Innholdsfortegnelse for April 23, 2025 i Autocar

Mercedes-Benz claims to have “set a benchmark” for the future of luxury travel with the Vision V concept. Making its world debut at the Shanghai motor show, it previews a VIP shuttle - dubbed the “dawn of a new era” - that will top a new-look V-Class line-up. Models will range from practical family-oriented vehicles to “luxurious limousines” and they will all be based on Mercedes’ new Van Electric Architecture (VAN.EA) platform. The first model will arrive in 2026. The flagship production version of the Vision V is being readied to push the nameplate further upmarket, said Mercedes, targeting the likes of the Volvo EM90 and Lexus LM. Its striking exterior “marks the next step” of Mercedes’ design language, especially in terms of also making the model as aerodynamic as…

A parliamentary report has criticised the absence of charge points that fully satisfy new standards for disabled driver access, concluding that “the interests of disabled drivers have been left behind in the rollout”. The Public Accounts Committee’s paper into the UK’s EV charge point network also claimed that of the 15,000 rapid and ultra-rapid charge points in the UK, none is fully compliant with BSI PAS 1899, a standard created partly by the Department for Transport (DfT) to improve the charge point experience for disabled drivers by making chargers safer and more accessible. Explaining the challenges facing disabled users, the committee wrote: “By 2035, 1.35 million drivers with disabilities are expected to be partially or wholly dependent on public charge points, but many charge points, or their surrounding environment, have…

SUBARU HAS GIVEN its Solterra electric SUV a wide-reaching update that includes a new look, extra range and more performance. Due in the UK in early 2026, the facelifted EV is visually a big departure from the car it replaces, with a new front panel and new headlights. The Solterra follows its Toyota bZ4X and Lexus RZ siblings in being updated with a fresh look as it bids to compete with new rivals in the busy electric family SUV segment. Key to the upgrade package is a new 74.4kWh battery, which replaces a 71.4kWh unit. This boosts range to “more than” 285 miles on the US’s EPA test scale, says Subaru – an increase of around 25%. This means the SUV could offer as much as 356 miles on the…

AN INCREDIBLE DEBUT I’m delighted to see Autocar giving Rivian some love (‘Move fast and make things’, 12 March). My wife and I took delivery of our Rivian R1S some two years ago. Everything about this SUV is brilliantly conceived and executed: the build quality is superb, the passenger and load space is beyond impressive and the tech is intuitive and spot-on functional. The R1S is also tremendously comfortable and boasts a very handsome and distinctive (thankfully non-generic) design. In my opinion, it’s one of the best-looking and best-engineered utility vehicles available, electric or otherwise. Where we live, people are catching on: we see more and more R1Ss and R1Ts on the road every day. I expect the smaller and more affordable vehicles Rivian has in the pipeline will do…

“The suspension is on the softer side and, while it can feel a little under-damped at times, it’s mostly very absorptive” You could hardly come up with a clearer example of collateral damage caused by sweeping legislation than the way Suzuki has been affected by the UK’s ZEV mandate. This noted manufacturer of affordable, compact, efficient cars has had to effectively stop selling some of its cars, not because people didn’t want to buy them but because it was going to be fined otherwise. Is a 60mpg, sub-one-tonne Swift really worse for the environment than a three-tonne electric SUV? Debatable at best. Be that as it may, it does seem like an oversight not to have an EV in your 2025 model line-up, so rather than sulking, Suzuki has now…

Quick recap for the people who can’t keep up with the relentless new car churn of 2025: the Mini Aceman is an electric-only baby crossover – basically a taller version of the Cooper hatchback. And the E tested here is the base version, with a tiddly 38.5kWh (usable) battery. Mini pitches the Aceman as Goldilocks-esque in its ability to blend a compact footprint with family-friendly space. This base spec apparently adds sensible, usable range for an affordable price. Although it’s worth bearing in mind that Goldilocks is really a story of perception: she did, after all, break into a house and steal some food. Understood? Good. Allow me to question the assertions that Mini tenders. Compact footprint? By 2025 standards, it’s reasonable: a bit longer than but not as wide…

BMW’s recent appetite for special versions of its mainline M cars shows no sign of letting up, and the latest derivative to join the ranks is this: the M4 CS. It’s a model its maker says exists in the “broad space between racetrack experience and soul-stirring road performance”, and there’s certainly evidence to back up that sentiment. The car’s engine, cabin and use of composite materials closely mirror that of the hardcore, Porsche 911 GT3-baiting, rear-drive M4 CSL of 2022, yet the highly adaptable fourwheel drive system of the regular M4 Competition is present, as are the back seats that were sacrificed to save 21kg in the track-ready CSL. Garching’s form when it comes to cars like this can be variable, but when it nails the recipe, the results are…

The ‘Escort Mk1 RS’ will be an almost entirely different proposition from the race car, even if the body, the rear-drive layout, the near-800kg kerb weight and a four-cylinder engine are shared properties. The star of the show is likely to the 85kg, ground-up 2.1-litre billet engine Boreham Motorworks is cooking up – it will spin to 10,000rpm and develop 296bhp – though the company has also talked of leaning into the Escort’s wonderful progressive tail-happy proclivities, only with a level of precision alien to the original car. “Controllable oversteer” is a phrase Boreham Motorworks clearly enjoys trotting out. At £295,000, the car is aimed at a different client from that other Escort restomod: the much-admired, Wales-built MST Mk1, which costs around £80,000. It’s more akin to Prodrive’s recent P25…

Six months on, it still hurts. Tom Ingram won’t forget how a second British Touring Car Championship title slipped through his fingers in the final race of 2024 at a damp Brands Hatch. But as the 2022 champion readily admits, that defeat to WSR’s Jake Hill only makes him hungry for redemption as the new BTCC season rolls into action this weekend at Donington Park. “Sometimes you learn more out of not winning,” says Ingram, who will once again race a Hyundai i30 Fastback N run by Excelr8 this year. “That has been the nature of our off-season: looking at those individual stones that maybe we could have turned over. It’s a case in point of how competitive the championship is now that it comes down to such fine margins.”…

Volkswagen Up A brilliant, small, simple allrounder. Either of its cousins – Skoda Citigo and Seat Mii – will do the job of first car just as well as the Up. These city cars, along with the Citroën C1, Peugeot 106 and Toyota Aygo family, are the best learner cars of the past decade. How much? Perfectly sound examples are available for a couple of thousand quid. Supply is abundant too. Fiat Panda The enthusiast’s choice would be the 100hp model but this might have insurance premium issues for a young driver. Any Panda will be fun and practical. It’s much more spacious and useful than the more iconic 500 and a better car to boot. How much? You’d need to go over it very thoroughly before buying but there…

MILEAGE 2290 WHY WE’RE RUNNING IT To find out if the Tavascan really is a sporty SUV – and if the segment needs it We speak in the office a lot about today’s car design. How everything looks the same and the sad truth that, in the age of EVs, wind tunnels have become dictators. The issue is heightened further by most cars being based on one of half a dozen platforms, making it harder for designers to be truly creative. The same can be seen with interiors. Take cars based on the Volkswagen Group’s MEB EV platform: the Volkswagen ID cars, for example, all have a similar layout inside, and while the Skoda Enyaq and Ford Capri both try valiantly to buck the trend, their roots are obvious to…

MILEAGE 9667 WHY WE’RE RUNNING IT To see if the new-gen Tiguan maintains the appeal of VW’s best-seller There are two kinds of cars in this world: Autocar cars and What Car? cars. I hasten to add that our friends on the other side of the office are no less enthusiastic than we are about performance cars and my Autocar colleagues are no less appreciative of a car that is sensible, practical and easy to own. But a car that one would put on the front cover, the other would seldom mention. And it won’t surprise you to hear me say that the Tiguan is very much a What Car? car. How could it not be, with such an enormous boot? When I had to do an airport run recently,…

Faced with his expectant wife’s ultimatum – ‘It’s either the family or your impractical, classic cars’ – Craig Beevers devised the perfect solution: he gave one of his precious motors to his newborn daughter. Twelve years later and already she’s talking about being driven to her wedding in it, one day. This is music to the ears of her father, who, with his daughter’s permission, is now able to enjoy her car, a 1958 Jaguar XK150 3.4 drophead coupé, safe from any wifely displeasure. For the record, Craig’s other cars at the time were a Lamborghini Gallardo and an E-Type, both two-seaters. This XK150 is a 2+2, but a glance at the rear chairs suggests they’re only there to fill a small space. Craig bought the car at auction in…

ASTON MARTIN VANQUISH COUPE 2002, 53,000 miles, £49,500 Astons don’t get much cooler than this meticulously maintained Vanquish. It comes with a detailed history file, with £40k spent on its upkeep from new. MOT is due soon, but we’d buy it for the 5.9-litre V12 alone. MERCEDES-BENZ CL600 2007, 30,000 miles, £22,990 If you’d rather have your V12 GT come from Stuttgart, then this 517bhp CL600 should grab your attention. This “exceptional example” has just two former keepers and comes with an extensive service history. It was recently serviced and will come with a fresh MOT. JAGUAR XKR 5.0 V8 2011, 52,000 miles, £19,500 The XKR is the spiritual heir to the XK150 (left). It’s got the exhilarating 5.0 V8 with a fierce 500bhp, so there’s plenty of performance on tap. The water…

The Volkswagen Golf is set to be radically reinvented as an advanced electric vehicle when it enters its ninth generation, benefiting from bold new hardware and software technology. The new model, due in 2028 or 2029, will be a key part of a wide-reaching overhaul of Volkswagen’s EV line-up that will kick off with the ID 2X later this year. The new model will start the brand’s pivot back towards more conventional and familiar styling. There have been electric variants of previous generations of the Golf, but the new version will be the first engineered purely as an electric car. While that marks a significant step for the Golf, it will retain familiar design cues from the model’s history and be offered with GTI and R performance variants. The new…

THE NEWLY UNVEILED Genesis X Gran Equator concept signals the brand’s intention to tap the lucrative luxury 4x4 market, rivalling the Land Rover Defender and Toyota Land Cruiser. More slab-sided than Genesis’s existing models, its silhouette almost recalls the great American station wagons of the ’70s and ’80s. Indeed, Genesis says the 4x4 “defies traditional SUV conventions”, more closely resembling high-riding estates such as the Audi A6 Allroad and Volvo V90 Cross Country. Nonetheless, it is intended to be a fully fledged offroader and is fitted with a set of 24in alloys and chunky all-terrain tyres. Inside, the dashboard dispenses with the large screens typical of modern cars. Instead, there are physical switches for important functions such as the drive mode, and small gauge-style displays feature the sat-nav, wheel travel…

THE NEW SUBARU Trailseeker is an electric counterpart to the Outback estate that prioritises off-road capabilities. It’s the first EV developed by Subaru itself, although it sits on a platform shared with partner firm Toyota. This is also used by the updated Subaru Solterra (see right), but while the SUV is built by Toyota alongside its own bZ4X, the Trailseeker will be built by Subaru. The Trailseeker will go on sale in the UK early next year, although Subaru has hinted that the name could be changed for Europe. The Trailseeker will be sold exclusively with a four-wheel-drive powertrain. To optimise the 4WD system, it uses two newly developed 201bhp electric motors, offering a maximum system output of 375bhp and giving a 0-60mph time of 4.4sec. Energy is drawn from…

ONE OF THE more obvious complexities of an electric car is that it uses both direct and alternating currents. The battery produces DC but the motor runs on threephase AC, because such a motor is more efficient and delivers more power than a DC equivalent. AC motors do a better job than DC motors, then, but we’re stuck with batteries putting out DC electricity. Or are we? Research has been under way for a while into designing batteries that produce AC directly, and Porsche Engineering has been conducting a feasibility study to find out whether the concept of the AC battery has a future. An EV drivetrain normally comprises a number of separate components. There’s the high-voltage DC battery with a builtin battery management system; an on-board charger allows charging…

Heman Leung moved to the UK from Hong Kong in 2020. Because of the urbanisation in Hong Kong, he arrived with no driving experience but, soon after arriving in London with his family, he realised he needed a car. “Booking a driving test is awful,” he told Autocar. “My booking was for half a year later.” He added that the stress from being unable to drive was “huge” because the long wait between each of his driving test failures left him plenty of time to “catastrophise”. “There were a lot of issues that made me feel like I couldn’t take care [of my family]. I blamed myself a lot,” he said. Two years later, Leung passed his driving test on his fourth attempt. “It changed everything,” he said. Leung moved…

I care about McLaren and long for it to succeed. But it’s a case study in how to mismanage a brand. It reminds me of Star Wars: the original was the gold standard, but with every new release, the brand seems somehow lessened. You have the mirrored removal of the great founders, and for the Skywalker Ranch see Woking. Before McLaren became a ‘volume’ maker, I remember seeing brand value charts with it at the top. Yet on the release of the MP4-12C, the mood was lukewarm; somewhat anodyne, it didn’t stir the soul like a Ferrari. It was McLaren’s Phantom Menace. McLaren responded by redesigning the front end and upping the engine noise, changing the original design ethos so the headlight graphic mirrored the McLaren logo. I’ve always felt…

“Am I loving it? Am I involved? Am I truly engaged? Not overtly” The most important line to remember about the new BMW M5 Touring came from Dirk Hacker, head of research and development at BMW’s M division, when he was giving my colleague Matt Saunders a go in a prototype last year: “We had to remember that the M5 is a working vehicle, a tool for business and everyday life.” I do wonder whether, from time to time, what we enthusiasts expect from M cars is a bit different from what customers expect and from what BMW opts to build. Take the V8-powered ‘E90’ M3 of 2007, for example. ‘This isn’t what an M3 is about’, some of us thought at the time about this bigger, heavier M3, as…

Not often are concept cars universally loved, and rarely do the heart-stealers reach the road. The few that do usually lose their special essence in being ‘productionised’ or are compromised in practical terms. The new Renault 5, as our 12 March road test revealed, somehow avoided each of those sad fates. It actually captured Takeshi’s Castle. However, the yellow car that won four and a half stars was in the top spec: Comfort Range powertrain and Iconic Five trim, costing £29k. This green car is the exact opposite: Urban Range powertrain and Evolution trim, at £23k. Can it really carry its golden ball all the way across that wobbly bridge? The differences are significant. The Comfort Range has a 52kWh battery and a 148bhp motor, the Urban Range a 40kWh…

“We’re luck y to have engineers who recognise the value of design” Ever wondered why so many supercars claim a ‘217mph-plus’ top speed? The McLaren P1, LaFerrari and Lamborghini Revuelto are just a trio of heavyhitting examples. An easy, clean conversion to a mite under 350kph is one possible reason. Another explanation, however, is aerodynamics. “There’s an exponential increase in difficulty and complexity beyond 220mph,” says Nathan Malinick, Hennessey’s director of design. “Most hypercars can do that no problem, but 250mph and above remains very, very difficult. You have to know what you’re doing.” His most dramatic work so far is the Hennessey Venom F5, its target to be the fastest production car in the world. Its theoretical 310mph-plus top speed (itself a neat 500kph) will outstrip Bugatti and Koenigsegg…

Tim Harvey, the 1992 BTCC champion and these days co-commentator for ITV, is the expert voice of the series. Here’s his take on the season ahead. “No one will miss hybrid at all, that’s for sure, in terms of cost for the teams and car weight for the drivers. And from a racing point of view, it should make no difference at all, because of the extra turbo boost used as push-to-pass to make up for it. “The tyre rules change is significant, because it should mean a lot more overtaking in race two. We should have cars coming through from fourth place down with a tyre advantage, rather than the top 10 mixing it among themselves on the same tyre. That’s good for the entertainment. “Engine development is frozen…

WHY WE’RE RUNNING IT With sports car pace and space for the dog, could this rapid wagon be the ultimate do-it-all daily driver? “On paper, this is about as close as it gets to peak car” Back in the gloomy days of Covid lockdowns, when most of our exposure to car company executives came courtesy of Skype or Zoom, we would occasionally be invited to fire up our laptops and join then Seat CEO Wayne Griffiths on a digitally imagined Spanish island to hear what he and his Cupra ‘rock stars’ had been working on lately. There would be announcements about festival partnerships, tie-ups with fashion designers I’d never heard of and lots of chat about the metaverse. The messaging could sometimes be a little hard to follow – not…

MILEAGE 15,655 WHY WE’RE RUNNING IT To see if the spirit of the classic Land Rover Defender really does live on here Our photographer Jack Harrison has taken my Grenadier to Wales to do some green-laning. “Useful to have some rough road library pictures of it,” he said. Which sounded like an excuse to have a go, really, but I could just about bear to oblige. A few minutes in, he felt he was regretting it, what with the heavy ride and slow steering, but he came around. You have to feel your way in to a Grenadier, its charms being so mechanical and old-school. Sure enough, he came to like it (almost) as much as I do. And now we have some of the best pictures we’ve yet taken…

Prices of some used EVs have nose-dived in recent years, which means you can get your hands on a premium model for far less than you might think. So how does a luxurious, comfortable and handsome Jaguar I-Pace sound for less than a new Dacia Spring? That’s right: you can snap up the British brand’s sleek electric car from as little as £12,000, which is a steal when you consider that when new Jaguar’s first electric car cost as much as £80,000, once a few optional extras had been thrown in. Under the floor is a 90kWh lithium ion battery that has a claimed WLTP range of up to 292 miles (more than its Audi, Mercedes and Tesla rivals and still competitive today). Even if that’s more like 200-250 miles…

In 1998, Volkswagen bought the rights to the Bugatti brand from the bankrupted Italian firm that had given us the V12-engined EB110 supercar. Seven years and more than €1 billion later, we drove a Veyron for the first time. It was the fastest and most powerful production car the world had ever seen, by quite some margin, and it hit, if not exceeded, all of the targets that had been set – except for cost, because there was no constraint on that, and, despite it retailing for €1 million, Volkswagen allegedly lost €5m on each one. Or rather company supremo Ferdinand Piëch lost it, because the Veyron was his car through and through. The idea only came to fruition because his attitude was: “You will get it done, and if…

MERCEDES-BENZ HAS taken the G-Class 4x4 back to its roots with a special version that draws heavily on the 1979 original. Called the G-Class ‘Stronger than the 1980s’, it features a series of historic styling cues, including amber-tinted light units and a set of classic five-spoke alloy wheels. It also gets a roof rack, mudflaps, a rear ladder and mesh grilles for the headlights. The two paint options – Agave Green or Colorado Beige – and contrasting Night Black accents reference the same scheme used on the original car. The seats are upholstered with Dove Grey chequered fabric. The special-edition model is based on the regular G450d, packing a 3.0-litre diesel-powered straight-six engine that puts out 382bhp. Mercedes will build a total of 460 examples, priced at £152,815 each.…

THE LEXUS ES is returning to battle the BMW 5 Series and Audi A6 for an eighth generation, with a bold new look and an electric option for the first time. The new version of the Japanese premium marque’s executive saloon was revealed at the Shanghai motor show in China, where it’s the number-one imported vehicle, ahead of a UK launch next spring. The ES will be Lexus’s only saloon on sale here, following the axing of the larger LS flagship earlier this year. Prices will be set nearer to its UK launch. The new ES’s minimalist cockpit marks a complete departure from the previous model and has clearly been designed with heavy influence from the Chinese market: physical controls are few and far between and a large 12.3in touchscreen…

A generation of learner drivers is under threat from spiralling costs, stress and even career damage as the waiting list for a practical driving test balloons to unprecedented size. Learners now face a wait of more than half a year at 57% of Britain’s test centres, according to new data released by the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency. DVSA figures reveal that the number of centres with an average waiting time of more than six months almost doubled between February 2024 and February 2025 to 183 sites. Meanwhile, the average waiting time for a practical test nationally increased from three and a half months to five months. The problem, according to AA Driving School spokesperson Lorna Lee, is the DVSA’s failure to fulfil pent-up demand for tests that accumulated during…

HAVING SPENT THREE years running Audi’s dealer network in China from 2018, Damien O’Sullivan witnessed first hand the rapid progress of Chinese brands and their increasing readiness to export. Today, he heads the Volkswagen Group in the UK, and ensuring it remains the UK’s market leader in the face of more rivals than ever, including those from China, fills just part of his overflowing in-tray. Tariffs, mandates, falling consumer confidence, more brands competing for fewer sales… It’s not an easy time to run a car company. A 17-year veteran of the VW Group after starting his career in finance and banking, O’Sullivan decided a decade ago he was willing to hit the road as an executive in the group’s vast global network. “Sometimes you get sent to Changchun in northeast…

ROAD TEST LAND ROVER DEFENDER OCTA Ultimate 4x4 faces ultimate challenge: Autocar’s road test. Can this 627bhp V8 off-roader offer the best of all possible automotive worlds? DRIVE STORY FORD EXPLORER ROAD TRIP Steve Cropley drives this EV from Ford’s oldest British home to its newest FEATURE THE FUTURE OF URBAN TRANSPORT? Yo-Go’s yellow buggies are the Boris Bike of EVs. We drive one in London EVERY WEEK USED GUIDE BMW 3 SERIES TOURING Top tips to find a tidy ‘F31’ example of this well-sorted executive estate from just £2500 LIVING WITH AN… INEOS GRENADIER Off-roading fan Matt Prior delivers the verdict on this new but old-school 4x4…

“Given all the sporty promises, you can’t help thinking ‘is that it?’” ‘Flexible’ platforms like the Volkswagen Group’s MQB throw up various ‘why not?’ questions. It means you can have a multi-link axle and adaptive dampers in an otherwise lowly Volkswagen Golf. Because why not? Meanwhile, the clever four-wheel drive system with torque-splitting device had already been developed for the Golf R, so more recently it has been shared around to the Cupra Leon and Audi S3. Again, why not? Putting the Golf GTI engine into a Skoda Kodiaq for the sporty vRS version is more of a head-scratcher. A big seven-seat SUV tends to be used more for mooching than haring so is ideally suited to a diesel or electrified powertrain. Indeed, when Skoda launched the Mk1 Kodiaq vRS,…

It seemed odd, perhaps even a little bit cruel, that Toyota elected to permanently nix the Prius from its UK line-up just as the model, after decades in existence, was hitting its stride in respect to capability and desirability. Strange timing indeed, even if sales had been cannibalised by the C-HR, to the extent that the Prius was only finding 600 or so buyers annually. That was back in 2022, and the following year Toyota reversed its decision. Result: the fifth generation of the world’s most famous hybrid is now available over here, and anybody who hasn’t been paying attention might need a moment to adjust to its presence. For one thing, the exterior design is now striking enough to turn heads as its glides down city streets – something…

The summer of ’25 will mark the debut of an official new Mk1 Ford Escort RS. Even tapping out that sentence feels surreal, but allowing a little bit of wiggle room for semantics and technicalities, it’s the truth. Every car will even have a fresh VIN stamped into a bona fide, Ford-signed plate beneath its featherlight carbonfibre bonnet. Each of the 150 examples aims to be a spiritual and mechanical successor to the Escort RS2000 of 1973, to the extent that the chassis numbers will pick up where the old-timers’ once ended. It’s all being masterminded by Coventry-based Boreham Motorworks, which is more than just an evocative name and striking typeface. Boreham is a sub-division of newly formed mothership DRVN Automotive, which has lately brought together a gaggle of expert…

The folks in Texas aren’t just known for the Venom. The other side of their business is Hennessey Performance, a profitable line of modified trucks and muscle cars that helps fund the pursuit of 300mph (and beyond). “We’ve just signed deals with General Motors, Stellantis and Ford, so cars will be shipped directly from their lines to us,” says Malinick. “Our previous philosophy was fully retail, where our customers would buy the car first.” Simplifying the process should see business double from last year’s 600 cars. “One project drives the other,” he adds. “So if the guy buying the Mustang thinks it’s neat that the same company produces this hypercar, the guy who’s buying the hypercar might love Mustangs or big trucks so ends up with a fleet of Hennessey…

There’s a Morris Minor fan near where I live. He has a Traveller on his drive and a saloon on the road outside that doesn’t appear to have moved for some time because there’s an eco system developing underneath it. Then a few weeks ago, while cycling past Hampton Court Palace, I saw what looked like the saloon motoring along the A308 in the direction of the M3. An impressive turnaround in fortune for a car that, I suspected, might never run again. Except this wasn’t that Morris Minor. This one was being driven by a young-looking lad who, from the presence of an L-plate front and back, appeared to be learning to drive in it. A few days later, I spotted the car parked outside the local doctor’s surgery.…

MILEAGE 15,888 WHY WE’RE RUNNING IT To find out if the quintessential Jeep is really a vehicle you can live with every day The Wrangler has been here for only a few weeks and I’ve already done 4500 miles. One reason is that we’ve been busy, but it’s mostly because, for all its beguiling crudity, the Jeep turns out to be (as I knew it would) one of those happy cars you use for everything. When the task is to drive from our village to an area of restricted parking in the nearby market town, I’d usually take a smaller car from our fleet – the Duster or the Mini – but I find myself thinking ‘what the hell’ and taking the Jeep anyway. With its elevated driving position, straight…

MILEAGE 40,058 WHY WE’RE RUNNING IT To find out if an approved used car is the best route into Tesla ownership few days away on the Isle of Wight helping my best A friend do some work to his parents’ holiday home was a good opportunity to give the Model 3 a proper run on a mixture of roads. Among my preflight checks was topping up the windscreen washer fluid, which is under the bonnet and reminded me that the Model 3 has extra storage space up front that I hadn’t used yet. Once this frunk is combined with the long, deep rear boot, it gives a hatchback-rivalling 425 litres of luggage room – which was plenty for our bags, painting gear and various DIY tools without having to resort…

AN OWNER’S VIEW DANIEL WOOD “I purchased my 71-reg I-Pace HSE back in August last year from a Jaguar main dealer. The reason I went for an I-Pace was the massive depreciation from new and how well it drove compared with rivals in the same price bracket. Mine is fitted with the adaptive air suspension – it’s a worthwhile option because I found the ride a bit bouncy on standard springs. I’ve had no issues so far, and OTA updates come up fairly frequently. Realworld range in my experience is 210-240 miles, but it can be expensive to charge publicly.” BUYER BEWARE… ■ BATTERY Be wary of 2019-model-year cars fitted with LG Energy Solution batteries: these can overheat and potentially catch fire. Around 264 are subject to a recall, and…