Opinion

It’s 4.15am and I’m in my kitchen waiting for the kettle to boil while flicking between the Google Maps and Waze apps on my phone.

I have to be at a lay-by in Teesdale between 9.30am and 10am in a car that’s fuelled enough for the day, and I need to pick up a videographer from Leeds on the way.

My phone says Leeds is 1hr 30min from our destination, so I should get to the videographer by 8am. And he’s 2hr 50min from my gaff near Bicester, so I could leave almost an hour later than now, at 5.10am.

But that – and you’ll have known this as you read it – would be a mistake. Because by the time I get to Leeds for 8am, there will be loads of people getting to Leeds for 8am. So the kettle boils, I fill a mug and off I go.

Initially it looks like I’ll be daftly early: 7.20am. But I’ll want more tea and a bun on the way, and if I fuel the car near Leeds, it will last the day. My estimated arrival time creeps onwards.

After a relaxed fuel stop, I arrive at 7.55am. Spot on.

The second section of the journey is more predictable. We’re the only people trying to get to a lay-by in Teesdale by 10am, so traffic is expectedly light and we’re there by 9.35am.

It couldn’t be simpler. Or could it? There are variables and options to go around if it goes awry, which I know about only through experience. Different leaving times give different results. But a near constant, at least, is how much it will cost.

A few weeks ago, I took a train to Birmingham. As with the car, I stood in my kitchen working out journey times. Being naive, I would have gone to the station and bought a ticket.

But that again would have been a mistake. At £29.10, I would have overpaid the German taxpayer, who ultimately owns Chiltern Railways.

Had I gone online, I could have saved myself 10%, paying £26.10 for the same journey. But that too would have been a mistake, because I was travelling with someone who had a Network Railcard and therefore could buy me a ticket for just £24 so long as we travelled together.

I say ‘a’ ticket. The catch was that the Network Railcard was valid only to King’s Sutton, a few stops up the line. So we were travelling there with a Railcard discount, then on a full fare to Birmingham – although these ‘split’ tickets were valid only on trains that called at King’s Sutton.

Confused? I was – and I would have paid 20% more than I’d needed to if somebody else hadn’t known better.

If you’ve regularly used trains for as long as I’ve been driving to nowhere via somewhere, I’m sure you’ve got the hang of it. But should one have to?

If I drive now to Edinburgh, say, all I have to think about is how long it will take me to get there. It will cost me the same amount as if I’d have thought about it three months ago.

By train, my options can be as little as £179 or as much as £380 (both standard class), depending on when I go. In a car, my naivety and spontaneity aren’t taken advantage of. It’s no longer really meant to be like this.

In May 2021, a new public body called Great British Railways was announced, promising that “a quarter century of fragmentation on the railways [would] end” and it would “simplify the current mass of confusing tickets”.

Alas, three prime ministers and three transport secretaries later, it has been bumped to at least the next parliament, even assuming it’s picked up then.

I don’t mind planning a journey. And I don’t mind the idea of a loyalty card: you regularly use something, you save a few quid doing it.

But I do mind the feeling that unless I game the system, I’m being taken for a mug. Kettle has boiled. Fetch the car keys.

The ZEV mandate, which dictates that 22% of each car maker's sales in the UK must be electric cars, has now finally come into effect - and some are in far better shape than others. 

Data from Automotive Services International (ASI) on 2023 new-car registrations to the end of October revealed that you can count on one hand the traditional makers that are already over the threshold of compliance.

Every car sold above the 22% will attract a £15,000 fine, unless a car maker defers the sales to a future year. Complying can mean buying credits from other car makers with credits in hand – Tesla, Polestar and MG.

In the third quarter of 2023, Mercedes-Benz and the BMW Group both broke through the 22% share well ahead of schedule, with Mercedes pushing closer to 30%.

In the September plate-change month, Mercedes sold only 710 fewer EVs (5054) than petrol cars (5764), whereas in the March plate-change month, the gap was more than 7000 (2514 EVs compared with 9844 petrols). 

The BMW Group's numbers are following a similar trend, its Q3 share sitting above 25%, thanks to increasing numbers of electric BMWs being registered; and with new Mini EVs coming as well in 2024, expect the 22% target to pose no problem. 

The Volkswagen Group is edging its EV sales upwards, although not at a run rate that on the face of it shows an obvious way to 22%, currently sitting at 15%. 

In the bumper month of September, the 3747 EVs registered by Volkswagen itself was 17% of its total sales, but in October that slipped back again to 11%.

The opposite occurred at Audi, where 18% of EV sales in September increased to 21% in October.

While premium brands are making greater headway towards the 22% target (Volvo was another running well in October, at 29%), ASI’s numbers show how hard it is for mainstream brands to convince mainstream buyers to go electric during the cost of living crisis.

With this in mind, the other Volkswagen Group brands need Audi’s EVs to perform, as the proportion of EVs sold reduces as you look down the brand hierarchy. 

Stellantis lacks a premium brand with the cachet of Audi, BMW or Mercedes, yet even with a number of EVs across its brands, it saw its proportion of EV sales in Q3 drop below 10% from above 15% in the quarter before. 

Yet this could be a case of smoke and mirrors. Vauxhall registered just 378 EVs in October, the first month of the fourth quarter, which was comfortably its lowest of the year by some margin. Is it holding back EV registrations until 2024, when they will count towards the ZEV mandate? On this evidence, it would seem so, and similar trends at Peugeot (225 EVs in October, compared with 753 in April) and Citroën (117 in October, after 370 in April) gives this argument extra merit.

Stellantis is on record as saying it will comply in 2024 without paying fines or buying credits from elsewhere; it seems it’s going to give itself a nice head start in January. 

Similar seems to be occurring at Kia. In October, its EV sales total of 955 was the second lowest of the year (it sold 902 in February). In March and September (admittedly plate-change months), it was around triple that. It was closing in on 22% in September, with an 18% share of EV sales in the month. So we shouldn’t expect to read too much into Kia’s EV sales from Q4. 

There are brands that will obviously be deferring their 2024 ZEV mandate requirements to future years, including Toyota. Its first EV, the bZ4X, has bombed, selling just 14 examples in October, and even in the plate-change month of September, it was only 51.

Toyota has several EVs in the works, so it's banking on their future success, along with likely a complicated formula of trading that can be done to take advantage of an otherwise low-CO2 fleet average for ICE cars to offset lower EV sales.

We will be looking at how this could work in practice - something that also involves trading with separate ZEV credits for vans - in an upcoming Autocar Business feature. 

Ford has confirmed that it will defer to future years, when the likes of the Explorer will finally hit the market and it will finally move away from being known as the Fiesta maker. The Mustang Mach-E sells okay compared with some EVs, but it still  takes only around 2-3% of Ford’s sales. 

Others that are likely to follow a similar deferral path in the mid-market are early EV pioneers Renault and Nissan, which presently don’t have the cars to support a 22% market share but will do soon enough, most notably in Renault’s case with the 5. Keep your eye on the low-cost Dacia Spring to help support the mothership, too. 

Land Rover has openly said it will buy credits, which is no surprise when it doesn’t yet have an EV on the market and is one of only two car brands - the other being its sibling, Jaguar - that still counts diesel as its most popular drivetrain. 

The 22% target may be the same for everyone, but as the ASI data shows, the circumstances are different for every car maker, and there's no one fixed way to achieve that target.

If the business of designing, engineering and building cars wasn’t hard enough, the art of selling them in the UK perhaps now trumps them all for complexity. 

At our road testers’ Christmas dinner, I was roundly derided for nominating the BMW M340i as my most underrated car of 2023.

“I can’t remember the last time a 3 Series lost a group test,” spat one of my colleagues disdainfully. “How can it possibly be underrated?”

“Nice work. Maybe next time you could bring an Alpine A110 or the Porsche 911,” chuckled another.

“Or a really overlooked gem like the Mercedes S-Class.”

They had a point, of sorts. We rated the G20-generation BMW 3 Series at five stars when it was launched in 2019 and it emerged from a hefty update for 2023 “as ruthlessly brilliant as ever”.

No variant currently on sale merits fewer than 4.5 stars in our book, and there’s usually a BMW with a ‘3’ on it somewhere at the annual Autocar Awards photocall.

But I thought the M340i, specifically, deserved a few more column inches.

I spent a fair bit of time in the M3 Touring this year and was left slightly cold: its ride is too harsh to let rip on crumbling country lanes, its wheels are too big to parallel park with abandon in town and its styling is too brash to fade into the background on long jaunts.

Plus, its outrageous firepower means you could find yourself on the wrong side of the law in mere seconds from standstill.

The M340i, I reckon, is all the M3 you need in the real world. It has an intoxicating exhaust note, handles with aplomb, rides beautifully on and off the motorway and – with 369bhp from its blown straight six – goes like spit off a spade. It’s 75% an M3, and I’d wager you’d have to push pretty damned hard to reach the point where the 150bhp deficit and softer-sprung chassis become obvious.

The ultimate Q car? I think so: just as fun, far less fuss – and a chunky saving to boot.

Is ‘restomod fatigue’ a thing? I’m not sure, but if it is, then I’ve certainly been suffering from something like it over the past year or so.

The early exponents of this updating art were fairly simple in their approach, serving up a sharper driving experience while retaining the donor car’s retro looks and character.

Yet recently the scene appears to have changed, the emphasis shifting to outlandish money-no-object projects that seemingly obliterate the original machine’s personality in pursuit of the coffee-run (ugh!) bragging rights of a well-heeled few.

However, the Tolman 205 GTi proved that it doesn’t have to be this way.

For starters, it actually looks like the car it’s based on, to the point that even keen lion lovers will probably dismiss it as a stock example, albeit a beautifully kept one.

And while the period-perfect exterior and interior hide some heavily modded mechanicals, none of the many changes dilutes the fast French hatch’s core appeal.

If you’ve driven a 205 previously, then a blast in the Tolman will bring happy memories, and if you haven’t, then you’ll soon understand what the fuss was about.

Yes, it’s faster than the old car (a bespoke 200bhp twin-cam 16-valve 1.9-litre motor sees to that) but the razor-sharp throttle response and classic hot hatch big-engine-in-a-small-car vibe remain intact.

And while there’s a welcome injection of precision, control and braking power, the Tolman handles with the same old-school Gallic flair as the original, its acrobatic agility, fluid ride and endless throttle adjustability serving up engagement and entertainment regardless of speed or circumstance.

With prices starting at around £60,000, the exquisitely finished Tolman is still pricey, but it’s a snip compared with some of the mind-boggling figures being charged for machines that are increasingly ‘mod’ and less ‘resto’.

More importantly, the Tolman 205 GTi was the car that left me grinning the most in 2023, the silly smile plastered on my face from the moment I clapped eyes on it until long after I’d clambered out of the driver’s seat and handed back the keys.

The Prodrive P25 shouldn’t really appeal to me. As a reminder, it’s a reinterpretation of a 1997 WRC Subaru Impreza, but with 2023 components, technology and know-how.

Crucially, it doesn’t require an engineering team to run it and you can – well, could – use it on the road. It does come at a price: more than £550,000.

I guess it’s aimed at the person who loved WRC in the ’90s, has come into some money over the past 25 years and now wants to relive that time.

That is very much not me: I was five at the time and I generally think Subaru Imprezas are a bit naff. I harbour no nostalgia whatsoever for Colin McRae and Richard Burns.

But I love a unique driving experience, and flinging the P25 around a damp Anglesey circuit was exactly that.

Driving it below nine-tenths is pointless, other than to get to a location where you can drive it flat out, so you need to be on a circuit or a closed road.

On a track, I’m generally a very smooth driver – gently pouring the car in to corners and not upsetting the balance, but the P25 awakened a latent rally driver in me.

It soon became clear that the P25 loves to rotate into corners off the power, with the beautifully light yet communicative steering talking you through every degree of rotation.

Then there’s a moment, and a choice. With its four-wheel drive and complicated diffs, it’s never going to settle into a gentle powerslide, so you need to either gather it up and be on your way or Commit. With a capital C.

Treat the throttle pedal like an on/off switch and the P25 doesn’t spin or even take on more angle.

It maintains the angle and drives forwards like nothing else. Track edge getting a bit too close? Power off, then power on again. The way this unliveried rally car four-wheel drifts its way around a circuit boggles the mind.

It’s driving, but it has very little in common with what you did on your driving test. It’s its own unique experience and that’s what makes the Prodrive P25 so intoxicating.