Innholdsfortegnelse for January 12, 2022 i Autocar

Chrysler Airflow Chrysler will launch its first EV in 2025, its centenary year, as it prepares to ditch ICE by 2028. The Airflow, with a pair of 201bhp motors, a 350-mile-plus range and a futuristic, tech-laden interior, sets the future visual and technological tone. It also provides a first look at how parent company Stellantis will exploit a new partnership with Amazon to enhance the connectivity of its EVs from 2024. One Gemini US battery developer Our Next Energy (One) claims its new Gemini EV battery can provide 752 miles of range. It deployed the 207.3kWh unit in a Tesla Model S and drove for 14 hours at an average of 55mph in cold temperatures to achieve the headline-baiting figure. One aims to eliminate range anxiety with its high-energy-density batteries…

VOLKSWAGEN’S LONGawaited electric saloon is edging closer to production as advanced-stage development testing of the Tesla Model 3 rival begins ahead of its 2023 launch. Through its light camouflage, a recently spotted prototype bore all the hallmarks of a car that’s nearly ready for a reveal, suggesting a public debut could come before 2022 is up. However, the immediate priority for Volkswagen is the launch of the retrofuturistic ID Buzz, which is set to be unwrapped in a matter of weeks. Like the ID Buzz (and the already launched ID 3, ID 4 and ID 5), the new saloon will use the Volkswagen Group’s MEB EV architecture and be offered with a range of batteries and drivetrain set-ups. The most powerful version, which is expected to wear the GTX badge,…

What are the highlights of the ET5? “Our global design team worked through the pandemic to create the ET5. The team has developed an ever-growing confidence in our design DNA, and I think that’s evident in the form. “We’ve progressed many Nio signatures, such as the shark nose and X-bar, but also introduced a sporting edge. It evokes the lines of the EP9, our record-breaking hypercar, with muscular haunches, and we’ve introduced the ducktail spoiler. “Inside, we had the opportunity to innovate further. We have Clean+, a sustainable fabric that’s made from 100% recycled PET bottles. And we have an industry first with the AR/VR [augmented/virtual reality] experiences that underline a Nio as a second living space.” Where does it sit in the range? “It’s our mid-size car. The ET7,…

I have a tale to tell of some supercars. It’s a curious time of year to be thinking a lot about mid-engined 200mph motors, but here we are. Just a few days before Christmas, my email notification pinged to say that the Noble M500 prototype (see p6) would be available if I would like to go and have a nose around it and a chat to its creators. Absolutely I would, I replied, so off I toddled to Noble’s factory in Leicester the very next day. I use the term ‘factory’ cautiously here. ‘Factory’ implies big levels of industrialisation, machinery and large numbers of products for sale. Noble’s base is today a development centre, perhaps an artisan workshop, but nothing rolls down a line towards the door. Since beginning development…

Ford might look in bad shape for car sales last year but, in reality, it’s the top-selling manufacturer when you combine car and van sales. In fact, while the Corsa is top of the car rankings, the Tourneo Custom is the best-selling vehicle of 2021, selling 54,000 units compared with the Corsa’s 40,914. Plus, Ford vehicles accounted for one-third of all commercial vehicles sold in the UK. Ford of Britain boss Lisa Brankin said: “Ford prioritised vehicle supply in a difficult year, with the pandemic ongoing and semiconductor shortages affecting the entire automotive industry, to grow commercial vehicle sales and meet the demand and loyalty to the Transit brand.”…

1 CO2 price of €65 per tonne by 2024. 2 End fossil fuel subsidies; phase out coal earlier than planned. 3 Expand renewables to 255GW by 2030. 4 Re-orient company car subsidies to electrics. 5 Gradually reduce electric vehicle premium by 2025. 6 Huge expansion of charging network; mandated targets for fast chargers. 7 Limit green hydrogen to decarbonise steel, chemicals and cement. 8 Refocus city transport on ride sharing and e-bikes. 9 New rules on vehicle data and vehicle/cyber security. 10 Nationwide 5G to accelerate the shift to autonomous vehicles.…

Such is the extent of the changes that Mercedes has made to the SL for its seventh generation that it’s hard to know exactly where to start. The new luxury roadster is more than just an evolutionary update of its decade-old predecessor. In fact, it’s a major reset, not only in design and engineering but also in construction, packaging, performance and, perhaps most importantly of all, dynamics. Given the SL’s revered standing, it’s a move that clearly hasn’t been taken lightly. The 1954 original, a modified race car with flamboyant gullwing doors, got the ball rolling and set the tone for a line-up that has endured for close to 70 years and long since achieved cult status. The fact that the new SL (known internally as the R232) was conceived…

The new ID 6 was intended to be a China-only member of Volkswagen’s rapidly expanding electric car portfolio. However, that might well be about to change, because rumour has it that this car – the German brand’s biggest EV so far – is heading for Europe as an import. The ID 6 is essentially an extended-wheelbase version of the ID 4, designed to seat seven people. In every other dimension, the two SUVs are very similar, the ID 6 being not quite 40mm taller or 30mm longer. In fact, in the metal, the only easy way of visually differentiating the two is by the badges on the bootlid and the ID 6’s larger rear window. Two variants exist: the ID 6 X tested here and the stockier ID 6 Crozz,…

There’s no shortage of trackbiased supercars playing on their makers’ motorsport heritage, but Radical’s SR10 is very much the real thing. You can’t drive it on road, but for anyone wanting an off-theshelf racer that’s faster than a factory GT3 car or a way of dominating topend track days, its value-for-money proposition is close to unbeatable. That has been true since its 2020 launch, but now Radical has revised it with a new engine map, better cabin ergonomics and the options of uprated brakes and a new Formula 1 halo-inspired protection structure that wraps around the cockpit. The car’s core appeal is unchanged as a very gentle introduction to the world of slicks and wings. The engine remains the least special part of the experience, a heavily reworked 2.3-litre Ford…

Your overwhelming impression from standing for the first time in Lotus’s magnificent new Emira assembly hall at Hethel is that, for the first time, this really is a firmly founded long-term sports car business. Hethel has been responsible for 55 of Lotus’s 73-year production history, but there has always been an undercurrent of impermanence brought by organisational changes and hiatuses from weak sales. But this place, and the mighty three-tier paint shop beside it, has clearly been built by planners looking 20 years ahead. Wandering the new hall with Carl Elston, executive director of quality, it’s impossible not to be impressed by the scale of the thing. Bodies emerge from a framing line next door into a spacious four-line assembly process where they travel on AGVs (automatic guided vehicles). Chassis…

For some of us, the 1990s were only yesterday. They were simpler, Britpoppy times with dial-up internet. The cars were brilliant, too. Not just characterful and entertaining, they were also safer than cars had ever been. The widespread adoption of ABS and crumple zones, along with power steering, made them easier to live with – and today they remain eminently fixable, rather than being chip-based life forms. But when you wander around a car park, how many ’90s survivors do you find? They seem to be disappearing fast and are now owned by only the eccentric or impoverished. It is possible to drill down into the official registration stats and discover that an awful lot of models are rather rarer than any ’90s Ferrari you care to mention. Modena officially…

COMPARISON Hyundai Kona N vs Cupra Formentor The Kona N is the latest in the growing cohort of performance crossovers. Is it better than its fast-selling Spanish rival? FEATURE Speccing a Ferrari What goes into the ordering process of creating a bespoke supercar? We find out INTERVIEW Kimi Räikkönen The 2007 champion has left Formula 1 after 20 years. Here’s what he plans to do next EVERY WEEK ROAD TEST BMW i4 One of the most compelling electric cars yet faces our road testers LONG-TERM TEST Jaguar XF Our time with this excellent saloon is up. So how will we remember it? SUBSCRIBE autocar.co.uk/subscribe or see p24…

“Two motors make a total of 402bhp. I’m waiting to download an additional 67bhp” FIRST REPORT WHY WE’RE RUNNING IT To see if an electric car fits into a high-mileage life There’s a tendency among car makers, especially makers of posh cars, to complicate things. To throw at them technology and features – some of which you will never use – to wow you. This, the Polestar 2, from a company part-owned by Volvo, is refreshingly simpler than that. The 2, Polestar’s second car after the wild plug-in hybrid 1, is a pure EV. This one is with us as my daily wheels until the middle of the year. It’s 4.6m long and 1.8m wide across the body, with a five-seat interior and a 78kWh (usable) battery pack beneath it.…

An expert’s view KARL PRICE, L&M, ALFA AND FIAT SPECIALISTS “The 100 HP is unburstable and bulletproof in many areas and it can survive huge mileages. One just in had 123k miles on the clock but was in great condition. It’s mostly a very reliable car. Rear shocks are a real weak point, though. The rear subframe bushes can go, too. It’s always best to make sure your car has had new top mounts fitted. The front suspension arms can go as well, so check those carefully. And it’s always best to make sure the cambelt’s been done. You can’t remap a 100HP, although there is a turbo conversion out there that really flies.” Buyer beware… ▪ WHEELS, TYRES AND BODYWORK The car is very sensitive to suspension geometry, so…

The striking new Noble M500 is the British supercar maker’s long-awaited followup to the acclaimed M600, which arrived in 2009. First shown as a concept at the 2018 Goodwood Festival of Speed and developed into this working prototype since, the M500 is a cheaper and less powerful car than the M600 that it effectively replaces as the company’s sole offering. Dynamic testing has just begun, and in an exclusive interview and unveiling with Autocar, Noble said that first customer deliveries will get under way this year. Like the M600, the M500 is a two-seat, mid-engined supercar built around a steel chassis. But instead of a twin-turbocharged Volvo V8, it runs a twin-turbocharged 3.5-litre Ford V6, as deployed in the Blue Oval’s GT supercar. As standard, the engine makes a little…

BAC Mono R The hardcore new Mono R is claimed to be faster, more powerful, lighter and keener-handling than the already formidable Mono. A £190,950 list price puts it on a par with fully fledged supercars, but there really is nothing else like it. Ultima RS Few cars simultaneously bring Bugatti Veyron-beating power, wear a numberplate at each end and cost the same as the BMW M3. Ultima’s most powerful model yet uses a Chevrolet V8 tuned to 1200bhp to sprint from 0-60mph in just 2.3sec and on to a top speed north of 250mph. Wells Vertige Developed by and exclusively for driving enthusiasts, the Vertige from new firm Wells is a lightweight two-seater with 208bhp and equal focus on dynamics and usability. It will be built in extremely limited…

The iPhone maker’s highly secretive development programme for a self-driving EV – codenamed Project Titan – has been ongoing since at least 2014. It remains unclear exactly what the plans are, but BMW i3 designer and ex-Canoo CEO Ulrich Kranz was recently enlisted by Apple’s car division and in 2021 it was reported LG and Magna could play a part in the car’s production. This time last year, an announcement that Apple was in talks with Hyundai about shared development of an autonomous electric car sent shares in the Korean manufacturer soaring by 20% overnight. However, talks ended soon after, with no deal agreed, and no official update on potential partnerships has been given since.…

ISRAELI COMPANY STOREDOT, which numbers Daimler, Samsung and BP Ventures among its investors, claims to be the first to have produced extreme fast charge (XFC) lithium ion battery cells on a mass-production line. The cells, based on silicon-dominant anodes, are said to reduce charge time by 50% with no increase in cost. Silicon, as a replacement for graphite to store and release lithium ions during charge and discharge, is the big thing in battery technology today, but making it work isn’t easy. It can store about 10 times more lithium ions than graphite and allows much faster charging: that much is well known. The problem is that during charging and discharging, it changes volume by as much as 300%, which is enough to mechanically destroy a cell. One solution is…

Buyers who opt for Nio’s battery-swapping service will cut roughly £8000 off the price of their ET5. The car’s battery can be swapped out for a fully charged one in as little as three minutes – a far quicker replenishment than even the fastest chargers can offer. By the end of 2022, Nio anticipates that it will have more than 1300 battery-swap stations in operation across China. It also recently signed an agreement with Shell to expand its battery-swapping infrastructure into Europe, and the first station is already in operation in Norway.…

One in six new car registrations in 2021 was a plug-in, electrified vehicle, compared with one in 10 the previous year, creating a growing chasm between electric vehicle adoption and the infrastructure with which to power EVs. New data from the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders shows that 305,000 plug-in vehicles (electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids) were sold last year, accounting for 18.6% of the overall market. Including non-plug-in hybrids, 27.5% of the market was electrified. In 2020, electrified cars had a market share of 17%. Electric vehicles accounted for 11.6% of the market, or 190,727 units. It means that more EVs were registered last year than over the previous five years combined. SMMT CEO Mike Hawes said: “It’s very good news on the plug-in front but we can’t…

Charger provider Osprey has opened a new rapidcharging hub in Croydon as part of a £75 million nationwide infrastructure push to support the growing number of EV drivers in the UK. Comprising six chargers, ranging in output from 75kW to 175kW, the new site is described as “a blueprint for rapid EV charging infrastructure” in London, where the number of EVs increased by a substantial 95% from 2020 to 2021. Autocar spoke to Osprey boss Ian Johnston to hear how the shape of charging infrastructure in the UK is changing and how Osprey plans to expand. How has the UK’s charging infrastructure changed since Osprey began operations? “I think the pandemic has made everybody aware that by 2030, we will all be transitioning to EVs, and it means that everybody…

THE FIRST EXTREME E electric off-roader racing season ended with a nail-biting (and muddy) finale at the Bovington Camp military base in Dorset. A week after missing out on an eighth F1 title, Sir Lewis Hamilton’s mood might have been lightened by a first win for his X44 entry, driven by Sébastien Loeb and Cristina Gutiérrez, only to be darkened again by losing the XE title to old nemesis Nico Rosberg. The 2016 F1 champion’s Rosberg X Racing team, helmed by Johan Kristoffersson and Molly Taylor, endured an uncharacteristically difficult final in the Jurassic X Prix so could finish only fourth. But that was just enough, the Rosberg and Hamilton teams ending the season equal on points but RXR claiming the crown on wins countback. Jenson Button’s JBXE outfit ended…

The eight-year-old Macan is one of the most successful Porsches in history, which is quite a claim for a model that’s made by a world-famous sports car company but isn’t even a sports car. Porsche is extremely adroit at projecting its sporting image onto models of non-sporting layouts (the Taycan, for instance, is billed as “the sports car of luxury limousines”), and this is more of the same. The Macan, however, is especially valuable for the way it brings new buyers into the fold. Porsche has sold more than 600,000 examples since launch – a better performance than even the most optimistic early expectations. Around 80% go to people new to Porsche. Better yet, 60% of buyers are women. Porsche looks, image and quality are regularly cited as the decisive…

MODEL TESTED 77.4KWH GT-LINE RWD Price £43,945 • Power 226bhp • Torque 258lb ft • 0-60mph 6.9sec • 30-70mph in fourth na • Fuel economy 3.4mpkWh • CO2 emissions 0g/km • 70-0mph 46.5m Quietly, Kia and Hyundai have become forerunners in the electric car race. With electric versions of the Kia Niro and Soul and the Hyundai Kona, these stablemates proved they had the talent and know-how, demonstrating that EVs with a decent range could look pretty normal, drive in a familiar fashion and needn’t be prohibitively expensive. As a result, while some other manufacturers struggled to shift their EVs, Kia and Hyundai amassed substantial waiting lists for theirs, even before the current supply chain issues started wreaking havoc. So far, though, these trailblazing Korean-built EVs haven’t been very exciting. They’ve…

The EV6 is the first product of a new Kia. It shows a completely new design language that will trickle down throughout the range and it sits on an entirely new and innovative EV platform that will spawn several other models. A lot is riding on the EV and, with a few caveats, Kia has knocked it out of the park. It avoids one significant pitfall by having a substantially different character from the mechanically similar Hyundai Ioniq 5. It’s a much more dynamic car to drive than the Hyundai – and most other full-sized EVs, too, short of a Porsche Taycan. That’s also reflected in the car’s driving environment, which doesn’t go for the lounge-on-wheels style of some EVs but instead has a more traditional executive car feel, while…

As if buying a used car weren’t already a stressful process, what with the need to check its service history, examine it for damage and haggle over the price, we’re about to make it worse with the news that, according to a major vehicle information company, one in 11 used cars has been clocked – a 45% increase on five years ago. That’s right: despite the proliferation of sophisticated electronics in modern cars, it’s still possible to wind back an odometer to display a lower mileage and boost the car’s value, and more people are doing so. “Clocking is a greater problem now than it has ever been,” an HPI spokesperson told Autocar. “What was once the preserve of unscrupulous dealers is now also carried out by unscrupulous motorists looking,…

If you want to find a clocked car, look no further than an old taxi. The fact that the Toyota Prius we found advertised on a leading website was a 2010-reg with a convincing 180,000 miles and that its history check gave the odometer reading a clean bill of health didn’t deter us one bit. This car had ‘clocked’ written all over it. On this point, we have to be careful. The term means a deliberate attempt to conceal a car’s true mileage. The advertisement certainly didn’t suggest the mileage was other than accurate and no mileage disclaimer sticker – a recognised way of alerting buyers to a reading that cannot be relied on – was visible in the pictures of the car. In addition, when we first spoke to…

Flying in the face On a whim, I recently downloaded the Flightradar24 app to my phone. At any one time, I can see hundreds of thousands of aeroplanes making their way across the heavens, each discharging, I assume, thousands of tonnes of CO2 and other pollutants during the course of its journey. Quite apart from being intrigued as to what on earth the reasons can possibly be for so many people to have to travel to other countries in the way that they do, surely little old me and little old you spending small fortunes on ‘going electric’ with our next vehicles isn’t going to make even the tiniest difference to the vital need to cut down on all this sort of thing. I’m actually fully prepared to embrace electric…

AS REMAINS A traditional activity for Autocar, in January 1951 we looked back on the previous 12 months of road testing. Whereas today British cars are rarities, back then there were few foreign cars, as the UK and Europe strove to recover from the war – although things were looking up after the end of petrol rationing. The best car tested in 1950 was the Jaguar XK120, which clocked 0-62mph in 12.0sec – about three times as fast as an everyday car. “This car by now must have become insufferably conceited, if it is true that cars have personalities, by all the superlatives that have been lavished on it,” commented HS Linfield. The priciest was Bentley’s Mark VI, at £2595 (about £83,360 today), while the most affordable was the £299…

Nearly every car company that has ever existed has had a defining slogan, functioning as both a mantra and an advertising tool. Some are so famous that they’ve become part of everyday language. Some were dreamed up in the distant past and some are still in use. Here are the short stories behind a few of the best. Vorsprung durch Technik In the early 1980s, Audi was widely seen as a posh Volkswagen rather than a rival to BMW and Mercedes-Benz. Exciting new cars like the Quattro started to change that, but its marketing needed a push; and it was new British ad agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty tasked with changing its image. In 1982, BBH creative boss John Hegarty toured Audi’s Ingolstadt factory to seek inspiration. He spotted the statement…

Technology giant Sony could soon launch its own line of bespoke electric cars following the announcement of a newly formed subdivision dedicated to mobility at the unveiling of a radical new SUV model. The Japanese technology giant rocked the automotive industry in 2020 when it revealed the Vision-S 01 saloon as a showcase of its autonomous driving and in-car entertainment systems. But even as it started testing with a road-legal prototype a year later, it didn’t suggest there would be a production variant. Now, though, the firm has said it will launch a new operating company called Sony Mobility Inc this spring through which it “intends to explore entry into the EV market”. The company’s business model will revolve around Sony’s in-house-developed artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics technologies, which, it…

Chinese EV maker Nio is going after the hugely popular Tesla Model 3 with its new ET5, a sleek compact saloon that achieves a range of up to 620 miles on its home market’s CLTC test cycle. The dual-motor, four-wheeldrive ET5 packs 483bhp and can do 0-62mph in 4.3sec. It can be specified with a choice of three battery capacities (75, 100 and 150kWh), the largest of which could make it one of the longest-range EVs in the world. Just as notable as the ET5’s impressive capabilities is the news that Nio plans to enter 25 more global markets by 2025, following a recent launch in Norway, including Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden this year. The UK hasn’t been named, but Nio bosses have previously expressed a keen interest…

FAREWELL, HAKAN Håkan Samuelsson is soon to step down as Volvo boss after the better part of a decade, to be replaced by ex-Dyson chief Jim Rowan. This brings to an end one of the most transformative eras in the brand’s 95 years. Aside from him being among the most candid CEOs we’ve known in recent years, he will be missed for his ability to not just spot coming changes in the way cars are created and sold but act on them before rivals. Here are some landmark moments from his tenure. 2014 Off the back of a strong 2013, Volvo kick-started its revitalised line-up with the all-new XC90, its first car developed under Geely ownership. 2015 Volvo’s global sales soared past the 500,000 mark for the first time. 2016 In…

BACK IN 1992, Toyota opened its first major European manufacturing facility in Burnaston, Derbyshire, and 30 years later it’s still at the heart of the Japanese firm’s European operations. The numbers tell an impressive story. Toyota has invested a combined £2.5 billion to date in this facility and its sibling site in North Wales, with a total of 4,579,166 cars being produced in Derby (between 1992 and 2020, the most recent data available). Some 2600 people are employed directly, with a further 800 in North Wales building engines. These days, the 2.35 million square metre Derbyshire plant is capable of producing one car every 89 seconds, or 3000 a week. The facility is also good for UK plc’s bottom line, as it exports 90% of production overseas, mostly to mainland…

BUSINESS GERMANY’S NEW ‘TRAFFIC light’ coalition government is planning a dramatic upsurge in electrified motoring together with greener industrial policies. The shift puts a question mark over 880,000 jobs and the future of its world-leading car makers and global tierone suppliers, but it also promises a radical reshaping of an industry at the heart of Europe’s car-making skills. The battle around electrification and the pivot in Germany’s powerhouse assembly plants and supply chain to batteryelectric cars has already split the outgoing Merkel government from some sectors of the German automotive industry. That trend may continue since new transport, energy and industry ministers were appointed by the coalition in early December. Significantly, the Greens have been allocated the key economy and climate change department, under Robert Habeck, who will coordinate climate,…

MONDAY How many times have you been inspired by a hole in the ground? Not often for me, so I was unprepared for the uplifting experience of a trip to Catesby Tunnel, a few miles south of Daventry on the A361, where a 2.7km-long, formerly double-tracked Victorian railway tunnel has been repurposed and expensively calibrated for vehicle aerodynamics testing. As soon as you clap eyes on this place, its potential hits you over the head. Here is a secure, private location, temperaturecontrolled, perfectly flat and straight and with a modern Tarmac surface, where you can drive a car at speeds of up to 200mph in repeatable conditions. There will never be a breath of crosswind and your results will be entirely devoid of the usual corrections and drawbacks of tethered…

This is a Porsche 356 with an electric motor where the engine used to be. Curious. Electrogenic, the Oxfordshire EV-conversion company behind it, thinks it might be the first electrified original 356 in existence, made at the behest of the car’s owner, who wants to drive a zero-emissions classic in town and whose family didn’t much like driving it when it had an engine. They also get to keep the original 1.6-litre flat four, though, in case they ever want to put it back. The process is reversible; in a way, it has to be if you want to keep a car’s original registration. There’s a points-based system for keeping modified cars on their original identity, and a certain number of those have to be accrued from an unmodified chassis,…

Never has it been simpler to add a four-wheel-drive version to a model line-up than with dedicated EV platforms, because they’re usually designed to accommodate an optional second electric motor from the outset. It’s no surprise, then, that Skoda has created a four-wheel-drive version of its MEB-platform SUV, the Enyaq iV. It’s called the 80x, because it has the bigger, 77kWh ‘80’ battery and adds a 61bhp motor on the front axle for a total of 261bhp. The Enyaq is so far our favourite of the Volkswagen Group MEB family. It’s not an entertainer, but it offers practicality, material appeal and comfort in spades. Do more power and enhanced traction sweeten the deal even more? They better do, because the extra motor is available only with Sportline trim, which isn’t…

“We’ll do a few laps in the electrical car,” says Gavan Kershaw, standing beside a Lotus Emira prototype outside Lotus’s impressive new Hethel HQ. It’s an odd-looking machine – familiar in shape and basically white, but covered in random colour flashes as if it recently lost a high-speed argument with a random salvo of paintballs. This word ‘electrical’ is unexpected. Every shred of Emira publicity has so far made it clear that while Lotus is indeed readying an all-new pure-electric sports car for launch in the mid-2020s, this Emira is very much Hethel’s last tilt at “celebrating the glories of combustion”. It isn’t even a hybrid. The electrical explanation turns out to be undramatic. Lotus currently has around 35 Emira prototypes engaged in final testing in locations all over the…

I’m not sure I will bother to watch another Formula 1 race after the travesty of the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix. All season we’ve had indecision and changes of mind from race director Michael Masi, and at the time it counted most, he made the worst decision of the year. He had a choice, as per the sporting regulations: let all the lapped cars past the safety car or none of them. Apart from a red flag, there was no other decision to make. Except Mr Indecisive found an additional option: let past only the lapped cars in front of Max Verstappen and thereby hand him victory on a plate. Masi might as well have declared Verstappen the winner before the start and avoided all controversy. If only we could…

Whoever said the best things come in small packages must have owned a Fiat Panda 100HP. This is essentially a hotted-up version of the firm’s diminutive and wonderfully utilitarian city car, and in its transmogrification to hot hatch, it became a relatively simplistic and disarmingly cheerful hipster, full of fun and as lively as a puppy. It ran from 2006 to 2010 and initially cost £9995 new and, provided you shop carefully, it can still make for a quirkily attractive and decently affordable used car buy now. The recipe was relatively simple. Take one second-generation Panda and stick a 99bhp 1.4-litre overhead-cam FIRE engine from the contemporary Punto under the bonnet. Throw in a six-speed gearbox and then lower and stiffen the suspension and thicken the front anti-roll bar. Add…

Cute, pert and cheap on the upkeep, the dinky Skoda Citigo (subcutaneously the same as the hugely impressive Volkswagen Up and Seat Mii) is a fun and surprisingly grownup city car that was a huge success from its launch in 2012 to its death in 2021 and is now a bargain used buy. For the first seven years of its life, it was a pretty conventional petrol-engined car, with a naturally aspirated 1.0-litre three-cylinder unit making either 59bhp (the 60) or 74bhp (the 75). They came with a fivespeed manual gearbox or, for a little extra, an automated manual (ASG). A Greentech version with a stop-start system and eco tyres even pushed CO2 emissions below the magic 100g/km marker. Strim gets you a CD player but not a great deal…

You know what you’re going to get from a Vauxhall Monaro: power, and lots of it. It’s certainly not the subtlest car out there: with a low-slung spoiler, large tailpipes and aggressive-looking dual front air intakes, there are plenty of telltale signs that this is a coupé geared towards speed. But is that all there is to it? Hardly. Here’s why you should scour the used market to pick up one of the last 439 Monaros left on UK roads. The perfect ticket to cheap thrills, the Monaro is a sly buy for those who fancy a change from the usual European stalwarts. This is no less true with the Monaro’s most extreme variant, the VXR, which joined the range in 2004, priced at £36,785. Those who fancy a record-breaker…