As a car manufacturer, it's very easy to get ideas above your station. It's happened to Honda a couple of times in its past when, flushed with pride at its racetrack successes, it has attempted to punch well above its weight and has had its fingers burned. Being accepted as a true premium manufacturer is a case of tiny steps and over the past few years, the company has been diligently doing the groundwork. Is the latest generation Accord now on a par with the prestige German makes? Today you can certainly argue the point. Undeniably, it's a notch or two above the 'big box' mainstream marques.

Honda was fiendishly clever when it introduced this Accord series back in 2003. Where the previous generation Accord range had opened with budget 1.6 and 1.8-litre cars, this time round there was no such thing, the opening model being a 2.0-litre car. This resulted in two key effects. Firstly it deterred the usual fleet buyers from purchasing mass quantities and instantly denting residual values and, secondly, it cemented the view in the public perception that the Accord was a more upmarket product than something like a Vauxhall Vectra or a Ford Mondeo.

Sit in the Accord and you'll easily appreciate how this perception came to be. It feels extremely well built and certainly a level removed in terms of materials and design from its rather reedy predecessor. What wasn't so apparent was that this perception is largely a very clever piece of subterfuge by Honda's marketing gurus. Back in 2003, the price of an equivalently specified Mondeo 2.0-litre was £16,145, so in reality, the Accord wasn't that much dearer than the Ford or other mainstream stalwarts - the public just thought it was.

"Honda is looking at the margins realised by the German premium brands and eyeing their market shares enviously"

This kind of strategy usually spells disaster for a given product but Honda was playing the long game here, trading off the short term pain of lost fleet sales for the longer term gain of being able to charge more for a product seen as an increasingly desirable vehicle. They've managed the Accord range very astutely since then, each subsequent update and change further distancing it from the fleet market norm. Park an Accord on your drive and you'll have made a very conscious decision to announce your own social mobility.

These days, prices start at £17,177 and, as before, there's a choice of 2.0 and 2.4-litre petrol engines plus the superb 2.2-litre CTDi diesel we've been trying in our long term test car. The latest model goes in for a few styling tweaks, the most obvious of which is the wide chromed bar running across the front grille where before there was none. The front and rear bumpers have also been subtly resculpted and the sides of the car look a little swoopier, thanks in no small part to the fitment of side skirts. The Tourer estate model I've been driving gets a little more chrome around the rear end to give a more upmarket look and there are some revised alloy wheel designs along with an expanded palette of colours to choose from. Each step edges the Accord closer towards the BMW 3 Series, the Audi A4 and the Mercedes C Class. Before it gets there, the Honda will have to deal with the barrier guard of the Saab 9-3, the Alfa Romeo 159, the Volvo S60, the Jaguar X-TYPE and the Lexus IS, all vehicles that are also attempting to crack the premium market.

In order to do that, it needs an angle, a trick up its sleeve. It might just have that in the form of the Accord ADAS - a technological showcase that demonstrates that when it comes to vehicle technology, there aren't many that can live with Honda. Basically they've thrown a whole bunch of technology at it, allowing customers access to some seriously advanced features, the like of which were the stuff of show cars only a few years ago. The Vehicle Stability Assist (VAS) and Drive-By-Wire (DBW) throttle system are just a couple of acronyms to get you started. There's also the option of VASN. Any guesses on that one? Voice Activated Satellite Navigation is your answer there, although how it will cope with the profanities I end up directing at most sat nav systems is still open to conjecture. Next up is HFT. That's a Hands Free Telephone kit. The really interesting stuff comes with Honda's ADAS system itself.

It's vaguely unsettling at first. Relax your hands on the wheel of Honda's ADAS (Advanced Driver Assistance System) equipped Accord at motorway speeds and you'll feel the car taking over. The steering nudges the car into the centre of its lane all by itself while the accelerator modulates itself, keeping a respectable distance between you and the car in font. It may not drive itself, but it's enormously impressive.

It's at its best when combined with the Lane Keeping Assist System (LKAS). Citroën have developed a system that alerts the driver when he or she drifts over the white lines on a major road, but Honda have gone a stage further and brought a system to market that makes it very difficult to do so in the first instance. LKAS uses a digital camera mounted at the top of the windscreen to study the road ahead. It then calculates the optimum steering torque - combination of human and assisted inputs - required to keep the vehicle in the centre of the lane. Take your hands off the wheel and you can see it doing its magic, but within ten seconds, the car detects the driver has stopped making any inputs and stops the electrical steering assistance.

With award-winning television advertising backing up the metal in the dealerships, Honda seems to be on a steady march upmarket. Can a company that sells budget cars like the Jazz and the Civic really cut it against the heavyweights? That remains to be seen, but if there's one company I'd hesitate to back against, it would have to be Honda.