Opinion

The people behind Bloodhound, the jet-and-rocket-combining land-speed-record-attempting car, have been looking for more money for quite some time.

Now they’ve combined that search with one for a new driver, in what strikes me as the most sensible change of trajectory in the project’s difficult history. I had a ‘why didn’t I/they think of that before?’ moment when the story landed.

It has been trying to appeal to corporations – it should have appealed to egos long ago. The land speed record has stood at 763mph for the past 26 years, since Andy Green took Thrust SSC supersonic.

Now 61, Green has been in the hot seat for the Bloodhound project too since its 2008 inception and has already tested it at 628mph. Initially the talk was of 1000mph, but these days they just talk about going faster than before: 800mph.

Since the very first land speed record was set, one has never stood for this long. The costs are so high and, once the speed of sound had been broken, what, in the view of any big business, would be the point?

For Bloodhound, it was always to boost skills and education in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (Stem).

The car has been on roadshows and educational tours; volunteer ambassadors have been to schools and colleges and spread the word about the tech behind going fast. It was meant not just to create noise and speed but to create engineers, too.

It was hoped that big businesses would back that cause. And while many did, it was never quite enough. So since the world’s attitude to noise and speed has tilted, so has Bloodhound’s educational focus – onto green tech.

If it runs at all, its jet will run on synthetic fuel. Its fuel pump, initially planned to be a detuned Formula 1 engine and later a Jaguar V8, is now a high-capacity electric motor. The rocket’s emissions were only ever going to be just steam, oxygen and excitement. 

Alas, that hasn't been enough. It's not that executives in big companies don’t like going fast, but they can see that this is a risky venture.

They can spread the word about Stem subjects and synthetic fuels all they like, but the people on social media who shout the loudest and want the world to be the beigest will still cry it down as a bunch of silly men traipsing off to the desert to make lots of noise while the world burns.

The metrics, as they say, aren’t necessarily good. Which big company with shareholders to report to would look at the potential benefits and potential risks and decide it’s worth the trouble?

No, Bloodhound needs the one thing it can’t get from businesses with reputations to carefully manage: a massive ego that doesn’t care about how it looks.

This is in the old tradition of land speed record-breaking. It has generally taken individuals with deep pockets, who are bored by superyachts and who maybe have a little bit of skill, to stick a couple of fingers up to the naysayers as they drive past at supreme speeds – and in the process perhaps prove them right. But what a hell of a mid-life crisis it would be.

Bloodhound is talking £12 million. There are more individuals than corporations in the world who can spend that amount of money without having to justify it.

This might look like Bloodhound’s last shot. But I also think it’s its best one yet. 

The company that makes it might be Japanese, but the genre-defining Nissan Qashqai is a Great British success story on multiple levels. It is built in Sunderland, of course, but it was also designed and developed in the UK – and is a permanent fixture on the list of best-selling cars.

So the news today that both the Qashqai and the smaller Juke will continue to be built in Sunderland as they undergo the seismic shift to electric power is hugely significant, not least because it secures long-term futures for the 6000 or so employees of Nissan’s Sunderland plant and tens of thousands of jobs in firms that supply it.

While Nissan had already made a substantial investment in readying its UK plant for an electric future with the Leaf successor due in 2026, there were no guarantees: there’s a bidding war going on as governments race to secure electric car and battery production, and the high-skilled ‘green’ jobs they generate. Nissan could easily have found a better offer to build the next-gen Qashqai and Juke EVs elsewhere. While Nissan officials were clear the huge investment figure announced today doesn’t involve any government money, it’s clear that support from Westminster was likely vital to the deal.

Still, it’s worth celebrating just how much Nissan has invested in the UK: Alan Johnson, the firm’s European manufacturing chief, notes that Britain is the only country outside of Japan in which the firm has the capacity to style, develop and manufacture cars – with the Qashqai being the prime example of that.

So this deal isn’t just a win for Sunderland: it’s big news for Nissan’s technical centre in Cranfield, and its styling studio in London – and huge vote of confidence in the British car industry’s ability to excel in all aspects of car development.

A few years ago, the UK car industry was facing difficult times approaching the electric transition. But now: Stellantis electric vans in Luton, electric Minis in Oxford, Tata batteries that will go in future UK-built Jaguar Land Rover EVs in Somerset, and now three Nissan EVs in Sunderland – headlined by the most significant car in the country.

The Qashqai is a Great British success story – and the next generation could be a symbol of the continued strength of our car industry.

For so long, interventions from the UK government into the automotive industry have been scattergun, but suddenly it seems like there's some kind of strategy to hold everything together.

It started with the chancellor’s £2 billion-plus commitment to support zero-emissions investment in the automotive sector over the next five years, as part of a wider £4.5bn package to support green manufacturing in the UK. 

Such numbers should always be taken with a degree of caution, lest for any double-counting on money already committed. But it was notable that Jeremy Hunt said this investment had been “warmly received by Nissan and Toyota”, neither of which could be tied to investments made so far as part of that £2bn and thus pointing to true new investments still to be disclosed. 

Such namechecks are incredibly rare, so there was no slip of the tongue.

Indeed, Nissan’s reaction was seemingly so warm that, after months of work in the background between the Japanese firm and Westminster, it now looks set to commit to a wholesale reinvention of its Sunderland factory as an EV-only plant in the future. 

The long-term future of Sunderland never really felt in doubt, but even so, it will be secure for well into the 2030s with the manufacturing of electric successors to the Qashqai and Juke from later in the decade.

So what now of Toyota It's the only major manufacturer in the UK yet to commit to EV manufacturing here in one form or another in the future, yet Hunt’s intervention suggests that good news should be forthcoming from there too. 

The winds of change have been running through the industry the past few months. It felt like we had hit rock bottom when Britishvolt collapsed, taking away the UK’s best site for a battery gigafactory in the UK, but since then Tata’s gigafactory has been announced and Mini has confirmed EV production in the UK.

What we have here already now looks increasingly secure in the future, and now the UK can look to secure new entrants for EV manufacturing. Even Tesla has been mooted as one potential arrival.

Two key strategic documents remain outstanding to tie this all together with a discernible plan to follow: the detailed manufacturing plan behind the headline £4.5bn/£2bn number and the wider battery strategy for the UK.

The latter is due this week, and it's set to lay out the details behind the government’s plans for “battery design, development, manufacturing and recycling” to “support economic growth, productivity and jobs”.

The automotive industry and EV production will of course play a key part in this, and clarity for would-be investors here could unlock further opportunities for UK EV manufacturing.

However, while manufacturing has taken a step forward, and the charging industry too, with easier connections to the National Grid, projected EV uptake itself has taken a big step back.

The Office for Budget Responsibility said alongside Hunt’s Autumn Statement that it expected EV uptake to be almost half what it had predicted by 2027, down from 67% of new car sales in the UK to 38%.

EVs are losing the PR campaign in the national conversation and are seen as too expensive.

SMMT boss Mike Hawes says the government must demonstrate “how it will support consumers in making the switch to zero-emission motoring”, as without intervention, rising interest rates and falling fuel prices will continue to stagnate their growth.

So too will the frankly weird campaign against them from some clickbait-hunting national newsdesks.

This is bad news for the government, with its net-zero targets, and bad news for the industry, which faces huge fines should its EV sales not reach certain thresholds from next year.

What can help solve both of these things is for the government to offer support to encourage EV uptake.

Without it, the risk is that the government’s finger has been moved from one hole in the bucket to another.

Looking through the Autocar archive in aid of a recent Lotus Elise feature, I read information about and tests of the 340R, the limited-run, extra-light, Elise-based roadster that Hethel made in 2000.

It was warmly received by us, but we were mildly involved in its development, so it kind of had to be, even though we conceded it was "a very expensive exercise in minimalism".

I'm not sure it was more broadly loved (like, say, the conceptually simpler 2-Eleven of 2007), but I do think it was probably ahead of its time. Rare, trinket-like special editions of sports cars and supercars have become a staple way of keeping cash coming in for some niche makers.

Anyway, that's not what I want to talk about this time. What caught my eye was the Lotus 340R's interior, with its bare spar stretched like a bridge across its width, with the instruments attached to it and a conjoining vertical central pillar featuring key functional buttons.

It reminded me of something, but what? I pulled up pictures of Lotus's new electric hypercar, the Evija. Fast forward 20 years and there's a conceptually similar horizontal spar and a vertical pillar hosting functions.

It's a slightly more complicated interior today, no doubt, but today's production cars are more complicated than an Elise-based lightweight special. Plus it has to have air vents.

And there's another link. Lotus "prepared five designs" for the 340R, we were told back in the day, and "the decision was taken to go with the Russell Carr proposal".

The Evija's designer? None other than the very sane Mr Carr. There are huge differences between these cars and Lotus is a very different company than it was 20 years ago, but I was quite taken with the link.

How feasible is mega-miling a car?

Do you know of an incredibly high-mileage motor? As referenced in the Elise feature, I've come across a 290,000-mile Series 1 example that's daily-driven. I'd like to know more about it, but I'd also like to find other mega-milers to tell their stories; to know what makes a car ripe for accumulating moonshot mileages.

Is going far the preserve of only interesting and strongly valued cars, or can we find some genuinely uninteresting metal that would be ripe for the Festival of the Unexceptional yet is still doing the rounds on the daily commute decades and five-figure distances after their brethren have met the scrapper?

Are some construction types more able to withstand higher mileages than others? And do some car makers think differently to others? It seems that Lotus engineers didn't build much obsolescence into the Elise, given that its aluminium chassis won't corrode, it apparently won't wilt and most things that are bolted to it are also aluminium or composite. Beyond those are just consumables, making the car straightforward to maintain.

When manufacturers talk about rating components for the life of a car now, they tend to talk about 200,000 kilometres or 120,000 miles, which is about commensurate with the average age for cars being scrapped/recycled in the UK, which happens at around 15 years.

But I'm a fan of buying well and keeping forever, or for as long as is feasible. Which is why I'd like to hear from people who think the same way. How many cars with half a million miles, or indeed more, are out there?

I'm looking to put together a feature of celebration and - who knows? - maybe that could include some advice, too. So if you know a motor that would like to feature, drop me a note via one of the channels below.

It’s tough to be a start-up in the car industry. It’s one thing to engineer a car ready for production, quite another to then put it into mass production, satisfy all kinds of legislation, manage sales channels and aftersales and generate public awareness.

No other product requires such careful cradle-to-grave management and burden as cars, and you have to do it for multiple models at the same time for wildly different global markets. 

Tesla made a loss for 17 straight years before turning a profit in 2020 and is truly the anomaly for car-making start-ups achieving success; so many names have faded away (eg Faraday Future), others have got there but are struggling (eg Rivian) and Dyson got to the point of making a car, having spent billions to get it to production readiness, then pulled out anyway.

Then there's Polestar. It's a start-up in the sense that it didn’t exist as a car company a few years ago, yet in being spun out of Volvo and part of the Geely group, with access to all those technologies and other operations, it has had a huge leg-up from those truly starting from scratch.

Still, in being listed on the New York Stock Exchange, Polestar’s financial reports show just how tough life is as a start-up and how much money you need to spend in scaling up the business, building sales channels and in research and development before revenues come in on selling cars.

So far in 2023, Polestar has spent more than $1.5 billion (£1.2bn) in paying for day-to-day operations, development and continuing to scale the business.

To that end, Volvo and Geely have recently provided it with “additional liquidity” and the company is seeking a further $1.3bn (£1.0bn) in funding, all with the ultimate goal of Polestar becoming cash-flow break-even from 2025.

On the cars it has sold this year, it has taken in $1.8bn (£1.5bn) in revenue but at a margin of just 1%. The goal is to get margins closer to 20% when the Polestar 2 is joined by the 3 and 4 SUVs and the 5 saloon.

By that point, if all goes to plan, development costs will be much lower and the cash burn will slow as profits from selling cars can go into development of new ones. 

For now, Polestar’s share price is about 80% down on its all-time high and its market capitalisation is remarkably less than 1% - one per cent! - that of Tesla, despite the 2 being an excellent car and Polestar on track to sell 60,000 examples of it this year. A good car doesn’t always bring financial success.  

“Building a new brand, a new company, isn't easy,” CEO Thomas Ingenlath told investors and media at a special event last week in Los Angeles called Polestar Day, designed to show off all the work the company was doing and models it had in development. However, he added that the company was “resilient”, despite the fact “things don’t always go according to plan”.

So how will Polestar crack the code and get to its goal of being cash-positive by 2025? “It’s a combination of things,” Ingenlath told me later on, after the covers had come off the new models. “The product portfolio is evolving with [the] 3, 4 and 5, and with two of those cars in SUV segments, they have a higher margin potential.”

Then there's the diversification of manufacturing footprint, with Polestar taking 3 production for the US market to Volvo’s South Carolina plant and 4 production for the US and South Korean markets to Renault’s Busan plant. (Contract manufacturing is Poletsar’s strategy for building cars, because “manufacturing isn't an expertise for us”, according to Ingenlath). Building cars in the US for the US is a “prerequisite to being financially successful in the US", he added.

Cost reductions are expected to achieve “normal levels and better levels” for the likes of raw materials and logistics in the near future, and then there's more general “big work on cost efficiencies” and a “strict cost focus”. These are what Ingenlath calls “traditional levers” for any business to pull.

You then feel a sense of relief from Ingenlath when he lists more of the big costs that will be behind Polestar. “Over the last two years, we established a digital market environment, and you can imagine how expensive that is and how many consultants you need to actually do that. Now there's a digital system and the markets are developed,” he said. And of course there are reduced development costs for new models, with money coming in from new models to support it.

Polestar is also not trying to conquer as many markets as before; it will instead more strategically focus investments on markets where electrification is really taking off. Ingenlath didn’t name which markets would see a reduction in investments, however. 

As a designer, Ingenlath has created a brand that's undeniably cool and some cars that have been well received so far. Now the hope is that a range of desirable Polestars, rather than a single model, will help propel the brand towards profitability.

Further USPs come from a bespoke operating system for China, the brand’s adoption of automated driving technology and a focus on sustainability.

The jury is out on how far autonomous driving technology will ever go, but you would imagine the market will ultimately come to brands with a focus on sustainability, either through customer demand or legislators getting involved.

“Product is key for Polestar,” said Ingenlath. “Clearly, the big, big wave of investment with [the] 3 and 4, and with [the] 5 being in the final stages of development, means that big first round [of investment] is coming to an end.”

As he said himself, building a new brand is not easy. Who would launch a car company?