r/autoexpressuk

Say hello to the BMW iX4. Although, looking from the front, you might feel like you know it already. It’s a more style-conscious sibling to the BMW iX3, our 2026 Premium Electric Car of the Year, which it’ll be built alongside at BMW’s Debrecen, Hungary factory. 

Although nothing seems to have been done to the front, the iX4 is a visual departure from the iX3 from the B-pillar rearwards. It gets a sloping roofline typical of previous cars we’ve seen from BMW that it describes as ‘Sports Activity Coupes’.

From a technical standpoint, there aren’t any surprises. Aside from not bothering with an equivalent of the rear-wheel drive iX3 40, the iX4’s powertrain line-up mirrors that of its marginally more practical counterpart. 

Read more: https://www.autoexpress.co.uk/bmw/368277/all-new-bmw-ix4-arrives-514-mile-range-and-604bhp

Verdict: 4.5 stars

The Polestar 5 is a brilliant GT car, and a fitting flagship for the brand. It’s fast, fun and luxuriously appointed, with bags of head and legroom no matter where you’re sitting. If you can, we’d suggest upgrading to the Performance model; not for the added straight-line speed, but the brilliant MagneRide adaptive dampers, which transform the car’s ride and handling. In this guise, the 5 is a true Porsche Taycan troubler.

Read the full review: https://www.autoexpress.co.uk/polestar/5/360472/polestar-5-review

The Renault Espace could be about to receive the same retro-inspired rebirth as the R5, R4 and Twingo, with the new E-Space concept putting a contemporary spin on the French firm’s pioneering people-carrier from the eighties.

Renault says the striking new E-Space concept – designed to honour the original Espace that was launched in 1984 – reflects its ambition to continue creating ‘cars for living’, or ‘voitures à vivre’ in French. It’s been part of the brand’s heritage stretching all the way back to the Renault 16, and evidently it’s an ethos that lives on today.

As with the revolutionary first-generation Espace, the E-Space concept is a ‘monovolume’ design, meaning it’s a ‘one-box’ people carrier with its stubby wedge-shaped nose that flows into a huge cockpit/glasshouse. This shape prioritises functionality and maximises interior space, but maintains a surprisingly aerodynamic profile. 

Read more: https://www.autoexpress.co.uk/news/370586/new-renault-e-space-concept-reimagines-revolutionary-espace-mpv

There’s a lot to like about the Renault Twingo. It’s super-stylish, fun to drive and very affordable, and it’s about to get more appealing than ever. 

Renault has announced a new ‘Twingobay’ panoramic roof for the car, with a 0.7m² surface area and rounded edges. The unusual, almost egg-shaped panel enhances rather than detracts from the Twingo’s nineties-inspired styling, we reckon.

It isn’t just a plain chunk of glass, either: around the edges it features the ‘Twingo graphic alphabet’, with elements including an N in the shape of the car’s headlight, while G is represented by a geolocation-style symbol. “This exclusive detail brings to mind the playful, offbeat world of Twingo, while creating a distinctive visual signature,” Renault says.

The multi-layer roof is intended to work well across all seasons without the need for a space-sapping blind, blocking out 99.9 per cent of UV rays on sunnier days while keeping heat in when it’s cooler outside. 

Read more: https://www.autoexpress.co.uk/renault/twingo/370591/renault-twingo-gains-unusual-twingobay-panoramic-roof

Failure is not an option. Two years after Jaguar broke the internet with its derided ‘Copy Nothing’ relaunch video and subsequent Type 00 concept, here is the first production car of the company’s all-new electric era.

The Type 01 is a four-door Gran Turismo, a throwback to a romantic past when wealthy motorists crossed continents in big, high-performance petrol coupés. But who buys a big coupé these days, and – more pointedly – who buys a new Jaguar?

No one since early 2025, when Jaguar euthanised its range and burned down its house. The bold ambition is to rebuild it as the fourth luxury stable in JLR’s house of brands, alongside Range Rover, Defender and – a leap this – Discovery. And that means hugely “elevated” prices, to use Jaguar’s euphemism, with the Type 01 likely to cost from around £120,000.

Read more: https://www.autoexpress.co.uk/jaguar/gt/365043/new-jaguar-type-01-revealed-last-british-brands-luxury-ev-future-begins-now

I once made the mistake of buying and running a Mercedes S-Class. It felt weirdly underwhelming; more like a barge than a car. Not that I’m the only paying customer falling out of love with luxury saloons. Lately, they’ve been selling so atrociously that their registration figures are in danger of becoming statistically irrelevant.

In the UK over the past decade, sales of such cars have more than halved. In 2025, fewer than three buyers per day bought a BMW i7 – despite it being by far the number-one seller in the sector. Its S-Class arch-rival couldn’t even find two paying customers daily. At best, each luxury saloon only sells in the hundreds per year – even when they’re the ‘most popular’ models in their elite (allegedly) sector.

All this means that of the two million-plus new cars sold in the UK last year, 99.8 per cent of them were NOT luxury saloons. In that sense, the business case for designing, building and trying to sell such high-priced vehicles that sit very much on the fringe has to be seriously questioned in the mid-2020s. The evidence clearly shows that worryingly few buyers want them. My guess is that as times, trends and tastes change, people don’t really want to be seen in them.

Why should we care? Because UK PLC, British companies such as Bentley and Rolls-Royce and plenty of Brit workers have long had roles to play in this niche sector that was always quite small, but has shrunk further still over the past decade.

Now countless Jag workers are joining in as they start playing the tricky luxury saloon game for the first time. Will the “reimagined” (its word) Coventry firm be able to grow this tiny market next year and beyond, or will it be content merely stealing a few sales (not that there are many to steal) from the German and British firms who’ve occupied this highly specialised field for countless decades? None of us on the outside (or, I suspect, on the inside at Jaguar HQ or at its franchised dealer network) know for sure, because this is such new, unknown territory for the firm and its retailers seeking younger, wealthier, saloon car-loving buyers who are happy to wear Jag badges.

As I exclusively revealed in Auto Express about 14 years ago, Rolls-Royce – even back then – was quietly thinking of doing the unthinkable by gently moving away from increasingly out-of-fashion saloons and into more popular, on-trend SUVs. And that is exactly what it did. The same goes for Bentley.

The new Jaguar Type 01 four-door GT (née saloon) will be revealed this week, and deliveries to customers paying circa-£125,000 will begin in 2027. The maker has plans for more models in due course – SUVs included – but the proposed launch rollout is an interesting one. I wish the company, its one-model (for now) range and its workers luck in 2027. They’re going to need a lot of it.

https://www.autoexpress.co.uk/opinion/370579/its-hard-see-how-jaguar-type-01-will-be-huge-success

By Mike Rutherford

*Auto Express Exclusive Image used above is a digital render based on disguised prototypes of the Type 01 that our editors have seen and ridden in . The final production car's reveal takes place in New York on October 6.