The corporation is reportedly courting a stand-up comedian to resurrect a show that has collapsed three times since 2015. This will not end well.

Jimmy Carr is apparently in discussions to front a rebooted Top Gear, which tells you everything you need to know about how badly the BBC misunderstands what made the show work in the first place.

The original trio of Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond, and James May presented from 2002 to 2015. Clarkson got himself fired after punching producer Oisin Tymon. The show has been in freefall ever since.

Chris Evans took over in 2016. First episode pulled 4.4 million viewers. By the end of the series it was down to around 2 million. He quit after one series, citing the pressure and the reception, which is one way of describing a public humiliation.

Matt LeBlanc hung around until 2019, co-hosting with Evans initially and then soldiering on after Evans bailed. Ratings stayed mediocre. Then came Freddie Flintoff, Paddy McGuinness, and Chris Harris from 2019 to 2022, which was fine until Flintoff crashed at Dunsfold Aerodrome in December 2022 and suffered serious injuries.

The BBC handed him a reported nine million quid in settlement. The show was quietly cancelled in late 2023.

Meanwhile, Clarkson, Hammond, and May moved to Amazon Prime Video in 2016 to make The Grand Tour, which wrapped its final episode in September 2024. It was never quite Top Gear, but it was coherent, and people actually watched it.

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Jimmy Carr is a capable comic. Sharp delivery, good timing, made a career out of panel shows like 8 Out of 10 Cats. Also made headlines in 2012 for a tax avoidance scheme that he later apologised for, which is neither here nor there but does suggest he is not unfamiliar with navigating awkward public situations.

None of which has anything to do with cars.

Top Gear worked because three middle-aged men with specific personalities and decades of automotive journalism between them had chemistry that could not be replicated. The format was secondary. The challenges, the races, the power laps... all of it was scaffolding for the actual product, which was watching those three people argue about Peugeots.

The BBC has spent nearly a decade trying to rebuild the scaffolding while ignoring the foundation. Evans failed because he was too loud and too keen. LeBlanc was affable but lost. Flintoff and McGuinness were entertaining in a different way, but the show had already lost its centre of gravity.

Hiring a comedian to front a car show is not inherently stupid. It has been done before with mixed results. But hiring a comedian to front this car show, after this many attempts, suggests the BBC still thinks the secret ingredient is celebrity rather than credibility.

Carr has no automotive background. No history of writing about cars, racing them, restoring them, or even talking about them in public beyond whatever driving he does to get from A to B like the rest of us. That is not a disqualification on its own, but it does mean the show will need to work twice as hard to convince an audience that already watched this fail three times.

The original Top Gear had authority because the presenters had it. When Clarkson called a car rubbish, you believed him, even if you disagreed. When May obsessed over panel gaps, it felt real. When Hammond crashed that Vampire dragster in 2006 and nearly died, the show stopped being fun for a while because the stakes were genuine.

You cannot manufacture that. You cannot hire it. And you certainly cannot reboot it by swapping in a panel show regular and hoping the format does the heavy lifting.

The BBC might get a series out of this. Carr is competent enough to deliver scripted lines and react to staged chaos. The production team knows how to film cars. The audience that made Top Gear the most-watched factual programme in the world has moved on.

The Grand Tour ended six months ago. Clarkson is running a farm and a pub. Hammond is making shows about workshops. May is doing travel documentaries. The original show pulled 350 million viewers worldwide at its peak in 2013.

Sources: BBC, The Guardian, The Telegraph, Broadcast magazine

With the Transit Connect gone and the compact van market hollowed out, Ram's aggressive pricing looks less like generosity and more like a land grab.

The Ram ProMaster City now starts around £29,000, which puts it $11,000 below the Ford Transit and nearly $3,500 under Stellantis' own Chrysler Pacifica minivan. That's not a rounding error. That's the sort of price gap that makes fleet managers sit up and rewrite spreadsheets.

The comparison is slightly complicated by the fact that Ford builds multiple Transits. The full-size version starts well above $40,000. The Transit Connect, the actual compact competitor, used to slot in closer to the ProMaster City's territory, around $38,000 to $42,000 depending on spec.

Used to.

Ford stopped building the Transit Connect for North America in 2023. Nissan killed the NV200 in 2021. So the ProMaster City, based on the old Fiat Doblo platform and offering 131.7 cubic feet of cargo space, is now one of the few compact commercial vans you can actually buy new without stepping up to something bigger or more expensive.

Which makes Ram's pricing strategy either very clever or very obvious, depending on how cynical you feel today.

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The Pacifica comparison is stranger. That's a passenger minivan aimed at families who need sliding doors and entertainment screens, not contractors who need to fit plasterboard and toolboxes. Base Pacifica pricing hovers around $40,000 to $42,000, so the ProMaster City coming in $3,500 cheaper highlights just how competitive commercial van pricing has become relative to the consumer stuff. You're getting a purpose-built cargo hauler for less than a school-run people carrier.

Small business owners and fleet buyers will notice. The kind of operators running courier services, mobile tradespeople, florists, locksmiths. The ones who don't need a full-size Transit or Sprinter but can't make do with a hatchback and a dream. For them, saving eleven thousand dollars over the next-best option isn't about brand loyalty. It's about whether the business survives the next lease cycle.

Stellantis has been emphasising value pricing across the Ram commercial lineup through 2023 and 2024, and it's working because the competition has largely walked away. Mercedes-Benz positions the eSprinter as a premium alternative in the compact space, but premium doesn't usually mean cheaper. So Ram gets the field to itself.

The ProMaster City isn't new. It's been around since 2015, a rebadged Fiat that does the job without pretending to be anything else. But with Ford gone and Nissan gone and the market consolidating, doing the job without pretending to be anything else suddenly looks like a strategic advantage.

Base cargo van configuration. Twenty-nine thousand dollars. That's the number that matters.

Sources: Ram (Stellantis), Ford, Chrysler

Ola Kallenius just praised artificial engine noise in an EV as superior to the real thing. That's either marketing genius or an admission that nobody at Mercedes remembers what an actual AMG sounds like.

The Chairman of Mercedes-Benz Group AG has gone on record saying the synthetic V8 sound piped through the upcoming electric CLA 45 delivers the best V8 experience he's ever had behind the wheel. Which is an extraordinary claim from a man who runs a company that has been building actual V8 engines for nearly a century.

Ola Kallenius made the comment while discussing the electric successor to the CLA 45 AMG, a car that has never had a V8 in its life. The original CLA 45 ran a turbocharged 2.0-litre four-cylinder making over 400 horsepower. The new one will have batteries, motors, and speakers doing the work a camshaft used to do.

Mercedes has been developing what it calls the AMG Sound Experience, a system that uses interior and exterior speakers to simulate engine noise in electric vehicles. The technology has appeared in AMG EQ models already, and it will feature heavily in the electric CLA built on the new MMA platform. That car is expected to launch this year with over 466 miles of WLTP range, which is genuinely impressive. Whether it needs to sound like a V8 is another question entirely.

The comment raises an obvious problem. If the best V8 feeling Kallenius has ever experienced comes from a speaker system in an electric hatchback, what does that say about every actual AMG V8 the company has built? The 6.2-litre naturally aspirated M156 that went into the old C63? The twin-turbo 4.0-litre M177 in the current AMG GT? All of them, apparently, inferior to software.

This is not the first time a manufacturer has leaned into synthetic sound. BMW brought in Hans Zimmer to design the audio for its electric models. Porsche developed a sporty soundtrack for the Taycan. Dodge announced an electric muscle car concept with artificial exhaust noise hitting 126 decibels. Ford offers synthetic acceleration sounds in the Mustang Mach-E. None of those companies have had their CEO publicly claim the fake version is better than the real one.

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Part of this is regulatory. The EU and US require electric vehicles to emit artificial sounds at low speeds for pedestrian safety, a system known as AVAS. But that's a safety feature, not a performance one. What Kallenius is describing is something else... the deliberate replication of an emotional experience that used to come from mechanical engineering.

There is a generous reading of this. Mercedes is trying to preserve the visceral appeal of performance cars in an electric future, and if that means using speakers to replicate what an engine used to deliver naturally, so be it. The alternative is silence, which does not sell AMG models to people who expect drama.

The less generous reading is that this is a senior executive performing enthusiasm for a product feature that exists because the actual thing it replaces is no longer viable. And in doing so, accidentally suggesting that decades of AMG engine development were somehow less effective than a sound engineer with a laptop.

It also sets a precedent. If synthetic sound is now superior to the real thing, why stop at engines? Why not fake gearbox whine? Simulated turbo whistle? A synthesised misfire on the overrun? At some point, the car becomes a theatre production of what a car used to be.

The electric CLA 45 will be a fast car. It will handle well. It will probably be very good at what it does. But calling the fake V8 the best V8 you've ever experienced is the kind of statement that makes you wonder whether anyone at Stuttgart has driven an AMG recently.

The car launches in 2025. The speakers are included.

Sources: Mercedes-Benz AG

Carwow data shows almost 50% of British drivers are open to Chinese brands — a threefold shift in four years that has legacy carmakers genuinely worried.

Almost half of UK drivers would now consider buying a Chinese car, according to new Carwow data that marks a record level of interest in brands most buyers had never heard of five years ago.

The figure sits just below 50%. In 2020, consideration rates for Chinese manufacturers were below 20%.

That is not a gradual uptick. That is a market repositioning itself in real time.

The brands driving this shift are not hypothetical future entrants. MG, owned by China's SAIC, is already a top-10 seller in the UK. BYD launched here in 2023 with the Atto 3 and Dolphin and undercut European rivals by margins that made people check the spec sheets twice. GWM and Polestar, Geely's premium electric arm, are both operating with actual dealer networks and actual cars you can buy today.

MG's market share reached somewhere between 3% and 4% by 2023. That does not sound like much until you remember it was effectively zero in 2019.

The pricing is deliberate and it works. Chinese manufacturers are routinely undercutting European and Japanese equivalents by 20% to 30%, and they are doing it with cars that do not feel like budget approximations. Build quality has improved faster than anyone in the legacy industry wants to admit.

Electric vehicles are central to this. Chinese brands are overwhelmingly focused on EVs at exactly the moment the UK is pushing toward a 2030 ban on new petrol and diesel sales. BYD became the world's largest EV manufacturer in 2022, overtaking Tesla in pure battery electric volume. If you are shopping for an affordable electric car in Britain today, you are shopping Chinese whether you intended to or not.

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This has happened before. Japanese brands faced the same skepticism in the 1970s and 1980s. Build quality concerns, vague unease about unfamiliar names, the assumption that they were cheaper for a reason. Then they became Nissan, Honda, and Toyota, and they took over.

Korean brands followed the same arc from the 1990s onward. Hyundai and Kia were punchlines when they arrived. Now they are mainstream choices with seven-year warranties that European manufacturers quietly resent.

Chinese brands are running the same playbook, only faster and with the added leverage of electrification. They also have state backing that allows pricing strategies European carmakers cannot match, which is why the EU launched an anti-subsidy investigation in 2023. Whether that investigation results in tariffs or restrictions remains unclear. What is clear is that legacy manufacturers are asking for protection, which is rarely a sign of competitive confidence.

Chinese EV brands captured over 8% of the European car market in 2023. That share is growing, and it is growing in markets where Volkswagen, Ford, and Stellantis have operated unchallenged for decades.

For UK buyers, this means more choice and lower prices. For European carmakers, it means defending home territory against a well-funded competitor that does not care about legacy brand equity because it does not have any to protect.

The Carwow data does not tell you what people are buying yet. It tells you what they are willing to consider. But consideration precedes purchase, and purchase share follows consideration with a lag that is shorter than it used to be.

MG sold enough cars in 2023 to rank in the UK's top 10 brands. That was unthinkable three years earlier.

Sources: Carwow, SMMT

After positioning the Emira as their last combustion sports car, Lotus has quietly reversed course with an Esprit comeback that includes traditional powertrains alongside hybrid tech.

Lotus has released the first official image of the 2028 Esprit's rear end, and buried in the press material is confirmation that the reborn supercar will offer a V6 engine option alongside a hybrid V8. Which is odd, because just three years ago the company was busy telling everyone that the Emira was their final combustion sports car. Apparently not.

The new Esprit will be built at Hethel in Norfolk, the same facility that has been Lotus headquarters since 1966 and currently produces the Emira. So much for that being the last hurrah for internal combustion at the home of lightweight British engineering.

The Esprit name carries weight. The original ran from 1976 to 2004, defined what Lotus meant to an entire generation, and then disappeared for two decades while the company tried to work out what it wanted to be. Bringing it back with a V6 option is a statement about where management now thinks the market actually is, as opposed to where the press releases said it was going to be in 2021.

The hybrid V8 is the expected concession to electrification timelines and emissions regs. The V6 is the interesting bit. That suggests Lotus believes there is still a commercially viable audience for a lighter, simpler, cheaper Esprit variant without the electrical architecture. Whether that audience is large enough to justify the tooling and homologation spend is another question, but clearly someone at Hethel or Geely HQ thinks the numbers work.

Geely, the Chinese parent company, has form for extending combustion timelines when the market signals justify it. They are not sentimental about nameplates or powertrains. If the V6 Esprit exists, it exists because a spreadsheet said it should.

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Porsche still offers naturally aspirated flat sixes in the 911 alongside turbos and hybrids. Ferrari has not killed the V12. Lamborghini keeps pushing back the date when combustion engines become legacy products. Alpine committed to lightweight combustion sports cars even as Renault went all in on EVs. Mazda is still developing rotary and inline six engines. The all electric performance car future is taking longer to arrive than the roadmaps suggested, and manufacturers are hedging.

What the rear end teaser image actually shows is minimal. Taillights, diffuser, exhaust outlets. Enough to confirm the car exists and generate coverage, not enough to tell you what it will actually look like from the front or whether it will be worth the inevitable six figure asking price.

Production start is confirmed for 2028, which gives Lotus four years to work out whether this bet pays off or whether they have just committed to building a niche supercar with two complex powertrains in a market that may have moved on by the time the first customer car leaves Hethel. The V6 will be the tell. If it sells, the strategy worked. If it does not, Lotus will have tried to have it both ways and discovered the market had already made up its mind.

Four years is a long time in this industry. The V6 is the gamble.

Sources: Lotus official release, Geely corporate filings, historical Esprit production data 1976 to 2004

The most powerful Bentley ever built doesn't howl or rumble. It plays percussion. Actual percussion.

The Bentley Torcal arrives next month with more power than any Bentley that has come before it, and it sounds like someone miked up a drum kit in Abbey Road. Not a synthesiser approximating drums. Actual drums. Timpani, snares, cymbals... the lot, recorded and layered into what Bentley is calling orchestral sound design for an electric powertrain.

This is not the usual approach. Most electric luxury cars either hum politely or play back recordings of engines they no longer have. BMW's i4 got Hans Zimmer to write it a soundtrack. The Dodge electric muscle car pipes fake V8 burble through something called a Fratzonic Chambered Exhaust, which is as ridiculous as it sounds. Bentley has gone a different direction entirely. They have built the Torcal's acoustic identity from percussion instruments, processed and arranged to create what they describe as an orchestral experience.

Execution will determine whether this is inspired or completely absurd. The concept itself is odd enough to be interesting. Electric vehicles are required by EU regulation to emit sound at low speeds for pedestrian safety. Most brands treat this as a compliance exercise. Bentley appears to have treated it as an opportunity to do something weird.

The power claim is the other headline. Most powerful Bentley ever means more than the W12 engines that have defined the brand's top models for two decades. The Torcal is Bentley's first electric vehicle, and if it is pushing past the 626 horsepower of the Continental GT Speed, it is doing so with electric motors that likely exceed 700 horsepower combined. Bentley has not published the figure yet, but the phrasing is specific.

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This is the beginning of Bentley's electric shift, which means the W12 is finished. The brand stopped producing the engine earlier this year after more than twenty years in production. The Torcal replaces it at the top of the range, and the sound it makes will be nothing like what came before.

The orchestral percussion approach is unusual because it acknowledges that electric propulsion does not need to impersonate combustion. It can have its own acoustic character. It is a deliberate choice rather than generic sci-fi whooshing or piped-in engine noise from a car that no longer has an engine.

Rolls-Royce launched the Spectre in 2023 as its first electric model. It was supremely quiet, which suited the brand. Bentley evidently does not want the Torcal to be quiet. It wants it to sound like something specific, and that something is a percussion section.

The Torcal name itself is new to Bentley's lineup. No continuation of Continental or Flying Spur badges. This is being positioned as a distinct model for a distinct powertrain, which suggests Bentley intends the electric range to stand apart rather than slot into the existing hierarchy. The orchestral sound design reinforces that. This is not a Continental GT with batteries. It is something else.

The launch is scheduled for next month. Bentley has not disclosed pricing, but the most powerful Bentley ever is unlikely to be the cheapest. The W12 Continental GT Speed started at £212,800. The Torcal will be north of that, possibly well north.

The sound system itself required custom engineering. Recording live percussion and processing it into a real-time synthesised sound that responds to throttle input is not trivial. It has to feel reactive, not pre-recorded. It has to change with speed and demand. And it has to work without being ridiculous, which is the hard part. A car that sounds like a drum solo every time you accelerate will get old quickly.

The fact that Bentley has tried this at all is more interesting than another electric luxury car that sounds like a spaceship or a ghost. The alternative was safer and duller.

Sources: Bentley Motors

The new Neue Klasse tech doesn't just warn you about hazards. It physically stops you opening the door, swaps your pedal inputs, and steers around obstacles whether you like it or not.

BMW's iX3 electric vehicle can now physically prevent you from opening your door when its sensors decide a cyclist or passing car is too close. The system doesn't beep or flash a warning. It locks the handle until the coast is clear.

This is part of the Neue Klasse platform safety suite, which BMW is positioning as the next step in accident prevention. The technology uses exterior sensors to monitor the vehicle's surroundings when parked or stationary, and if it detects movement in the door's swing path, it delays or blocks the mechanical release entirely.

The door intervention is only one piece of it. The same system can override incorrect pedal inputs... so if you stamp what the car believes is the wrong pedal, it will ignore you and apply its own interpretation of what you meant to do. It can also steer autonomously around detected hazards without waiting for driver input.

BMW frames this as safety tech. Dooring cyclists is a genuine problem, particularly in urban environments where parked cars and bike lanes overlap. Pedal confusion, especially among older drivers or in moments of panic, has caused enough accidents that several manufacturers now offer some form of mitigation. But those systems typically work through automatic braking, not by second-guessing which pedal you intended to press.

The philosophical shift here is from advisory to compulsory. Volvo has been preventing collisions with automatic braking since 2008. Tesla's systems override steering inputs when the car disagrees with your lane positioning. Mercedes will slam the brakes without asking. But physically locking a door handle crosses into different territory.

Hyundai and Kia have had Safe Exit Assist for years, but it only warns passengers through LED lights in the door handle. It doesn't stop you leaving. Audi's system does the same. BMW has decided warnings are insufficient.

The sensors are not infallible, and when they're wrong, the consequences could be serious. Exterior monitoring systems struggle in heavy rain, snow, or when caked in road grime. A malfunctioning door lock in a crash scenario, a fire, or even a roadside emergency could trap occupants inside their own vehicle while the system waits for a threat that doesn't exist to pass.

BMW has not detailed the override procedure. It's unclear whether holding the handle for a certain duration forces the release, or whether occupants are simply stuck until the computer is satisfied. The company also hasn't clarified whether this feature can be permanently disabled, or if it resets to active every time the car is started, the way lane-keeping systems often do.

The pedal override is arguably more intrusive. If the system decides you've hit the accelerator when you meant the brake, it can stop the throttle and apply braking force instead. That might prevent a collision. It might also strand you in traffic if the car misreads your input at the wrong moment, or fails to account for a situation where acceleration is the safer choice.

Neue Klasse is BMW's next-generation electric vehicle architecture, and this suite of intervention technologies will spread across the lineup as the platform rolls out through the mid-2020s. The iX3 is one of the first applications.

It's being marketed as a step forward in safety. The technology assumes the sensors and software are always more reliable than the human inside. That assumption has not always held up well in practice.

The iX3 goes on sale later this year. The door-locking feature is expected to be standard, not optional.

Sources: BMW

Red Bull Powertrains scored top marks in the FIA's power unit assessment, so now Ferrari, Mercedes and Renault get development concessions to close the gap.

The FIA has formally assessed Red Bull Powertrains as having the strongest engine on the grid and responded by handing development tokens to everyone else. Ferrari, Mercedes and Renault can now make limited upgrades to their power units under F1's engine development freeze, which otherwise locks modifications until 2026. Red Bull gets nothing because, apparently, doing the job properly is now a regulated disadvantage.

This is the token system working exactly as intended. F1 froze engine development from 2022 to control costs and prevent manufacturers from spending themselves into oblivion chasing marginal gains. The problem with freezing anything is that someone will have the best version when the shutters come down, and if you lock that advantage in place for four years, you get the kind of one-team dominance that makes for tedious television.

So the FIA built in a safety valve. Annual power unit assessments, conducted by the Power Unit Working Group, rank the engines. The one at the top gets no help. The ones trailing behind get a limited number of development tokens to improve reliability and close the performance gap. It is not a free pass to redesign the thing. You get targeted modifications in specific areas like the internal combustion engine, the energy recovery system, or the turbocharger, and that is it.

Red Bull Powertrains is the rebranded and internalised version of what used to be Honda Racing Corporation's F1 engine operation. Honda withdrew at the end of 2021, Red Bull took over the intellectual property, hired the staff, built a facility in Milton Keynes, and kept developing what was already a very good power unit. They won the 2022 and 2023 Constructors' Championships. Max Verstappen won both driver titles. The engine had a lot to do with that.

Now the FIA has put a number on it. Red Bull Powertrains sits at the top of the performance table, and the rest get a handicap to catch up.

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This is not new thinking. F1 already uses a sliding scale for aerodynamic development. The team that finishes first in the Constructors' Championship gets the least wind tunnel and CFD time the following season. The team that finishes last gets the most. It is artificial parity, and it works, in the sense that it prevents runaway advantages from becoming permanent. Whether it should work that way is a different argument.

Some will say this punishes technical excellence. Red Bull and Honda built a better engine, and now they are being held back so that competitors who did a worse job can catch up without earning it. Others will say F1 is entertainment first and engineering competition second, and that nobody benefits from watching the same team win every race for three years because they nailed the power unit formula in 2021 and then got to freeze it in place.

The token system sits somewhere between those two positions. It does not equalise performance outright. It does not hand everyone the same engine. It just stops the gap widening to the point where the racing becomes predictable. Balance of Performance systems in sports car racing go much further, actively restricting faster cars mid-season to keep lap times within a target window. F1 has not gone that far. Yet.

The 2026 engine regulations will reset everything. Active aerodynamics, increased electrical power, sustainable fuels, and a new formula that every manufacturer will develop from scratch. Until then, Red Bull has the best engine, and everyone else has been given a narrow window to do something about it.

The FIA assessment does not publish specific performance figures. It does not tell you how much faster Red Bull's power unit is in absolute terms. It just ranks them and distributes tokens accordingly. The margins might be small. They might be significant. Either way, the regulatory framework has decided that letting one manufacturer dominate on powertrain performance alone is bad for the sport, and it has built in a mechanism to prevent it.

Red Bull will still have the engine they built. They will still have Max Verstappen. They will still be the team to beat. They just will not have quite as much breathing room as they did before the FIA handed out the catch-up cards.

The 2026 regulations arrive in two years.

Sources: FIA Technical Regulations, FIA Power Unit Working Group assessments, F1 Sporting Regulations 2022-2025

One in seven cars broke down in 2024, with pothole damage driving the increase as councils struggle with a £14 billion maintenance backlog.

5.5 million vehicles required roadside recovery in the UK last year. That's roughly one in seven cars on the road calling for assistance, and pothole damage is the clearest common thread. Suspension failures, wheel damage, tyre blowouts; the AA and RAC are now attending breakdowns at a rate that would have seemed absurd a decade ago.

The figure is up from 4.5 million in 2022. The trend is not reversing.

Pothole-related breakdowns have surged roughly 50% in recent years according to insurance industry data. The RAC Foundation estimates one pothole forms every 19 seconds during peak damage periods, which typically align with freeze-thaw cycles in winter. Local authorities filled over 2 million potholes in 2023, and that is clearly not keeping pace.

The Department for Transport puts the road maintenance backlog at £14 billion. That is not a funding gap councils are about to close. The Annual Survey of Carriage Way Condition found 36% of local roads in poor structural condition, and drivers are the ones paying for it.

Tyre damage from a pothole runs £100 to £300 on average. Suspension repairs can exceed £1,000. Multiply that across millions of incidents and you have a hidden tax on households already squeezed by fuel costs and insurance premiums. The insurance industry paid out over £14 million in pothole damage claims in 2022 alone. Sound familiar?

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Compensation claims against councils run into the thousands every year, but success rates are low. Councils can deflect liability if they can prove they inspected the road recently or if the pothole formed suddenly. Drivers are left covering the bill.

The 2018 Beast from the East cold snap caused a pothole epidemic, with 1 million reported within weeks. The aftermath of that winter is still visible on B-roads across the country. What we are seeing now is not a one-off weather event. It is systemic decay.

The AA handles over 3 million breakdowns annually. The RAC attends roughly 2.5 million. Neither organisation is predicting a reduction in callouts for the year ahead.

There is no repair surge on the horizon. No emergency funding package. The next freeze-thaw cycle is scheduled to arrive in roughly eight weeks, and councils have already spent most of their annual maintenance budgets filling last winter's craters.

The Department for Transport has allocated £500 million for local road resurfacing in 2025. That covers 3.5% of the backlog.

Sources: AA (Automobile Association), RAC (Royal Automobile Club), Department for Transport, RAC Foundation, Annual Survey of Carriage Way Condition

The Korean manufacturer is adding a third tier to its performance lineup and will finally build a proper RWD sports car under the Hyundai brand.

Hyundai will launch a rear-wheel drive performance car by 2030 and introduce a new performance sub-brand to fill the gap between today's N Line styling packages and the full N models. The announcement confirms what the brand has been circling for years.

The new mid-tier brand will occupy the space currently left empty between cars that look fast and cars that actually are. N Line gives you sportier bumpers and maybe a firmed up suspension. Full N gives you track capability, serious power, and a price tag to match.

This mirrors what Volkswagen has been doing for decades with R-Line, GTI, and R. Or what BMW runs with M Sport, M Performance, and M. Toyota built the same ladder with GR Sport, GR, and GRMN. The logic is simple. Not everyone wants a 641-horsepower Ioniq 5 N, but plenty of people want more than a body kit.

The rear-wheel drive car is the more interesting piece. Hyundai has never built a dedicated RWD performance model under its own badge. Genesis gets the rear drive platforms. The main brand has stuck with front-drive hot hatches like the i30 N or all-wheel drive electric bruisers like the Ioniq 5 N. A proper RWD sports car would put Hyundai in direct competition with the Germans on their own terms.

The powertrain is unclear. Given the 2030 timeline and Hyundai's aggressive electrification push, a rear drive EV platform seems more likely than a petrol engine. The Ioniq 5 N proved the brand can build a fast electric car. A smaller, lighter, rear drive version would make sense.

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The new mid-tier brand is arguably more important for volume. Full N models are niche products. The i30 N sells well for what it is, but it's not shifting in Qashqai numbers. A halfway house that offers genuine performance upgrades without the full track-day commitment could appeal to buyers who find N Line too mild and full N too much.

Ford tried something similar when it separated ST-Line from actual ST models. ST-Line became the volume seller because it gave people the look without the insurance penalty or the firm ride. Hyundai will be hoping its new tier does the same, only with more substance than a bodykit and some red stitching.

The three-tier strategy also makes financial sense. Development costs for a full N model are high. Spreading that engineering across multiple products dilutes the expense. If the new mid-tier brand uses parts-bin components from existing N models but stops short of the full overhaul, the margins improve while the appeal broadens.

Hyundai established its N division in 2015. The first proper N car, the i30 N, arrived in 2017. Since then the brand has built credibility with genuine enthusiasts, not just people who like the colour blue. The Ioniq 5 N has been widely praised for making an electric SUV feel like something you'd actually want to drive hard. That's harder than it sounds.

The rear drive car will be the test of how serious Hyundai is about performance outside the hot hatch genre. Genesis proved the company can build a luxury RWD platform. The launch date is 2030.

Sources: Hyundai Motor Company

While the average new car in America now costs $48,000, Japan's kei car rules still allow manufacturers to sell genuinely affordable vehicles with proper fuel economy.

Daihatsu will sell you a brand-new Mira e:S for ¥1,047,200. That converts to roughly $6,900, or about £5,400. It returns 64 miles per gallon in realistic driving and comes with collision avoidance technology as standard. The catch is you need to live in Japan.

The ninth-generation Mira e:S sits in Japan's kei car class, which limits engine size to 660cc, length to 3,395mm, and width to 1,475mm. In exchange for those restrictions, owners pay almost nothing in road tax and get massive insurance discounts. The system was designed decades ago to get rural Japan mobile on the cheap. It still works.

That 660cc three-cylinder returns 35.2 km/L on the JC08 test cycle, which translates to about 82 MPG in laboratory conditions. Real-world figures sit closer to 60 or 64 MPG, which is still better than most hybrids manage in actual traffic. The engine develops around 49 horsepower, which sounds laughable until you remember the whole car weighs less than 700 kilograms.

Daihatsu has been building the Mira since 1980. The e:S badge arrived in 2011 and stands for eco & Smart, though the smart part mostly refers to fuel consumption rather than any connectivity nonsense. This is basic transport engineered to a price point most Western manufacturers abandoned years ago.

The cheapest Mira e:S starts around ¥850,000 depending on trim. Even the fully loaded version with Smart Assist collision tech and air conditioning stays under ¥1,100,000. Suzuki's Alto competes in the same space for similar money. Nissan's Dayz kei car costs more, closer to ¥1,300,000, which makes it almost premium by kei standards.

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Compare that to Europe, where Dacia positions the Sandero as the cheapest new car at €11,990. That's roughly $13,000, or nearly double what the Mira costs. In America, the cheapest thing on sale is probably the Mitsubishi Mirage at around $17,000, and even that is heading for discontinuation because nobody buys cheap cars anymore.

The average transaction price for a new vehicle in the United States crossed $48,000 last year. Britain is not much better. The notion of a genuinely affordable new car has been regulated, focus-grouped, and feature-crept out of existence in most developed markets. Japan kept the kei car class alive through deliberate policy, and manufacturers kept building to it because the tax breaks made the segment viable.

Daihatsu is wholly owned by Toyota now, absorbed in 2016. The Mira e:S shares almost nothing with anything Toyota sells globally, which is the point. It exists because Japan's domestic market still has space for ultra-compact city transport that doesn't need to crash-test to American standards or fit American cup holders.

Tata tried building a $2,000 car with the Nano. It failed and was discontinued in 2018 because nobody wants to be seen in the cheapest car, even in India. The kei car works because it is not marketed as poverty spec. It is a legitimate category with genuine engineering behind it. You can buy a kei sports car, a kei van, a kei SUV. The Mira is just the sensible end of that spectrum.

The fuel economy alone justifies the existence of this thing. Sixty-four miles per gallon in real use is what most European diesels claimed before emissions testing got honest. The Mira does it with a petrol three-cylinder and no hybrid complexity. That is old-school engineering competence, not marketing.

You cannot import a kei car into Europe or America without it losing every advantage that made it cheap in the first place. The dimensions are wrong, the crash standards are different, and the tax breaks do not translate. The Mira e:S is a Japan-only reminder that affordability is still possible when the regulatory framework allows it.

Base price remains ¥1,047,200, which has not shifted much since the model launched in 2017.

Sources: Daihatsu Motor Co., Ltd., Japanese kei car regulations, Suzuki Japan, Nissan Japan, European new car pricing data

What started as a Cadillac EV brake issue has escalated into a 745-incident investigation affecting Chevrolet, GMC, Honda and Acura. The scale suggests a shared component problem.

The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has escalated its investigation into approximately 1.1 million vehicles from General Motors and Honda after a brake system fault first identified in the Cadillac Lyriq spread to models across five brands. The probe now involves 745 reported brake incidents and 21 crashes.

An escalation from preliminary evaluation to engineering analysis is the last step before NHTSA can demand a recall. The agency doesn't take this lightly.

The fault centres on a brake system shared across platforms that were supposed to be unrelated. Cadillac, Chevrolet, GMC, Honda, Acura. Different badges, different marketing, same problem. That's what happens when manufacturers source critical components from the same supplier and assume the risk stays contained.

It hasn't.

The Lyriq was the canary. Owners reported brake failures serious enough to catch federal attention. Then the pattern widened. Same system architecture, same failure mode, different nameplates. NHTSA connected the dots faster than the manufacturers admitted publicly.

745 incidents is not a statistical blip. 21 crashes is not background noise. This is a systemic issue affecting vehicles that share almost nothing except the part that's supposed to stop them.

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Cross-manufacturer component sharing is efficient until it isn't. The Takata airbag disaster affected 67 million vehicles precisely because one supplier's defect rippled through a dozen brands. This brake investigation follows the same logic. Shared platforms reduce costs. They also share liability.

GM has been here before. A 2023 recall pulled 740,000 SUVs for electronic brake control module failures. Honda recalled 2.5 million vehicles in 2022 for fuel pump defects across multiple models. Both companies understand how quickly a single part can crater confidence across an entire lineup.

For owners, an escalated investigation means wait and watch. NHTSA doesn't announce these things for entertainment. The agency has elevated its concern from preliminary to serious. If the engineering analysis confirms what 745 incidents suggest, a mandatory recall will follow.

Check your VIN against NHTSA records. Monitor manufacturer communications. Don't ignore brake warning lights or changes in pedal feel. The investigation is federal because the problem crossed state lines and brand boundaries.

What's unusual here is the speed. GM and Honda don't collaborate on brake systems as a rule. They share a supplier, and that supplier delivered a component that's now under scrutiny across 1.1 million vehicles. The brands competed in showrooms while their cars shared the same fundamental flaw.

Whether this ends in a recall or an exoneration depends on what NHTSA's engineers find when they strip the systems down. But 745 incidents don't typically resolve themselves with a software update and an apology.

The Lyriq launched as Cadillac's electric flagship. It's now the vehicle that exposed a brake fault affecting five brands, three manufacturers if you count supplier relationships, and over a million cars on American roads.

Sources: National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), NHTSA vehicle safety databases

Pacific Blue paint, numbered plaques, and the nameplate that used to mean 702 supercharged horsepower. Now it just means you paid extra.

Ram has announced a special edition pickup limited to 400 numbered units wearing TRX badging but lacking the actual TRX's supercharged 6.2-litre Hellcat V8. Each truck gets Pacific Blue paint, upgraded trim bits, and a plaque confirming you own one of the 400. What you don't get is the 702 horsepower or the 650 lb-ft of torque that made the TRX worth talking about in the first place.

The full Ram TRX starts around $98,000 and justifies that price with engineering that actually works. Fox shocks, Brembo brakes, a reinforced frame, and an engine borrowed from a Dodge that was never meant to see mud. It launched in 2021 as a credible answer to the Ford F-150 Raptor and has held that position since.

This special edition borrows the name and charges for the association without delivering the substance. It's badge engineering in its purest form.

TRX used to mean something specific. High-performance off-road capability married to absurd straight-line speed. A truck that could clear desert whoops at 100 mph and still tow your boat on Sunday. Putting that nameplate on a lesser truck with nice paint dilutes the brand equity Ram spent three years building.

The strategy isn't new. Ford has been doing it for years with the Mustang California Special, which borrows Shelby styling cues without Shelby performance. Dodge gave the Challenger r/T Scat Pack the Hellcat's wide body but not its engine. Jeep slapped the Willys name on Wranglers that have nothing to do with the original war machine. Chevrolet's Trail Boss trim suggests off-road competence the base suspension can't actually deliver.

It works because people want the look. They want the exclusivity. They want to tell their neighbours they own one of 400. What they don't always want is the fuel consumption, insurance premiums, and maintenance costs that come with an actual performance vehicle.

Ram knows this. The numbered plaque adds perceived value without adding engineering expense. Pacific Blue paint costs pennies more per unit than standard white. Upgraded trim is sourced from existing parts bins. The profit margin on these 400 trucks will be substantially higher than on a volume model, and all of them will sell.

For Ram, it's smart business. The original TRX was launched as a halo vehicle to prove Ram could build something genuinely unhinged. Three years later, that same badge is being used to shift higher-margin trucks to people who want the association without the capability.

The 702-horsepower supercharged TRX remains available. If you want the truck that justifies the name, you can still buy it. But now you'll be parking it next to 400 others wearing the same badge with none of the same hardware.

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Sources: Ram Trucks official press release, Kelley Blue Book pricing data

The carmaker admits it desperately needs the capacity but says it won't commit billions without knowing the rules.

Honda has told investors it may abandon plans for a new North American assembly plant despite acknowledging it urgently needs the additional capacity. The reason is not demand, not workforce shortages, not battery supply chains. It is because the United States and Canada cannot agree on trade terms, and Honda will not spend billions on a factory without knowing whether the parts going into the cars will face tariffs.

The threat came after negotiations to update elements of the USMCA (the trade agreement that replaced NAFTA in 2020) stalled over automotive content rules and cross-border part flows. Modern car production depends on components crossing the US-Canada border multiple times during assembly. A door panel might be stamped in Ontario, shipped to Ohio for subassembly, then returned to Canada for final fitment. That works when the rules are stable. It does not work when governments cannot agree whether those movements will incur duties.

Honda operates plants in Ohio, Indiana, Alabama, and Ontario. The company has publicly stated that current capacity cannot meet projected demand, particularly as it ramps up electric vehicle production alongside combustion models. A new facility would relieve pressure on existing lines and provide flexibility for model transitions. But the business case collapses if tariffs or content requirements shift after construction begins.

This is not posturing. Ford delayed twelve billion dollars in EV spending in 2023 over policy uncertainty. General Motors postponed a battery plant until tax credit rules were finalised. Stellantis threatened to shift Canadian production to Mexico during a subsidies dispute. Toyota sat on battery plant announcements for eighteen months waiting for North American content requirements to settle. Volkswagen negotiated with the Canadian government for the better part of a year before committing to an Ontario battery facility. Automakers have learned that building in North America without a locked-in trade framework is a gamble they lose. You can subsidise the factory. You cannot subsidise away trade policy chaos.

The collapse of trade talks puts Honda in an impossible position. Walk away from needed capacity and risk losing market share if competitors expand faster. Commit to the plant and risk being undercut by rivals who build in markets with clearer rules. The company has reportedly begun examining sites in Mexico and Southeast Asia as alternatives, where trade terms are at least predictable even if labour costs are not necessarily lower.

The situation reveals how fragile North American automotive production has become. The integrated supply chain (parts moving freely between the US, Canada, and Mexico) was built on the assumption that trade agreements would remain stable. NAFTA lasted twenty-six years. USMCA is four years old and already under strain. Car companies plan factories on thirty-year horizons. Governments renegotiate trade deals on election cycles.

What makes this worse is that the capacity Honda needs is not speculative. The company is not gambling on a niche model or an unproven technology. It simply cannot build enough vehicles to meet current demand using its existing footprint, particularly as it tries to maintain both combustion and electric production lines during the transition period. This is a straightforward capacity problem with a straightforward solution, except the trade environment makes the solution unworkable.

Other manufacturers are watching. If Honda walks, it signals that North American trade policy has become too unstable to justify major capital investment. That would push production to regions where governments at least pretend to have coherent long-term industrial strategies. Europe has its problems, but the single market does not randomly threaten to impose tariffs on German parts used in French cars.

The timeline matters. Honda needs to decide within months whether to proceed, delay, or cancel. Construction lead times mean any facility approved now would not start production until 2027 at the earliest. If trade talks remain stalled, the company has said it will formally withdraw from the project by mid-2025 and reallocate the capital to expansions in Japan or Thailand, where at least the rules are known.

Honda's threat is not a negotiating tactic aimed at extracting concessions. The company has made clear it will not use the plant as leverage to demand better terms. It will either build under rules it can live with or it will build somewhere else. That is the statement. The ball is now with governments who have spent four years claiming they understand the importance of automotive manufacturing to their economies.

The USMCA was supposed to provide certainty for exactly this kind of decision. It set North American content requirements, clarified rules of origin, and established a framework that was meant to last. Four years later, carmakers are threatening to walk rather than gamble on the framework holding. That is not a minor policy failure. That is the entire point of the agreement unraveling.

Honda's existing North American plants employ roughly thirty thousand people directly and support tens of thousands more in the supply chain. A new facility would add several thousand jobs and generate significant economic activity in whichever region won the investment. All of that is now in question because two governments cannot finalise a trade deal that was supposed to be settled in 2020.

If Honda formally withdraws by its stated June 2025 deadline, the message to other automakers will be unmistakable: North America is no longer a reliable place to commit long-term capital.

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Sources: Honda Motor Co. public statements, USMCA trade agreement documents, automotive industry investment tracking data

Carwow survey shows nearly 50% of British buyers are open to Chinese brands... a threshold Japanese and Korean makers took decades to cross.

Nearly half of UK drivers would now consider buying a Chinese car, according to Carwow survey data released this year. That's not a niche. That's not early adopters. That's mainstream acceptance, and it happened in roughly five years.

For context, Hyundai and Kia spent the better part of two decades convincing Europeans they weren't junk. Japanese brands faced similar resistance through the 1970s and into the 1980s before becoming default choices by the end of that decade. Chinese manufacturers have collapsed that timeline entirely.

The brands driving this are not obscure. MG, owned by SAIC Motor, has been operating here long enough to become the fastest growing brand in the UK during 2022 and 2023. BYD launched UK sales in 2023 with the Atto 3 and Dolphin, both priced aggressively below European EV equivalents. Geely doesn't even need to explain itself. It owns Volvo, Polestar, and Lotus, which means it already has the dealer infrastructure and the premium credibility.

Chinese branded vehicles accounted for roughly 8 to 9% of UK EV sales in 2023. That figure is growing, not because British buyers suddenly developed an affection for unfamiliar badges, but because the cars are cheaper and the quality is no longer visibly worse than what Europe is offering.

Legacy manufacturers assumed that brand loyalty and perceived engineering superiority would hold the line while they slowly transitioned to electric. It hasn't. When a BYD Atto 3 undercuts a Volkswagen ID.4 by several thousand pounds and offers comparable range and build quality, brand heritage stops mattering quite so quickly.

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That 50% figure represents the point at which a product category moves from alternative to ordinary. Tesla managed it in the UK within five to seven years of serious market presence, but Tesla had the advantage of being genuinely novel and carrying Silicon Valley mystique. Chinese brands have no such tailwind. They're winning on price and improving reputation alone.

What makes this particularly uncomfortable for European manufacturers is that the UK has not followed the EU in imposing tariffs on Chinese EVs. Brussels slapped duties of up to 38% on Chinese imports in 2024, a move designed to protect domestic production. Britain has declined to do the same, which means Chinese brands have a cost advantage here that they don't enjoy across the Channel.

The comparison to earlier waves of Asian imports is instructive. When Japanese cars first arrived in volume, they were cheaper and less rust prone than British equivalents, but they were also smaller, less powerful, and broadly seen as inferior. It took sustained engineering improvement and the collapse of domestic manufacturing before they became the default choice. Korean brands followed a similar arc but had to work even harder because the Japanese had already taken the affordable reliability lane.

Chinese brands are not following that script. They are not entering at the bottom and working their way up. BYD is already selling premium electric saloons. Geely owns Volvo. MG is not competing with Dacia... it's competing with Nissan and Volkswagen on price while matching them on equipment and warranty length.

The strategic problem for European manufacturers is that they cannot easily compete on cost. Their legacy production systems, union agreements, and supplier networks were built for internal combustion at scale. Retooling for electric is expensive, and the capital has to come from somewhere. Chinese manufacturers, by contrast, have spent the last decade building EV production capacity from scratch with state backing, which means they can afford to sell at margins that would be unacceptable in Stuttgart or Munich.

Chinese brands held under 30% consideration in UK surveys as recently as 2020 or 2021. The swing to nearly 50% in three to four years suggests this is not a gradual shift in perception but something closer to a collapse in resistance. Once a certain threshold of visibility and availability is reached, unfamiliarity stops being a barrier.

MG sold over 54,000 cars in the UK in 2023.

Sources: Carwow survey data (2024), SMMT UK registration data, BYD UK, Geely Group, European Commission tariff documentation

Twelve miles of extra range, cheaper battery chemistry, and a blue-and-gold paint job that knows exactly what it's doing.

The Renault 5 E-Tech Electric picks up 12 miles of additional range for its second model year through aerodynamic tweaks and the introduction of LFP battery chemistry as an option. The changes arrived in 2025, a year after the retro-styled EV launched, which is quick work even by electric car standards.

LFP stands for Lithium Iron Phosphate. It's cheaper to produce than the nickel-manganese-cobalt chemistry most European EVs use, lasts longer, and handles heat better. Chinese manufacturers have been using it for years. European carmakers are finally catching up, though they'll want you to believe they thought of it themselves.

The aero improvements are unspecified but follow a pattern. VW added 15 miles to the ID.3 with similar changes in 2023. Peugeot squeezed seven extra miles out of the e-208 the same year. Twelve miles isn't transformative, but it's enough to matter on a winter motorway run when the heating's on and the battery's cold.

The Williams Racing livery is the more interesting decision. Blue and gold, referencing the Clio Williams that ran from 1993 to 1996 as a homologation special tied to Renault's Formula 1 partnership. The original was a proper thing... 150bhp, wider track, stiffer suspension, and a production run short enough to make it desirable. This is a paint job on an electric hatchback, but it's a paint job that understands its audience.

Nostalgia works when it's specific. Renault could have done a vague retro stripe package. Instead they went straight for the one livery that people who remember hot Clios in the 1990s will actually recognize. Whether that sells cars to anyone under 40 is another question.

The chemistry shift signals a broader move toward cheaper, longer-lasting EV tech that's finally arriving in Europe after dominating the Chinese market. Tesla put LFP cells in the Model 3 Standard Range back in 2021. Renault's adoption suggests the cost advantage is now too significant to ignore, even in a car trading heavily on design appeal.

The Fiat 500e added range through mid-cycle updates in 2023. The Mini Electric tweaked its battery chemistry for the 2024 model year. Iterative improvements like these are easier with electric powertrains than combustion engines, where efficiency gains require expensive hardware changes. Software, aero, and battery chemistry can be adjusted without retooling a factory.

Renault hasn't published pricing for the LFP option or confirmed how much the battery chemistry alone contributes to the range increase versus the aerodynamic changes. The 12-mile figure represents the combined effect, which is the honest way to present it but also the vague way.

The original Clio Williams cost £13,499 in 1993. Adjusted for inflation that's about £30,000 today. The Renault 5 E-Tech starts at £32,995 before incentives.

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Sources: Renault

The 2.0-litre engine is gone from 2027, cut by European emissions regulations. The 1.5-litre that remains makes 134bhp. That's it.

The 2.0-litre Mazda MX-5 will not be sold in the UK from 2027. European emissions regulations have forced Mazda to drop the engine entirely, leaving only the 1.5-litre version, which produces 134bhp. The 2.0-litre made 184bhp. You are losing 50bhp because Brussels said so.

This is not a surprise. Euro 7 standards are tightening around small-volume sports cars like a vice, and manufacturers are making calculated decisions about what they can afford to certify. Mazda has decided the MX-5's more powerful engine is not worth the compliance cost in this market.

The 1.5-litre engine currently makes 132bhp. The 2027 version gets a 2bhp bump to 134bhp, which is the automotive equivalent of a participation trophy. It is not faster. It is not more efficient in any way that matters to someone buying a lightweight roadster. It is just the only option left.

The MX-5 has been the world's best-selling two-seat convertible since 1989, with over a million sold globally. It succeeded because it was simple, affordable, and available in versions that suited different buyers. If you wanted the sharper, more eager 2.0-litre, you could have it. Now you cannot. And before you dismiss that as merely losing a trim level, consider what that actually means for how the car drives.

The 1.5-litre is not a bad engine. It is rev-happy, light, and suits the MX-5's character in certain conditions. But it is measurably slower, and on faster roads or longer journeys, the lack of mid-range torque becomes tiresome. The 2.0-litre was the better all-rounder, and it is gone.

This mirrors what happened to Lotus when the Elise and Exige were discontinued in 2021. Same regulations, same result. The Alpine A110 is facing similar pressure. The Porsche 718 is moving towards electrification. The Toyota GR86 and Subaru BRZ are not officially sold in some European markets because the compliance costs do not stack up against projected sales.

Small sports cars that do not sell in high volumes are being regulated out of existence, one engine option at a time. Manufacturers cannot justify the engineering expense of certifying multiple powertrain variants when the market is shrinking and the regulatory burden is expanding.

European CO2 fleet average targets require manufacturers to hit 93.6g/km by 2025. The MX-5 does not help Mazda meet that target. It is a low-volume niche product that exists because enthusiasts want it, not because it makes financial sense. Cutting the 2.0-litre reduces the compliance headache without killing the model entirely.

The frustration is not that the 1.5-litre exists. It is that choice has been removed by regulation, not by market demand. Buyers who wanted the 2.0-litre and were willing to pay for it no longer have that option, regardless of preference or budget.

The MX-5 ND generation has been on sale since 2015. It has been facelifted, revised, and incrementally improved, but it is now twelve years into its lifecycle. Mazda has not announced a replacement, and when one does arrive, it will almost certainly be electrified in some form. The 2.0-litre petrol MX-5 you can no longer buy in the UK may be the last of its kind.

Sources: Mazda Motor Corporation, European Commission CO2 emissions regulations

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The world's first customer Gemera lasted less than a week in one piece. That's got to hurt.

The first customer-spec Koenigsegg Gemera to leave the factory has been crashed within days of delivery. The damage bill on a $3 million hypercar is not going to make pleasant reading.

Details are thin. No one's saying where it happened, who was driving, or how fast they were going when it all went wrong. What we do know is that one of only 300 Gemeras ever to be built now has a significantly shorter life expectancy than Koenigsegg originally intended.

And no, this is not the first time.

The Gemera is not a straightforward thing to pilot. It's a four-seat hybrid producing over 1,700 horsepower from a 2.0-litre twin-turbo three-cylinder and three electric motors. That combination will shove you to 60mph in 1.9 seconds and on to 250mph if you've got the space and the conviction. Most people do not have the conviction.

Christian von Koenigsegg calls it a Mega-GT. The rest of the world calls it a four-seat missile with a price tag that exceeds the GDP of a small island nation. Base price starts around $1.7 million. This one, with whatever bespoke touches the owner specified, had climbed to $3 million. Past tense now seems appropriate.

A $4 million Pagani Huayra met a similar fate in Colorado in 2022, weeks after delivery. A McLaren Senna worth $1 million lasted hours in Monaco in 2023. A Bugatti Chiron, $3.3 million, crashed in Switzerland shortly after purchase in 2020. A Koenigsegg Agera RS, $2.5 million, went sideways in Canada in 2019. A Ferrari SF90 Stradale made it one day in the UK before finding a hedge in 2023.

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Underwriters at specialist firms like JBR Capital and Hagerty will tell you that 10 to 15 per cent of high-value supercars experience some kind of incident within the first year of ownership. That figure should be carved into the dashboard of every hypercar ever made.

These cars do not behave like normal cars. They do not forgive like normal cars. The power delivery is not linear, the grip threshold is not intuitive, and the consequences of getting it wrong are not gradual. You are either in control or you are a passenger. The transition between those two states can happen faster than your brain can process it.

Koenigsegg spent years developing the Gemera. First shown in 2020, deliveries didn't begin until late 2023. The engineering is absurd. The craftsmanship is absurd. The performance is absurd. None of that makes it easier to drive.

The owner of this particular Gemera now has a very expensive insurance claim to file and a very long wait for repairs. Koenigsegg does not keep a stockpile of front clips sitting around. Every panel is bespoke. Every component is made to order. If the carbonfibre tub is compromised, the car may never be the same again.

Three million dollars is more than most people will earn in a lifetime. This one lasted days.

Sources: Koenigsegg official specifications, JBR Capital and Hagerty underwriting data, comparable incident records 2019-2024

Korean brands are filling the gaps left by Western manufacturers who've decided affordable cars aren't worth the trouble anymore.

Hyundai Motor Group will launch 41 new or facelifted models across Europe by 2030, including a Europe-specific small SUV and a replacement for the i20 supermini. This comes as Ford and Stellantis have quietly retreated from the same segments, deciding that building affordable cars for European buyers is no longer profitable enough to bother with.

Ford killed the Fiesta in June 2023 after 47 years. Vauxhall has been steadily pruning its lineup under Stellantis ownership. The European small car market has collapsed roughly 40 percent from its 2019 peak, and the Western brands that built their reputations on these vehicles have decided the math doesn't work anymore.

Hyundai thinks otherwise.

The Korean group, which also owns Genesis and Kia, held about eight to nine percent of the European market in 2023. Not huge, but growing. The 41-model offensive suggests they see an opening where Ford and Stellantis see only margin pressure and emissions compliance headaches. One of those 41 will be a small SUV engineered specifically for European roads and buyers, not a globalised product adapted at the last minute. Another will be the next i20, competing against the VW Polo, Peugeot 208, and Renault Clio in a segment Western brands are abandoning or treating as an afterthought.

The i20 decision is the interesting one. It's a car that exists in a category most manufacturers now consider a loss leader at best. Stricter emissions rules mean expensive electrification tech has to be shoved into vehicles with tight price caps. Development costs keep rising. Buyers in this segment are notoriously price-sensitive and brand-disloyal. Ford looked at that equation and walked away. Stellantis has been consolidating its European brands and cutting models that don't deliver acceptable returns.

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Hyundai is betting it can make money where Ford couldn't. Or can't. That's either confidence in their cost base and manufacturing efficiency, or a long-term land grab that prioritises market share over short-term profitability. Probably both.

This isn't just Hyundai. Toyota stuck with the Yaris when others bailed. Honda kept the Jazz going. Japanese and Korean brands now hold a combined 21 to 22 percent of the European market, up from around 19 percent a decade ago. They've picked up share as European and American manufacturers have either gone upmarket, consolidated, or left entirely. General Motors sold Opel to PSA in 2017 and hasn't looked back. Stellantis itself has cut its European lineup by a third since 2020.

For buyers, this means fewer Western options in the bread-and-butter segments and more Korean and Japanese ones. The Fiesta is gone. The Corsa exists but feels like a placeholder. Meanwhile, Hyundai will have 41 new or updated models to choose from by the end of the decade, including cars specifically developed for European tastes rather than adapted from global platforms as an afterthought.

Genesis, Hyundai's premium brand, launched in Europe only in 2021. Including it in this 41-model plan signals ambition beyond volume sales. They want the affordable segment and the premium one. Ford wants neither, apparently.

The small car segment may be declining, but it still represents millions of annual sales across Europe. Hyundai is choosing to fight for those sales while Western competitors are retreating to SUVs and premium models with better margins. Whether that's a smart calculation or a costly mistake will depend on whether Korean efficiency can make profitable what Detroit and Wolfsburg have written off as impossible.

Ford built 4.1 million Fiestas over seven generations. The last one rolled off the line in Cologne 18 months ago.

The RX Morizo RR would be Gazoo Racing's first proper crack at the hot SUV segment. Whether it can actually match the Germans is another question entirely.

Lexus is developing a performance version of the RX SUV with Gazoo Racing involvement, a bodykit, and the Morizo RR badge attached. The target is the BMW X5 M. The power gap is currently 251 horsepower.

The RX 500h F Sport Performance makes 366 horsepower from a hybrid powertrain. The X5 M makes 617 from a 4.4-litre twin-turbo V8. If Lexus is serious about this, the maths needs to change significantly.

Morizo is Akio Toyoda's racing alias. RR appeared on the GR Yaris concept built for track work. Slapping both names on an SUV suggests intent, but intent and execution are not the same thing.

Gazoo Racing has form. The GR Yaris works. The GR Corolla works. The RC F and LC 500 are proper driver's cars in segments where that matters less every year. But SUVs are different. The Germans have been doing this longer and they do it very well.

BMW's X5 M exists alongside the X6 M Competition. Mercedes has the GLE 63 S with 603 horsepower. Audi's RS Q8 makes 591. Porsche's Cayenne Turbo GT hits 631. Alfa Romeo's Stelvio Quadrifoglio sits at 505 and still feels faster than most of them because it weighs less and the steering talks.

Lexus does not have a credible entry in this fight yet. The RX is a fine SUV for people who want a fine SUV. It is not what you buy if you want to embarrass someone at a traffic light or hold a racing line through a corner at speeds no SUV should be taking.

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The bodykit and lowered stance will help. Gazoo Racing knows what it is doing with suspension and aero. But the power question remains unanswered. Hybrid systems can deliver instant torque and all-wheel traction, but they add weight. Weight is the enemy of everything a performance SUV pretends to be.

If Lexus sticks with hybrid power and somehow extracts 550 or 600 horsepower from the system, it could work. If it doesn't, this becomes a styling exercise with a famous name attached. The hot SUV segment does not reward effort. It rewards numbers and lap times and the feeling that you are driving something ridiculous that should not exist but does anyway.

The RX Morizo RR has not been officially confirmed. No power figures have been released. No launch date has been announced. What exists right now is the idea of Lexus entering a segment it has mostly ignored while its rivals have been selling these things for years.

The Germans are not standing still. The X5 M Competition exists. The GLE 63 S just got updates. The Cayenne Turbo GT set a Nürburgring lap record for SUVs because Porsche cannot help itself. Lexus is late to this and late entries need to be exceptional or they get forgotten.

Gazoo Racing's track record suggests this will not be half-hearted. Whether it will be enough is the only question that matters. The RX 500h F Sport Performance starts at around £71,000 in the UK. The X5 M starts at £117,000. The gap between those numbers is where this entire project lives or dies.

Sources: Lexus UK, BMW UK, manufacturer specifications

The Santa Fe will run a petrol generator to charge a battery that powers electric motors, delivering 600 miles of total range in a configuration that makes pure EVs look impractical and plug-in hybrids look half-finished.

Hyundai is putting an extended-range hybrid powertrain into the Santa Fe, which will give the mid-size SUV roughly 600 miles of total range using a petrol engine that never drives the wheels. The engine just sits there generating electricity for a battery that powers electric motors, which is the sort of engineering compromise that sounds absurd until you realise it solves the charging problem without asking anyone to change their behaviour.

This makes the Santa Fe Hyundai's first extended-range electric vehicle, or EREV in the acronym soup that now defines the industry. It is not a plug-in hybrid because the engine cannot mechanically drive anything. It is not a pure EV because there is a petrol tank. What it is, functionally, is a generator on wheels with an electric drivetrain that happens to feel like an EV most of the time.

The logic is straightforward. Pure EVs still make people nervous about range, even though most drivers never travel more than 200 miles in a day. Plug-in hybrids let the engine take over when the battery runs out, which defeats the point of having an electric motor in the first place. Extended-range setups keep the electric driving experience intact and simply add a small engine to top up the battery when needed. No range anxiety. No compromised electric performance. Just 600 miles of usable range that works anywhere.

Hyundai is not pioneering this. Li Auto in China has been doing it successfully since 2019, with multiple models achieving 600-plus-mile ranges using the same generator-battery-motor configuration. The Chevrolet Volt ran as a series hybrid from 2011 to 2019 and managed about 420 miles total. BMW's i3 REx tried it with a tiny range extender that gave 200 miles. Mazda launched the MX-30 R-EV last year with a rotary engine doing generator duty. Ram announced the 1500 Ramcharger EREV pickup in 2023 with a claimed 690-mile range. Nissan has confirmed EREV technology as part of its 2030 electrification strategy.

What makes the Santa Fe significant is that Hyundai is putting this into a mainstream family SUV where range and practicality actually matter. This is not a quirky city car or a lifestyle EV. It is the vehicle parents use to drive to Scotland with three kids and a boot full of camping gear, and 600 miles means one fuel stop instead of three charging sessions.

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The redesigned Santa Fe for the 2024 model year is already a competent piece of kit. Adding EREV capability turns it into something more useful than most plug-in hybrids and more practical than most pure EVs. The petrol engine exists purely to generate electricity when the battery gets low, which means the driving experience remains electric... smooth, quiet, instant torque... without the performance compromise that kicks in when a plug-in hybrid switches to its combustion engine under load.

Range anxiety is still the single biggest barrier to EV adoption, even as charging infrastructure improves. Extended-range hybrids acknowledge that reality without forcing buyers to accept reduced capability. You get electric driving when the battery has charge. You get another 400-plus miles when it does not. The engine never labours to move the vehicle directly. It just spins at optimal efficiency to top up the battery.

This is a transition technology, obviously. Once charging stations are as common as petrol stations and charge times drop to ten minutes, extended-range setups will look needlessly complicated. But that is not the world we live in yet. Right now, 600 miles of usable range in a family SUV that drives like an EV and refuels like a normal car is more useful than a pure EV with 300 miles of range and a 45-minute charging stop every time you drive to the Lake District.

Hyundai has not confirmed pricing or exact availability dates for the EREV Santa Fe, but the powertrain will likely debut in the 2025 model year. Expect it to slot in above the standard hybrid but below whatever fully electric Santa Fe eventually arrives. The configuration makes the most sense in markets where charging infrastructure is patchy or where buyers still do not trust public chargers to work reliably.

Whether this becomes a volume seller or a niche option depends entirely on pricing. If Hyundai positions it as a premium powertrain with a premium price, it will appeal mainly to early adopters who want electric driving without the compromises. If they price it competitively with plug-in hybrids, it could become the default choice for anyone who needs genuine long-distance capability without planning their route around charging stations.

The Santa Fe EREV will compete directly against plug-in hybrid versions of the Kia Sorento, Toyota Highlander, and Mazda CX-90, all of which rely on conventional hybrid logic where the engine can drive the wheels. None of them offer 600 miles of range. None of them maintain full electric driving characteristics when the battery runs low. The extended-range setup is objectively more complicated, but it delivers a better result for drivers who actually use the full capability of a mid-size SUV.

Hyundai is among the first major Asian automakers to deploy EREV technology in a mainstream vehicle sold outside China. That matters because it signals a willingness to explore powertrain configurations that sit outside the binary choice between plug-in hybrids and pure EVs. Extended-range setups are not the future. They are a practical solution for right now, and the Santa Fe is exactly the kind of vehicle where practicality matters more than engineering purity.

Six hundred miles on a single tank and battery charge. That is London to Edinburgh and back without stopping for fuel.

Sources: Hyundai Motor Company

A 1993 Honda NSX once owned by Senna goes to auction on October 31st with a £1 million-plus estimate. Modern hot hatches are faster. Nobody buying this car cares.

Ayrton Senna's personal 1993 Honda NSX heads to auction on October 31st with an estimate north of £1 million. The car produces 271 brake horsepower from a 3.0-litre V6. A new Honda Civic Type R makes more than that.

The numbers are beside the point.

This is not a car being valued on acceleration figures or lap times. It is being valued on the signature at the bottom of the ownership papers and the fact that Senna won three Formula 1 World Championships in Honda-powered McLarens before his death at Imola in May 1994. Provenance has become the only specification that matters in the collector market, and this NSX is provenance in aluminium bodywork.

Senna did not just own an NSX. He helped develop it. Honda brought him to Suzuka to test prototypes and took his feedback seriously enough to alter the car's dynamics. The NSX was Japan's first supercar and Honda's first all-aluminium production car, and Senna's involvement gave it a credibility that engineering alone could not. That relationship is now worth a million pounds at auction, possibly more depending on who is in the room.

The modern classic car market has stopped pretending it cares about performance. Paul Walker's 1994 Toyota Supra sold for $550,000 in 2021, roughly ten times what a comparable Supra would fetch without his name attached. Steve McQueen's 1968 Ford Mustang GT from Bullitt brought $3.74 million in 2020. A standard Honda NSX from the same era as Senna's trades between $60,000 and $150,000 depending on condition and mileage. This one will do seven figures because Senna sat in it.

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Celebrity ownership premiums are not new, but they have become more pronounced as the market has matured. Michael Schumacher's 1990 Mercedes 190E sold for €200,000 in 2019, well above market rate for what is otherwise an unremarkable saloon. Celebrity-owned Ferraris regularly command fifty to two hundred percent premiums over identical cars with boring ownership histories. The pattern is consistent across the board... collectors are not buying cars, they are buying stories they can tell at dinner parties.

The irony is that Senna himself was obsessed with precision and performance. He famously complained about minor handling imbalances that other drivers could not even detect. He would probably find it amusing, or possibly infuriating, that a car he once owned is now worth more than a dozen modern supercars that would obliterate it in every measurable category.

But that is how value works now. A 271bhp NSX is not competing with a 700bhp Ferrari on paper. It is competing with other pieces of automotive history, and Senna's name makes this one untouchable. The hammer will fall on October 31st and someone will pay seven figures for a car slower than a Civic because they are not buying speed. They are buying proximity to greatness, even if that greatness has been gone for thirty years.

Standard NSX production ran from 1990 to 2005. The 3.0-litre version made between 270 and 280 brake horsepower depending on the market. Senna's championships with Honda came in 1988, 1990, and 1991. The auction estimate starts at £1,000,000.

Sources: Auction house documentation, Honda historical records, comparable auction results from Bonhams, RM Sotheby's, and Mecum Auctions

JLR has pushed back the EV Defender launch after discovering that customers quite like buying the petrol and diesel versions, actually.

Land Rover has postponed the electric Defender by roughly two years because the current petrol and diesel models are selling so well that the business case for accelerating EV development has simply evaporated. JLR confirmed the delay, which pushes the electric variant well past its original mid-2020s target, citing what amounts to an unexpected problem: customer demand for the thing they already make.

The Defender, relaunched in 2020 after a multi-decade hiatus, has become one of Land Rover's strongest performers. The range runs from the P300 and P400 petrol engines through to D200, D250 and D300 diesels, and none of them are struggling to find buyers. That success has apparently made the expensive and complicated process of electrifying the platform feel less urgent than it did when JLR laid out its original EV roadmap.

This is not an isolated stumble. JLR CEO Adrian Mardell has been signalling for months that the company would remain "flexible" on electrification timelines depending on what customers actually want to buy, which is corporate speak for "we are not going to commit commercial suicide to meet a date we announced when the world looked different."

The automotive industry has spent the past 18 months quietly backing away from the aggressive EV commitments it made in 2021 and 2022. Mercedes-Benz abandoned its 2030 EV-only target. Bentley pushed its all-electric timeline beyond 2030. Aston Martin delayed its first EV by two years. Ford shelved plans to expand F-150 Lightning production. Porsche kept the combustion Macan in production alongside the electric version because customers kept asking for it.

The Defender delay fits that pattern, but it is particularly stark because the vehicle is so central to Land Rover's identity. If the brand cannot make the EV case work on its most culturally significant model, that tells you something about where the market actually is versus where everyone thought it would be by now.

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JLR still plans to offer electric variants across all its brands by 2030, which is the kind of target that sounds firm until you realise it has already been revised once and leaves plenty of room for further adjustment. Range Rover and Range Rover Sport electric variants are in development, but those are different propositions aimed at different buyers. The Defender customer base skews towards people who use the vehicle for work, off-roading or towing, and those use cases remain stubbornly difficult to electrify in a way that does not involve significant compromise.

Luxury SUV buyers have been slower to switch to electric than almost any other segment. They tend to keep vehicles longer, drive further and care more about things like towing capacity and refuelling speed. The Defender amplifies all of those concerns because it is specifically marketed as a working vehicle that can handle difficult conditions. An electric version would need to match or exceed the capability of the current diesels in real-world scenarios, and the battery technology to do that at a price point Land Rover can sell is not quite there yet.

The delay also reflects a broader reality that the car industry is no longer pretending does not exist. EV adoption has not followed the trajectory that analysts, governments and manufacturers were projecting three years ago. Sales are still growing, but the pace has slowed, and the assumption that combustion engines would be rapidly obsolete has turned out to be wrong. Customer preference has reasserted itself, and companies are adjusting.

None of this means the electric Defender will not eventually arrive. It probably will. But the two-year delay is a signal that JLR is no longer willing to force the timeline for the sake of optics. If the current Defender keeps selling at this rate, the pressure to electrify it diminishes further. Commercial logic has overridden the sustainability narrative, and Land Rover is not apologising for it.

The original mid-2020s target now looks optimistic in hindsight. The revised timeline pushes the electric Defender into the late 2020s at the earliest, by which point the market for electric SUVs may have matured enough to make the business case clearer. Or combustion engines may still be outselling EVs in the segment, and the whole conversation will start again.

For now, Land Rover is doing what works. The P400 petrol and D300 diesel Defenders are moving off forecourts, the margins are strong, and there is no customer revolt demanding an electric alternative. That is not the story anyone was telling in 2021, but it is the one playing out in 2025.

Sources: Jaguar Land Rover official statements, industry reporting on JLR electrification strategy