Opinion

There’s an enjoyable story which our sibling title Classic & Sports Car covered about a TVR Griffith, an MG RV8 and a Marcos Mantara.

Or at least it’s a story that I was enjoying, right up to the point when I remembered that I had read a group test of those three cars (along with a Morgan Plus 8 and a Ginetta G33) when they were new, which was 1993 but seems like about three weeks ago. And yes, of course I’ve bored several office colleagues about this.

Perhaps this will be no surprise to you, but increasingly I understand what people older than me say about still feeling young: there’s no appreciable difference between the nub of me now and the one from 30 years ago, except I get up earlier, like more cheeses and trim my nose hair more frequently. Otherwise, same idiot, different day. I still like Griffiths.

I mention this because the car market of today is quite different from the one of the mid-1990s, and Autocar’s inbox is broadly evenly split between people who think that modern cars are becoming ever more dismal and people who think the world ever improves.

I suppose it has always been this way. I mean, those once-annoying millennials are now bitching about having to manage zoomers. But electrification in particular has amplified the reaction and the noise around cars.

Largely, I’m of the thinking that things ever get better. I think there were certain peaks in the mid-2010s that haven’t been equalled since; recent misfiring driver assistance systems have made me want to burn more cars than ever; and all of the UK’s electricity salesmen combined won’t convince me that an electric car is the right choice for everybody.

But I also think it’s easy to forget that, for example, a late-1990s Daewoo Lanos was unspeakably bad in a way that we don’t have to tolerate today.

It’s not the quality of today’s cars that underwhelms me but rather the quantity that overwhelms. In 1993, I could have told you the trim level and price of a car by a glimpse of its wheel.

Today, I could stare for several minutes at a premium SUV and still be a little foggy about its name. I may be the UK’s only person sad about the Ora Funky Cat having its name changed to… whatever it is now. At least I remembered it the first time around.

But back to that sports car group test. If you’re tired or bewildered by most new cars, these more basic thrills are still available to you. While the RV8 and Marcos have sadly left us and the Lotus Elise has both come and gone since then, cars of their ilk are still around.

In two weeks’ time, I will drive a Morgan, now with a BMW engine, which looks the same as it always has but which is engaging and better in every way than one from 30 years ago.

Ginetta doesn’t put much stock into road cars today, but given how it races them, it’s perhaps a more credible car maker and certainly more financially stable than at any time in its history.

And you can still even place a deposit for a brand-new TVR Griffith hahahahahahahaha (seriously, don’t do that).

Beyond those, you can now buy an Ariel Atom, which you couldn’t back then. Today’s Caterham Sevens offer the same excitement as ever.

Morgan has even added a three-wheeler back to its range. And going more mainstream, the Porsche 718 Cayman GT4 RS and Porsche 911 S/T are as good a pair of sports cars as have ever been made, not just compared with the 1990s but in all of history.

Ultimately, then, for all the change, not so much is different after all. Except my ability to remember where I put my glasses.

Calls for the return of electric car sales incentives have come from across the industry this week, yet the most important voice of all remains silent.

The government has mandated that 22% of new car sales must be electric in 2024 - but it's doing precious little to support this aim.

The Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, the boss of Britain’s biggest car seller and even the House of Lords have called for incentives to spur demand for EVs within a private market that as a whole dropped 16% year on year in January. 

Measures suggested have included a cut in VAT on the purchase of new EVs from 20% to 10% and a targeted return of the Plug-in Car Grant towards smaller and cheaper EVs; as well as other potential support, such as cutting the VAT rate on public charging from 20% to 5% and an extension of the EV-favouring benefit-in-kind tax rates.

Incentives for EVs made for the dominant topic in our Autocar Business Live webinar this week, which you can watch now on demand here.

Stellantis’s UK sales boss Eurig Druce said that such speculation on a return of incentives and the silence that meets it breeds uncertainty, as potential buyers risk delaying their purchase in the hope of getting some imminent assistance from the government. (Although when is there every certainty around the new car market these days?)

Druce said the government’s strategy around EVs isn't a 360deg one, compelling supply of EVs but not demand.

This means there are two ways of achieving it: cutting supply of ICE cars to artificially boost the sale of EVs or by selling your way to success. Clearly the latter is the desirable outcome, but it’s much harder to do. 

One of the people on the frontline of selling cars is Vertu Motors CEO Robert Forrester – someone who doesn’t pull punches. 

He told Autocar Business Live that without incentives there's no chance of the ZEV mandate succeeding in 2024, let alone EV sales growing to 80% by 2030. 

He can’t fathom why the UK's target is so far ahead of the EU's in what is an ultimately integrated industry.

His view is that the government will see that the policy isn't working and in time row back on it and in the meantime doesn't have the capital or the willpower to support the policy financially. 

There is a growing sense that the industry feels collectively cheesed off with the government over its inability to properly back its own policies and legislation.

Watch: How to sell cars in 2024 - Autocar Business Live

Private buyers clearly need financial incentives to go electric (Druce said there’s emphatic evidence the previous Plug-in Car Grant helped turn the dial); even the most EV-friendly car makers say they need help to sell these cars; and dealers can’t understand why there has been such an intervention in the first place and consider it unwelcome. 

The government’s silence is becoming deafening.  

I’m indebted to (and a little envious of) my colleague Richard Lane for his recent visit to the Ansible Motion simulator.

I’ve spent a good amount of time in simulators over the past decade – more than my colleagues, to the point that I’ve felt like I’m our sim correspondent.

They do have more visual impact in person than they do in photos for you, dear reader. If we drive a real prototype car, there will be shots of it on ice, in a desert or at a track, as it throws up snow or sand or is chucked sideways by a heroic test driver.

See a prototype car during simulated development and, no matter what it’s doing or where it virtually exists, it will always look like a big screen and some thick cables in a darkened room. Make that look exciting if you can. I suppose it’s like any driving.

Driving or racing is fun to do, and watching it is good too. But virtual driving? I like racing games, but they’re an acquired taste, less exciting than the real thing, so watching somebody else playing one must be even more acquired.

If actual racing is like drinking wine, watching somebody race a simulator isn’t even like watching someone else drinking wine. It’s like watching them pretend to.

But back to industry sims. Horiba MIRA, the test centre that until recently hosted our performance car road tests (inconveniently for us, they’re building a solar array on our handling track) has a new one.

It’s not from Ansible, rather VI-Grade, but the whole set-up, including a less advanced supplementary sim, has still cost it £4 million and incorporates the very handy ability to put an engine or drivetrain in a separate room and make it respond to real human inputs.

This is particularly good news. Most cars aren’t fully electrified, and getting hybrid drivetrains to behave well is evidently difficult. They stop-start, they shunt between motor and engine and they can take an age to get going or change gear as they try to make human demands match emissions-regulated response.

The ability to refine them in a lab where one can make adjustments rapidly, rather than having to pound asphalt in a prototype, will more quickly make better cars. And that’s just one of dozens of vehicle traits that sims can handle.

“Manufacturers have had to shift very quickly to new platforms,” says MIRA driven attributes engineering manager Tom Lee. “That takes away their brand DNA, and they have to redefine what that could be.”

So if you feel like we reached ‘peak car’ in terms of dynamics and drivability (and you wouldn’t be alone if you did), this rapid shift in vehicle engineering is why.

The old way of doing things – making cars a tad bigger, more efficient, faster, plusher and pricier each time – is over. Cars are so much more complex than those they replace that they’re no longer routinely better.

Steve Cropley recently found the Ford Kuga’s dynamics particularly disappointing for a firm that used to offer benchmark ride and handling. But the car was developed during the mid-2010s, when plug-in hybrids were still only a twinkle in engineers’ eyes.

So, depending on its powertrain, the Kuga weighs anything from 1526kg to 1859kg, and who knows how different the distribution of mass is between an ICE version and a PHEV?I bet Ford would handle the development situation differently today – much more of it virtually, before a real car ever turned a wheel.

“We’re a way off not needing [real] prototypes,” says Lee, concurring with Ansible boss Kia Cammaerts, “but our goal is to have all the development done here, so we’re only doing validation [with physical vehicles].”

Pics of development cars will be less exciting, then, but the end products should be better.

What do you think when you come across or drive up behind a newish small car? Something like a Kia Picanto, MG 3 or Suzuki Swift.

Do you think that there must go a smart person, because compact cars are light and uncomplicated and easy on consumables? That this driver has to be pretty enlightened, confident within themselves, to choose something as practical and usually very competent and refined yet seriously unassuming?

Do you credit them for resisting the expensive drip payments that could have led them to a more glamorous yet no better badge on their driveway?

Do you look and think that there’s a reason why those consumer motoring experts at the world’s longest-established car magazine, Autocar, are so taken with cars like this?

Or do you look and think, like one of those consumer motoring experts from Autocar (me), ‘come on, Doris, get out of the way. I’m in an Audi/Mercedes/Tesla and I’ve got places to go’?

Sigh. I’m sorry about this. I genuinely am. But yesterday I came upon a small new car on a dual carriageway that exited a roundabout and stayed in the overtaking lane, showing no intention to overtake anything, and thought less kindly about it than I would have done if it were, say, a new German SUV – a car that I know would either get its skates on and start passing things or pull over to the left. I assumed the city car doggedly wouldn’t, as indeed it didn’t.

I know I’m not alone in thinking things like this. I regularly drive cars on both sides of the dial and I know you get more patient treatment from other road users in something swanky than you do in something small and cheap.

Do you drive a posh company car? The next time you take it for a service, ask for the cheapest, smallest courtesy car the garage has to find out how it feels to be bullied relentlessly by people who assume things about you.

It comes, I suppose, from years of experience and conditioning. There are back-of-mind stereotypes about small cars. See a Ford Fiesta or Fiat 500? That will be a young budget-limited buyer with places to go.

See a very old, very cheap small car? That will be driven by a middle-aged, blue-collar bloke who fixes it himself and drives everywhere at eleven-tenths. See a pretty new, very clean Honda Jazz? Come on, you old duffer – get a flipping move on.

I wonder how frequently this stops people buying what could be the best and most suitable car they will never own. I love the Picanto and its Hyundai i10 sibling. 

They’re two of the best things I could and should probably buy as a family daily runner. But when it came to buying, one thing that would play on my mind would be knowing that as I passed cars on the motorway, there would be some berk behind me, impatiently gesturing me to get out of the overtaking lane, because he would be thinking exactly like, er, I would.

Will this go on forever, I wonder? The market is in its biggest phase of disruption for a century. Where do newer players sit?

Teslas seem to be driven with the same motorway, um, ‘spirit’ as Audis or Mercedes. In my mind, GWM, maker of the Ora 03 (formerly the Funky Cat), is a bit Proton and it’s a bit soon to tell about BYD.

Will new makers become the bullied, like a new kid at school? The maker of the Picanto now sells an £80,000 SUV, after all. Hyundai makes the world’s most outrageously fun EV. Will it significantly shift how we think about their smallest cars? I kind of hope so.

In the meantime: seriously, matey in that Jazz, get a move on.

What I suspected was the case with the Toyota GR Yaris has turned out to be about right. 

“It’s no wonder I’ve had correspondence from people with big car collections who drive a Yaris every day,” I wrote in 2021 after spending a few months living with one and finding that it offered a driving experience so special that it would please people who could afford rather more than the £29,995 the hot hatchback cost.

And last month, Toyota presented me with some data backing that up: 48% of GR Yaris owners own one as an ‘additional car’, when the class average is only around 10%.

Many have a GR Yaris “next to a supercar”, said a delighted chief engineer Naohiko Saito. “This is something we’ve never seen before.”

Given this, and that Toyota has sold 100% more GRs than it had expected to by now, it’s little wonder that it has felt emboldened not only to put the car through a facelift but to suggest that it will make it a permanent fixture in the range – for as long as it’s still able to sell it.

“This isn’t the end of development,” said Saito at the event where I drove a pre-production example of the facelifted car.

“Smells and noise are something we don’t want to give up. We want to make sports cars for the next 100 years.”

By the end of this decade, though, 80% of new cars sold in the UK must be zero-emissions, and while it has only a 1.6-litre engine, the GR Yaris isn’t one of those.

Still, I live in hope of a long existence – and that Toyota resists the temptation to hike the price too much, now that it knows the wherewithal of many buyers.

More excitable quotes, although less happy ones, come from ABC News in Canberra. The Street Machine Summernats car event has come to town, and with it has come “moron tourism”, according to Mark Richardson, Australian Capital Territory’s acting inspector of road policing.

Australia has some strict anti-hooning laws – hooning being the word for “any antisocial behaviour in a motor car”, according to the authorities – but they don’t dissuade semi-organised burnout events.

“The real car enthusiasts aren’t the problem,” said Richardson. (I’d like to think those are people like me and you.) “If we set up an IQ [testing] station at the [state] border instead of a vehicle testing station, we’d probably halve our problem. They literally come down here to see ‘how big of a pest can I be this week?’.

"They were all over Canberra [this week] and we were just playing whack-a-mole.

“Every jurisdiction in Australia has been through this. It’s not unique to us and it’s not unique to the Summernats; it happens all year round. [Hooners] just haven’t evolved very far; they’ve just plateaued as a sub-species of the human race. I don’t know what goes through their minds.”

I know, Mark, I know. And yet… As somebody who is partial to a burnout or a drift, I wonder: is a hoon still a hoon if nobody’s around to see it?

Is it antisocial if you’re sufficiently antisocial as to want to hide away from society anyway?

Visible hoonage gets my goat like it does Richardson’s. It’s why I dislike most noisy, showoff-ish supercar events, where bad, loud, obnoxious driving (and owners) are prevalent.

And it’s why I think most recreational driving (or motorbike riding) is best done alone and why it’s better to assume that anybody who might see you also has a camera aimed at you.

It’s easy enough to find appropriate space, even in England, where there are 1124 people per square mile. In Australia, there are just 9.1. Hooners there literally have to go looking for bystanders. Personally, I think it’s much better to drive where people are not.