Opinion

It was the sight of Jan Lammers and Rickard Rydell wrestling their unapologetically boxy Volvo 850 estates around the circuits of Britain in the 1994 British Touring Car Championship that did it for me.

Forget the Alfa Romeos that won everything that year: it was Volvo, maker of safe, practical, boxy cars, that became cool in my eyes.

The road-going 850, with its transverse engine, Delta-link rear axle, side impact protection system and other innovations, was a seminal car for Volvo. It was the result of a development programme known as Project Galaxy, which at the time was the largest single industrial investment in Swedish history. That is how important saloons and estates were for Volvo.

So the news that Volvo is removing its saloons and estates from sale in the UK is hugely significant and a blow to those of us who love automotive variety – but it’s not entirely unexpected. The firm’s revitalisation over the last decade or so has come from the incredible success of its SUVs, and their sales dwarf those of the S and V model lines. 

Volvo goes SUV-only in UK as all saloon and estate cars axed

In a sense, the cull of the saloons and estates is a by-product of Volvo’s ongoing transformation under company boss Jim Rowan – whose background is in tech, not automotive – from a car firm into a tech company that produces electric cars. 

Rowan is probably bored with being asked about future electric Volvo saloons and estates in media sessions, and his stock answer is that nothing is ruled out and he would love to offer such models in the future, but the firm is still relatively small and has to choose where to focus. 

That makes absolute business sense and is backed up by the strength of Volvo’s SUV line-up, but still… It feels like Volvo won’t really be complete without safety-first saloons and brilliantly boxy estates. You only have to drive into the Swedish countryside to see the popularity of such models in certain regions.

Surely when the market is right in the future, Volvo will offer saloons and estates again. They will be electric and have a heavy focus on software, technology and safety. And hopefully, they will be as straight-edged as ever.

My local pub recently received a two-star online review from a walker who arrived to find it shut.

They had checked a website created, but left dormant, by the pub’s previous landlord: wrong times, wrong menus, wrong everything.

They didn’t follow up before leaving a review. Didn’t call. Didn’t check. So the new landlord, busting a gut to make it a success, cops unjustified two-star flak. Hundreds of people enjoy the pub every week.

If five more visitors think to leave a five-star rating, it still only pulls the mark up to 4.5. As the cliché says: no good deed goes unpunished.

And so to the Goodwood Festival of Speed, one of the biggest, most successful events in the motoring calendar. The de facto British motor show; a success to all involved.

Except, last week The Sun managed to find a handful of people in Chichester furious that it takes place, so miserable does the accompanying congestion (briefly) make their lives.

The eldest of the complainants, 66, was born nine years after the motor circuit held its first race; even in the decades when there was no competitive racing, there was regular motorsport activity. I watched track days and did a Formula Ford experience at Goodwood back in the early 1990s.

One griped about being “not into cars”, which is like living in Wembley and bitching about that football thing. Goodwood has had motor racing since 1948 and crowds since horse racing began there in 1802. The horses noted their biggest one-day crowd, of 55,000, in 1955.

I know Goodwood’s traffic is bad. The A27 is busy at the best of times, and the Festival of Speed is its worst. But it’s only a few days a year, and you can imagine what kerfuffle would be caused by the suggestion of major road building on the south coast.

“They can go and race around a circuit elsewhere,” another said. This is an argument more often used by people who live next to busy roads, and who have more of my sympathy. To my mind, public roads are best enjoyed as a more lonely experience.

I was struck last week by Steve Cropley’s column in which he mentioned finding new roads close to home that he didn’t know existed.

A month ago when trying some Ducati motorcycles a few miles from mine, I was directed onto something similar: roads I didn’t know were there and that will remain better for me not to reveal their location.

Advertising roads so everyone flocks to them is, to my mind, a bad idea. Nobody notices one car or motorcycle going past; they do two or three. By the time it’s 20, they’re furious, and by the 200th of a morning, the local council is getting an earful at the next parish meeting.

Scotland’s North Coast 500 is a huge success for some, but I’ve had letters from those it doesn’t benefit, who only notice the congestion, the motorhomes blocking passing places and the waste left behind. There are bits of Wales, too, that were advertised by another car magazine which will never be forgiven by some of the locals.

Take your cars to an organised gathering elsewhere, they say there. Except when you do: guess what? Cue a grumpily posed person in a national tabloid newspaper.

This brings me to my Ireland road trip. Have I said too much? I hope not. It’s a four-hour, £400 ferry from Great Britain, so it’s not an easy Saturday morning ride-out for most of us. (But whisper it: it’s worth the effort - buy this week's mag to see it).

It’s no surprise to me to see how good the Morgan Super 3 looks on the dreamy, sun-dappled roads of California.

What car wouldn’t look good there? But there’s something about the 3’s retro-futuristic appearance that particularly suits the place. It looks more at home there, I think, than in a Cotswold village.

And last week Morgan announced that its three-wheeled vehicle is to make a return to sale in the US, with the latest model federalised there, like its predecessor, by the application of a few discreet reflectors and by moving the headlights inboard – thus making it look even more spidery.

Morgan has certainly taken deft advantage of the fact that trikes are subject to different regulations than four-wheelers, but still, for a small car maker to send a modern car into the wild, legislated for so many markets and yet staying entirely true to the company’s long-standing ethos and values is a credit to it.

That’s no easy task these days for a small-volume manufacturer. Lotus, if you believe some of the below-the-line comments on reviews of the new Lotus Eletre SUV, hasn’t managed to do the same. There’s little of Lotus’s values of simplification and lightness about the 2500kg 4x4, and it doesn’t drive so much like a traditional Lotus, either.

This is a modern problem that will particularly afflict makers of lightweight cars. A Rolls-Royce can weigh 2.9 tonnes, as the Spectre does, but still feel like a Rolls; Caterham will have to work a lot harder for Project V to feel like a Caterham.

Does the Eletre’s weight matter? I suspect not if it helps the company sell the 150,000 cars a year it would like to by the latter half of the decade, and if that in turn helps to pay for the development of some competitive Norfolk-built sports cars.

But still, I have a bit of additional respect for a manufacturer that manages to face the future while still maintaining the qualities that gave its cars such character in the first instance.

Protecting the working man's SUV

I spotted a hand-scrawled note taped inside the rear window of an early 2010s Land Rover Defender 110 while driving along the M25 this morning: ‘Essential Working Vehicle’, it read.

There was no livery and the car was clean, but it was an old Defender 110, and we know what that means: noisy, cramped shoulder room, a heavy-pedalled driving experience and waiting an age for it to cool down or warm up.

Unless it was one of those Defenders that has been tweaked with accessories – and this wasn’t one of those – I’d have made no assumption other than it was a working vehicle.

Besides, what business is it of mine if it wasn’t?

So why the note? Unless, perhaps, it was a plea for somebody to not steal it, I can’t see a purpose other than to say: ‘Don’t judge me. I need a big car.’ I felt it was a sign born out of feeling conspicuous about being perceived as driving an ‘urban 4x4’.

I think that’s a shame, and even more so if the note was in response to unpleasant interactions with self-important activist types who have time to waste on a blinkered agenda.

It’s a pity that anyone should feel like they have to justify their transport to strangers. I know that a Defender can last forever and should return the good side of 30mpg: there are plenty of alternative cars that wouldn’t do either, yet which wouldn’t attract the ire of a 4x4.

I’ve always felt happy driving an old Defender without fear of judgement. Although I’m now questioning why I’ve left the ‘Pony Club 90th anniversary’ sticker on the back window of mine for longer than is strictly necessary.

Tata’s commitment to building a £4 billion gigafactory has the potential to be a shot in the arm for electric car manufacturing in this country – and not before time. 

The Tata announcement of a new 40GWh battery factory that will be online by 2026 is just the beginning of a solution rather than the solution itself.

However, it is significant in shifting the previously bleak mood and tone around car manufacturing in the UK in the electric era. Now there is something tangible and significant to work with.

The capacity of the Tata site is enough for 40% of the 100GWh of capacity the Faraday Institution says Britain will need by 2030 to satisfy demand for electric vehicles and support local manufacturing.

The other confirmed UK gigafactory is Envision’s in Sunderland, which will have a 12GWh capacity but could go higher.

Beyond that, it’s slim pickings and the rumour mill is quiet. The former Britishvolt site remains in flux – the site’s purchaser, Recharge Industries, has allegedly not yet paid for the site and its Australian HQ was recently raided by tax authorities – and the West Midlands Gigafactory hasn’t really got beyond the fancy artist’s sketches stage yet. 

Still, with Tata and Envision, we’re already halfway to the 2030 goal and the two factories will secure long-term futures for domestic car production at JLR’s Castle Bromwich and Solihull sites, and Nissan’s Sunderland plant. Mini too is committed to building electric cars at Oxford, although final details are awaited.

A welcome by-product of the Tata site in particular – which will have JLR as its anchor partner but is set to supply other manufacturers (Stellantis? Toyota?) – is the supply chain it will stimulate. Lithium miners in Cornwall have already been vocal in their support. The supply chain can now be not only established but also ramped up to meet up demand.

The UK has R&D expertise and people talent in abundance, albeit not yet with all the required skills or future automotive industry jobs to support them. Again, the Tata factory can shift the tone here and be a catalyst for meaningful change. 

The elephant in the room remains a government industrial strategy to underpin all this. The government is said to have stumped up half a billion pounds of incentives for Tata to bring the gigafactory to the south-west, although the terms are not yet clear. Energy costs were said to be one area of help, which shows how unattractive the UK is in this cost-intensive area. 

Business secretary Kemi Badenoch told the FT that “targeted support” would be offered to secure more manufacturing investments although she hinted that the UK would be unable to compete with the seemingly open chequebook being offered elsewhere. Targeted support does not breed the same confidence that a fully clear and disclosed industrial strategy does, and risks a more hand-to-mouth approach that could eke away at the current positivity. 

The PR value for the UK as a place to invest in advanced manufacturing has been huge this week. The narrative has changed and a window has at last opened to secure a long-term future for automotive manufacturing in the UK. The government’s next moves will decide just how big that industry can be.

“There’s a lot to do,” admits McLaren CEO Michael Leiters, who has been in one of the industry’s toughest yet potentially most rewarding jobs since July 1 last year. “It’s definitely challenging – but I think it’s the most exciting job in the automotive industry.”

We first spoke to Leiters just a few weeks into the job, when he ran through the lengthy to-do list: improve the quality and reliability of the cars, shore up the supply chain, deliver the troubled Artura hybrid supercar production, return to profitability… With a list like that, where do you start?

We met again this week at the Goodwood Festival of Speed, where Leiters detailed the progress he’d made. He started with the company’s culture, making everything “very, very strictly orientated on output, on efficiency, on affecting the quality, with the customer experience at the centre of it all. We have increased dramatically the engagement of our people, and are communicating a lot more than in the past”.

As well as the culture, the internal structure has also changed, with 11 layers of company management reduced to five. “This allows much more direct communication for everybody, right up to the very top,” says Leiters. 

The financial part “has been the most challenging” though, according to Leiters, and McLaren remains in the red. Although revenues increased by £7.2 million in Q1 of 2023 over 2022 to £135.2m, losses increased by £17.2m to £57.9m as it sold more vehicles at a lower price. The rest of the year will remain just as challenging, as Artura production is yet to be at full capacity and the 720S is changing over to the 750S on the Woking production line. 

The number one priority at the moment is to recapitalise the business with existing shareholders, who have made a “big commitment” to the company, Leiters says, and although “it’s a very complicated restructuring process” the firm was in “very productive and good discussions with our shareholders and we are very positive to finish in the next months. And then we can go forward”. 

Leiters admits the “biggest challenge we have right now is definitely a revenue challenge”, but is resisting any notion of simply pushing out more volume due to a laser focus on quality, particularly on the Artura.

“We don’t want to push too much. We have taken in the past quality enhancements, and we need to ensure the customer experience is positive. We prefer to go slower on production instead of increasing production capacity. This is not a delay [to Artura]; it is a ‘non increase’ of our production volume...we don’t want to damage the image by taking risks.”

Quality improvements include getting more people and areas of the business involved in the design of parts right at the start of development, including those from procurement and the supply chain, and then working with suppliers to follow the same processes. All this is part of stopping potential problems before they ever existed. 

McLaren remains independent, and Leiters confirmed that external investment – including from other OEMs – was not part of the recapitalisation process, nor a priority for now. These kinds of conversations will only take place when the path back to profitability is in place, which means for now McLaren will continue to go it alone in the supply chain, a tough task in times of logistical hardship.

“The supply chain is less robust than five years ago, or three years ago even before Covid. There are many suppliers in distressed situations and you have to manage them. Sometimes it’s good to have a big OEM on your back and push back a little bit, but I think it’s all about relationships. You have to build a good relationship with your suppliers so there is real support to help you in difficult situations, as you then have to help them.”

Before speaking to Leiters, I wondered a bit what had been going on at McLaren this past year given how little we’d heard from them apart from downbeat quarterly financial updates and a series of delays to the Artura.

Afterwards, I had respect for a man not looking for a quick headline, quick win, or success built on sand; the structural problems at McLaren clearly run – or ran – deep, and although there’s plenty of pain ongoing, fires are being put out.

Leiters was not kidding when he said there was a lot to do and how challenging the role was – but crack this and he can get on with developing the kinds of cars and technologies that really can make it the most exciting job in the industry.