Opinion

Why do some cars obtain classic status when similar ones don’t?

This isn’t a position I ever thought I’d find myself in, but after reading details of the new Vauxhall Frontera, I’ve opened the classifieds to browse for originals. If you remember, the Frontera was a 4x4 of the early 1990s, when ‘SUV’ meant something more than just having a taller driving position and bigger boot.

It was considered a relatively road-biased car at the time, slightly maligned as not being a serious off-roader, even though it had considerable hardware by today’s standards: a separate chassis, low-ratio gears and selectable four-wheel drive system so crude that it couldn’t be used at road speeds.

So help me, I liked the look of it (I was young). And I think it has been through its naff phase and popped out the other side. You might say it’s a bona fide classic car. Or maybe you wouldn’t.

How to put it? Even at over 30 years old, the Frontera is more of an eBay Motors or Facebook Marketplace car than a Car and Classic one. While you can find plenty of other 4x4s on specialist classic websites, they seem to have no Fronteras, partly because few still exist but also, I suspect, because it isn’t perceived the right way.

There’s one for sale on eBay, and a good one, in the more desirable (these things are relative) three-door, removable-roof Sport form, with one owner from new, just 34,000 miles, routine servicing, a fresh MOT and a genuinely believable “you will not find another in this condition” description.

How much do you think a Frontera like this is worth? I think it will be less than that. It’s up for £2300, and I think if one promised the current owner an easy sale and that it were going to a good home, it could be yours for a little less.

I’m not going to buy it, although I will admit that I’m tempted. Had Steve Cropley not recently bought a nearly new Ford Ranger Raptor, I wonder if I’d have been able to convince him to take a look, because at one stage he was considering getting a vehicle (perhaps a Suzuki X90) to take to the Festival of the Unexceptional.

A Frontera strikes me as just the sort of car for that task. This year, an unmolested Toyota Hilux won the overall FotU prize, which raised a few eyebrows, because the model has become a bit too notable to be truly unexceptional.

This isn’t the Hilux’s fault: it was sold as a humdrum and dependable commercial pick-up at the time. But since Marty McFly had a terrific one, Top Gear couldn’t destroy one and guerrilla fighters the world over found they make durable machine-gun platforms, the Hilux has obtained a classic status denied to cars like the Frontera.

It’s not like the Frontera was considered a bad car in its time. “In most respects, the Frontera has the [Land Rover] Discovery licked – and that’s a considerable achievement,” Autocar’s road testers reckoned on 30 October 1991, scoring it 7/10 overall and 8/10 for value.

Yet Discoverys and Hiluxes of the same era command several multiples the price of a Frontera, even at the scruffier ends, and there are sky-high limits on good ones. A dealer wants £20,000 for a 67,000-mile 1997 Discovery (“a very rare opportunity”, of course) and there’s a beach-ready 1983 Hilux with KC spotlights and brown-on-beige graphics up for a gulpsome £38,000.

Question is, which is the fairer price: £2300 for a Frontera or 10 times that for an alternative that’s objectively no better and almost certainly more common? I’m still not going to buy one, but I think it’s the Vauxhall.

It feels like it’s been too long since we had a showdown of blue-blooded GT titans, but with the simultaneous arrival of this new Vanquish and Ferrari’s 12Cilinidri, there’s an almighty scrap brewing.

The on-paper comparisons will make for interesting reading – how could they not when we’re talking about a combined two-dozen ‘cilindri’ and in excess of 1600bhp – but the on-road, real-world comparison will be more captivating, and perhaps surprising. 

Ferrari is currently in an intimidatingly good vein of form, though it’s fair to say that Aston got its old flagship, the DBS Superleggera, into pretty formidable shape by the time the ‘770’ run-out special arrived.

If it has carried that momentum forward to the Vanquish, Ferrari will have a tough time beating its old English foe.

Key to the 770’s magic was an exceptional cohesiveness in the steering and handling that allowed you to goad the car as though it was an overgrown Toyota GR86.

Bottomless mid-rpm torque from the Aston’s blown V12 also made it easy to steer the car on the throttle, and that’s something the naturally aspirated 12Cilinidri will lack, relatively.

Of course, the Fandango will sound better, no doubt about it.

My gut says the Aston’s ace card could be its manners over big distances. This is the bread and butter of the GT skillset, though in recent years Ferrari has disregarded it, focusing instead on making its front-engined V12s needlessly agile.

A Vanquish triumph in what will be the twin-test of 2025 could hang on its superior ability to remain serene when required. 

Elements of the German car industry pushed hard last year for ICE cars to be allowed to remain on sale in the EU after 2035 – and they got their way, provided such cars use only carbon-neutral fuels.

But that might not be enough, said BMW Group CEO Oliver Zipse. 

Unless the EU accelerates the availability of such fuels, it will amount to “a deliberate ban on [ICEs] through the back door”. 

The problem here (if you want to perceive it as such) is that the car industry is, despite what some will tell you, actually moving quickly. Too quickly for synthetic e-fuels to arrive in large quantities and at sensible cost.

The EU requires that “all new cars and vans registered in the [EU] market are zero-emission by 2035” and that “average emissions of new cars come down by 55% by 2030” from 2021’s level.

Vans get only a slightly easier time on the rate of reduction, while discussions about heavy road haulage are still ongoing. 

(The UK’s regulations are different, more stringent again and, unlike EU laws, mandate percentages of car sales being zero-emission, which is why we are now seeing and will continue to see market disruption and distortion, such as firms selling electric cars at losses and Suzuki becoming unable to sell its lightweight superminis.)

Other transport industries are moving at a slower pace – understandably, given the lifespans and costs of the vehicles involved and the inviability of battery electrification.

Within the EU, aerospace companies need to reduce their CO2 emissions by 20% by 2035, by which time passenger jets must use a blend of 5% synthetic fuel. Maritime companies must achieve a 14.5% CO2 reduction by 2035, although they have no requirement for synthetic fuel use. 

No such requirements yet exist for vehicles used in off-highway agriculture and construction, but they will surely come at some point. The presumed answer for applications where battery electrification isn’t viable – which is on most of those heavy-duty, high-altitude or long-distance trips – will be synthetic fuels.

“Aviation will use jet fuel indefinitely,” said Paddy Lowe, CEO of British firm Zero Petroleum, which has begun making small quantities of synthetic gasoline, diesel and jet fuel without using fossil fuels, instead utilising CO2 from the air and hydrogen from water.

Porsche has invested heavily in the e-fuels firm Highly Innovative Fuels, which currently powers its Porsche Supercup race series. Formula 1 will start using synthetic fuels in 2026, too. 

But these are such small steps. The actual business of cars driving around a circuit accounts for less than 1% of F1’s total emissions, dwarfed by the business of getting everyone and everything there. Zipse’s concern, then, is that while the tech and consumer demand will exist, the supply won’t, due to the car industry outpacing others.

Thomas Schäfer sees it differently. “Why spend a fortune on old tech that doesn’t give you any benefit?” asked the CEO of Volkswagen, which will sell its last ICE car in Europe in 2032.

EVs will be good for most car owners, especially after improvements in battery tech that will make today’s EVs look like prams. But Schäfer’s use of “old” doesn’t hold for every industry. ICE tech is their present and future.

The sooner there’s mass availability of carbon-neutral fuels to car makers that want to keep a small number of enthusiasts happy, the sooner heavy industries that can’t be electrified can also access it and the quicker they can move away from fossil fuels.

Which means I’m with Zipse, in the unusual position of thinking that what’s good for sports car makers, high-mileage drivers, supercar engines, racers, motorcyclists and race-track goers is good for all of us.

Building cars is hard. Thousands of components must all come together to work safely and reliably, to create a product that meets all kinds of stringent legislation. Customers have to then want to buy it, and once you’ve sold it to them, you have to look after them, then anyone else to whom they might sell it. 

The era of electric cars is no exception, but even greater complexity is being added into the business of building cars through all the software that is needed with the rise of more active safety and automated driving functions.

Some car makers are using this as an opportunity to revolutionise the in-car experience, among them Volvo.

I spoke with Alwin Bakkenes, head of software engineering for Volvo, at the launch of the new EX90, the computing power and software capabilities of which are central to the story.

Bakkenes said that this push for more software in Volvo's cars is done with the firm's proud safety reputation at its core. More advanced software capability in Volvo "is really about how we make our products as safe as we possibly can".

He said Volvo was making full use of software-defined vehicles (SDVs) to chiefly further improve safety capability through over-the-air updates.

"Many car makers will talk about being over-the-air-capable but will only update the maps. We update the software on the ADAS control units, on every ECU in the car if we need to."

Bakkenes is excited about the new SPA2 platform on which the new EX90 is based and how it can improve and add safety features much quicker than in the past.

"It's a new era for us. We've built the infrastructure to take sensors' data, retrain our models and then feed them back into the vehicles so we can continuously update and improve the performance of the vehicles.

"Instead of improving products in a matter of years, as we did in the early 2000s, we've gone to months and now to weeks. For developers, it's even better, because they can iterate every day."

I ask Bakkenes whether 'software' is therefore too simplistic a word to describe such a broad array of functions and features in cars now, when a car's entire software capability can be dismissed as not being very good if the heater controls are too hard to find.

"Software is so much more than just a line of code. It's the software we write to actually build the machine. Our test automation, our integration machines, the things that enable our software developers to actually work with the collective software product: that is also part of it.

"Every car is connected. We have significant cloud infrastructure. We manage the network operators globally, which is also software. We have a mobile application that connects to all the cars. That's also software. There's a lot..."

So is building a software architecture harder than building a new four-cylinder engine family? Or just different?

"I'm not gonna say it wasn't hard, right? This was a tough journey, because it's a big transformation for a legacy car maker to become really good at software," Bakkenes answers.

"We've been so intentional about why we're doing this. We've been able to select which pieces we need to do ourselves and become good at and which pieces we continue to work with our suppliers on."

Lots of early talk about SDVs has been about taking the dozens of different ECUs that control different parts of a car's functions and centralising them onto one to make deploying updates easier and more robust.

However, Bakkenes said: "Personally, I don't think that the hunt for as few ECUs as possible is the most important thing. It's how you build something that's stable, creating something that allows us to manage different product variants as efficiently as possible."

The new EX90 follows the launch of the Volvo EX30 just under a year ago, a car that was criticised for its software in a broad sense, and the EX90 launch itself was delayed by software that wasn't ready on time.

Does such criticism hurt, particularly in the aforementioned context of specific issues undermining the car's entire software capability? 

"You should tell us about your observations," said Bakkenes. "It's up to us to make sure that we deliver a fantastic experience. If sometimes we get something wrong, we try to fix it. That's why we have over-the-air updates.

"Of course, we want to get it right the first time, but I don't think you're getting anything wrong if you think that the speed display was too small.

"Some cases, there might be a preference. Some cases, it might be for real. We need to address those and we do. And above all else, we listen to customers."

The golf club car park has long been a battleground for premium car makers, yet in an era where brand loyalty is diminishing and newcomers are circling around the established players, the sport is being used in an altogether different way.

Golf offers something unique in sport in allowing amateur players to play in the same sporting arenas as legends of the game. While you can’t go and take a penalty from the same place as Harry Kane at Wembley, hit a six like Ben Stokes at Lord’s or serve an ace like Novak Djokovic at Wimbledon, you can go and play St Andrews or Pebble Beach and attempt the same winning putt as Rory McIlroy.

Car makers recognise that and are now hosting their own tournaments on a vast international scale at some of the world’s best courses, designed solely for customers, rather than corporate entertainment. 

More than 200,000 car buyers will take part in amateur golf tournaments organised by car companies this year. So big have these events become that they're now the largest in the world for amateur golf, thus opening up another front on which car makers can do battle. 

Audi, BMW, Mercedes-Benz and Porsche are among those offering competitions organised with customer retention firmly in mind. They offer not only epic prizes but also, more memorably, “truly money-can’t-buy experiences”, as Mercedes puts it.

Many of these tournaments have evolved from traditional sponsorship deals that these German brands have had with golf tournaments - and now newcomer Genesis is getting in on the act, with its headline sponsorship of the Scottish Open each July.

The Korean firm is following a path well travelled. Yet no car maker has gone so far as to copy JCB in building its own golf course, as the construction machinery giant has done next to its Staffordshire base. Give it time… 

BMW’s roots in golf perhaps run deepest in the UK, through its 20-year-old headline sponsorship of the biggest professional tournament in the UK, the PGA Championship at Wentworth (previously sponsored by Toyota and Volvo), and with more than 90% of its retailers having proactively engaged in partnerships with local golf clubs.

These are used both as venues for qualifying rounds for BMW’s own International Golf Cup (claimed to be the world’s largest amateur golf tournament, the next edition of which will culminate in Bangkok) and for EV test-drive events and product placement.

The goal is to not only retain and look after existing customers but also use golf clubs as a platform to promote cars to potential new customers. 

“Golf for BMW is not just a logo on a trophy but creating memories to unite people and share unforgettable moments,” said Tim Holzmüller, who runs BMW Group’s sport communications.

“We don’t just present a brand but [also] develop a brand and brand engagements. We want to leave an impact beyond something on the course or at an event.”

Audi claims its Quattro Cup, established in 1991, is also the largest single global amateur tournament in the world (let’s call it a tie with BMW). Each year, some 70,000 customers from 38 countries compete across 600 tournaments, whittled down to a final that has been staged at the likes of the Earth Course in Dubai and the Ryder Cup 2023 host venue, the Marco Simone Club in Rome. 

The stakes rise quickly for the 16,000 customers who enter the Porsche Golf Cup. A top-two finish at a regional qualifying for around 35 customers gets you (and a plus one) a two-night trip to a national final competition, this year taking place at the home of golf, St Andrews in Scotland.

There you can compete for a Tag Heuer watch and a place at the global final, most recently held in Mallorca. 

While Mercedes UK opts out of the Mercedes Trophy, there are still 60,000 Mercedes customers taking part in it each year from more than 60 different countries. 

One of the opportunities offered by Mercedes is a chance to play the host course of the The Open (which Mercedes partners) the day after the Champion Golfer of the Year has lifted The Claret Jug on the very same fairways. Not your typical optional extra on a new E-Class.