Opinion

I’m pleased to see the government is to look into the issue of headlight brightness and glare – let’s hope they squint a bit – following a recent RAC survey that found a large number of drivers thought dazzling was a problem.

There may, though, not be a quick legislative fix. The Department for Transport has already been talking to a United Nations expert group on vehicle lighting – who knew? – but proposals to introduce automatic beam alignment, which would lower beams as cars go over hills and the like, won’t come into play until 2027.

And even then? Well, I’ve driven a number of cars with the most advanced ‘intelligent’ lighting on sale, which automatically aligns the beam or limits the areas lit by high beam, and still found oncoming drivers flashed me because they were being dazzled. As in many cases of legislated technology, some of it isn’t up to the job.

No, what we could do with is a solution, and sharpish. Some cars retain a switch to lower the beams in case you’re carrying a load in the back, but it’s an increasingly small number of them. In the vast majority of new cars, there’s not a lot you can do about your own glare.

It’s not like you can take apart a £1500 unit with 1200 LEDs, each with the power of the sun, to replace the bulbs either.

Fortunately, the French used to have the perfect solution, which you’ll remember if you took a holiday there before the 1990s because you’ll have had to pick up a little pot of yellow paint to daub on your headlights to give them an appropriate glow.

An article I found suggests that moving from white light onto a more yellowy part of the spectrum has a longer wavelength, which is quite good for seeing it, and it reflects less off of water.

But also, conveniently, that daubing your headlights with a little yellow pot of paint would, naturally, reduce the brightness as sure as letting them become ever more filthy. Limited research suggests that so long as both sides of the car have a matching hue, MOT testers would give it a nod.

Now, I haven’t fully investigated the scientific rigour of this feature and given it could mean new Alpine A110s running around in French blue and with yellow headlights, and that after every third car wash we’ll be refreshing the yellow tint to make it feel like setting off on a 1980s driving holiday, I’m not about to. But beyond the jokes, might there not be something in it?

Why EV tax breaks are a bad idea

One piece of advice I hope the government doesn’t take too far is the SMMT’s call to halve VAT on electric cars for three years to boost demand. Weird in itself – my LinkedIn feed is full of invested parties telling me how popular they are.

On the bland face of it, a tax break to clean up the air sounds sensible. But the numbers involved get quite big: 1.6 million cars are sold in the UK each year and we want a quarter of them to be zero-emissions, so over three years, that’s 1.2m cars having 10% VAT applied. EVs cost the best part of £50,000 on average. Simply put, that’s a £5 billion tax break.

It won’t be as simple as that: most private buyers will of course spend less than £50k on an EV; and full VAT on a cheaper ICE car is still less than full VAT on an EV. So the money the Exchequer would be missing is impossible to quantify, but it won’t be insignificant. If it’s £4bn, the public purse will be shorter by £141 for each of the UK’s 28.2m households.

There are people in my life, probably yours too, at the start of their careers, paying £1000 a month in rent on flats, driving £2000 superminis with a fuel tax rate of over 50%, who come to the end of the month with, if they’re lucky, only as much money as they started it with.

I’m not ready to ask them to forgo £140 of public services over the next three years, or make up the difference, so that matey can give the Chinese £40,000 and then fuel their car at a 5% tax rate.

The numbers vary but the point remains: what amount is okay for the poor to subsidise the rich?

An audience with Aston Martin executive chairman Lawrence Stroll is always a memorable occasion.

Most will know the Canadian from Netflix’s Drive to Survive series, in which he's straight-talking and has a fearsome presence, often wearing the look of a man who you’ve just told you’ve run over his cat. In person, he’s far warmer; he sparks a room into life and always remains at the centre of it.

The ‘executive’ part of his job title remains an understatement for how hands-on he is, as an audience with Stroll in Aston’s sleek boardroom in Gaydon last week again revealed.

On the product side, Stroll talked about EVs; Aston has pushed back plans to launch its range of electric cars to 2027, due to a slowdown in demand, and increased investments in PHEVs as a result. The rush to legislate in favour of EVs was “obviously premature”, according to Stroll.

Yet he was also in a reflective mood as he approached his four-year anniversary in his role and he said he was “very proud of the industrial as well as financial turnaround” experienced at Aston in that time. By the end of this year, Aston’s four model lines will all be less than a year old (“dealers will have four new products in a year when it has been four in 10 years before”) and the company has been refinanced to cover the next seven years.

Yet the share price is still around half that of when Stroll took over, itself well down on Aston’s original listing. This irks him. “Our share price is hugely undervalued,” he said.

He made a comparison between Ferrari, which sells around 13,000 cars per year, has a Formula 1 team and has a market cap of close to €80 billion, and Aston, which Stroll conservatively plans to sell 10,000 cars per year in the next couple of years, has an F1 team and has a market cap of around €1.5bn…

Yet he thinks Aston’s time will come, and 2025 will be the time to really judge the company when it has all its new models on the market and its new retail model fully in play for those cars.

Stroll has switched Aston away from a wholesale model, when it previously built just 7% of cars to order to above 60% last year, even with an ageing product range. Cars have more options and more bespoke content, thus are more profitable. 

Aston is only really delivering the DB12 at the moment, pending the arrival of the revised Vantage, DBX and DBS models. Stroll said this was “financially painful” but the company would “not stuff the market with old cars”, which would hurt profitability. “Dealers are complaining about low inventories, but I’d rather have pent-up demand,” he said.

By the second half of this year, Aston will be cashflow-positive “and then forever”, according to Stroll. 

Aston’s recent share price dip occurred last year, when it was forced to delay the launch of the D12 due to software problems. “We’ve struggled like other OEMs with software integration issues,” said Stroll. “It’s a very big challenge to do our own HMI. It has been a big complaint in the past from customers that our interiors look like Mercedes', and that’s because they are.

“This cost us a few-months delay in the launch of the car, and we got heavily penalised in the share price, from £4 in August to £2, for being late with a few hundred cars.”

Stroll said recruiting software developers was a huge challenge, but now that Aston has the base HMI, it will be rolled out across its other models, and delays to the DB12 won’t be repeated. Over-the-air software updates will be offered in the future to improve the HMI.

Aston is targeting around 7500 sales this year and “well into” the 8000s in 2025. Stroll expects it to be “easy” to get that figure up to 10,000, given that Aston historically sold around 7000 cars per year when it only had the three front-engined cars and not even the DBX, which now takes 40% of its volume. 

A new era will soon start at Aston with the arrival of Adrian Hallmark, who will start no later than October, having spruced up his garden while on leave from Bentley. Stroll said they had been “talking for a while” and he “doesn’t see a better person in the world to be the CEO of Aston Martin”.

“He completely understands a luxury company," Stroll continued. "He knows the company well and has admired us from afar for many years. He's proud to be part of it and a coup for us to lead the business.”

Stroll aims to spend two days of his working week at Gaydon and two days at the F1 team’s new Silverstone headquarters, the balance at his home office in London. But he admits the road car side is taking up the majority of his time, although whether that softens on Hallmark’s arrival remains to be seen.

He described Hallmark as “a very hands-on CEO”, but it’s hard to see Stroll take his hands off either. Having listed off his achievements to date, Stroll said it was “still only the beginning” at Aston.

The company is box-office viewing on his watch; perhaps Netflix should divert some cameras to Stroll the Aston Martin Lagonda boss to show this other side to him. 

Trips to visit Lotus in Hethel, Norfolk for much of the 2010s followed a very similar format.

There’d be a chance to drive the latest variant of the Elise or Exige with a few extra kilograms taken out of them, followed by a chat with the management of how better times were ahead.

It was admirable the company kept going for so long in that period after the chaos left behind by Dany Bahar who, whatever you think of his plans to grow the brand and launch new model lines, made the crucial mistake of trashing the cars that needed to be sold in the meantime. 

History will be kinder to Jean-Marc Gales, the man who picked up the pieces after Bahar and steered Lotus through some of its darkest days when the company had a real hand-to-mouth feel to it. His ‘animated’ style was not universally popular, it’s fair to say, yet he ran the business diligently and kept the lights on.

Well, the lights were kept on metaphorically at least, for Hethel always felt deserted in the mid-2010s, a tone set when you drove into the site and were met with the ‘skeleton building’ of a steel frame from Bahar’s attempts to grow Lotus’s production capacity.

Whole floors of desks were unused in the main headquarters, and you’d question whether Gales was actually the only executive at the place for the ghostly feel on his office’s floor.

It’s in this office that the better days were always promised, and they finally started to arrive when Geely took a 51% stake in Lotus Cars in 2017. Geely’s presence at Hethel built up gradually, the staff-pleasing early signs including resurfacing the car park, making the coffee machine free, and then redoing the canteen. 

Car wise, things changed more slowly: it took four years for the Evora to become the Emira (via the reveal of the limited-run Evija hypercar, which is understood to have been created under Gales but not revealed until after his departure) and the production facilities were upgraded accordingly in Hethel. On my last visit there in summer 2021 there was a real freshness and vibrancy to the place for the first time in recent memory, now under the leadership of Matt Windle.

To return to Hethel now and you’d likely think not much else has changed, but in fact there’s been more change at Lotus in the past two years than in perhaps the rest of its history combined. Having been stagnant for so long, the company’s rapid pace of back-office growth and implementation of a new structure since then takes some getting your head around.

It’s hard to think which of the headline developments is the most remarkable: that Lotus makes electric SUVs in China, it is has technology and engineering centres in the Midlands and Germany, a design centre in the Midlands, wants to sell 150,000 cars per year (a near 100-fold increase on recent history levels), or that its official base is not even in Hethel anymore but in London, at a soon to open new headquarters for the Lotus Technology company that underpins this recently-assembled empire.

Lotus Technology's commerical operations are headed up by Mike Johnstone, a modest and quietly-spoken executive who joined Lotus from Volvo last year and sits above Windle in the new Lotus hierarchy and is being positioned as the face of the brand. When I spoke to Johnstone recently along with my colleague Steve Cropley for an upcoming feature story at the firm’s swish new Piccadilly dealership in London opposite The Ritz, we ask to him if Lotus should in fact be considered a start-up brand given how much has changed and the wildly different path it has now taken.

“There are elements there that are like start-up brands but you don’t get many start-up brands with 76 years of history,” he said. “There's a start-up attitude within the teams. If you think of the organisation previously, we were selling 1500 cars a year consistently over time. Now we have aspirations to get to 150,000 and to do that needs a certain level of agility you would expect to have in a start-up.

“Then you also have the benefit of not just launching a new brand that no one's ever heard of, you're taking something with its history and heritage and respectfully packaging that up and sharing all the fantastic things about it to a whole new group of consumers that would never have even considered it in the past.”

The switch away from Norfolk for its headquarters is surprising as that’s where the heart and soul of the company lies and the history and heritage is still being traded off, however hard an area it might be to recruit from. The review of the future of its design studio in Hethel is the latest development here. You don’t see Porsche moving out of Stuttgart or Ferrari out of Maranello… 

What impact that has will be seen over the coming years, but for now the rapid emergence of Lotus Technology culminated in an IPO on the New York Stock Exchange in February, and this week Lotus reported its results for the first time.

This laid bare the huge task facing the company in taking on this monumental rate of growth: it reported progress as “steady” but losses were close to £600 million last year and the 7000 cars it sold is not even 5% of where it wants to get to by 2028. 

The clock is ticking, but having treaded water for so long, Lotus is at last being given the chance to thrive rather than simply survive. 

Trips to visit Lotus in Hethel, Norfolk for much of the 2010s followed a very similar format.

There’d be a chance to drive the latest variant of the Elise or Exige with a few extra kilograms taken out of them, followed by a chat with the management of how better times were ahead.

It was admirable the company kept going for so long in that period after the chaos left behind by Dany Bahar who, whatever you think of his plans to grow the brand and launch new model lines, made the crucial mistake of trashing the cars that needed to be sold in the meantime. 

History will be kinder to Jean-Marc Gales, the man who picked up the pieces after Bahar and steered Lotus through some of its darkest days when the company had a real hand-to-mouth feel to it. His ‘animated’ style was not universally popular, it’s fair to say, yet he ran the business diligently and kept the lights on.

Well, the lights were kept on metaphorically at least, for Hethel always felt deserted in the mid-2010s, a tone set when you drove into the site and were met with the ‘skeleton building’ of a steel frame from Bahar’s attempts to grow Lotus’s production capacity.

Whole floors of desks were unused in the main headquarters, and you’d question whether Gales was actually the only executive at the place for the ghostly feel on his office’s floor.

It’s in this office that the better days were always promised, and they finally started to arrive when Geely took a 51% stake in Lotus Cars in 2017. Geely’s presence at Hethel built up gradually, the staff-pleasing early signs including resurfacing the car park, making the coffee machine free, and then redoing the canteen. 

Car wise, things changed more slowly: it took four years for the Evora to become the Emira (via the reveal of the limited-run Evija hypercar, which is understood to have been created under Gales but not revealed until after his departure) and the production facilities were upgraded accordingly in Hethel. On my last visit there in summer 2021 there was a real freshness and vibrancy to the place for the first time in recent memory, now under the leadership of Matt Windle.

To return to Hethel now and you’d likely think not much else has changed, but in fact there’s been more change at Lotus in the past two years than in perhaps the rest of its history combined. Having been stagnant for so long, the company’s rapid pace of back-office growth and implementation of a new structure since then takes some getting your head around.

It’s hard to think which of the headline developments is the most remarkable: that Lotus makes electric SUVs in China, it is has technology and engineering centres in the Midlands and Germany, a design centre in the Midlands, wants to sell 150,000 cars per year (a near 100-fold increase on recent history levels), or that its official base is not even in Hethel anymore but in London, at a soon to open new headquarters for the Lotus Technology company that underpins this recently-assembled empire.

Lotus Technology's commerical operations are headed up by Mike Johnstone, a modest and quietly-spoken executive who joined Lotus from Volvo last year and sits above Windle in the new Lotus hierarchy and is being positioned as the face of the brand. When I spoke to Johnstone recently along with my colleague Steve Cropley for an upcoming feature story at the firm’s swish new Piccadilly dealership in London opposite The Ritz, we ask to him if Lotus should in fact be considered a start-up brand given how much has changed and the wildly different path it has now taken.

“There are elements there that are like start-up brands but you don’t get many start-up brands with 76 years of history,” he said. “There's a start-up attitude within the teams. If you think of the organisation previously, we were selling 1500 cars a year consistently over time. Now we have aspirations to get to 150,000 and to do that needs a certain level of agility you would expect to have in a start-up.

“Then you also have the benefit of not just launching a new brand that no one's ever heard of, you're taking something with its history and heritage and respectfully packaging that up and sharing all the fantastic things about it to a whole new group of consumers that would never have even considered it in the past.”

The switch away from Norfolk for its headquarters is surprising as that’s where the heart and soul of the company lies and the history and heritage is still being traded off, however hard an area it might be to recruit from. The review of the future of its design studio in Hethel is the latest development here. You don’t see Porsche moving out of Stuttgart or Ferrari out of Maranello… 

What impact that has will be seen over the coming years, but for now the rapid emergence of Lotus Technology culminated in an IPO on the New York Stock Exchange in February, and this week Lotus reported its results for the first time.

This laid bare the huge task facing the company in taking on this monumental rate of growth: it reported progress as “steady” but losses were close to £600 million last year and the 7000 cars it sold is not even 5% of where it wants to get to by 2028. 

The clock is ticking, but having treaded water for so long, Lotus is at last being given the chance to thrive rather than simply survive. 

'Vorsprung durch Technik' is one of the most enduring marketing slogans in the automotive industry – and one that has truly given expression to Audi’s focus.

It was first used in 1971 to showcase the technical diversity of the NSU range, then encompassing water-cooled front-drive, air-cooled rear-drive and rotary-engined models. But it really came into vogue in the 1980s with the radical Audi Quattro. At one point, the slogan was featured on the largest illuminated advert in Europe.

For the past few years, though, Audi has been more sparing in its use of Vorsprung durch Technik, with the focus on grappling with the advent of electrification and the need to reduce carbon emissions. Expect that to change, according to Gernot Döllner, Audi’s new CEO and chairman.

“I grew up with Vorsprung durch Technik,” he said, “but in the last few years, with not having [new] products, it was not the right time to talk about it. But this is still the core of the brand.”

That said, Döllner believes Audi needs to find “a new interpretation” of the slogan for a new era, with a focus on technology “that helps people”. In Döllner’s view, ‘vorsprung’ is about innovation as much as technology and hardware, and there’s a real focus on software.

“Thanks to shorter development times, we would like to demonstrate our Vorsprung durch Technik more clearly again,” he added. “At the same time, we are working on a paradigm shift towards the software-designed vehicle. Software will be the leading element in the development of future vehicles, with all other processes oriented towards it.”

That shift to software could well come to define Döllner’s time at the helm of Audi - and it has certainly been the most pressing issue that he has had to address since starting his role last September.

Formerly the Volkswagen Group's strategy boss after a long stint at Porsche, Döllner was appointed by Group chairman Oliver Blume in tough circumstances.

He was brought in to replace Markus Duesmann, who was reportedly sacked because of numerous delays to the Q6 E-tron, the first Audi model to sit on the new Premium Performance Electric (PPE) platform and use the new E3 software architecture developed by Audi and Cariad, the Volkswagen Group’s software arm.

The PPE platform and the E3 architecture are intended to underpin a whole range of models from not just Audi but the other premium and performance brands in the Volkswagen Group (Bentley, Lamborghini and Porsche), so its successful rollout was considered vital.

But the Group has clearly faced huge challenges in adapting to a software-led development progress. The delays with the E3 system (which affected the Porsche Macan Electric as well) followed numerous software issues with the early wave of mainstream Volkswagen EVs based on the MEB platform.

Döllner acknowledges that the firm set “very ambitious targets” for both the hardware and software platforms, which he says were intended to take “digitalisation to the next level”. He said the decision to delay the Q6 E-tron was because “quality and maximising customer benefits was our focus”.

As software becomes increasingly important in modern cars, several manufacturers have tried to reimagine themselves as ‘software firms’, only to find that developing code is a very different challenge from building cars.

That’s to be expected - and you only need to look at the efforts of firms such as Apple to realise that it’s even harder for a tech company to learn how to build cars.

Döllner insisted that the software delays weren’t “a Cariad topic but a Volkswagen Group topic”. He added: “We put a lot of emphasis on optimising the way we develop software and products. We have worked a lot to smooth the processes and cooperation [within the Group].”

The delays have clearly been frustrating, but Döllner believes that the efforts to develop the E3 system will be worth it, given the customisation options for customers and the ability to offer greater over-the-air updates in future. And he is adamant that this situation won’t happen again.

“We learned our lesson,” he said candidly. “In the history of car development, there have been other companies and groups struggling with huge changes in electrics and electronics. To be honest, we underestimated the complexity of the network that we chose and the lines of code necessary for all the functionality we planned for. That took some time, and we learned our lesson and now have this architecture under control. The cars will prove it on the street.”

Audi and Cariad have also reworked their development processes, said Döllner: “We tried to do innovation and scale at the same time, so we put too many cars on that architecture too fast. In the future, we will separate innovation from scaling. The next generation will be developed in a protected room, and once we are sure that it's stable, then we think about scaling in terms of both functions and other vehicles and derivatives.”

Still, Döllner is adamant that Audi will continue to put software first in future - and that means fundamental changes to the way cars are developed. 

“Right now, one of the latest functions that comes to the car is the over-the-air functionality. But now the first function we implement on the cars is the software to allow OTA," he said. "From there on, every car will be updatable, in production, in aftersales and so on – that's a paradigm shift.”

The focus on software is particularly pressing as Audi faces increased competition from tech-focused Chinese rivals.

Döllner noted that the switch to electric in China is slower in the country’s premium segment, saying: “That surprised us, but the big dynamic is definitely in small and very small segments. In the premium segment, we still see huge demand for combustion and plug-in hybrids.”

Audi is having to focus on connectivity and the in-cabin experience to win over tech-hungry Chinese buyers. That means working with Chinese companies to use locally produced infotainment software for the cars Audi and its joint ventures sells in those markets.

“It makes sense to rely on the Chinese ecosystem for functions such as HD maps,” said Döllner. “The key is the back end and having partnerships to connect with the Chinese ecosystems.

“That’s tough, and to be honest, in the past decades we really didn't manage to to integrate Chinese software properly in our vehicles. We are catching up, and that will get better.

"We have the same challenges that the Chinese competition has coming to Europe. If you’ve ever driven a Chinese car in China and then in Europe, it seems to be a different product.”

It might have been a tough path getting there, but Döllner is adamant that software is key to the future of the automotive industry – and in the long run, you wonder if Audi and the wider Group will benefit from facing such challenges at this stage.

Technology has always taken time to develop: the Quattro first competed in the World Rally Championship in 1980, but it took until 1981 to win an event, and it was another two years before an Audi driver claimed the WRC title.

But Audi’s continued pursuit of that revolutionary technology transformed the brand – and exemplified Vorsprung durch Technik. And with new technological challenges to master (albeit software, rather than hardware), it’s time to reassert those values back at the heart of the brand.