Opinion

After a four-year absence, Caterham has revived its Drift Experience. The clue is in the name to what happens: it’s a day spent learning to drift, in a Caterham.

While it’s rear-wheel drive, a Seven isn’t the most natural car in the world in which to drift. These are light cars with short wheelbases and unassisted steering: great at scribing lines on a race circuit but not easily held sideways like an overpowered long saloon car that has oodles of steering lock and a heavily assisted rack.

So Caterham does its Sevens a favour. It takes the 360Rs it uses for other track experiences, jacks up the rear suspension, puts hard back tyres on its biggest-diameter wheels and over-inflates them. Voila: a car that can easily be sent sideways and, with a bit of practice, will stay there.

It happens in big empty spaces at relatively low speeds, at either Brands Hatch or Donington Park, but on wide open steering pads with cone courses laid out to steer around, rather than on the circuits. It’s all high-rev but low-speed stuff, so it’s suitable for those with no track experience, or loads of it.

The cars are wider SV models so have more footwell and leg space than narrow-bodied cars. And bigger radiators because so much throttle use is involved.

Back in the day, Autocar used to co-promote these days. We would send staffers along to meet our readers and have a very good time squealing around (or into) cones in a big empty car park.

It has been years since I did one and I was initially out of practice, particularly since a couple of the test tracks we previously used for photos and video are unavailable to us. But it comes back, and for me it’s a useful skill. I’ve vowed to find a way to keep up my practice.

Now, I could tell you that the day is very useful for learning car control, and that this is very valuable in emergency situations on the road, where the Highway Code will tell you to steer into the skid, but that means nothing unless you’ve experienced it earlier.

But unless you drive a Seven or equivalent, you’ve probably got stability control anyway, so consider it more about hooning and having a riot behind the wheel in safe conditions.

At £359 they’re not cheap days, but I came away tired from the amount of driving, you’re encouraged to use and abuse the cars, and the hospitality is good. Caterham is organising 11 days this year and all but three are sold out.

With a new electric model on the way, a new factory the company is moving into as you read, and its experience and race programmes, lots is happening at Caterham.

The encouragingly youthful car restoration scene

The lovely looking Series 3 Lotus Seven pictured below, on display at April’s Bicester Heritage Sunday Scramble, has just been restored by its encouragingly youthful owner, who is involved with the Bicester-based charity StarterMotor, which gets young people into looking after and restoring historic vehicles.

There’s a growing network of organisations like this, and the also-Bicester-based Association of Heritage Engineers, finding partnerships and providing education and apprenticeships to maintain and build skills that the old car business was once worried might be lost.

Recently I popped over to nearby Hightone Restorations, near Steeple Aston (which along with being a great restorer also runs a free ‘classics at the crossroads’ car meet on the first Thursday of each month), where managing director Gregg Alvarez told me that while there are the old mechanics and artisans who have been doing this stuff for decades, there was a shortage of slightly younger people (those in their thirties and forties) coming through.

But thanks to organisations like the AoHE and StarterMotor and restorers like Hightone taking on apprentices, the trend has been reversed, and the future for looking after old cars is now much brighter. If anyone tells you young people aren’t into cars, don’t buy it.

Who’s going to clean up the donkeys? The big, 3.5-tonne vans and derivatives that do the biggest mileage and stay on the road for the longest amount of time, and often have been fitted with bespoke cargo areas that cost several times over that of the donor van in the first place. Camper vans, ice cream vans, fridge vans, ambulances, supermarket delivery vans and the like. 

Bedeo, an electric vehicle company based in Farnham, Surrey, would like to lead that cleaning up and believes it is a world leader in retrofitting vans with modern, clean, efficient hybrid drivetrains, with its own proprietary electric motor and battery technology.

Its work is done to OEM standards and it currently has the contract to fit electric powertrains to Stellantis's large electric vans at its plant in Turkey. 

Bedeo, then, has a very real solution to a very real problem: it can electrify vans already on our roads in a quick and cost-efficient way, significantly reducing emissions for the remainder of that van's substantial life. 

Yet the word conversion has a bad name in the industry and is a Wild West of varying standards and quality because there remains no legislation or standards governing conversions in the UK for cars or vans, only for buses. 

Bedeo Group CEO and founder Osman Boyner says it is urgent that this is changed because the prolonged life of vans ('vans' is used throughout here to describe the large, 3.5-tonne vehicles, rather than smaller car-derived vans) means that they'll be on the road and not replaced by electric ones for far longer than the government expects. Boyner points to camper vans as having a 30- to 40-year life as an example. 

He says: "People are not going to pay three times the price of a diesel van for a new electric one when you have so much invested in the back of a vehicle."

Boyner points to OEM projections that show 3.5-tonne vans will still be about 60-70% diesel-powered when produced new in 2030 across Europe, which means that "the donkeys doing the most work and creating the most pollution" produced then will escape any electrification well into the 2040s and beyond. 

Don't focus on new vans, when the reality is the ones already on our car parc will be here for a long while yet. 

According to Boyner, retrofitting hybrid drivetrains is the answer. (In Bedeo's case, it electrifies the rear axle with in-wheel motors and a battery pack in the chassis, so as not to encroach on the cargo area.) Boyner is trying to raise awareness of this solution, which costs around €30,000 (roughly £25,500), substantially less than the cost of a new electric van before any expensive cargo conversion is factored in. The conversion takes no more than a couple of days.

He's being met with silence, not just on legislative standards for retrofitting but also on grants (there are £5000 grants for new electric vans, but not for used conversions, and Boyner sees no distinction given how long the life of a van is) and even the need for the treasury to give permission to change the fuel type of a vehicle registered after 2000.

"When you speak to the government, they say they've laid the strategy and it's net zero," he says. "But how do you achieve that? It's not clear. There is no execution, no next steps. 

"We say to them: 'You've included buses [in retrofitting standards] but why not vans as well?' Seventy per cent of vans are not sold through OEMs but through a convertor with some kind of job being done on the back. It's more valuable, an asset you own."

Boyner has built up an impressive empire, which includes electric motor company Protean, allowing the firm to create complete electric drivetrains and integrate them into vehicles. 

Yet he laments the government's disinterest in industry, including that of his own company, and he says that this has deteriorated over the past decade. "There isn't even anyone to lobby, unless you go to the very top."

His words should be ringing in the ears of the government. 

Boyner says: "[UK chancellor] Jeremy Hunt is the local MP here. He came when we opened and we've asked him to come again but we hardly even get a reply.

"People should be queuing up [from the government] as we have 322 patents, have established a technology company and we ask to be supported because engineering is not cheap and you can't find people.

"It's difficult. Every month we have a discussion among ourselves about whether we should do more in Turkey, or in China. We should not have this discussion. Government should be encouraging bringing the supply chain here, which is mandatory if the UK is to win the war on electric vehicle production.

"We can't get out of China. I don't want to produce in China but we can't get out. It's an addiction to be there, because you buy the products cheaper than in Europe."

Diminishing returns is something I used to understand well with cars.

It was a simple concept to grasp and it largely held true: the more you paid for a car, the better it was, although as they got more expensive, they got better more slowly.

A £50,000 car was lots better than a £20,000 car, for example, but a £100,000 car wasn’t so much better than the £50,000 one and a £200,000 car was a smaller amount better again.

Of course, there were exceptions and sweet spots across the market: cars that were never worth the money and some absolute bargains. But the basics were what they were for so many consumer products. You paid more, and got something better.

A manufacturer had invested more, therefore the product was superior and, as a buyer, you would feel it. A BMW 7 Series was better than a 3 Series; a Ford Mondeo was superior to a Fiesta.

I don’t know if I’ve changed or the market has changed or it’s a combination of the two, but this feels broadly much less true than it used to.

Recently I drove home in a bog-standard, sub-£18,000 Renault Clio. And I loved it. And not just ‘look at what they’ve done for the money’ loved it: I loved it regardless of its price.

It used to take an expensive car to give me all of the comfort and convenience features that I need, but the Renault has everything I can do while driving and more besides.

Fine, there’s no variable ambient lighting or massage function, but it’s a car, not a hot tub, and I’d rather not lug a function around if I’m not going to use it anyway.

Then there’s its size. It’s 4.05m long and 1.80m wide, which means it’s more useful, not less, than a car that’s 5m long and 2m wide. It’s easier to park and sneaks through gaps they can’t, therefore saving me time, and that’s the most precious thing I have. If time is money, then surely a small car is worth more, not less.

The Clio is also much more pleasant to drive than most big cars. It had been a while since I drove one, and the road testers told me it was the supermini class swot, but I didn’t realise it would ride with such deftness, be so absorbent, yet settle so quickly – and steer so nicely.

Of course I’d like it to be faster, its plastics to be softer or thicker and it to be quieter, but here some of the things money buys you still apply. Soft-feeling thick polymers and real metals cost more than scritchy-scratchy plastics, and remember that they’ve made a whole Clio for less than the price of some luxury car options.

And what clearly isn’t price-dependent is reliability and engineering-style quality – as in how often a car goes wrong. In the 2023 What Car? Reliability Survey, the top 10 most reliable cars included two Suzukis, a Ford, a Toyota and a Hyundai. Luxury stuff this is not.

This doesn’t ring true for every small or big car, but at this end of the market are products that are nicer to drive, easier to live with, practically as comfortable and even more reliable and trustworthy than cars costing three or four times as much.

I’ll go further: if the Clio and some of the market’s most expensive cars were outside my house every morning, I’d climb into the Clio more often than not.

I’m wary of saying ‘this isn’t how the world used to be’, because that way dufferhood lies. But I don’t think this is how the world used to be.

On a not entirely unrelated note: car feature subscriptions. Thankfully manufacturers seem to be backing away from plans to charge drivers to use hardware features that are already fitted to their cars.

But I have a counter-offer to any manufacturer that does request a subscription fee to turn on, say, a heated steering wheel or a cooled seat.

Look here, matey: it’s costing me money to ferry around this feature that I don’t want, and evidently you own it, not me. So either come and take it out or pay me a monthly fee for the cost of transporting it.

The cost, the technology and now the styling of the cars and branding of the companies: the latter stages in the development of the Chinese industry was on full show at the Beijing motor show, which ran this week for the first time since 2018.

When the Chinese car makers cracked brands and branding, these were always going to be the things that could really take them global and into the mainstream, rather than simply known for cost. The 2024 Beijing show could turn out to be the springboard for that.

Indeed, western car makers at Beijing were in turn talking up the strength of their own brands as for how they can continue to have an edge and stay ahead.

The show was squeezed into eight halls at a convention centre in the north east of Beijing’s still-expanding metropolis (I swear that tower block has an extra storey on two on it than when we drove past yesterday…) and provided a striking insight into just how far China’s domestic industry has developed and the obvious export appeal of several of its latest models.

Wednesday, 19:00 The main pre-show event was a BMW Group night, which unusually included Rolls-Royce co-branding - although not any Rolls-Royce cars. There was the unveiling of a revised BMW i4, but the big news was the new Mini Aceman, a Chinese-built electric supermini that has the potential to be the Mini brand’s best seller. 

The Aceman looks very literally styled to be between the Cooper and Countryman, looking half like an expanded version of the former and shrunken version of the latter. It's tipped to be the best-seller not least because it finally opens up real volume in the Chinese market, where local production is key. 

Mini will look to mirror the success of BMW, one of few western brands to enjoy a successful 2023 in China. BMW Group sales boss (and ex-China boss) Jochen Goller told me the brand is “as resilient as it can be” against any external geopolitical forces, as its production in China is focused on China, without any export threats. “The product follows the market and we localise as much as possible,” he said.

Thursday, 08:30 Beijing traffic survived and straight to the show halls. I can remember my first trip to a Chinese show in Shanghai in 2013 and being shown around a hall by the design chief of a western car maker.

They pointed out in horror (yet not sneeriness) some of the fit and finish of many of the models on display – memorably a foglight where it seemed they had to run out of glassfibre to trim it. 

Oh what a difference a decade makes. Many cars had the look of an AI-generated Tesla about them, but they were still largely clean and modern, with simple faces, lines and designs. In little over a decade, Chinese cars have gone from looking like old 1990s Hondas and Toyotas to blatant western copycats, then to shouty and showy, and now refinement has taken over, and the stands and logos adorning them are often as smart as many cars themselves.

09:00 In contrast, the stands of the likes of Lincoln, Genesis and Lexus I pass en route to my first interview look a bit dark, dingy and tired – and have far less foot traffic. Given the constant desire for ‘new’ in China and the pace of progress and development, you can see why interest in brands like these are waning among far less loyal consumers for whom the latest technology and design is king. 

09:15 I also pass JLR’s House of Brands on its show stand, where Defender, Discovery, Jaguar and Range Rover each get their own branding. All this did was to show how it’s only really a two-bedroom house, with the Defender and in particular Range Rover models dwarfing the other duo. The JLR logo was also given a rare consumer outing, itself rather apologetically placed on a back wall. I'm not sure what relevance this has with car buyers. 

10:15 BMW product boss Bernd Koerber is in buoyant mode, not only for thinking the company has all bases covered with its ‘mixed energy’ platforms that cover combustion engines, hybrid systems and electric powertrains, insulating it from slow demand for the latter, but also because he has answer to that question of brands amid China’s catch-up here.

He believes the strength of the BMW brand is the “best protection” from interest waning from Chinese buyers. Individual brands and branding must be strong to survive and thive; simply being a western brand in China is no longer a guarantee of success. 

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a larger crowd around a car at a motor show than the Xiaomi SU7, so much so that I had to Google it to find out what it looked like without elbows sharp enough to get near it.

The smartphone maker has done what Apple and Google have so far failed to do and launched a car, one its maker claims to have had 75,000 orders for already and plans to deliver the first 10,000 units in June, which it believes to be record for a start-up. 

Xiaomi founder Lei Jun called on talent from other car makers to come join his 6000-strong team, which for the next three years at least only has desires to build cars for China, perhaps to the mercy of some western car makers. 

12:30 One thing Chinese car companies also seem to have licked is rapid development times. In response, Mercedes-Benz development boss Markus Schäfer tells me their own development times have been cut from 58 months to around 40 now, with more to come. Volkswagen revealed something similar last year at the Munich show, with development chief Kai Grunitz saying the goal was to come down to 30 months. 

Schäfer also says he expects big facelifts and updates in the middle of a car’s life cycle to be far less prevalent in the future, due to the rise of over-the-air software updates, which will allow for far more features to be added constantly over a car’s life. Again, China is leading the way here, due to the need to always be new and up to date. 

13:00 Scratch beneath the surface of all the shiny newness of the local brands and you do notice some of the plainer models are still there. One such is Roewe, whose range of saloons and crossovers looked tired next to newer brands and models, including those of its own nearby sibling brand Rising. 

Another Roewe sibling brand, MG, is better far known on our shores, yet it was surprising how little interest there seemed to be in the EXE181 electric hypercar concept, which was probably the easiest major new launch of the day to get up close and photograph.

A phrase of Schäfer's was ringing in my ears still after visiting Roewe and MG: “In China, the disruptors get disrupted.”

13:30 If a show star can be a person, for me at Beijing it was Mini boss Stefanie Wurst. An extended chat with her allowed brief respite from fishing for the latest scoop. She told me about her father’s role later in his career as a BMW engineer working on early prototypes of the first-generation BMW Mini and establishing BMW production processes for Rover and Mini models. Front-wheel drive proved to be a novelty for her father, after a career spent on rear-wheel-drive models. 

15:00 The Chinese copycats haven’t completely gone away. The Ford Bronco inspired the front end and the Mercedes G-Class the rear of the Jetour Shanhai T2, and the G-Class and Land Rover Defender were clearly ‘inspirations’ for the designers of iCar on a couple of the models on its stand.

15:15 After successfully developing the Rolls-Royce Spectre, Mihiar Ayoubi is now tasked with developing the next generation of BMWs in its upcoming Neue Klasse range of EVs. Already as cheery as they come, Ayoubi was further buoyed by a meeting with Chinese journalists that morning in which they had looked for reassurance that BMW wouldn't introduce too many distracting automated driving systems and continue to focus on simply making cars that were good to drive.

And there was us thinking that Chinese consumers were the ones looking for such technology. Who really does want it, then?

16:30 After a career spent largely in large German car groups including Volkswagen and Mercedes, Stefan Sielaff is enjoying a career swansong as head of Geely Group design. In a striking chat about just how quickly Chinese car companies get things done, Sielaff said the typical development time for a car was just two years – still some 18 months faster than Mercedes’ reduced development window. 

17:00 Back to the traffic jam. The Beijing show didn’t quite provide the great leap and demonstration of development as the Shanghai show did last year, simply because there was such a gap between the international media’s last visit to a Chinese motor show in 2019 due to the pandemic. 

Beijing was a refined and edited version of Shanghai 2023, with fewer has-beens and never-will-bes from local car makers and instead a series of refined and quality designs that look to have true export appeal, and at the very least the biggest share of interest from the local media.

With some exceptions (Mercedes, BMW and Hyundai among them), the western brands generally felt overlooked and less significant at the show not only in terms of the size of crowds on their show stands but also in their wow factor and any discernible edge over their Chinese rivals.