Innholdsfortegnelse for June 25, 2025 i Autocar

The ID 3 and ID 4 will be extensively updated for a second time to bring them visually in line with the upcoming ID 2 – as well as reintroducing physical controls inside. Talking to Autocar, VW technical development boss Kai Grünitz said the two models will adopt the new design language first introduced on the 2023 ID 2all concept to give them “a family resemblance to the ID 2” and a “lower and squatter stance”. The facelifted ID 3 and ID 4 will also receive fully revised interiors with a new dashboard and user interface. Changes include a return to physical buttons and knobs in place of digital display-based functions and the controversial slider element, a move hinted at on the ID 2all. “We’re going to bring back a…

MITSUBISHI WANTS TO return to the UK as part of a broader strategy to rebuild its business in Europe, the brand’s Europe head told Autocar. The Japanese car maker left the UK in 2021 amid a Covid-led sales collapse that forced a rethink across its global markets, including Europe. Since then, Mitsubishi has returned to most of its former European markets with the aid of new models sourced from Alliance partner Renault. Now, Mitsubishi wants to include the UK in that plan. “If you look at the potential and size of the market, it’s our preferred route to go back,” said Frank Krol, CEO of Mitsubishi Motors Europe. “But we need to have the right product line-up.” Mitsubishi’s preferred models for a UK return include the replacement for the Outlander…

HONDA WILL SHOW a concept car that previews a new city-focused EV at next month’s Goodwood Festival of Speed. Called the Super EV Concept, it paves the way for an A-segment hatchback to rival the Hyundai Inster, Fiat 500e and upcoming Renault Twingo. Its styling draws on the short-lived Honda E supermini. Technical details remain scarce, but Honda said the car is intended to show how a small, affordable EV can be fun to drive. It has already been tested in the UK as part of a broader international rollout. The Super EV Concept will be unveiled in full on 10 July. Honda will also use the event to showcase the bold 0 Series SUV concept in Europe for the first time, as well as the Civic Type R Ultimate…

Families across the UK are campaigning to stem the decline in school crossing patrol officers, otherwise known as lollipop men and women, in the face of council cutbacks. They argue the roles are still needed, given that new police data released in June reported that 413 pedestrians were killed in 2024, an increase of 2% compared with 2023, amounting to a quarter of all road-related deaths. People aged 16 years and under accounted for 4% of these deaths and 10% of those injured. The figures have been released against a background of reductions in school crossing patrols, the numbers of which have halved in the past 10 years but which their supporters insist make roads safer for children. Croydon Council is one of the latest to scrap its lollipop patrollers,…

WRITE TO autocar@haymarket.com ADAS EMBARRASSMENT I agree wholeheartedly with Illya Verpraet about adaptive cruise control (Testing, Testing, 4 June): it simply doesn’t work as it should and is inferior to normal cruise control. I find ACC as utterly exasperating as Illya clearly does. I once suggested on a forum dedicated to my type of car that ACC was less than satisfactory. I seemed to be alone in thinking this. Those who replied said I couldn’t be using it properly, which was a bit tiresome. I recently found a new gripe about ADAS. On a very narrow single-track road in Cornwall, I met another car and reversed a little way back into a passing space. This being Cornwall, the hedgerow and verge were high, which activated my reversing sensors, so the…

Ford’s car strategy in Europe has undergone a major overhaul in recent years, the results of which are still playing out. But while this has been going on, the Blue Oval’s sturdy commercial vehicle business has been holding the fort globally, delivering appealing vehicles and even more appealing profit margins. Transits are still the default vans in each size group, the F-150 pick-up truck remains the best-selling vehicle in the US full stop (period?) and the smaller Ranger is the best-selling pick-up in 21 other nations, the UK among them. Some five million Rangers have been sold over the past two decades. Ford has now created a plug-in hybrid version of the Ranger, which is a big deal, because PHEVs are back in fashion across Europe – and because the…

With this week’s road test, we check in on the latest developments concerning two of Rolls-Royce’s more popular modern inventions. The Ghost limousine – now on sale as a facelifted Series II take on its second-generation form – is the first of them and the anti-traditional Black Badge derivative phenomenon is the other. The Ghost first arrived in 2009 as a slightly smaller, more usable and less formal foil for the traditional Phantom. It broadened Rolls-Royce’s customer base significantly and also attracted a significantly younger audience. That car became one of the first to receive a Black Badge design treatment, in 2016. Intended as an effective counterpoint to the more traditional luxury design idioms of the firm’s ‘mainstream’ models, Black Badge variants adopt subversive, alternative materials and features to appeal…

Quiz Krief about the projects of which he’s the most proud and he’ll name two, starting with the Alfa Giulia Quadrifoglio, the secretive development of which he describes as “a human story”. It was like “a pure skunkworks” car, he says of the V6 super-saloon, which vividly showed us what the Giorgio platform could do. His other shout is for the Ferrari 458 Speciale, albeit with the recent 296 GTB shoehorned into the nomination, presumably because they have similar DNA. “The 296 is maybe the only car where, if I had to restart, I wouldn’t know what to do to make it better,” he says. From a dynamic perspective neither would we, Philippe – the car is a masterpiece and a total joy. But what of the product he wishes…

Who doesn’t love an epic narrative arc, eh? The McLaren Artura has certainly been on one of those. Back in 2022, the example yours truly was driving on the press launch at the Ascari circuit fell victim to a pretty serious “thermal incident”. There were, in fact, two of these ‘incidents’ on the launch that week. One of them, arguably the result of human procedural error and bad luck (new fuel hoses that hadn’t been torqued to the correct tightness), resulted in quite a large fire. My car’s spot of bother – lots of smoke, a dash full of warning lights, a knackered cooling system and an immobile car at turn 16 but no flames – was actually more serious in the longer term because it resulted from a genuine…

MILEAGE 16,250 WHY WE’RE RUNNING IT To find out if the quintessential Jeep is really a vehicle you can live with every day When people talk about elephants in rooms, theyare usually referring to some looming threat or fault. However, in the very special case of our Jeep Wrangler Sahara, the elephant refers to a glorious positive. Not only that, it’s also an asset that no other Jeep family member can boast, let alone any of the Wrangler’s more conventional rivals. The entire roof can be lifted off. All four doors can be removed, too, and the windscreen will fold forwards onto the bonnet, safari-hunter style. This, along with the robust ride and the general Tonka toughness of every aspect of the Wrangler, is why people so often reckon it’s…

The original BMW X1 racked up more than 700,000 global sales between 2009 and 2015, but for all its success it was plainly styled, poorly packaged and flawed on the road. Happily, the Mk2 car of 2015 to 2022 fixed all of that, and it holds up today as a great-value family hauler with up-to-date technology and real kerb appeal. Prices start at about £5000 for cars with more than 100,000 miles under their wheels, but with a budget of around £8500 you can easily find a clean and wellequipped example that will have the neighbours’ curtains twitching. You might think it a relatively staid, front-driven family SUV, but the X1 is a surprisingly good car to drive, cleverly hiding the extra bulk and height it has over a normal…

This 1986 BMW 635 CSi is one of four BMWs worked on by German tuning and modification legend Willy König that Tahmid Haque owns. The others include a 1990 850i with a supercharger and, says Tahmid, a massive spoiler on the back: “It was originally owned by a Polish gangster. There’s a Netflix documentary about him. He was shot dead in a nightclub, but his wife says she has fond memories of the car…” Then there’s a 1991 M5, one of just four in existence, and Tahmid’s most recent acquisition, a 1989 750i V12 that he bought in Denmark and which is being fully restored in Poland. All four are part of Tahmid’s wider collection, currently numbering 30 cars. Not bad for a 27-year-old. However, it’s the 635 CSi he’s…

The subject of last week’s My Car and I article, Duncan Rabagliati, was full of interesting recollections and titbits. Perhaps the most intriguing was about Arnott, “the only car company to be created and owned by a woman”. Daphne Arnott’s eponymous company lasted for only a decade or so, but its short existence was an exciting and noteworthy one – and not just because of gender norms. Arnott was born in 1926 to a father who was a third-generation automotive engineer and she was first exposed to motorsport at a young age, when he took her to Brooklands to watch a customer race using a supercharger of his. She joined the London-based family business after a magazine publishing venture failed and became friendly with its general manager, wartime aircraft engineer…

Bentley’s debut electric car will be a lowslung, sleek SUV that will bring something new to the EV class, according to the firm’s R&D chief, who has given Autocar new details of what to expect from the long-awaited EV. Matthias Rabe’s comments come as the British car maker prepares to put heavily clad prototypes onto the roads around its Crewe headquarters for the first time, ahead of a planned 2026 launch. Speaking at the launch of the Bentayga Speed in the US, Rabe confirmed that the EV’s roofline will sit lower than the Bentayga’s and the length of its wheelbase will be between that car’s regular and extended-wheelbase variants. As a result, the car – billed as a “luxury urban SUV” – ought to cut a comparatively sleek aesthetic compared…

Luca de Meo is stepping down as CEO of the Renault Group after five years and will take charge at Kering, the French company that owns luxury goods brands such as Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent. The Italian joined the Renault Group from Seat-Cupra five years ago and will depart on 15 July. Renault said a hunt for a new group CEO “based on the already defined succession plan” has been launched. “Luca de Meo’s departure is unequivocally a blow to Renault,” said Stephen Reitman, automotive analyst at banking firm Bernstein. “We are saddened by the loss.” Reitman’s obituary-like response is a reaction to the enormous impact de Meo has had on Renault since joining in July 2020. Then, the French firm seemed unsavable. The loss of sales from Covid…

WE’RE MOVING AWAY from heat engines with the transition from ICE cars to EVs, but heat still plays a big part in the performance and wellbeing of all electric cars. With that in mind, Continental has developed a device called an e-Motor Rotor Temperature Sensor (eRTS), which monitors temperature more accurately than software-based simulation and should reduce the amount of rare-earth material used in permanent magnet synchronous motors. Batteries, motors and inverters all generate heat due to the power they are handling and the majority of them use liquid cooling. Most EVs also use permanent magnet motors that have rare-earth magnets embedded in the rotors. Although some manufacturers have chosen to substitute permanent magnets for electromagnetic windings in the rotor, rare-earth permanent magnets have traditionally been the go-to solution to…

Audi has reversed its decision to end the development and sale of combustion-engined cars in 2033 and now has no fixed date for such a plan. The German firm had already pushed back that date after it had previously planned to end development next year. Speaking to Autocar, CEO Gernot Döllner emphasised that he “had not been the one to communicate the end date”. The decision was taken by previous management. But he confirmed that he has reversed it because he “believes in flexibility”, a stance that also applies to Audi’s high-performance RS models. Döllner said: “Audi is launching from 2024-2026 a completely new line-up of internal combustion engine and plug-in hybrid vehicles, and that gives us complete flexibility for at least another seven, eight, maybe 10 years, and then…

Crossing patrols for children were in use in the early 1930s, although some reports credit Mary Hunt, a school caretaker who began to informally help children cross the road in Bath in 1937, as the first ‘lollipop lady’. It took another 26 years for school crossing patrols to be officially enshrined in law as part of new road safety measures brought in by the government. A classic tool of a lollipop man or woman, the distinctive ‘lollipop’ sign was introduced in the 1960s and the yellow coat arrived a decade later.…

ON SALE 2 JULY FEATURE WE DRIVE CATERHAM’S FUTURE The British sports car maker has adopted all-new engines from Renault-Geely specialist Horse for its racers. Matt Prior has a go MOTORSPORT ASTON MARTIN AT LE MANS A behind-the-scenes look at the British firm’s return to this iconic race ROAD TEST VOLVO XC90 Can a facelift keep a decade-old car feeling fresh? Our testers find out EVERY WEEK USED GUIDE FERRARI 458 You can now buy the mid-engined supercar of your dreams for less than £100k. We tell you how LIVING WITH A… RENAULT 5 This year’s most-talked-about car joins our long-term test fleet. Will the love-in continue?…

For this latest Continental GT, Bentley has broken with convention and got things going with a bang. In the past, we have had to wait a short while for the excesses of the Speed derivative, but for the Mk4 car it was the first one out of the factory and into showrooms. Here’s the new 208mph Conti GT, they said. It will outdrag a Ferrari Enzo yet cruise more quietly than the latest Mercedes-AMG S63. Satisfied? If the goal was to make a statement, job done. We can now move onto the model that most owners will opt for: the ‘regular’ Conti GT, which is of course nothing of the sort. In fact, the entry-level car is mechanically closer to the Speed than ever. Both cars use the same V8-engined…

“He’s obviously my boss…” says Kia design boss Karim Habib with a smile when asked what life is like working with CEO Ho Sung Song. “But I’ll try and be as genuine as I can.” What follows is real warmth in Habib’s words about Song and he says the way they work together and Song’s interest and trust in design is “incredibly helpful and incredibly rewarding at the same time”. He says: “There is no formal process that says ‘design must be at table and sign this off’.” Instead, Song works with “a matter of trust and a matter of interest” in seeking the opinion of Habib and his team. “That allows us to propose things with a risk, but that’s important to what we do as designers,” says Habib.…

Diane Miller’s new domain, the Stellantis UK parts distribution centre at Ellesmere Port, where the group is spending £50 million to confirm the site as its UK commercial vehicles hub, has £500m-worth of stock on its shelves. It can cater for all Stellantis marques, including recently arrived Fiat, and reckons on sending out £1.5m-worth of components every day, most reaching customers the following day. Miller admits this is an all-new business to her, one in which they speak “a completely different language”. She sees her role being to help improve the efficiency of the place, but she was pleased to discover recently that the UK operation has a measurably better relationship with its customers than most, and it will soon be used as a good-practice benchmark for others in Europe.…

If you were ignorant of the revolutionary nature of Protean’s E-Class-based prototype, you’d be happily convinced it was a run-of-the-mill, mainstream electric family car: it is swift off the mark and quiet at a cruise, and it brings itself almost to a halt with no brake pedal input. What’s really remarkable is just how little fuss it makes while doing so, riding with a composure that’s comparable to anything fronted up by the German exec purveyors in 2025. The logical assumption would be that so dramatically increasing the unsprung weight at each corner would have a negative impact on refinement, but as Whitehead explains, that’s not an unavoidable truth. Chassis engineers work within an operating window of sprung-to-unsprung mass ratio: a 1500kg car, says Whitehead, might have 250kg of unsprung…

‘EVangelists’ love to shout that range doesn’t matter because many people can charge at home and because the rapid charge network has become really quite sophisticated. But the fact is that autonomy remains a major hurdle in many buyers’ minds. The smart car maker just plays the game – and Kia is smart. The latest electric battleground is C-segment SUVs – in other words, roughly Volkswagen Golf-sized crossovers. While a lot of rivals were muddling around with 60-70kWh batteries, Kia released the EV3, an 81.4kWh mic-drop with up to 375 miles of range. The clincher? At £36,005, it’s cheaper than the shorter-range Niro EV it is in effect serving to replace. Now that’s what I call progress. As we’ve come to expect from Kia’s product, the EV3 doesn’t just play…

MILEAGE 43,845 WHY WE’RE RUNNING IT To find out if an approved used car is the best route into Tesla ownership EVs are pretty much universally accepted as an ideal solution to the challenges of urban driving, but there remains a stigma around their suitability for long road trips. However, when we saw the cost of a sleeper train while investigating a 20th-wedding anniversary long weekend to visit friends in Fort William, wife Emma and I decided to entrust our Tesla. The usual M25 tedium was dispatched fairly quickly, followed by a fairly swift run up the M40/M42 and then the joy of the clear, fast M6 Toll, where we were comfortably the slowest car, keeping just shy of 70mph to conserve energy. The dreadful tailbacks around Manchester were unpleasant,…

AN OWNER’S VIEW IAN DAVID “I bought my X1 xDrive20d in April 2021, and so far it has proved to be a reliable and capable family car. It was the ideal replacement for an X3 that we had run for several years. While it is a bit firm-riding, the X1 is nice to drive, and I like the raised seating position. It’s very efficient, too, and will do more than 55mpg on the motorway. I did have to pay £320 for a new battery for the SOS emergency function, because it wasn’t covered under warranty, but aside from that it has been very reliable and decent to live with.” BUYER BEWARE… ■ ENGINE A clogged diesel particulate filter isn’t uncommon if a diesel car isn’t driven long distances, because regeneration…

Volkswagen has revealed the new Golf GTI Edition 50 as the most powerful and “the most dynamically adept” in the model’s 50-year history. The special hot hatch has been unveiled as part of the golden jubilee celebrations for the iconic GTI badge – first introduced on the Golf GTI in 1975 and standing for Grand Touring Injection. It builds on the existing Mk8.5 car but uses a more powerful iteration of VW’s turbocharged 2.0-litre four-cylinder EA888 petrol engine, which now delivers 321bhp and 310lb ft. That represents a 60bhp and 37lb ft hike over the standard Golf GTI and a 25bhp and 15lb ft increase over the more track-focused GTI Clubsport. While the four-wheel-drive Golf R 20 Years retains a small power advantage, at 328bhp, the special GTI matches that…

Bentley is also preparing a new range-topper for its Continental GT line-up – potentially even creating an indirect successor to the Supersports of 2013. Speaking to Autocar, Bentley R&D chief Matthias Rabe didn’t rule out the possibility of transplanting the 641bhp 4.0-litre twin-turbocharged V8 powertrain from the Bentayga Speed (First Drives, 18 June) into the Continental GT. New test mules photographed this month provided further evidence and suggest that the car will be positioned as something more extreme than the current car, rather than a model that guns to be the most powerful Continental in the range. The fourth-generation Continental – which was launched last year – exclusively uses a plug-in hybrid powertrain and, in its most powerful Speed guise, puts out a lofty 771bhp. Compared with that car, these…

Audi will preview its all-new look under design boss Massimo Frascella when it reveals a new concept car later this year. Frascella joined Audi from JLR 18 months ago and his impact on the German brand will be seen for the first time before 2025 is out, CEO Gernot Döllner has confirmed. Döllner did not reveal the size or type of car that the concept will preview but said Audi will only produce concept cars that have true production intent and it will be “a bold step” for the brand and its design. “We won’t show studies any more,” said Döllner. “When we show things, [they] will be substantial. Every concept we show will have a product decision behind it.” The new design for Audi will “look to the future…

AT A TIME of unprecedented change within and pressure on the automotive industry, having three CEOs in a little over five years will do strange things to a firm. Gernot Döllner has been in Audi’s top job for almost two years and has spent a fair chunk of that time unpicking some reactionary and occasionally bizarre decisions of predecessors. His reversal of the previous decision to end the development and sale of combustion engines was an obvious move. There was also a victory for common sense when he cancelled a plan to rename Audis with odd and even numbers based on their powertrains. The “only mistake was that we maybe changed it a couple of months too late”, Döllner told me in reference to the new A4 being named A5…

Will Rimell’s report on picking up his long-term Dacia Duster (28 May) and the feelgood experience of the bells-and-whistles handover from Renault London West struck a chord with me, as I have recently bought a pre-owned RX 450h from Lexus Cheltenham and enjoyed a similar experience. The car was not new (although the as-new condition of it after the dealership’s pre-sale prep could have led you to believe otherwise), but my wife and I got the full treatment, with covers on the car, a bouquet for my wife and a big ‘Thank you for buying from us’ card. I believe that such things are important these days, especially now with car sales to private buyers like me on the decrease in the UK. The price of the car was about…

Three years ago, Kia surprised us with the original version of its hot EV6. These were the dark days before our world got lit up by the Hyundai Ioniq 5 N. Here came Kia with a car that didn’t just have a power figure to raise eyebrows but was supposedly capable of pushing plenty of traditional driver’s car buttons too. I liked it when we did our first ‘fun EVs’ test, even if a full road test later showed it not to be the fully rounded dynamic item. Now, with the facelifted EV6, arrives an updated EV6 GT as well. At first glance, it looks like Kia has simply copied Hyundai’s homework. It adopts the same dual motors (223bhp at the front axle, 378bhp at the back, a bit more…

Renault’s investment in hybrid technology shows no sign of abating. It has just given its mid-sized Symbioz crossover a powertrain update, adding the E-Tech Full Hybrid 160 system recently introduced in the Dacia Bigster Hybrid and a mild-hybrid petrol. The car is otherwise as it was. The full hybrid tested here gets a combined 158bhp from a 1.8-litre four-cylinder petrol engine and two electric motors (a 48bhp drive motor and a 20bhp ISG). For reference, its predecessor (badged 145) received 141bhp from a 1.6-litre engine and a 52bhp electric motor. Despite the increase in power and engine capacity, this powertrain produces less CO2, at 97g/km, which means it gets a 25% benefit-in-kind tax rating – 1% lower than before. The motors draw their power from a 1.4kWh battery, which is…

McLaren COO Piers Thynne also oversees the team’s heritage fleet, which this year has moved back into the Technology Centre. That means McLaren’s historic racers are now rebuilt and repaired just metres from the workshop in which the current MCL39 is prepped. “Our legacy is extremely important to us, and it’s a privilege to carry the baton in our 63rd year as a race team,” says Thynne. The fleet spans McLaren’s history, but Thynne has a clear favourite: the M23, which was used for five seasons from 1973 until 1977 and in the hands of Emerson Fittipaldi secured the team’s first drivers’ and constructors’ titles. Last year Thynne discovered the previously long-lost chassis 15 in the archive, and he oversaw a project for a group of apprentices to rebuild it…

The Dacia Duster is not the cheapest car on sale today; it’s not even the cheapest Dacia. In fact, save for the recently introduced Bigster, it’s the most expensive car Dacia sells. But it is outstandingly good value, because it simply offers so much for so (relatively) little. Don’t make the mistake of labelling the Duster as a bare-bones budget car, though. It’s a fashionable and popular SUV, for starters, and it really leans into the junior off-roader feel with boxy yet confident looks, big wheels and an expansive, flat bonnet. Hop in, and the angular dashboard and pillbox windscreen could almost fool you that you’re in a Defender. The Duster has the sort of style you wouldn’t ordinarily expect from a budget car, and it has the substance to…

“It’s a car that takes a bit of time to warm to but then reveals plenty of strengths” WHY WE RAN IT To find out if the Blue Oval’s first European-built electric car – with Volkswagen underpinnings – really is a true Ford The estimable Steve Cropley has already explained things better than I ever could. When I took delivery of this Ford Explorer, the question set for me to answer concerned whether an EV with Volkswagen underpinnings could really be a true Ford. I had several months to consider. Then Steve borrowed the Explorer for a Ford-themed UK road trip (30 April) and pretty much nailed my brief in two days. As he put it, Ford took a VW platform, built a sensible, honest family car and added just…

CUPRA LEON ESTATE Mileage 8256 Last seen 11.6.25 Oh dear: I’ve been a wally. I complained recently that this latest Leon had no physical boot release button, forcing me to use the button on the key to pop it open. I’ve since had a few owners advise me that there is indeed a button; it’s hidden under the offside brake light. In my defence, I’d challenged no fewer than seven people to find it over the past few months and none had prevailed. FP BMW 1 SERIES Mileage 4119 Last seen 18.6.25 Many cars these days feature a ‘panoramic roof’, and those are great, but it’s a pity that proper opening sunroofs have become rare. You can add one to your 1 Series for £1050, and I sure would because…

MERCEDES-BENZ CL 500 2009, 72,000 miles, £13,695 A 5.5-litre V8 CL cost near £100k new, but now you can buy this one for £14k. You will do well to find a CL in better nick, too: it has a full service history, just had a gearbox service by a specialist and is MOTed until next January. JAGUAR XJS 4.0 CELEBRATION 1996, 47,000 miles, £17,995 This XJS is a GT that’s as refined and upmarket as most modern alternatives. This limited edition has a huge history file from its two previous owners and is said to have been” exceptionally well maintained”. Jag’s AJ 4.0-litre straight six was a peach, too. PORSCHE 928 GT 1990, 109,000 miles, £29,000 One of just 225 manual GTs made, this 928 is in decent nick for…