A FEW WEEKS ago, I wrote about the joy of driving a classic Mercedes-Benz 500E and it got me thinking.

What cars from today will have the same meaning to us in the future? At the cars and coffee meets of 2056, what will middle-aged men like me be rolling up in?

Cars of the 1990s were built, at times, without much in the way of filters.

Emission rules were a nice-to-have, and safety tech was only starting to catch on. Cars had airbags and felt solid, but nothing was watching your eyes to see if you were drowsy.

Those features are mandatory now, in part as an antidote to our addiction to our phones, and we are a far more distracted generation of drivers than any that came before us.

The classic car market is booming, and you have to admire anyone with the foresight to hold onto a car that meant something to them.

I wasn’t so clever. About 20 years ago, after a few glasses of wine and browsing the internet for cars, which is something I do about 20% of any given day, I found a 1991 BMW 318iS in Luton.

The E30 was the much-loved 3-Series of the 1980s and 90s, built in big numbers but, by the early 2000s, easily picked up for very little money. Mine was one of them.

I hopped on a cheap Ryanair flight and met the owner of Old Colonel Cars. He took £2,000 off me for a low-mileage, rust-free Lazer Blue car with a good history, and I drove it back to the ferry.

It never missed a beat. I loved that thing, and was delighted with myself when I sold it a year later for €4,000. Today, that same car in Ireland would probably cost me €25,000.

Drawing up a list of tomorrow’s classics is tricky, and one reason is our obsession with SUVs.

Since the Nissan Qashqai opened the floodgates in 2007, we have become a nation of crossover buyers, and they nearly all look the same.

Even at the luxury end, the Mercedes S-Class and BMW 7-Series have been elbowed aside by the ubiquitous Range Rover, a complicated, occasionally troublesome machine unlikely to be around in huge numbers decades from now.

Then there are electric vehicles. July saw Ireland become an EV-first market for new cars, and the technology, simple and rather brilliant, is already delivering lower running costs and emissions for those who choose it.

The earliest EVs, like the original Nissan Leaf and Renault Fluence, already feel like relics of an immature version of the same idea.

Classic EVs?

Are there EVs today that we will still want to keep? A few. The Renault 5 EV is a car Renault has got properly right, a modern take on the gloriously simple original that you would have seen plenty of outside Dunnes Stores in the 1980s.

It is fun to drive, looks great, and used values suggest it will hold on to its worth.

Even more likely to become a future classic is its feistier sibling, the Alpine A290. The Tesla Model S deserves a mention too, with a timeless shape and a mechanical simplicity that should make it easy to keep going.

Same goes for two design outliers, the Honda e and the BMW i3s. Neither made much commercial sense at the time, both were short-lived, and that is exactly why they will be sought after: small production runs and genuinely distinctive shapes that nothing since has quite matched.

On the petrol and hybrid side, a few spring to mind. The most obvious is the Toyota GR Yaris.

Honda GR Yaris

At close to €90,000, with a 1.6-litre turbo engine, all-wheel drive and 280hp, the numbers on paper aren’t remarkable, but it’s one of the most thrilling things you can drive, essentially a road-going rally car.

It is already much-loved on the used market and, without doubt, is a future classic.

The Volkswagen Golf GTI Edition 50 belongs here too, the birthday special I drove on Irish roads earlier this year, made a little more special by sharing its birth year with mine.

And you can’t talk about hot hatches without the Mini Cooper S, a nameplate with real heritage and still, somehow, as cheeky as ever.

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Then there’s a car I have spent the last week living with, the Honda Prelude. Newly arrived here, it reimagines a much-loved nameplate from the 80s and 90s, and although it runs a hybrid 2.0-litre engine, it feels like a proper performance car from a different era.

Honda has resisted the urge to make it needlessly fast, but its 180-odd horsepower is rapid enough, and it is a genuinely stunning-looking car that will still turn heads in 2056.

Honda Prelude.

Then there’s the Alpine A110, Renault’s performance arm. A 252hp coupé weighing just 1,100kg, it’s a direct descendant of the 1963 original and one of the purest sports cars sold today. At €94,995 it isn’t cheap, but it’s almost certainly an investment.

Any Porsche 911 falls into that category too, and prices are extraordinary at the moment.

There are around 30 on DoneDeal Cars right now, ranging from about €25,000 for the cheapest, with well over 200,000km on the clock, up to €329,950 for a three-year-old Turbo S with barely 19,000km showing.

If you can stretch to one of any description, it remains a very solid investment, and unlike my old BMW, probably not one you’d be selling on a year later for a loss.

Paddy Comyn is the head of automotive content and communications with DoneDeal Cars. He has been involved in the Irish motor industry for more than 25 years.

Journal Media Ltd has shareholders in common with DoneDeal Ltd