Table of contents for December 31, 2025 in Autocar

Citroën could replace the C1 with a new sub-£13k urban EV if EU law makers sign off the new ‘E-car’ category for small cars – and it would have the spirit, but not the look, of the 2CV. The E-car category is a proposed framework to ease the financial pressures on making small, affordable cars by loosening some of the restrictions they must adhere to. The new category is under consideration by the European Commission in response to complaints from car makers about the unviability of building true entry-level models. The move is viewed as a crucial step towards a renaissance for cheap, small cars in Europe – a class that has shrunk dramatically in recent years as car makers exited this most unprofitable of segments. “The E-car rules are…

Take a look at the number of car brands in the UK right now and you would be forgiven for not knowing them all. New entrants include Jaecoo, Leapmotor and Chery – and they caused a right ruckus in 2025, stealing market share from some established players. The Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders forecast that the UK’s new car market this year would grow by 3% to 2.012 million, which would mean sales breaking through the two million mark for the first time since pre-Covid 2019. After a strong November (the latest figures available), the tally is at 1.8 million. So let’s dig into the figures – the percentages shown here are UK market share – to see who will be happy with their 2025 and who will be…

SPECIAL FEATURE EVERY NEW CAR ARRIVING IN 2026 It’s your 15-page guide to more than 150 models making their debut next year, including city cars, limos, hot hatches, 4x4s and sports cars ROAD TEST AUDI Q3 Stakes are high for this big-seller. Is the all-new version up to the job? INTERVIEW SKY SPORTS’ MAN IN THE PIT LANE Ted Kravitz tells us what really goes on behind the scenes in Formula 1 EVERY WEEK OUR CARS SKODA ELROQ We start the year with a love story: our man fell for this car, big time. But why? His final report reveals all WHY I LOVE… CAR ADVERTS Can these sales and marketing tools actually be high art? Better believe it, says Sophia Grace…

The new Volkswagen ID Polo drives like a Volkswagen. If you haven’t been paying attention to all things Wolfsburg in recent years, that might seem a curious statement to make. It looks like a Volkswagen and it carries a well-known Volkswagen name, so was there any doubt that it would drive like one? Yes, actually, there was. The first wave of Volkswagen’s bespoke electric ID models had many merits but didn’t necessarily look or feel much like you would expect a Volkswagen to. So this entry into the circa-£22,000 affordable EV market is essentially the start of a reset of the look and identity of the German brand’s EVs. Except the development of the ID Polo’s underpinnings have – whisper it – been led by Cupra. The ID Polo is…

THIS MAY BE Blighty, but the recently arrived Leapmotor brand already knows that as well as meeting the Skodas of this world in this important battleground, much of the tussle will be with other Chinese brands, like MG and BYD. Leapmotor’s case for easy recognition is good. This may be a Chinese brand barely 10 years old, but nowadays it’s part of the Western Stellantis empire. For now its task is to help doubtful British drivers understand that Leapmotor has secure roots, including a ready-made dealer and distribution network – an almost unique dependability among the new arrivals. Leapmotor UK’s managing director, Damien Dally, puts it succinctly: “For every Hyundai, there’s a Daewoo.” The B10 offer is simple. This is a 4.5m-long, modern-conventional electric SUV, very big for a B-class…

FORMULA 1 Two points: that’s how close Max Verstappen came to equalling Michael Schumacher’s feat of winning five consecutive Formula 1 world championships, despite having fallen more than 100 points behind in the summer. Instead, 26-year-old Lando Norris did just enough to become Britain’s 11th F1 king and McLaren’s first since Lewis Hamilton in 2008. A tactical and cool-headed third place in the Abu Dhabi finale sealed the deal as Red Bull’s man charged to his eighth win of the season – one more than both Norris and his team-mate Oscar Piastri – and third in as many weeks. In the MCL39, Norris had the fastest F1 car of the season, as highlighted by how comfortably McLaren cantered to a second consecutive constructors’ crown. But still there was nothing easy…

“Over the first few hundred miles, the Q6 E-tron has impressed” WHY WE’RE RUNNING IT Do you need all the bells and whistles to create a good premium commuter? Go for a walk on any given day and count the number of Range Rovers, Defenders and SUVs from Audi, BMW, Mercedes-Benz and Porsche you see. Premium SUVs are a growing presence on our roads as more people pay to have the very best cars their money will buy – and manufacturers are alive to this, pumping out more and more luxurious models. But how ‘cheap’ can you go to access this lifestyle while ensuring your selection is future-proof? Our latest long-termer might just provide the answer. As standard, the Audi Q6 E-tron starts from a relatively low £60,515 (yes, ‘relatively’…

GTI, ST, Type R, GR: just some of the hallowed G names that crop up in any discussion about hot hatch greats of the modern era, and deservedly so. But there’s one oft-overlooked contender that could have them all licked as a second-hand performance hero for daily use, offering immense charm and dazzling dynamics for surprisingly little outlay – but only if you get in before it’s a full-blown classic. Renault created the Clio Williams as a rallying homologation special in 1993, but it proved so popular that it ended up in series production – and its success gave Renault the confidence to follow it up with hot versions of the Mk2 and Mk3 Clio, which stayed true to the philosophy of their simple, joyful forebear. In 2012 came the…

Chris Smith bought his first Lotus, an Elise S, in 1996, when he was 23. “It was my only car and people said I was crazy,” he recalls. “But every journey was great fun. I had it for seven years.” He’d owned a BMW 3 Series before and it was another German car that subsequently replaced the Lotus. “I bought a Porsche Cayman,” he says. “It was a great car but it was big and too comfortable and lacked the Lotus magic.” So back to Lotus he went, this time buying a 2010 Elise S3: “It had the 1.6-litre Toyota engine. You really had to wring its neck and keep it above 4000rpm. It was great fun.” Eventually, Chris sold it and some years later bought an Esprit Turbo. Then,…

Meet Peugeot’s CEO Alain Favey has a bold plan to put driving dynamics and GTis back at the heart of the brand’s positioning, as he tells Felix Page. Neue Klasse BMW rated BMW’s most important car in decades – reviewed on road and track by Matt Prior. He talks drivetrains, a lack of buttons and that face. Dacia Bigster vs the beach We put the Dacia Duster’s hybrid-powered big brother to the test on a beach in Denmark. Is it clever enough to plough on through? autocar.co.uk…

“The strategic partnership with Renault Group marks an important step for Ford” Ford has reached a landmark partnership with Renault and will launch at least two new “affordable” cars based on the French firm’s Ampr EV platform – including a Fiesta successor. The first of these new EVs will arrive in early 2028 and is expected to be a successor to Ford’s hugely popular supermini, closely related to the Renault 5 and built alongside it at the ElectriCity complex in Douai, France. The second EV is expected to be a small crossover derived from the Renault 4 and could sit alongside the Puma Gen-E, but no timeframes or specific details for this car have yet been given. Unlike the Nissan Micra, which is effectively a rebadged 5, Ford’s small EVs…

KIA HAS REVEALED the second-generation Seltos – and the big-selling SUV is planned to be sold in the UK and mainland Europe for the first time. The new Seltos is positioned as an “expressive” and “lifestyle” alternative to the Sportage, which it will sit beneath. The Volkswagen T-Roc rival will be sold with either a 147bhp 2.0-litre petrol or a 1.6-litre turbo petrol with 178bhp or 192bhp. Priced at around £30,000, it is expected to be launched in the UK in the middle of 2026. A hybrid, likely to use the smaller Niro’s 139bhp set-up, will arrive after. The first-generation Seltos made its debut in 2019 and is one of Kia’s best-sellers globally, especially in Mexico and India. It was not sold in Europe because it failed to meet EU…

I’ve just about assimilated the motoring news from the Autumn Budget and have to admire the chancellor’s disingenuous comment hinting that VED is spent on roads as a justification for yet another tax on motoring. As a plug-in hybrid driver, I’m not exactly delighted to find that my meagre ‘old’ pension is to be stretched even more by being obliged to pay eVED on my mileage. It appears that I shall also be paying VAT and fuel duty on the petrol I use – so this is effectively double taxation. To add insult to injury, eVED will apply to all of my mileage, even if I drive my car on a track, on private property or abroad. Just to complicate matters further, the proposed method of collection of this tax…

With the Fiesta culled and Renault surely being satisfied by the success of the electro-revived 5, one wonders if the venerable Clio suddenly finds itself on thin ice. Renault insists not. “Clio is Renault,” intoned executives at the launch of the new sixth-generation version in Portugal. Then again, in many European markets Fiesta was Ford, until it abruptly wasn’t. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. For now there is a new Clio. It will go on sale in mainland Europe next year but arrive here only in 2027. Renault puts this unusual delay squarely on the UK government and its inconsistent communications concerning its ZEV mandate. As for the car itself, the design has been overhauled, which is to say it has been wrenched in an angrier direction from…

Chinese marque Chery – self-proclaimed maker of ‘happy cars’ – has thus far brought us a model range populated entirely by SUVs. So now for more of the same: the most wonderful Tiggo of them all, the range-topping Tiggo 9. Spoiler alert: it’s neither bouncy nor especially fun, fun, fun, fun, fun, but if you want a cost-effective route into a super-practical plug-in hybrid, don’t overlook it on those counts. Only the uppermost trim level will be offered to UK customers, so it’s all massaging ‘eco leather’ seats, 20in alloys, 14-speaker stereo and laminated side windows. At 4.8m long and 1.74m tall, it’s just a little smaller than the Hyundai Santa Fe but bigger than the Peugeot 5008. It has the heft of a flagship, no doubt, if perhaps not…

Ever since the car industry started slowly pivoting towards electric cars, it hasn’t felt like the European manufacturers have really steered the ship. They’ve made plenty of good cars that have appealed on more traditional grounds such as vehicle dynamics and interior quality and ambience, but the big pushes on range and lean manufacturing have come from Tesla, and advances in battery tech from China and South Korea. Meanwhile, solid-state batteries have been the technology of the near future for an awfully long time and hydrogen is turning out to be a dud for use in passenger cars. Now here’s Mercedes-Benz with one of the longest-range electric cars on sale in the UK – and it’s not the brand’s top-dollar technology flagship but the entry-level saloon. The Mercedes-Benz CLA achieves…

I wonder if Ford would have liked to build this car 10 years ago. Back then it was planning to return to Le Mans, given it was approaching 50 years since the GT40 had won there, and senior Ford bods wanted to do that with a Mustang. It was the swankiest car they made and they thought it would be good to see it racing: win on (Saturday and) Sunday, sell on Monday. But the more Ford’s engineers looked into it, the more they thought they couldn’t make it competitive. The Mustang would be a big car for endurance racing’s GTE category, and while various ‘Balance of Performance’ allowances would be made for that, giving it more power than some rivals, there would be a limit to how fast they could…

THE HYPERCAR HOLY TRINITY: P1 vs 918 vs LAFERRARI Perhaps the defining automotive rivalry of the 21st century came in 2013 with the arrival of a ‘Holy Trinity’ of hybrid hypercars – the Ferrari LaFerrari, McLaren P1 and Porsche 918 Spyder – when three of the world’s greatest manufacturers went head to head to head. All three machines bolstered their ICE powertrains with at-the-time radical hybrids, pioneering the now ubiquitous tech. That made them simultaneously flagships and visions of the future. Indeed, current hypercars still draw from their developments. More than a decade on, the debate surrounding the three cars is as divisive as ever. It will take three seriously special cars for another rivalry to come close to matching this rarefied one. JAMES HUNT vs NIKI LAUDA Rarely has…

MILEAGE 2141 WHY WE’RE RUNNING IT To see if BYD’s value-focused newcomer can dislodge Europe’s small car elite As winter wraps its chilly hands around the UK, the fall in temperatures is bad news for electric cars like the BYD Dolphin Surf, which use lithium ion batteries that are prone to a drop in efficiency during these colder months. Tests by both Autocar and sibling publication What Car? have found that an EV’s range can fall by as much as 20% in colder weather but, so far, the Dolphin Surf has remained impressively resilient. I’m doing my best to mitigate the loss of range, including stubbornly refusing to switch on the climate control, no matter how low the mercury drops, and shifting into Eco mode on shorter journeys. An unwanted…

AN OWNER’S VIEW LUCY CHEN “I bought my 2014 Clio RS 200 because I realised that it wasn’t much more expensive to buy than an ordinary Clio and it delivers fantastic speed and stability. It’s properly quick and handles twisty roads brilliantly. However, the electronic aspects are frustrating. The gearbox is the car’s weak point: it’s clumsy in traffic and often feels too slow to react when you need a quick downshift. The interior quality is average. It’s a great car, but only if you don’t expect too much from it.” BUYER BEWARE… ■ ENGINE Throttle bodies and coil packs have both been known to go, but neither is a particularly big or expensive replacement job. ■ GEARBOX On your test drive, check for crunching between gears, a clicking or…

“The thrust doesn’t ease. At 150mph, the car is absolutely planted on the test track” Jaguar’s reinvention as an electric luxury brand will kick off next year with the arrival of the production version of its radical new GT – and Autocar has had a first taste of this era-defining EV’s incredible potential. The new coupé is based on the bold Type 00 Concept revealed last year and is nearing the end of an extensive testing process. We were given a high-speed ride in the prototype for our first experience of the new tri-motor set-up that offers in excess of 1000bhp. INSIDE THE JAGUAR GT PROTOTYPE The extraordinary invitation arrived without warning. A few days previously, the car world’s concentration had been on the departure of JLR design chief Gerry…

NOISE, VIBRATION AND harshness (NVH) are three of the most important words in the engineering of new cars. They describe exactly that: noise and vibration generated from hundreds of sources, from the texture and undulation of the road surface to the entire drivetrain, tyres, brakes and structure of the car itself. Often it may not be activity from the source that the car’s occupant notices directly but rather the result it has on another part of the car, such as a body panel that resonates, perhaps to some harmonic disturbance elsewhere. Over the years, engineers have done everything in their power to overcome NVH – from simply stuffing cars with heavy sound deadening and underlay in the pre-computer era to the introduction of complex equipment for measuring vibration and sound…

“YOU CANNOT REPLACE scale.” That comment from Ford of Europe head Jim Baumbick lies at the heart of Ford’s new partnership with Renault, which will build two new small cars for the US firm, one a Fiesta replacement (see News, p8). In Europe, Ford is now a relative minnow, with 3.4% of the passenger car market. The Volkswagen Group has 28% and Stellantis 15%. Then you’ve got China. “The competitive threat with the Chinese in Europe is significant,” said Baumbick. Ford in recent years fell into a doom loop. It wasn’t making money on volume models like the Fiesta, Focus and Mondeo so it axed them. But fewer cars pushes up production costs per unit. But Ford stuck at it. “We tried to do it alone for many years,” said…

IN DEFENCE OF PHEVs I read your final long-term report on the Volkswagen Golf GTE (26 November) with amusement. Will Rimell and Kris Culmer are not target buyers for this amazing car. I have off-road parking and a 13A charger and am lucky enough to have installed 4kW solar back when the government was giving people great returns on investment. I’m now in my seventh year of GTE ownership; I’ve now owned a Mk8 Golf GTE for a year, with a pretty average annual mileage of 9000. We live five miles from the nearest town and five miles from the coast in rural Cornwall, and the Golf GTE gives us some pretty remarkable economy. The best between fills of the rather measly tank is 2600 miles – that’s 371mpg. Mostly…

Ferrari tends not to do ‘facelifts’. Updated cars usually get an entirely new name – such as with the 360 and the F430, or the F12 and the 812. But they do tend to be pretty big updates that incorporate some major technical changes. This brings us to the new Amalfi, which we can all see is the facelifted version of the Roma, Ferrari’s front-engined V8 sports GT that’s a distant descendant of the California and has been the entry point to the Ferrari range since 2020. Visually, there’s a clear evolution from the sinuous style of the Roma and towards the more angular 12Cilindri but, as we’ll see, the mechanical updates are relatively minor. Then again, the ‘old’ Roma saw off the then brand-new Aston Martin Vantage in both…

A TOYOTA SHOULD slip into your life almost unnoticed; be competent but almost boringly so. That commonly held view is something the company has been trying to change in recent years, with varying degrees of success. The trouble is, lots of people quite like their boring Toyotas, so when the bZ4X came along with its daring design, but also various niggles, annoyances and general uncompetitiveness, many were less than impressed. So what looks like a nip and tuck on the surface for Toyota’s first bespoke EV has actually been anything but. The interior has been quite obviously revamped, gaining a 14in infotainment touchscreen. It’s a big improvement from before, being fast, intuitive and clear, with a smattering of controls around the gear selector and two expensive feeling knobs for the…

FORD SWEEPSTAKES The original Ford racing car, named after the Sweepstakes race at Grosse Pointe Race Track, in which Henry Ford beat a single rival in 1901. His only motor race made him famous enough to get the financial backing to start Ford Motor Company in 1903. FORD GT40 The original Ford Le Mans car first raced in 1964. It took a while to become successful but eventually won the Le Mans 24 Hours four consecutive times from 1966 to 1969. More than 100 road cars were made – and more replicas and continuations still. FORD RS200 More than 200 road cars were supposed to be built for a car to comply with Group B rallying regulations. The mid-engined, fourwheel-drive RS200 was designed for the job. But Group B was…

MILEAGE 5743 WHY WE’RE RUNNING IT Is this new luxury EV as compelling as its spec sheet and unique look suggest? Keys. Remember them? Once upon a time, getting into a car involved sticking a sculpted bit of metal into a slot and turning it. Simpler times, really. Still, this is 2025 and the future is here, which means cars that are unlocked using either a slice of plastic or an app on your phone. Is either an improvement? I’m not sure, although digital keys are good for those of us who write this section of the mag. In the old days, you could run a car for months without ever mentioning the bit of metal that unlocked it. Yet as regular readers will know, editor Mark Tisshaw has already…

PORSCHE 718 CAYMAN 2.0 PDK 2017, 8000 miles, £38,995 The 296bhp 2.0-litre boxer that powers this Cayman may not be as sonorous or powerful as the Toyota V6 in the Lotus Evora (left). But for driving thrills, the 718 Cayman is a tough act to beat – and it looks great in Miami Blue. FORD FOCUS 2.0 ECOBLUE ST 2020, 45,000 miles, £16,070 A diesel Focus ST wagon? It’s actually a great all-rounder. The 2.0-litre engine makes 187bhp and 295lb ft of torque, helping it to 60mph in a reasonable 7.7sec. Plus it will do up to 67mpg and has all the space and kit any modern family car needs. VOLKSWAGEN SCIROCCO 2.0 TDI BLUEMOTION TECH R-LINE 2015, 62,000 miles, £11,000 Matt Prior’s A2 (left) is a very parsimonious hatch,…