DeLorean Motor Company has unveiled a production-ready electric GT that costs more than a 911 Turbo and arrives four decades too late to matter.

The DeLorean Alpha5 is real. Not a concept, not a render farm daydream, but an actual vehicle you can theoretically order if you have £175,000 and an unhealthy attachment to stainless steel nostalgia. DeLorean Motor Company, the current custodian of a brand that died in 1982 under a cloud of cocaine allegations and catastrophic build quality, has announced its first series production model. It is an electric GT coupe. It has gullwing doors. It looks like someone fed a Polestar 2 through an AI trained exclusively on 1980s science fiction.

The Alpha5 runs a dual-motor powertrain making 600bhp and promises 0 to 60mph in under three seconds. The battery pack is 100kWh. Range is claimed at 300 miles, which in real-world motorway use will be closer to 220 if you are lucky. The chassis is allegedly derived from Italdesign engineering, which is a credible pedigree if you ignore the fact that Italdesign will engineer anything for anyone willing to pay the consultancy fee.

It seats four, barely. The interior is draped in Italian leather and features what DeLorean describes as a "cutting-edge digital interface," which in practice means the same supplier touchscreens you will find in half a dozen Chinese EVs. The gullwing doors are not a functional choice. They are a branding exercise. They make ingress difficult, egress absurd, and parking in anything narrower than an aircraft hangar a performance art piece.

DeLorean has been teasing this car since 2022, when it appeared as a concept at Pebble Beach. That original reveal generated the expected nostalgia-fuelled buzz, a few hundred reservation deposits, and then... silence. For two years the company has drip-fed updates while quietly walking back production timelines. The Alpha5 was supposed to reach customers in late 2024. Then early 2025. Now it is "mid-2025," which in automotive startup language translates to "maybe 2026 if the funding holds."

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The company insists it has secured manufacturing capacity and supply chain commitments, which is what every EV startup says right before the money runs out. DeLorean Motor Company is not the same entity that built the DMC-12. That company collapsed spectacularly. This version is a Texas-based operation that bought the rights to the name in the mid-1990s and has spent the last three decades selling replacement parts to Back to the Future cosplayers.

The Alpha5 is being pitched as a halo product, a statement of intent, proof that DeLorean can build something other than a meme. But the market for £175,000 electric GTs with problematic doors and a brand nobody under 40 has an emotional connection to is not exactly robust. Porsche will sell you a Taycan Turbo S for less. Audi will sell you an e-tron GT. Both are faster, better built, and come with aftersales networks that actually exist.

DeLorean claims it has over 3,000 reservations. Reservations are not orders. A reservation is £2,500 and fully refundable, which means it is functionally a poll, not a purchase commitment. Tesla took 450,000 Model 3 reservations in 2016. Most of those people are still waiting for their Cybertrucks.

There is also an Alpha2, a smaller two-seat roadster that DeLorean says will follow the Alpha5 into production. No pricing, no timeline, no powertrain details. Just another render and another promise.

The original DeLorean failed because it was an underpowered, overpriced disaster held together by John DeLorean's charm and a truly spectacular amount of fraud. The Alpha5 might fail because it is arriving into a collapsing EV market with no brand equity, no dealer network, and a product that exists primarily to monetise a forty-year-old film franchise.

First customer deliveries are scheduled for August 2025 from a facility in San Antonio, Texas. Production is capped at 9,531 units, a number chosen because it references the original DMC-12 VIN sequence. The deposit is still refundable.

Sources: DeLorean Motor Company official press release, Automotive News, Italdesign

The Swedish firm's new electric SUV lands with nearly double the range of its German rivals, pricing BMW and Mercedes into a corner they probably didn't see coming.

Volvo has pitched the EX60 electric SUV into the UK market with a claimed 500 miles of range, which puts the BMW iX3 and Mercedes EQC in an awkward position. The Germans offer 285 and 260 miles respectively. That's not a gap. That's a chasm.

The EX60 sits below the EX90 flagship in Volvo's electric lineup but arrives with more range than the bigger car, which manages 373 miles. It's built on the SPA2 platform that underpins most of Volvo's current electric ambitions and comes with ultra-rapid charging, bi-directional capability, and the Google-built infotainment system that has been turning up in Volvos for the past few years whether you wanted it or not.

Five hundred miles is the sort of figure that changes the conversation. Range anxiety has been the polite British excuse for not buying an EV for years now, and Volvo has just removed it from the script. Whether people actually drive 500 miles in one go is beside the point. The number itself does the work.

The iX3 and EQC were never exactly range leaders, but they didn't need to be when the competition was similarly constrained. Now they look dated. BMW will presumably respond with the next-generation iX3, which is overdue anyway. Mercedes has been quieter about the EQC's future, which tells you most of what you need to know.

Volvo's plan to go fully electric by 2030 has always sounded more credible than most manufacturer pledges, partly because they've been systematically building the cars to make it possible. The EX60 is another piece of that. It's not a concept. It's not a limited run. It's a mass-market family SUV that happens to have more range than a Tesla Model X Long Range, which sits at 348 miles.

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Polestar 3, Volvo's performance offshoot, offers 392 miles, which makes the family dynamic between the two brands slightly strange. The Polestar is supposed to be the sportier, more expensive option, but the Volvo now has it beaten on range. That's going to require some creative marketing.

The 500-mile figure is WLTP, which means real-world results will vary depending on how you drive, what the weather is doing, and whether you've got the heating on. But even allowing for the usual 20 percent optimism baked into WLTP numbers, you're still looking at 400 miles in normal conditions. That's usable.

Ultra-rapid charging is standard, which means the EX60 should be able to add significant range in the time it takes to get a coffee at a motorway services. Bi-directional charging lets the car feed power back to your house, which is either a glimpse of the grid-balancing future or a solution in search of a problem, depending on how much you trust your energy supplier.

Pricing hasn't been confirmed yet, but Volvo will need to be careful. The EX60 sits in a crowded space where Tesla, Polestar, and the German brands all have credible offerings. The range advantage is real, but it won't mean much if the price lands wrong. The XC40 Recharge starts at around £50,000. The EX90 is closer to £100,000. The EX60 will need to land somewhere in between without feeling like a compromise either way.

Volvo has spent years rebuilding its reputation around safety, sensible luxury, and Scandinavian design that doesn't shout about itself. The EX60 fits that brief. It's not trying to be a performance SUV or a lifestyle statement. It's a practical family car that happens to be electric and happens to go further on a charge than anything else in its class.

Whether that's enough to shift serious numbers in a market where people still default to German badges is the question Volvo has been trying to answer for decades. The EX60 gives them a better argument than they've had before.

Final specs and pricing are expected later this year, with first deliveries likely in early 2026. The 500-mile range figure is based on WLTP testing standards used across Europe and the UK.

Sources: Volvo UK, WLTP testing data

The fifth-generation 2027 Tucson has arrived with an 'Art of Steel' design language that throws out the rulebook. Whether that's brave or reckless depends entirely on whether RAV4 buyers are ready for something this different.

Hyundai has unveiled the fifth-generation Tucson with what it's calling 'Art of Steel' design language, and the first thing you need to know is that this looks nothing like the current model. Not a gentle evolution. A reset.

The compact crossover segment represents roughly a quarter of all new car sales in the UK, which means it's the last place you'd expect a manufacturer to roll the dice on radical styling. The RAV4 sells over 400,000 units annually in the US alone by being exactly what people expect a crossover to look like. The CR-V has been Honda's best-seller for years on the same principle. Safe works.

Hyundai is walking away from safe.

The current Tucson, launched in 2020, went bold with its Parametric Dynamics design. Jewel like LED lighting, sharp creases, a grille that looked like it belonged on something twice the price. It worked. The fourth-generation model became one of the brand's most successful designs and helped cement Hyundai's reputation as a company that actually thinks about how a car looks instead of just ticking regulatory boxes.

This new one doubles down. The 'Art of Steel' language is described as 4x4 inspired, which in practice seems to mean blocky, angular, unapologetic. Think less sculpted clay, more folded metal. Whether that translates to handsome or overwrought won't be clear until we see the thing in daylight on a dealer forecourt, but the intent is obvious. Hyundai wants the Tucson to look like it means it.

The risk is considerable. Volkswagen tried pivoting hard to angular minimalism with the Mk8 Golf and spent years fielding complaints that it looked worse than the car it replaced. Nissan's original Juke was so divisive in 2010 that half the internet declared it an abomination. Then it became segment defining. Toyota spent the 2010s transforming its entire lineup with the angular Keen Look design philosophy after decades of playing it safe, and the gamble paid off in perception if not universal affection.

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Hyundai's own recent history suggests they know what they're doing. The brand's transformation under Peter Schreyer from bland also-ran to genuine design contender wasn't an accident. The previous Tucson's parametric grille could have been a disaster. It wasn't. BMW's decision to enlarge its kidney grilles to billboard proportions from 2018 onwards remains polarizing, but it hasn't stopped people buying the cars.

Still, there's a difference between bold and miscalculated, and you don't know which until the sales figures come in.

The 2027 Tucson will be the fifth iteration of a nameplate that first appeared in 2004. Twenty-three years is a long time in the crossover wars, and the segment has gone from niche to dominant in that span. Hyundai has spent most of that time chasing Toyota and Honda. They've either designed something distinctive enough to make people consider switching, or they've just made it easier for fence-sitters to default back to the RAV4.

The Tucson goes on sale as a 2027 model year.

Sources: Hyundai Motor Company

A British firm is building an autonomous rigid truck with no cab at all, claiming a 15% capacity boost and testing it on UK roads.

Voltempo, a UK electric vehicle specialist, is developing a 15.6-metre autonomous rigid lorry that ditches the driver's cab entirely and claims a 15% increase in cargo capacity over conventional designs. The vehicle is fully electric, designed to operate without a human driver, and both testing and production are planned for UK facilities.

The logic is obvious once you say it out loud. A truck cab exists to house a driver. If there is no driver, the cab is wasted volume. Voltempo's design eliminates it, redistributing that space to the cargo box. The result is a rigid lorry that's longer than the standard UK two-axle limit of 12 metres but still shorter than an articulated unit, with more payload capacity than either.

Fifteen per cent doesn't sound transformative until you apply it to logistics at scale. For a haulier running a fleet of fifty vehicles, that's the equivalent of adding seven and a half trucks without buying them. Fuel costs drop. Driver costs vanish. The maths works, assuming the technology does.

Which is the part that requires belief. Autonomous freight vehicles have been five years away for the past decade. Einride's cabless T-pod has been trialled in Sweden since 2016. Waymo and TuSimple have logged thousands of miles in the United States. Tesla delivered its first Semi in 2022. None of them are operating at commercial scale on public roads in mixed traffic.

Voltempo's plan to test and produce in the UK adds another variable. British road regulations currently allow rigid lorries up to 13.6 metres for multi-axle configurations, but autonomous vehicles remain heavily restricted. The UK government committed £100 million to self-driving projects in 2022, but actual deployment requires insurance frameworks, liability law, and public tolerance for driverless heavy goods vehicles sharing motorways with family hatchbacks.

The cabless design also means no failsafe. A Tesla Semi still has a human being behind the wheel who can take over when the software gets confused by roadworks or a pheasant. Voltempo's lorry has a cargo box. If the sensors fail or the route planning glitches, the vehicle either stops or it doesn't, and there's no one aboard to make that call. Remote monitoring is the usual answer, but remote monitoring of fifty lorries spread across the M6 at three in the morning is a different proposition than supervising a fixed route in Arizona.

The manufacturing piece is more straightforward. Arrival demonstrated that electric commercial vehicles can be assembled in British microfactories. Voltempo's claim to produce domestically is plausible, assuming demand exists and regulatory approval follows. The testing phase will determine whether the UK's infrastructure, from charging networks to road conditions, can support autonomous freight vehicles that look nothing like traditional lorries.

The gap between a working prototype and a fleet operating commercially on public roads is where most autonomous vehicle projects have stalled. Voltempo is betting that Britain's regulatory environment, manufacturing base, and logistics sector will close that gap faster than other markets have managed. The vehicle measures 15.6 metres. UK law caps rigid trucks at 13.6 metres for multi-axle designs.

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Sources: Voltempo, UK government autonomous vehicle funding announcements, UK vehicle length regulations

The man who turned Range Rover into a design icon speaks publicly for the first time since leaving Gaydon, addressing what he calls false narratives around his departure.

Gerry McGovern has given his first interview since leaving Jaguar Land Rover, and he is not avoiding the question everyone in the industry has been asking. After roughly twenty years as the creative force behind Range Rover's transformation into a genuine luxury brand, McGovern says his departure was accompanied by what he bluntly calls disinformation.

He led the design of the L405 Range Rover in 2012, the model that redefined what a luxury SUV could look like when every rival was still busy with chrome and fake vents. Then the L460 in 2022, which doubled down on the minimalist modernist language he spent two decades refining. Those cars elevated Range Rover out of the utilitarian 4x4 segment and into direct competition with Bentley and Rolls-Royce.

McGovern's design philosophy was never about following trends. Minimalism in automotive design is easy to botch, it either looks expensive or it looks cheap, and Range Rover under his watch consistently looked expensive. Clean surfacing, restrained detailing, proportion over decoration. It worked commercially and it worked critically, which is rare.

His departure was announced sometime in late 2023 or early 2024, depending on which internal memo you believe, and the industry rumour mill did what it always does. McGovern is addressing that directly now. He characterised some of the narratives around his exit as disinformation, though he has not specified which narratives or who was responsible for spreading them.

McGovern was based at JLR's Gaydon design centre in Warwickshire, the same facility that has produced everything from the Jaguar F-Type to the deeply polarising new Jaguar Type 00 concept. He joined Land Rover in the early 2000s after stints elsewhere in the industry, and spent the next two decades essentially owning the Range Rover visual identity.

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Ian Callum left Jaguar in 2019 after twenty years as design director, and that departure was handled with the usual corporate diplomacy. Marek Reichman has been at Aston Martin since 2005 and shows no signs of leaving. Jozef Kaban exited BMW Group in 2023 after leading design on some of the brand's most controversial recent models.

What he plans to do next has not been detailed publicly, though the interview apparently outlines his next career moves. A designer with his track record does not retire quietly. Whether that means another OEM role, an independent consultancy, or something outside the automotive industry entirely is unclear.

Range Rover's commercial success under McGovern's creative direction is hard to overstate. The brand moved upmarket without losing its off-road credibility, a balancing act that Land Rover's rivals have tried and mostly failed to replicate. The L460 Range Rover starts at over £100,000 and can easily push past £200,000 with options, and people are still buying them.

McGovern's influence extended beyond the flagship Range Rover. The Velar, the Evoque, even the Sport, all carried his minimalist signature. Some of those designs aged better than others, but the overall effect was coherent. Range Rover looked like Range Rover, and nothing else on the road looked quite like it.

Jaguar is in the middle of a radical reinvention that has produced more controversy than product so far, and Land Rover is navigating electrification while trying not to alienate its existing customer base. Losing the designer who defined your most successful brand during that period is not ideal.

McGovern has not said whether he left voluntarily or was pushed. The disinformation comment suggests the latter, or at least that the circumstances were more complicated than JLR's official statements implied.

The L460 Range Rover he delivered in 2022 will likely be his last major project at Gaydon. Its successor will be someone else's problem.

Sources: Automotive industry reporting and publications covering Gerry McGovern's first public interview following his departure from Jaguar Land Rover.

The Oxford plant has strong sales, fresh investment, and 4,000 workers. It also costs 20 to 30 percent more to run than comparable European factories.

BMW pledged £1.3 billion to electric Mini production at Oxford in 2023. Two years later, the company is trying to decide whether British manufacturing costs make that investment defensible or whether the plant survives on sentiment and political optics rather than actual profitability.

The Oxford facility employs roughly 4,000 people and cranks out electric Mini Coopers launched last year. Mini sold 402,421 vehicles globally in 2023, a marginal 0.2 percent increase on 2022. The cars are moving. The brand is not collapsing. The problem is what it costs to make them in Britain.

UK automotive manufacturing runs 20 to 30 percent more expensive than comparable plants in Europe. Energy costs are higher. Logistics are more complicated. Regulatory burdens are different and not in a helpful way. The Oxford site is one of the country's largest automotive manufacturing operations, but scale does not fix a structural cost disadvantage.

BMW announced €2 billion in group-wide cost cuts late last year. CEO Oliver Zipse has been clear about needing better profitability across all brands. That includes Mini, which means Oxford is now under the same financial scrutiny as every other plant in the network. Heritage does not show up in quarterly reporting.

The Countryman already left. Production moved to Leipzig in 2024. The electric Mini Cooper stays at Oxford for now, but Chinese-built electric Minis from a Great Wall Motors factory also sell into UK and European markets. The existence of that parallel supply chain is not reassuring for anyone working in Oxfordshire.

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BMW has form for walking away when the numbers do not work, but so does everyone else. Honda closed Swindon in 2021 despite £267 million in prior investment. Ford shut Bridgend in 2020. Jaguar Land Rover cut thousands of jobs across UK operations between 2019 and 2024. Nissan Sunderland survived, but only after securing battery production and government support that made the financial case stack up differently.

Oxford has been making Minis since 1959, first under BMC, then British Leyland, then Rover Group, before BMW bought the brand in 1994. Sixty-five years of production history matters to local politicians and workers and people who care about British manufacturing. It does not matter to a balance sheet.

The £600 million investment announced in 2021, followed by another £1.3 billion in 2023, looked like commitment. It might have been. It might also have been the cost of buying time to see whether electrification could justify keeping a high-cost site open. The electric Cooper launched. Sales are fine. The cost structure has not changed.

Vauxhall's Ellesmere Port survived by switching to electric van production in 2022, which gave Stellantis a product it needed to make somewhere and a plant that could be retooled to do it. Oxford does not have that flexibility. It makes Minis. If Mini production moves somewhere cheaper, the site has no fallback.

BMW has not announced closures or cuts. The investment is recent enough that pulling out now would be politically and financially awkward. But the company is not pretending Oxford's cost base is competitive, and it is not pretending cost discipline is optional. The tension is visible.

The UK government can offer subsidies, tax breaks, and energy support. It has done all of that before with mixed results. State aid does not fix a 20 to 30 percent cost gap indefinitely. It delays decisions. Whether that delay leads to a solution or just spreads the same outcome over more years is the question Oxford workers are living with right now.

The electric Mini Cooper starts at £31,800. Leipzig could probably build it for less.

Sources: BMW Group, UK automotive industry reports, historical plant closure data

The 2.5-liter turbo five that powers the RS3 and TT RS could survive another generation if Audi Sport gets its way, despite Euro 7 breathing down its neck.

Audi Sport is evaluating whether its 2.5-liter turbocharged five-cylinder engine can make it through another product cycle. The engine currently powers the RS3 and TT RS with 394 bhp, and more importantly, sounds like nothing else Audi builds. That matters to the people who buy these cars, and apparently it matters to the division tasked with building them.

The issue is Euro 7 emissions regulations, which arrive in 2025 or 2026 depending on who you ask and how much faith you have in regulatory schedules. Five-cylinder engines are expensive to keep compliant because the configuration itself is inefficient by modern standards. Odd cylinder counts create balance problems. They need heavier counterweights. They don't share components easily across an engine range. When you're BMW or Mercedes, you develop inline-sixes because the tooling pays for itself across multiple platforms. When you're Audi and you've committed to a five-pot, you're doing it because you think the character justifies the cost.

Character, in this case, means an off-beat exhaust note caused by the firing order, which is neither the even pulse of a four-cylinder nor the smooth howl of a six. It sounds offbeat because it is offbeat. The original Quattro rally car used a five-cylinder in the 1980s, and Audi has kept some version of the layout alive ever since, mostly because killing it would feel like admitting the thing was a mistake in the first place.

The current engine produces 500 Nm of torque and uses direct injection and a single turbocharger. It is not exotic by today's standards. It is also not boring, which is a low bar that most modern performance engines fail to clear. Turbo fours sound like appliances. V6s sound like they're trying. The five-cylinder sounds like it has a limp, and people who care about these things find that deeply appealing.

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Audi Sport has said publicly that it knows the engine matters to enthusiasts. That acknowledgment is not the same as a commitment, but it's more than most manufacturers offer when they're about to kill something people like. Porsche kept the naturally aspirated flat-six in the GT3 by deciding it was worth the engineering cost. BMW added particulate filters and mild-hybrid systems to its inline-sixes rather than replace them with something cheaper to certify. Mercedes-AMG did the opposite and replaced the M133 with the M139 because the business case didn't support keeping the old engine alive.

Ford kept the 5.0-liter Coyote V8 going with cylinder deactivation, which is an admission that the engine would otherwise be unviable under current emissions rules. Alpine has managed to preserve its connection to Renault's turbo engine heritage while meeting European standards, mostly by making the cars light enough that the engines don't have to work as hard. All of these decisions come down to whether a manufacturer thinks the character of an engine justifies the cost of keeping it compliant.

If Audi proceeds with another generation of the 2.5 TFSI, it will likely involve particulate filters, possibly mild-hybrid assistance, and almost certainly a price increase to cover the development cost. The RS3 currently starts at just over £60,000 in the UK. A next-generation model could easily push past £70,000 if the engine requires extensive re-engineering. That puts it uncomfortably close to more powerful, more practical alternatives from BMW and Mercedes.

The counterargument is that the RS3 and TT RS are not bought by people comparing spec sheets. They are bought by people who want a five-cylinder Audi because it is a five-cylinder Audi. That is a smaller market than the one served by sensible turbocharged fours, but it is a market that will pay extra for the thing it wants. Whether that market is large enough to justify the engineering spend is the question Audi Sport is currently trying to answer.

The TT itself is already dead, which removes one application for the engine. The RS3 is the main volume carrier, and it sells well enough in markets where people still buy saloons and hot hatchbacks. If the business case depends on the RS3 alone, the engine's survival becomes less certain. If Audi can find another application or share development costs with a future model, the odds improve.

Peak torque is 369 lb-ft, delivered low enough in the rev range that the engine feels muscular rather than peaky. It is not the fastest engine Audi builds, but it is one of the most enjoyable, which is a different metric and one that manufacturers are increasingly unwilling to prioritize. Enjoyment does not show up in emissions testing. It does not improve fleet average CO2 figures. It sells cars to a specific type of customer, and if you are not that customer, the entire conversation seems pointless.

Audi has not committed to anything yet. The Sport division is aware of the engine's significance, which is the kind of statement you make when you are trying to manage expectations without making promises. It could go either way. If they kill it, the RS3 will get a two-liter four-cylinder with hybrid assistance and sound like every other fast hatchback. If they don't, it will cost more and probably make less power, but it will still sound like a five-cylinder Audi, which is the only reason to buy one in the first place.

The current engine produces 394 bhp. The next one, if it happens, will likely produce less.

Sources: Audi Sport division public statements, Euro 7 emissions regulation schedule, RS3 and TT RS specifications

China's Geely has cracked solid-state battery tech that Western carmakers have been promising for a decade. US tariffs mean it likely stays in China.

Geely has a solid-state battery entering pilot testing next year with a rated lifespan of 621,000 miles. That's one million kilometres. Triple what current lithium-ion packs manage before they start losing meaningful capacity.

The Chinese manufacturer owns Volvo, Polestar, Lotus, and stakes in Mercedes and Aston Martin. It is not a speculative startup. It builds millions of cars a year. And it has apparently achieved what Toyota has been promising since 2017 and still hasn't delivered.

Solid-state batteries replace the liquid electrolyte in conventional lithium-ion cells with a solid material. Higher energy density. Better safety. Longer life. The theory has been solid for years. The execution has not.

Toyota keeps pushing its timeline back. Currently aiming for 2027 or 2028, which is what it said about 2024 back in 2020. QuantumScape, the US startup backed by Volkswagen, has burned through years and investor cash without reaching production. Ford talks about it. Nissan has a pilot plant scheduled for 2028. Samsung showed prototypes last year.

Geely is moving to pilot testing in 2025.

The lifespan figure matters more than the range headlines most battery announcements lead with. A 621,000-mile rated life changes the ownership equation entirely. Current EV batteries degrade noticeably after 100,000 to 150,000 miles. Some hold up better. Some worse. The fear of expensive replacement has kept resale values uncertain and buyers cautious.

A battery that outlasts the rest of the car removes that concern. It also removes one of the last structural arguments against EVs that isn't just about preference.

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Except you probably won't get one. Not if you're in the US.

Combined tariffs on Chinese EVs now exceed 100 percent. The Biden administration added a 100 percent levy in 2024 on top of existing Section 301 tariffs. Geely could build the best battery on the planet and it still wouldn't clear US customs at a price anyone would pay.

This is how a technology gap opens. Not gradually, but in a single product cycle. Chinese drivers get 621,000-mile batteries in 2026 or 2027. American drivers get another delayed promise from a legacy carmaker that still hasn't worked out how to make solid-state cells at scale.

NIO, another Chinese EV maker, already launched semi-solid-state batteries last year with a 621-mile range. BYD outsold Tesla globally in the fourth quarter of 2023. The pace is not slowing.

Geely's European brands might see this technology eventually. Volvo and Polestar could route it through Swedish or Belgian production if the economics work. That's speculative. What's certain is that the US market is walled off by its own trade policy from a battery breakthrough that directly answers consumer concerns about EV longevity.

Western automakers have had nearly a decade to deliver solid-state batteries. They chose timelines and press releases over products. Geely chose testing.

Pilot production begins next year.

Sources: Geely Automobile Holdings, US Trade Representative (Section 301 tariffs), Biden administration EV tariff announcements (2024)

After years of insisting nobody wanted a Bronco truck, Ford is now building one for launch around 2028. Jeep sold the idea. Ford is just catching up.

Ford is developing a Bronco pickup for launch near the end of the decade, reversing a decision it made loudly and publicly when the modern Bronco arrived in 2021. Back then, the company insisted there was no market for a Bronco truck. The Ranger was the truck. The Bronco was the SUV. Simple.

Except Jeep had already launched the Gladiator two years earlier, and it has been selling between 80,000 and 100,000 units annually in the U.S. ever since. That is not a rounding error. That is a profitable segment Ford decided to ignore while watching someone else take the money.

The Bronco already shares its T6 platform with the Ranger, so the engineering lift here is not dramatic. Ford has the bones. It just needed the will, or perhaps the embarrassment of watching Jeep operate unopposed in a lifestyle pickup segment that turned out to be exactly as viable as customers kept saying it was.

This is not about capability. The Gladiator is not a better truck than the Ranger, and a Bronco pickup will not be either. It is about identity. People who want a Wrangler with a bed do not want a Ranger with a soft top. They want the specific thing Jeep figured out how to sell them, and Ford is now admitting it should have been there first.

The original Bronco, which ran from 1966 to 1996, included pickup variants in its early generations. Ford is not inventing anything here. It is returning to something it once understood and then forgot.

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What makes this more interesting is what else Ford is reportedly planning on the same platform. A Lincoln luxury off-roader, aimed squarely at the Mercedes G-Class, is apparently in the works as well. That is a different kind of gamble.

The G-Wagen sells for between $140,000 and $200,000 and has seen years of sustained growth in a segment defined by people who want to look like they might drive across a desert but almost certainly will not. Range Rover owns part of that market. Mercedes owns the rest. Lincoln has never been anywhere near it.

Ford CEO Jim Farley has made it clear the company is focusing on iconic nameplates and truck leadership, which is a polite way of saying Ford is cutting everything that does not make money and doubling down on the things that do. Trucks make money. Luxury SUVs make money. A Bronco pickup and a Lincoln G-Class competitor fit that strategy exactly.

The question is whether Lincoln has the credibility to charge six figures for an off-roader when it has spent the last decade trying to convince people it is still a luxury brand at all. The Navigator sells well enough, but it is a full-size SUV competing on space and comfort, not image. A G-Class fighter requires the kind of brand heat Lincoln has not generated since the 1960s.

Meanwhile, the Bronco pickup will likely arrive around 2028 or 2029, which means Ford is giving Jeep nearly a decade head start. The Gladiator will be well into its second generation by then. The market will be defined. Ford will be the one trying to take share, not create it.

Ram is working on the Ramcharger. General Motors has the Hummer EV. Rivian has the R1T. Toyota is still selling every 4Runner and Land Cruiser it can build. The off-road lifestyle truck and SUV space is not empty. It is crowded, expensive, and full of people who got there first.

Ford has the Bronco name, and that counts for something. It has the Ranger platform, which works. It has the dealership network and the production capacity. What it does not have is the last five years back.

The Bronco pickup will probably sell. The Lincoln luxury off-roader is harder to predict. But both represent Ford admitting it misread the market once and is now paying the cost of entering late.

Sources: Ford Motor Company, Jeep Gladiator U.S. sales data, Mercedes-Benz G-Class pricing

The compact SUV won't see a full redesign for twelve years. That's not confidence. That's surrender.

Mazda has decided the CX-50 (its second-best-selling SUV in America) will remain fundamentally unchanged until 2031. The current generation launched in 2022 as a 2023 model. Twelve years is not a product cycle. It's a monument to stagnation.

Most compact SUVs are redesigned every five to seven years. The Honda CR-V got a full overhaul in 2023 after six years. The Toyota RAV4 was redone in 2019 after the same interval. Mazda is planning to let the CX-50 age through two or three generations of its direct competitors without touching it.

The company's explanation centres on tariff concerns and cost pressures. Mazda builds the CX-50 at its joint plant with Toyota in Huntsville, Alabama. Redesigning a vehicle costs hundreds of millions of dollars. Retooling a shared production line adds complexity. Tariffs on imported components make the maths worse.

Fair enough. Except this isn't just about Mazda tightening its belt. It's about what happens to the people who buy a CX-50 in, say, 2029.

Sound familiar?

They will be purchasing a vehicle designed when the iPhone 13 was new. The safety systems, the infotainment architecture, the fuel economy calibrations... all locked in place while the rest of the segment marches forward. By 2031, rivals will have introduced adaptive cruise control improvements Mazda won't have had the chance to implement. Driver assistance tech that becomes standard elsewhere will remain optional or absent here. The CX-50 will feel older every year, and Mazda knows it.

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This isn't unprecedented. Nissan dragged the previous-generation Frontier pickup through sixteen years before replacing it in 2020. Mitsubishi has kept the Mirage on life support for over a decade. Both examples are universally cited as embarrassments, not strategies.

Mazda's decision suggests one of three things. Either the company is more financially constrained than it lets on, or it believes the US compact SUV market is too commoditised to justify investment, or it has simply deprioritised American buyers in favour of other regions.

None of those explanations are comforting if you're shopping for a CX-50.

The CX-5 remains Mazda's best-seller in the States, and it gets regular updates. The CX-50 was supposed to be the more rugged, outdoorsy alternative, pitched at buyers who want something a bit more adventurous than the conservative CX-5. Letting it fossilise for over a decade makes that pitch increasingly hollow.

Mazda has built a reputation in recent years for thoughtful design and engaging handling dynamics. The CX-50 is a genuinely good compact SUV right now. But good in 2025 is not good in 2030. Technology moves. Competitors improve. Standards shift.

Twelve years is long enough for a child to finish primary school. It's long enough for an entire generation of automotive safety regulations to be written and implemented. It's long enough that the CX-50's closest rivals will have been redesigned twice over.

The CX-50 competes with the Honda CR-V, the Toyota RAV4, the Subaru Outback. By the time Mazda replaces it in 2031, a buyer who ordered a 2023 model at launch will still be making payments on a vehicle that predates its own successor by nine years.

Despite developing a new AMG V8, the current C-Class will remain four-cylinder only for its entire production run.

The 671 horsepower Mercedes AMG C 63 S E Performance will never see a V8 option. Mercedes has confirmed the current W206 generation C Class is locked into its 2.0 litre turbocharged four cylinder configuration as a permanent decision, not a temporary measure.

AMG has developed a new 4.0 litre twin turbo V8 for other models in the lineup. The C 63 will not get it. The platform does not accommodate it, and Mercedes has no interest in making it fit.

The previous W205 generation C 63 used the M177 and M178 4.0 litre twin turbo V8, producing between 469 and 503 horsepower depending on specification. It sounded like a small angry V8 should sound. It had character. The current car makes more power on paper... 671 horsepower from a 2.0 litre four cylinder paired with an electric motor and a rear mounted battery. But the numbers are not the point.

When Mercedes announced the four cylinder C 63 in 2022, the response was immediate and hostile. AMG had built its reputation on engines that felt special, not spreadsheets that looked impressive. The C 63 was supposed to be the accessible AMG V8, the one you could justify buying instead of an M3. Now it is a plug in hybrid with a four pot and a battery where the back seats used to be useful.

Mercedes cited emissions regulations and electrification strategy. Fair enough. But then they went and developed a new V8 for the rest of the AMG range, which makes the C 63 decision look less like regulatory necessity and more like a calculated abandonment of a segment they have decided is not worth the engineering cost.

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BMW kept the inline six in the current M3 and M4. Audi still offers a 2.9 litre twin turbo V6 in the RS4 Avant. Porsche famously yanked the flat six from the 718 Cayman and Boxster in 2016, then brought it back in the GTS and GT4 models after the market made it clear that was a mistake. Mercedes is choosing not to learn that lesson.

The four cylinder C 63 is technically a remarkable piece of engineering. A 2.0 litre engine making 476 horsepower before the electric motor even gets involved is genuinely impressive in isolation. But a C 63 was never about isolation. It was about the noise and the balance and the feeling that you were driving something that cared about being driven, not something that cared about meeting fleet average CO2 targets.

There is no reversal coming. No limited run V8 special edition. No GTS model with the old engine. The next generation C Class arrives no earlier than 2027.

Sources: Mercedes-Benz AMG official statements, manufacturer specifications

Electric vehicles claimed all ten fastest-selling used car positions in July 2024, with the Model 3 leading. Turns out people actually want them when spending their own money.

The Tesla Model 3 was the fastest-selling used car in the UK in July 2024, according to Auto Trader's days-to-turn data. More striking: every single position in the top ten went to an electric vehicle.

Days to turn measures the gap between a car being listed and marked as sold. It is the clearest possible signal of what people actually want when they walk onto a forecourt with money in hand. No government grants. No company car tax breaks. Just someone buying a car because they have decided it makes sense.

This is not how the used car market has historically worked. Ford Fiestas and Volkswagen Golfs have dominated these rankings for years. Diesel hatchbacks moved fast because they were cheap to run and easy to sell on. The July figures suggest something has shifted.

Used EV prices fell roughly 25% year on year through 2023 and into 2024. That drop has been presented in some quarters as a depreciation crisis, evidence that electric cars hold their value poorly and buyers are getting burned. But depreciation only matters if no one wants to buy the thing at the lower price. Fast turnover suggests the opposite: these cars are now priced where people want them, and they are selling quickly as a result.

The speed also contradicts the idea that EVs are hard to shift because buyers are wary of battery degradation or range anxiety or charging infrastructure. If that were true, dealers would be sitting on stock. They are not.

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New EV sales hit 16.2% market share in July 2024. Used EV sales grew 57% year on year in the first quarter of the same year, according to SMMT data. The pattern is consistent across new and used markets, which means this is not a quirk of one segment or a temporary spike driven by a particular incentive scheme.

The government scrapped the plug-in car grant for new EVs in 2022. That pushed more buyers toward the used market, where early adopters' Model 3s and Nissan Leafs were starting to appear in meaningful numbers. Lower prices, established technology, no subsidy required. It turns out that combination works.

What this does not tell you is why each individual buyer chose electric. Some will have done the maths on running costs. Some will have charged at home and realised they rarely need a public charger. Some will have test-driven one and decided it was better than the diesel alternative. The data does not care about motivation. It just shows what moved fastest.

The Tesla Model 3 led the pack, which makes sense. It was the best-selling new EV in the UK through 2023 and into 2024, so there is plenty of stock filtering into the used market. It also has a strong brand, a decent charging network, and enough range that most buyers are not constantly doing mental arithmetic about whether they can make it to the next charger.

This will annoy people who have spent the last year insisting that EV adoption is stalling, that buyers are rejecting electric cars, that the whole thing is a subsidy-fuelled bubble about to burst. The used market does not lie. When someone spends their own money on a car, they buy what they actually want. In July, that was electric. All ten times.

Sources: Auto Trader UK, SMMT

The entire US allocation vanished before production started. Toyota vetted every buyer to keep flippers out.

Toyota has sold all 200 units of its GR GT3 road car allocated to the United States before the first one rolled off the production line. The million-dollar supercar, distributed through select Lexus dealerships rather than Toyota's own network, went to buyers who passed a screening process designed to weed out speculators.

Toyota is stepping into territory it has avoided for over a decade. The last time the company built something this exclusive was the Lexus LFA, which sold 500 units globally between 2010 and 2012 and required similar buyer vetting. The GR GT3 is more extreme. It is a road-legal version of Toyota's actual GT3 racing car, powered by a twin-turbocharged V8 lifted straight from the motorsport program.

Toyota required prospective buyers to demonstrate they intended to drive the thing, not flip it for a markup the moment the title cleared. That kind of gatekeeping used to be Ferrari's specialty. Ford famously rejected collectors when allocating the 2017 GT, prioritising brand ambassadors who would actually use the car. Mercedes did the same with the AMG One. Now Toyota is doing it too.

Handling distribution through Lexus dealerships instead of Toyota stores tells you how the company sees this car. It is not a GR Supra with more power. It is a halo product aimed at the same buyer who might cross-shop a Porsche 911 GT3 RS or consider a McLaren. Pricing around one million dollars puts it in proper supercar territory, well above anything Toyota has sold in the modern era.

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The 200-unit US allocation is a fraction of global production. Toyota has not disclosed total build numbers, but the company is deliberately keeping volume low. That scarcity drives the collector interest Toyota claims to be blocking, which makes the screening process critical. Without it, half the cars would be sitting in climate-controlled garages as investments rather than being driven.

Whether the vetting actually works is another question. Porsche GT3 RS allocations sell out in hours despite similar dealer scrutiny, and plenty of those cars still end up on resale listings within months at steep markups. Think about that for a second. Ferrari's ownership history requirements have not stopped flipping entirely either. The difference is enforcement. If Toyota is serious about keeping speculators out, it will need to track what happens after delivery and adjust future allocations accordingly.

Gazoo Racing started as a motorsport program. It expanded into hot hatches and sports cars with the GR Yaris and GR Supra. Now it is building limited-run supercars derived directly from racing hardware. That progression makes sense if the goal is to elevate the entire GR brand rather than just sell more Corollas with body kits.

Production has not started yet, so actual deliveries are still months away. That gap between allocation and delivery is where things usually go wrong. Delays, specification changes, or production issues could still derail the timeline. The Lexus LFA famously took years longer than expected to reach customers. The Mercedes-AMG One was delayed so long that some buyers sued to get out of their contracts.

All 200 US buyers are waiting to see if Toyota can actually deliver a million-dollar supercar that justifies the price and the vetting process. The company has the motorsport credibility. The twin-turbo V8 is proven in competition. What it has never done before is build something this exclusive and this expensive at scale.

Production starts later this year. All 200 US buyers have already been selected and approved.

Sources: Toyota Gazoo Racing

Herbert Wertheim bought Ferrari's first electric grand tourer at auction for a record-breaking sum, and it isn't even his most interesting purchase this year.

Herbert "Dr. Herbie" Wertheim has a spending pattern that would make most people wince. Last year, he paid $26 million for a one-off Daytona SP3 nicknamed the "599+1." Now he has spent $40 million on Ferrari Luce Chassis 0, the first production example of Ferrari's first electric grand tourer, at RM Sotheby's Monterey auction.

The sale makes the Luce the most expensive contemporary car ever sold at auction. Every dollar of that $40 million goes to the Ferrari Foundation, which supports education and cultural preservation initiatives in Maranello and beyond.

Wertheim is not your typical billionaire collector. He invented progressive eyeglass lenses and built a fortune worth an estimated $7.3 billion. His car collection reflects someone who buys what interests him rather than what impresses others. The 599+1 was a coachbuilt special based on the 599XX platform, commissioned by a client who wanted something nobody else had. Wertheim bought it quietly and without fanfare.

The Luce represents a different kind of statement. Ferrari unveiled the electric grand tourer earlier this year as a signal of intent. It is not a hypercar. It is not a limited run special. It is a fully electric four-seater designed to move Ferrari into a new era without abandoning what makes a Ferrari recognizable. The 800-volt architecture delivers serious performance, but the design language and interior execution aim for grand touring refinement rather than track aggression.

Chassis 0 carries symbolic weight. It is the first one built, the car used for final validation and the template for every Luce that follows. Ferrari chose to auction it rather than keep it in the museum or hand it to a favored client. That decision raised eyebrows. Some collectors assumed the company would retain the first example for historical purposes. Instead, Ferrari turned it into a fundraising vehicle.

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The Ferrari Foundation benefits from the full hammer price, which is unusual in charity auctions. Typically, a portion goes to the seller or the auction house takes a cut. Here, the entire $40 million flows to the foundation. The organization funds scholarships, restores historical buildings in Maranello, and supports music and arts programs. It is a pet project for the Ferrari family and a way to give back to the community that built the company.

Wertheim winning the bid adds another layer. He is not a flipper. He does not buy cars to resell them or park them in climate controlled storage as financial instruments. He drives his collection and engages with the machines. The 599+1 has been seen at private events. The Luce will likely follow the same path.

The $40 million price tag also resets expectations for electric vehicle values at auction. Until now, the highest prices for EVs came from early Tesla Roadsters or concept cars with historical significance. The Luce is neither. It is a brand-new production car, albeit the first one off the line. The sale proves that collectors will pay top dollar for electric vehicles if the story and the brand align.

Ferrari has committed to electrifying its lineup without losing its soul. The Luce is the first full expression of that promise. Whether it drives like a Ferrari or feels like one remains to be seen. Wertheim will find out before anyone else.

RM Sotheby's called the sale a milestone. They are right, but not for the reasons they think. The milestone is not the dollar figure. It is the confirmation that a billionaire inventor with a taste for the unusual thinks Ferrari's electric future is worth backing with eight figures.

Sources: RM Sotheby's Monterey auction results, Ferrari Foundation official site, Forbes billionaire profiles

16 years ago it was just a crazy idea. Today it's a reality and Voyah has demonstrated pure extreme handling, live.

The dual-motor EV used its 637 horsepower and instant torque to maintain momentum across the ceiling and land back upright.

Voyah claims the vehicle was completely stock with no weight reduction or special effects.

While the record hasn't been independently verified yet, it is a striking stunt if verified

Three weeks ago I projected this would be Monterey's first-ever $500 million week. I was wrong, just not in the direction anyone worries about being wrong in. Five auction houses moved roughly $758 million in collector cars over three days, up 75% from last year's $432.8 million and over $200 million clear of even my own $550 million base case.

Monterey Car Week 2026 closed last Sunday with total sales of just over $700 million. Not $500 million with a bit of momentum. Seven hundred million dollars.

That is not a record that crept over the line. It is a number that arrived without warning and made the previous benchmarks look lame.

The headline figure combines results from RM Sotheby's, Gooding & Company, Bonhams, Broad Arrow, and Mecum. RM alone cleared $340 million across two days. Gooding posted $210 million. Bonhams came in at $95 million. The rest made up the balance.

No single car accounted for the surge. The top sale was a 1962 Ferrari 250 GTO that went for $51 million at RM, which is expensive but not shocking by GTO standards. The 1955 Mercedes 300 SLR Uhlenhaut Coupé that traded privately in 2022 for $142 million remains the single most expensive car ever sold. This was not about one trophy lot.

What happened instead was breadth. Nearly every serious consignment found a buyer at or above estimate. Mid-tier Ferraris that might have struggled two years ago cleared seven figures without drama. Porsches from the 1970s and 80s that used to sit in the $200,000 range were hitting half a million. Even the specialist lots... Alfa Romeo competition cars, pre-war Bugattis, obscure coachbuilt rarities... moved.

The buyer base has widened in ways the industry has been predicting for a decade but only now seems to be seeing in hard numbers. Younger collectors with tech money. Asian bidders who no longer limit themselves to Ferraris. European family offices treating rare cars as hard assets in a way they previously reserved for art.

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RM's $340 million tally came from 114 lots sold. That is an average of nearly $3 million per car. Not every lot was a headline piece. Some were restoration projects. Some were racing spares packages. The math still works out to an average transaction value that would have been considered fantasy five years ago.

Gooding sold a 1967 Ferrari 275 GTB/4 for $4.8 million. A 1973 Porsche 911 Carrera RS 2.7 Touring went for $1.2 million. A 1959 Aston Martin DB4GT brought $3.1 million. None of those are surprises individually. Strung together across two full days of bidding, they add up to a market that has stopped hesitating.

Bonhams moved a 1937 Bugatti Type 57S Atalante for $10.4 million and a 1966 Ford GT40 for $9.8 million. Broad Arrow sold a McLaren F1 for $20.5 million, which is below the F1 record but still among the five highest prices ever paid for one.

Not everything sold. RM had a no-sale rate of around 18 percent. Gooding was closer to 22 percent. But those are historically normal figures. The story is not about what didn't sell. It is about how much the stuff that did sell actually sold for.

There were whispers all week that something unusual was happening. By Saturday night the auction houses were quietly revising their total estimates upward. By Sunday afternoon it was clear the week would break $600 million. The final tally of over $700 million only became apparent after Mecum closed its sale late Sunday evening.

Monterey has always been the single biggest week in the collector car calendar. But it has never produced a number like this. The previous record, set in 2015, was $492 million. That stood for over a decade. It just got beaten by 42 percent in a single year.

Whether this represents a permanent shift or a temporary spike will depend on what happens in 2027. But for now the market has spoken. And what it said was $700 million.

Sources: RM Sotheby's official results, Gooding & Company sale totals, Bonhams post-sale report, Broad Arrow Auctions press release, Mecum Auctions Monterey summary

The UK's ZEV mandate has turned Nissan's largest European plant into a political bargaining chip, and the government just opened the consultation window.

Six thousand people clock in at Nissan's Sunderland factory every day. Whether they still do in two years depends less on the cars they build and more on a spreadsheet in Whitehall that dictates how many electric vehicles British buyers are supposed to want in 2025.

The UK's Zero Emission Vehicle mandate requires 22 percent of new cars sold this year to be battery electric. By 2030, that figure hits 80 percent. Miss the target and manufacturers pay £15,000 per non-compliant vehicle. It is a legally binding trajectory with no relationship to actual consumer behaviour, which is the problem.

Last year, battery electric cars made up 16.5 percent of new registrations. The mandate required 22 percent. The gap is not a rounding error. It is the difference between a factory operating at capacity and a factory reconsidering its future in the UK.

Sunderland built over 234,000 vehicles in 2023, making it the largest car plant in the country. It produces the electric Leaf and the e-Power Qashqai, which Nissan markets as electrified but which runs a petrol engine to charge a battery that drives the wheels. Whether that counts as zero emission under the mandate's definitions is the sort of question that keeps employment lawyers awake at night.

The Department for Transport launched a consultation in January on potential flexibilities to the ZEV timeline. The word 'flexibility' in government policy language usually means 'we wrote rules we cannot enforce and are now pretending we planned to revisit them all along.'

Manufacturers can buy credits from rivals who exceed their ZEV targets. Tesla, which sells only electric cars, has turned this into a profitable side business. Traditional carmakers are effectively paying Elon Musk for the privilege of selling the combustion-engine vehicles their customers still want. It is a transfer of wealth dressed up as environmental policy.

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Stellantis threatened to close its Ellesmere Port and Luton plants late last year over the same issue. Ford announced 4,000 job cuts at its Cologne facility in Germany, citing EV transition costs. The pattern is consistent across Europe: governments set targets, consumers ignore them, manufacturers cut jobs.

Nissan's Sunderland workforce supports another 30,000 jobs in the supply chain. When a factory that size wobbles, entire regional economies tilt. The North East has seen this before. It does not improve with repetition.

The consultation is open until March. What happens after that depends on whether the government believes its own targets or acknowledges that forcing manufacturers to sell cars people are not buying has predictable consequences.

The Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders has called for government incentives to boost EV demand. Translated: we cannot make customers want these cars, so either subsidise the purchase price or change the rules.

Meanwhile, Sunderland keeps building Leafs and Qashqais, and six thousand people keep showing up for work in a factory whose future depends on a policy consultation most of them will never read.

The mandate rises to 80 percent by 2030. Five years to triple electric car adoption while the current rate sits at 16.5 percent. Either consumer behaviour changes overnight, or something else does.

The Leaf starts at £28,995. The e-Power Qashqai is £38,425. Neither price includes the cost of keeping the factory open.

Sources: UK Department for Transport ZEV Mandate Consultation, Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT) 2024 Registration Data, Nissan UK

The YouTuber drove a resurrected Veyron from the UK to Molsheim hoping to show Bugatti what he'd done. The place was shut. No one home. Bastille Day.

Mat Armstrong drove a Bugatti Veyron he'd rebuilt from salvage across the Channel and down to Molsheim, the small Alsace town where Ettore Bugatti founded the company in 1909. The plan was to pull up at the factory, show them the car was roadworthy, and film whatever happened next. He got there and the entire place was locked up. Empty. Not a soul.

Bastille Day. French public holiday.

A Bugatti representative later confirmed they'd actually been at the factory themselves that day, presumably not expecting a British YouTuber to arrive unannounced with a car the company might have preferred stayed broken. Armstrong posted the footage anyway. Empty gates, closed doors, the kind of anticlimax that makes better content than a scripted tour ever would.

The structural reason no one was there goes beyond the calendar. Bugatti's CEO is Mate Rimac, who runs the merged Bugatti Rimac entity from Sveta Nedelja in Croatia, not from Molsheim. The historic French factory still exists, still builds cars, but the company's actual operational centre of gravity has shifted east. Molsheim is heritage. Croatia is headquarters.

Armstrong's Veyron is one of those rebuild projects that sounds implausible until you see the invoices. He bought a crashed example, sourced parts, did the work, and ended up with something that moves under its own power and doesn't immediately catch fire. Whether Bugatti considers that a tribute or a mild form of brand vandalism is unclear, but they apparently noticed.

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A few days after the video went up, Bugatti called. They'd seen the failed visit and invited Armstrong and his team back for a proper factory tour in September. Not a polite brush off. An actual invitation. The kind of reversal that suggests someone senior saw the clip and decided engaging with it was better than pretending it hadn't happened.

There's been a wave of follow up content since then, most of it breathlessly titled and speculative. "Bugatti CEO Secretly Invited Mat Armstrong." "Rebuild War Nobody Expected." The usual YouTube reaction cycle, where every development gets repackaged as exclusive drama. The confirmed detail is the September factory visit. Everything else reads like commentary farming views off the original story.

What's interesting is that Bugatti bothered at all. They don't need Armstrong's credibility. They don't need his audience. Veyron values are stable enough that one rebuilt example isn't going to move the market. But they invited him back anyway, which suggests either someone at Rimac likes the project or they've decided public engagement with DIY Bugatti rebuilds is less damaging than ignoring them.

Ettore Bugatti is buried nearby in Dorlisheim. The company he founded in 1909 when Molsheim was still a German town now answers to a Croatian CEO and builds electric hypercars in partnership with a battery company. Armstrong's Veyron, cobbled together in a British workshop and driven to an empty factory on a French public holiday, might be the most Bugatti thing that's happened there in years.

The September visit happens or it doesn't. Either way, Armstrong already got the better story.

Sources: Mat Armstrong YouTube channel, Bugatti Rimac corporate structure, public records Molsheim

Bugatti's CEO is considering a real manual transmission for the Tourbillon and has taken a pointed shot at Ferrari's simulated clutch technology.

Mate Rimac has confirmed that Bugatti is seriously considering a manual transmission option for the Tourbillon hypercar, and he's not interested in faking it. The CEO of Bugatti Rimac made it clear that if the V16 gets a clutch pedal, it will be mechanically connected to the gearbox, not running through a computer pretending to be a manual.

Ferrari's 12Cilindri uses electronic systems to simulate manual gear changes without an actual mechanical clutch. Rimac called out that approach specifically, saying Bugatti would not go down that road. Either the transmission is manual or it isn't.

The Tourbillon already has one of the most ambitious powertrains in production. The naturally aspirated 8.3-litre V16, developed with Cosworth, makes over 1,000 horsepower on its own. Add three electric motors and the combined output climbs to around 1,800 horsepower. The idea of rowing gears manually in something that powerful is absurd in the best way.

Ferrari stopped offering manual transmissions years ago. By the mid-2010s, the entire range had moved to dual-clutch automatics. The 12Cilindri's simulated manual is an attempt to give drivers the sensation of a clutch and gear lever without the mechanical reality. Rimac clearly thinks that's a cop-out.

Bugatti, under Rimac's leadership, is staking a claim to mechanical authenticity. The company already distinguishes itself by building a brand-new V16 engine in an era when most manufacturers have abandoned anything larger than a V12. Adding a genuine manual option would be another line in the sand.

Whether Bugatti can actually pull it off is another question. A manual transmission capable of handling 1,800 horsepower and the torque from a V16 plus electric motors would be an engineering nightmare. Most hypercars ditched manuals not because manufacturers stopped caring about driver engagement, but because the hardware couldn't cope.

Gordon Murray solved this problem with the T.50 by keeping the power output reasonable and working with a specialist transmission supplier. Pagani offered a manual Huayra through a partnership with Xtrac. Bugatti would need something similar, and it would need to work with a hybrid powertrain, which adds another layer of complexity.

Porsche still builds manual gearboxes for the GT3 and GT3 RS, proving it can be done even in high-performance applications. Aston Martin brought back a manual option for the V12 Vantage in 2023. Both are less powerful than the Tourbillon, but both also prove there's still demand for a proper three-pedal setup.

The Tourbillon is already limited to 250 units, with a base price around €3.8 million. A manual version would likely command an even higher premium, assuming Bugatti can engineer it without compromising the hybrid system's performance. Rimac's public criticism of Ferrari suggests this isn't just talk. He's drawing a line between his vision for Bugatti and what he sees as shortcuts elsewhere in the industry.

Ferrari isn't the only target here. The entire hypercar segment has moved toward automation and driver aids that prioritize lap times over involvement. Rimac is betting there's still a market for the opposite, even at the very top of the price and performance ladder.

The Tourbillon was unveiled in 2024 as the successor to the Chiron. Production begins in 2026. First deliveries are scheduled for late that year.

Sources: Bugatti Rimac official announcements, Car and Driver, MotorTrend

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Ford's luxury arm is reportedly eyeing the booming rugged SUV market with a body-on-frame Lincoln priced around $75,000 to $90,000.

Lincoln is said to be developing a rugged luxury SUV built on the Ford Bronco's body-on-frame platform, aimed squarely at buyers who want G-Class presence without the $150,000 entry fee. The reported price bracket sits between $75,000 and $90,000, which would make it cheaper than a Mercedes G-Class by roughly half while undercutting the Range Rover and overlapping neatly with Jeep's Grand Wagoneer.

The platform is already there. Ford's Bronco uses body-on-frame construction with independent front suspension and a solid rear axle, the same fundamentals that underpin every serious off-roader from the Defender to the G-Wagon. The Bronco Raptor, priced near $70,000, already proves the chassis can support luxury features and serious capability without falling apart. Lincoln would be starting from a known quantity, not inventing one.

Lincoln has no body-on-frame SUV at all right now. Everything in the lineup rides on unibody construction, which is fine for road manners and not fine for the kind of buyer who wants something that looks like it could survive a war zone even if it never will. The Navigator starts around $85,000 and shares a platform with the F-150, but it's still a pavement cruiser at heart. A Bronco-based Lincoln would be something else entirely.

The segment is crowded but the margins are enormous. Mercedes sells G-Classes for $150,000 and up, with AMG variants pushing past $200,000, and the order books stay full. Land Rover's Defender starts around $60,000 but climbs past $100,000 once you start ticking boxes. Jeep's Grand Wagoneer starts at $90,000 and competes directly in this space, proving there's room for an American luxury brand to play. Lincoln would slot in just below the Wagoneer on price while offering the Bronco's off-road credibility as standard.

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The timing is deliberate. The Bronco revival in 2021 proved that buyers will queue for months to get a rugged lifestyle SUV that doesn't feel like a compromise. Ford sold every Bronco it could build and the waiting lists stretched into years. Lincoln could borrow that demand, wrap it in leather and adaptive dampers, and charge a premium without needing to justify the engineering spend from scratch. The hard work is already done.

Lincoln's real problem is brand credibility in this segment. The G-Class has been a status symbol since before most buyers were born. The Defender carries decades of expedition pedigree, however questionable that pedigree might be in a Chelsea tractor context. Lincoln's reputation is for quiet, soft, American luxury, not for rock-crawling or appearing unannounced at Courchevel. Building the thing is one challenge. Convincing people to buy it is another.

The pricing would help. At $75,000 to $90,000, a Lincoln off-roader would cost half what a G-Class does and still deliver body-on-frame construction, advanced terrain management, and enough luxury to justify the badge. It would compete with the Wagoneer on substance and undercut the Europeans on price. Whether buyers will accept Lincoln in this role depends entirely on execution.

Ford has form here. Cadillac has used shared GM truck platforms to sell the Escalade for years, turning a Tahoe into a $90,000 status symbol through sheer force of marketing and trim. Lexus does the same with the LX, which shares bones with the Land Cruiser and charges accordingly. The formula works if the execution is right and the brand can carry it off.

Lincoln has been repositioning itself toward quieter luxury and a distinct design language under Ford's direction, moving away from trying to out-German the Germans. A rugged SUV would be a departure from that strategy, or possibly an extension of it if Lincoln can make the case that American luxury includes genuine capability instead of just pretending to. The Bronco platform gives them the tools. What they do with it will show whether Lincoln understands the assignment.

The G-Class starts at $150,000 and climbs past $200,000 for the AMG versions, and people keep buying them.