Opinion

The 2024 Geneva motor show provided a classic case of being able to hold two conflicting opinions and believe both to be true.

You can call the show poor - although perhaps not the “pathetic” that one car maker did in private - yet still have enjoyed being there.

Geneva's problem was as much what it used to be rather than what it was. If a new show were set up in a different city and this were the result, we would probably be giving more credit for getting the manufacturers that did turn up there in the first place.

Still, the two halls were too stuffed with old cars and coffee shops; they would have been better just having the one open to create a bit more buzz and a busy feel. 

But let’s be honest: the Geneva decline started long before Covid, which was the catalyst for four subsequent cancellations of the show.

The 2019 show was down on exhibits and 2020 was looking light too, so follow that leakage of attendees and you might have ended up with the same size show as what occurred in 2024 anyway. 

Still, motor shows remain fine fare for us, simply because we get access to so many industry leaders in one place. I would call the below a fruitful day at work. Those talking up Geneva’s demise should be careful what they wish for.

Sunday evening

It was strange to arrive in Geneva and not have something like the Volkswagen Group night to attend, a usual prerequisite of a so-called big international motor show.

The biggest news on Sunday night actually came from Fiat, some guerilla marketing announcing its future product strategy and a preview of the new Panda in a video set in an Italian village called Ginevra. Yet it was late on a Sunday night, so it landed with a whimper, and what should have been a positive story just left people with more questions and nobody on hand at the show to answer them.

Why not just turn up at Geneva itself? By the time Monday morning came around, we had some cars we could look at and touch to write about and executives on hand to speak to them about. Fiat had been forgotten.

Car of the Year

Car of the Year (COTY) is a big deal for car makers, and the announcement for the winner of the 2024 award had real tension as it turned into a two-horse race between the Renault Scenic E-Tech and the BMW 5 Series.

The Scenic scooped the award in the end, a good start to the day for Renault at a show where it dominated the headlines with the unveiling of the 5. 

Watching the COTY announcement, it was just as intriguing people-watching in the crowd, as representatives from Toyota and BYD soon disappeared when it became clear they weren’t going to win.

Most of the seven shortlisted car makers had senior executives on hand to lift the trophy should they have won.

Linda Jackson

One such executive was Peugeot CEO Linda Jackson, who was there to see the new Peugeot 3008 take third place in the COTY final running order.

I interviewed her in a meeting room near to where in Geneva shows past a thriving media centre was sited. The proverbial tumbleweeds were blowing through this area of the Palexpo centre, and the Peugeot team (and Jackson herself) kept having to wave their hands to activate the motion-detected lights coming back on.

Still, Jackson was in fine form, promising a revolution to the interior of future models. Peugeot has increasing confidence and a growing track record of improving the quality and design of its interiors and is making that a key focus in development. “Not only is it a major reason for customers buying cars, but it’s also something we score higher on when compared to our competitors,” she said. 

It’s a very handy advantage with the rise of EVs, as there will be far fewer differentiators between cars sharing largely similar technology. Interiors are one of few places you can win in a meaningful way. 

Mobilize V2G tech

Two appointments on the Renault stand, first with Mobilize boss Gianluca De Ficchy and then with design chief Gilles Vidal.

It’s easy to get carried away with the design of the 5, but to do so would be to overlook some key technology developments. Among them are the introduction of vehicle-to-grid (V2G) charging technology, which De Ficchy believes is a very real solution to what will be a growing problem of energy storage. 

“Already today, there are several weeks of the year across all European countries where the price of energy is negative. You want to sell, you have to pay," he said. 

"This phenomenon will grow exponentially,” he believes, as energy production increases in line with demand.

V2G allows electric cars to give back energy to the grid and the owner to be paid for it. “This will make electric cars more affordable,” said De Ficchy. 

It’s complicated, requiring new contracts and deals with the grid, domestic energy suppliers and the customer, and you will need a new home charger that’s V2G-compatible, but Renault is working on offering this for the 5’s UK launch next year. 

Renault 5 

Renault dominated the Geneva show both with share of voice and physical footprint, but stands from Chinese brands MG and BYD were in its eyeline.

With Jackson’s comments on design fresh in my mind, I asked Vidal if distinctive design can help see off the threat of China.

“For me, it’s the key to success or possibly even survival in the future,” came the empathic response.

Lucid

It's always a spectacle to be in the company of maverick Peter Rawlinson, the former Lotus and Tesla engineer who now leads Lucid.

Questions about its development as a brand aside, what can't be disputed is the technology that the American manufacturer has created – what Rawlison calls a “miniaturisation” of electric car running gear.

The result is efficiency that’s a good 25% better than Tesla's, which is already impressive, and a chunk ahead again of legacy car makers'.

Efficiency is so important, as it’s a way of allowing smaller batteries to be fitted to electric cars and dramatically bring down the size and therefore cost of the battery needed to propel them. 

If three miles per kWh is 40mpg in old money, Lucid is talking about hitting around 8mpkWh on the WLTP test, or 100mpg. 

Rawlison believes that this is the “holy grail” that will ensure that EVs will help to “save the planet”. That's the sort of statement easily dismissed as hyperbole, but in the case of Rawlinson and his track record, it’s eminently believable. 

Will we be back?

On my way back to the airport, I spoke to one car manufacturer who wasn’t present at the show but came to see what it was all about and speak to the organisers about its future. They told me organisers had been humble about what the show was but weren’t apologetic or promising any large growth plans.

Which leaves the show in a bit of a predicament. As a journalist, I found it useful. But if I had paid to go with my own money and had nobody to speak to professionally, I would have been sorely disappointed and felt that if I wanted to see a new 5, I would just go to my local Renault dealer.

It’s the reaction of visitors that will probably decide the show's fate, providing this absolute bare minimum number of manufacturers that attended in 2024 return. 

Yet speak to Swiss journalists and they already say that Geneva's fate has been sealed, as the government won’t support the event and that 2024 was merely a face-saving exercise.

My hunch is that we won’t be back at the Geneva motor show in Geneva, the name living on instead in Qatar as part of a peculiar licensing deal that started last year. Sad.

There’s a mistaken sense that Ineos Automotive is a whim of Britain's second-richest man, Sir Jim Ratcliffe; a pet project to make a car that he wants – the Ineos Grenadier – because nobody else makes a car like that, rather than a serious automotive business. 

“The objective is to be commercially successful as a business and that’s what the Grenadier is doing,” said Ratcliffe, when asked if such a notion bothers him. 

Such perceptions have long since been dismissed as fantasy and the Ineos Automotive story has moved way beyond that. What started as a single model with a very clear purpose – a modern successor to the Land Rover Defender – has turned into a car company that has just revealed its third model line, the Fusilier, bringing in new powertrain and platform technology and an additional factory, too. It is a company that has invested heavily in R&D, facilities and people. 

Ineos has done more than most start-ups simply by getting a car into production and delivered to customers. There have been plenty of wannabes with a good idea, yet Ratcliffe’s admittedly well-financed effort has still got past the biggest hurdle of all. It has been done in a clever way, keeping design in-house, sourcing key components from elsewhere, outsourcing engineering to an expert company and then buying a ready-made factory. 

Perhaps most intriguing about Ineos is its emergence as a serious car company that communicates with a welcome dose of clarity and realism. There are no splinters to be found in anyone’s backside from being on the fence at Ineos. Its chief bugbear at the moment is - in the words of Ratcliffe - “idealistic” backing that the UK and Europe have given to electric cars and “forcing them at the market”. 

Ratcliffe is as quotable as they come and does not fear those who might take exception to his words and dose of realism – a position you can afford when you’re chairman, CEO and founder of the holding company that Ineos Automotive sits within. 

His gripe is that, rather than there being a wider goal of carbon net zero and seeing what blend of technologies emerge to work towards that, battery-electric vehicles are being forced on consumers when they are either not ready or don’t want them, for myriad reasons including charging and cost. 

“You can’t force a solution that the customer rejects,” said Ratcliffe in a lively Q&A at the reveal of the Fusilier at The Grenadier pub he owns in London. (The pub was actually renamed The Fusilier for the day and is famous for being where Ratcliffe came up with the idea for the Grenadier 4x4.)

Ratcliffe is open to not only battery-electric vehicles but a world beyond them, though he says the Fusilier is a legislative necessity to be able to operate in the UK and the EU. So beyond EVs, range-extended electric cars (his personal favourite new technology), improvements to internal combustion engines, e-fuels, biofuels and hydrogen all hold appeal and should be on the table.

As a global company, Ineos has a global outlook and Ratcliffe believes that, for example, Europe stopping development of internal combustion engines will have an impact on reducing carbon emissions in places like South America where EVs are less plausible than ever-improved, lower-carbon combustion-engined cars are.

There was surprise in our audience that it took at least half an hour for a question to come up on Manchester United, Ratcliffe's recent investment that has thrusted him firmly into the wider public consciousness. That question was in the context of Toby Ecuyer, who designs anything and everything that wears an Ineos badge, having a go at redesigning the United logo, which Ecuyer quickly clarified he would not be doing lest any unwanted headlines get out.

Meanwhile, Ratcliffe couldn’t resist a dig, intended or otherwise, at the other side of Jaguar Land Rover (Land Rover, of course, took him to court over claimed copyright infringements). He believes Britain had a design icon equivalent to the Porsche 911 with the Jaguar E-Type, which could have had its design evolved over time to leave us with a “marvellous car today”. Picking a design, sticking with it and evolving it is his plan at Ineos.

Those plans are fascinating and logical, as well as well financed. Surprisingly, CEO Lynn Calder said the company breaks even and had “a couple of months last year in the black”, although that’s for day-to-day running and excludes the huge investments made in model development and the Hambach factory in France. “The return on investment won't be this year – it’s a long way away for that,” she said. 

The car world is a better place with Ineos and its cars in it, and so is the automotive industry for having Sir Jim Ratcliffe as part of it. 

American farmers in the 1960s had a surprising amount in common with electric car buyers in the UK in 2024. 

EM Rogers’ diffusion of innovations theory looks at how quickly new ideas and technologies are adopted by different parts of societies over time. Of the five types of people identified in Rogers’ bell curve, innovators and early adopters account for just 16% - the exact figure the UK’s electric car has stalled at en route to the legislated 80% needed by 2030. 

Some 60 years ago, American farmers stalled at this point in their willingness to adopt new technologies to aid farming methods, and as Rogers’ theory has shown, many other industries since have witnessed similar stagnation of innovation.  

Using Rogers’ theory, the 16% stall point for EV adoption in the UK could have been predicted decades ago, and it suggests that the growth electric cars have enjoyed to date will by no means see them inevitably continue to become the mainstream, rather than merely a part of it. 

This means a different approach is needed for incentivising the mass adoption of EVs. The next set of buyers have different needs, expectations and anxieties, and they will be swayed by negative stories and put off in a way that early adopters won’t. Early adopters are well informed and pre-sold on EVs; the mass market needs more reassurance and to understand the technology better. 

Incentives are part of this but not the only tool, and cracking the mainstream requires much deeper thinking, chiefly along the lines that not all EV buyers should be lumped into the same pot.

In Rogers’ bell curve, innovators and early adopters combined make up 16% and are followed by a 34% early majority and a 34% late majority, before 16% of 'laggards’ bringing up the rear. 

Getting that messaging right and the right information out there is the mission of all car makers. They need to tread carefully and take all buyers with them, not just in a way that appeals to early adopters. There are people who have a less forensic and more traditional approach to car buying and for whom an EV will remain an alien concept for a long time to come. 

Wider exposure to EVs for everyone in this country, whether they're about to buy a new car or not, is important as part of a long-term and widespread information campaign, including everything from greater awareness of batteries, charging, range and the recharging infrastructure, as well as opportunities for drivers to experience EVs away from the buying process.

“One thing we also need to talk about is usage and not maximum range,” one car company executive recently told me. “The average daily usage for one of our cars with any powertrain is just over 25 miles. With home charging, it makes total sense as a daily commute and city or second car. Yet still, a binary yes/no question of whether it has a 300-mile range is the dominant argument.”

Car buyers tend to be lumped together collectively, but each time a person buys a car, it’s an individual decision. When it comes to EVs there will always be reasons not to or reasons to put it off. 

American farmers got there in the end, and inevitably so too will EVs in the UK for myriad reasons, the bluntest being legislative - yet there must not be complacency along the way or an assumption that progress in EV uptake will be linear.

Autocar research has found that 83% of motorists would prefer to use cash or contactless payment machines in car parks over smartphone apps.

Feedback revealed that people don't like having to download so many apps (there are more than 30 across the UK), worry about online fraud and worry that the apps are too complex.

Dennis Reed, director of campaign group Silver Voices, called the abandonment of pay-and-display machines "blatant ageism". I'm with him.

I reckon there's more to people's dissatisfaction with online payment than complexity or fraud, too. It's not that we can't use this stuff - it's that we don't want to. I think that people have had enough of the mission creep of surveillance and data gathering and that there's a fear not of fraud but of poor tactics from parking providers.

Last year, I wrote twice about my family's parking travails. One relative drove into a car park, tried to get the online payment to work, couldn't and got hit with a £100 fine for spending five minutes trying to do so. Another paid for the wrong car park in his town on an app (there are two) so was fined. Both appealed successfully.

All of this is administrated by numberplate-recognition cameras and a computer that prints and sends nasty letters to unsuspecting drivers, who then have to go through a stressful, time-consuming and uncertain system of appeal. If either of those car parks had a payment machine, neither of these dramas would have happened.

I'm not one for reminiscences. But in the old days, you paid your cash, you got a chit to show you'd rented your space and that was the end of it. The government is promising to 'streamline' the app system. It should be insisting there's a payment machine at every car park.

After a new job..? 

Dream job klaxon: the Isle of Wight hovercraft, subject of Autocar's 2022 Christmas road test, is in need of a new pilot. There's much excitement and dusting off of CVs among my colleagues.

Hovertravel operates two Griffon Hoverwork 12000TDs and is looking for a new 'master to join its team of eight pilots, who spend their days crossing the Solent in these £5 million, 33-tonne, 78-passenger, 2126bhp vehicles. It's the only year-round scheduled hovercraft service in the world.

There is a potential problem for motoring hacks dreaming of sunny days drifting across calm waters, however.

The job advert states: "Individuals must hold one of the following STCW95 Certificates of Competence: Master 11/2 or 1I/3 (Unlimited, <3000GT or <500GT); Master Il/3, limited to hovercraft less than 500GT on near-coastal voyages only; be appropriately qualified seafarers applying to obtain this coC under STCW regulation 11/3 as stated in MGN1856 and with reference to Annex D therein." I've no idea. But if you do, you know where to look.

Autocar's archive continues to grow

Exciting news comes from Autocar's unofficial chief archive nerd, sub-editor Kris Culmer. Having audited our digital archive (which is powered by Exact Editions) to find where gaps exist, he has been working to get them filled.

Page presentation and text recognition are much better when magazine pages can be laid flat on scanners. Many thanks to reader John, then, for donating his collection.

The first batch of missing issues has now been uploaded: 290 from the 1950s through to the 2000s, bringing the total number up to 6210. (See p18 for details on how you can read them.) There's still more to come - hopefully fairly soon - in order for the archive to be complete.

We're grateful for the enthusiasm, support and patience for what's still a big job and something of a passion project for a number of our staff.

"Misinformation" is what the recent House of Lords report on the UK’s bungled EV strategy called some of the mainstream media reporting about electric cars.

“Several witnesses told us that media coverage of EVs was inaccurate and portrayed EVs in a disproportionately negative light - noting that even when corrected, fact checks often do not reach as wide an audience as the original article,” it read. 

The report highlighted articles from the Daily Mail, the Daily Express and The Telegraph as examples of this and quoted Ford as saying a “vocal anti-EV campaign” had emerged in early 2023.

The boss of the UK’s biggest-selling car maker, the Volkswagen Group, isn't one for such statements. Alex Smith has instead said that such reporting simply makes him more determined to counter such reporting with facts.

“If I read something which is obviously misleading, then it just makes me and the team here even more determined to ensure that we provide great information and products to consumers,” he told me in the VW Group’s UK boardroom on the day the Lords’ report was published. 

Smith is feeling buoyed by the VW Group’s progress in selling EVs – something that it, like all car makers, has to do in increasing numbers in 2024 after the introduction of the ZEV mandate, which dictates that 22% of any car maker’s UK sales must be electric.

While EV sales grew 18% across the total market in 2023, at VW Group, the growth was closer to 50%.

“There has been massive media coverage on electric vehicles from many different angles, but it all comes back to compelling products,” Smith said. “If you have them and have compelling and constant new products, then there is the consumer interest.”

Still, Smith believes that incentives are needed to further stimulate demand and also called for binding targets for the infrastructure rollout to be set in the same way that car makers have been in the government dictating the amount of EVs car makers must grow each year.

Intriguingly, Smith said the ZEV mandate itself would be reviewed in a couple of years, leaving the door open to a softening of the sliding scale of EV sales. At present, firms must get to 80% by 2030 and 100% by 2035. 

“We know that there is provision for review of the zero emission [vehicle] mandate in a couple of years' time," he said. "This will allow everybody to take stock and then figure out exactly what might be necessary in order to continue to drive the transition in the second half of the decade.”

That’s assuming we even have the current status quo by then; with a general election due within the 12 months, Smith simply pleads for “consistency” for the automotive industry from whoever is in power. 

Every VW Group brand grew its market share in the UK in 2023 as the firm put the semiconductor chip shortage behind it and more typical lead times returning, including cars in stock.

Volkswagen itself retained its number-one position in the sales charts, while Audi and Skoda posted record shares. 

In total, VW Group sales volumes grew by 106,000 cars in 2023 over 2022 – a total that self-confessed numbers buff Smith calculated would stretch from his home in Oxford to his daughter’s university in Exeter and back on his way to pick her up over Christmas. 

VW Group’s early electric cars had well-publicised software problems, but Smith said there had been “positive response to the latest version of software” and an overwhelming majority of EV buyers would not be going back to ICE cars, even after any rocky experiences.

Smith himself is an EV owner: he made the switch in 2019 with an Audi E-tron and currently drives a Cupra Born. And he can’t remember the last time he needed to borrow an ICE car with a particularly long journey in mind.

When out and about, he will talk to anyone who asks about the benefits of EVs as part of “education without sounding incredibly patronising” - but he doesn’t think it should solely be down to EV owners and car companies to do so. 

“Increasing consumer familiarity with the reality of electric vehicles has a really important part to play," he said. "But we’re not the only people who need to coordinate, to take a lead and to send clear, educative messages. 

“What’s really important about education is that it needs to be objective, freely available and digestible in a way that isn’t directive or patronising.”