motor show, we take a look at the vehicles that stoked our fire, and those that extinguished our joy.

HIT: Honda Urban EV Concept

It’d be easy to put the Mercedes-AMG Project One or Porsche 911 GT3 Touring at the top of this list but, desirable as they are, no other car sparked as much discussion in the office or elsewhere like this adorable little EV. Honda blindsided everybody by revealing it completely out of the blue, and then raised the bar by confirming it for showrooms in 2019.

MISS: BMW X7

Have you ever been presented with an ugly baby? It’s hard to know what to say. “Ooh. He’s a bruiser, isn’t he?” was about the best I could come up with when my cousin showed me her newborn. To be frank, he looked as if he’d been attached by the umbilical to a Hungry Jacks grease trap rather than a placenta.

HIT: Suzuki Swift Sport

Weighing in at less than 1000kg with a rorty, torquey engine and a manual gearbox, the third-gen Swift Sport has all the ingredients necessary for simple, accessible driving enjoyment. If it lands in Oz at around $25K, like the old one, this little hatch should be a cracking performance bargain.

MISS: Aeromobil Flying Car

There’s nothing like a flying car to top off a European motor show experience. It’s just one of those things you need to tick off along with Knight Rider yoke steering wheels, outdated Fatboy Slim launch music and sexagenarian men with red trousers and pomaded mullets. This year we have the Aeromobil flying car, which looks like an utterly ghastly car and a woeful aeroplane all rolled into one.

On the ground, the model is powered by an electric front wheel drive system which gives it an optimistic-sounding range of ’approximately’ 700km and a top speed of 160km/h. The company claims it can be converted to flying mode in just three minutes, although we think we could shave that down to two minutes if we really rushed it and cut a few corners.

According to Aeromobil chief technology officer Douglas MacAndrew, “Integrating flight and car travel is not simple, but having condensed approximately 60 man-years of research and development into three, the AeroMobil flying car is designed to meet the current legislative requirements.”

We reckon that if they’d hurried and cut a few more corners they could have condensed that into two. Slackers.

HIT: Audi RS4 Avant

Fast wagons are cool. A fast wagon based on the Audi A4 that so narrowly missed out on 2017 Car of the Year victory promises to be even cooler. Audi’s fourth-gen RS4 ditches the old 4.2-litre atmo V8, replaced by a twin-turbo V6 just like the original B5 RS4. It’s the same engine as found in the new TT RS – a 2.9-litre unit with 331kW and 600Nm.

“The Audi RS4 Avant is our RS icon with an incomparable history,” said Audi Sport chief, Stephan Winkelmann. It’s hard to think of a better candidate to occupy the ultimate single car garage.

MISS: Absentees

We sometimes hear of a car manufacturer dipping out of one or two shows in the season, but this year it seems that almost everybody had a sick note. Yes, the big German manufacturers were all present, desperately trying to outdo each other in terms of square metres, but the list of no-shows was huge.

They might have been seen elsewhere, but Frankfurt remains Europe’s biggest show and gets huge numbers of paying customers through the door. Must try harder.