Category Archives: Opinion

Opinion

Will cellphone funds make automotive park machines out of date?

Autocar analysis has discovered that 83% of motorists would like to make use of money or contactless fee machines in automotive parks over smartphone apps.

Feedback revealed that individuals don’t love having to obtain so many apps (there are greater than 30 throughout the UK), fear about on-line fraud and fear that the apps are too advanced.

Dennis Reed, director of marketing campaign group Silver Voices, known as the abandonment of pay-and-display machines “blatant ageism”. I’m with him.

I reckon there’s extra to individuals’s dissatisfaction with on-line fee than complexity or fraud, too. It’s not that we won’t use these items – it is that we do not need to. I feel that individuals have had sufficient of the mission creep of surveillance and knowledge gathering and that there is a concern not of fraud however of poor ways from parking suppliers.

Last yr, I wrote twice about my household’s parking travails. One relative drove into a carpark, tried to get the net fee to work, could not and acquired hit with a £100 high-quality for spending 5 minutes making an attempt to take action. Another paid for the unsuitable automotive park in his city on an app (there are two) so was fined. Both appealed efficiently.

All of that is administrated by numberplate-recognition cameras and a pc that prints and sends nasty letters to unsuspecting drivers, who then should undergo a worrying, time-consuming and unsure system of attraction. If both of these automotive parks had a fee machine, neither of those dramas would have occurred.

I’m not one for reminiscences. But within the outdated days, you paid your money, you bought a coupon to point out you’d rented your area and that was the top of it. The authorities is promising to ‘streamline’ the app system. It needs to be insisting there is a fee machine at each automotive park.

Opinion

Matt Prior: Not all vehicles have been higher “back in the day”

There’s an pleasant story which our sibling title Classic & Sports Car coated a couple of TVR Griffith, an MG RV8 and a Marcos Mantara.

Or not less than it’s a narrative that I used to be having fun with, proper as much as the purpose once I remembered that I had learn a bunch take a look at of these three vehicles (together with a Morgan Plus 8 and a Ginetta G33) once they have been new, which was 1993 however looks like about three weeks in the past. And sure, in fact I’ve bored a number of workplace colleagues about this.

Perhaps this will probably be no shock to you, however more and more I perceive what individuals older than me say about nonetheless feeling younger: there’s no considerable distinction between the nub of me now and the one from 30 years in the past, besides I rise up earlier, like extra cheeses and trim my nostril hair extra often. Otherwise, identical fool, totally different day. I nonetheless like Griffiths.

I point out this as a result of the automobile market of right now is kind of totally different from the one of many mid-Nineteen Nineties, and Autocar’s inbox is broadly evenly cut up between individuals who assume that trendy vehicles have gotten ever extra dismal and individuals who assume the world ever improves.

I suppose it has at all times been this fashion. I imply, these once-annoying millennials are actually bitching about having to handle zoomers. But electrification particularly has amplified the response and the noise round vehicles.

Largely, I’m of the considering that issues ever get higher. I feel there have been sure peaks within the mid-2010s that haven’t been equalled since; current misfiring driver help methods have made me need to burn extra vehicles than ever; and all the UK’s electrical energy salesmen mixed received’t persuade me that an electric car is the appropriate alternative for everyone.

Opinion

Why simulators are the way forward for engineering

I’m indebted to (and slightly envious of) my colleague Richard Lane for his current go to to the Ansible Motion simulator.

I’ve spent a very good period of time in simulators over the previous decade – greater than my colleagues, to the purpose that I’ve felt like I’m our sim correspondent.

They do have extra visible influence in individual than they do in photographs for you, pricey reader. If we drive an actual prototype automobile, there might be pictures of it on ice, in a desert or at a monitor, because it throws up snow or sand or is chucked sideways by a heroic check driver.

See a prototype automobile throughout simulated improvement and, it doesn’t matter what it’s doing or the place it just about exists, it would at all times appear like an enormous display and a few thick cables in a darkened room. Make that look thrilling in the event you can. I suppose it’s like every driving.

Driving or racing is enjoyable to do, and watching it’s good too. But digital driving? I like racing video games, however they’re an acquired style, much less thrilling than the actual factor, so watching any person else taking part in one should be much more acquired.

If precise racing is like consuming wine, watching any person race a simulator isn’t even like watching another person consuming wine. It’s like watching them faux to.

But again to business sims. Horiba MIRA, the check centre that till lately hosted our efficiency automobile street checks (inconveniently for us, they’re constructing a photo voltaic array on our dealing with monitor) has a brand new one.

It’s not from Ansible, reasonably VI-Grade, however the entire set-up, together with a much less superior supplementary sim, has nonetheless value it £4 million and incorporates the very useful capability to place an engine or drivetrain in a separate room and make it reply to actual human inputs.

Opinion

Do small automotive drivers have an unfair repute?

What do you suppose once you come throughout or drive up behind a newish small car? Something like a Kia Picanto, MG 3 or Suzuki Swift.

Do you suppose that there should go a sensible individual, as a result of compact automobiles are mild and uncomplicated and straightforward on consumables? That this driver needs to be fairly enlightened, assured inside themselves, to decide on one thing as sensible and normally very competent and refined but critically unassuming?

Do you credit score them for resisting the costly drip funds that might have led them to a extra glamorous but no higher badge on their driveway?

Do you look and suppose that there’s a cause why these client motoring consultants on the world’s longest-established automotive journal, Autocar, are so taken with automobiles like this?

Or do you look and suppose, like a kind of client motoring consultants from Autocar (me), ‘come on, Doris, get out of the way. I’m in an Audi/Mercedes/Tesla and I’ve obtained locations to go’?

Sigh. I’m sorry about this. I genuinely am. But yesterday I came across a small new automotive on a twin carriageway that exited a roundabout and stayed within the overtaking lane, exhibiting no intention to overhaul something, and thought much less kindly about it than I might have performed if it had been, say, a brand new German SUV – a automotive that I do know would both get its skates on and begin passing issues or pull over to the left. I assumed the town automotive doggedly wouldn’t, as certainly it didn’t.

I do know I’m not alone in considering issues like this. I commonly drive automobiles on each side of the dial and I do know you get extra affected person remedy from different highway customers in one thing swanky than you do in one thing small and low cost.

Do you drive a complicated firm automotive? The subsequent time you’re taking it for a service, ask for the most cost effective, smallest courtesy automotive the storage has to learn how it feels to be bullied relentlessly by individuals who assume issues about you.

Opinion

The brilliance of the Toyota GR Yaris and why ‘hooning’ is allowed

What I suspected was the case with the Toyota GR Yaris has turned out to be about proper. 

“It’s no wonder I’ve had correspondence from people with big car collections who drive a Yaris every day,” I wrote in 2021 after spending a number of months residing with one and discovering that it supplied a driving expertise so particular that it could please individuals who might afford reasonably greater than the £29,995 the new hatchback value.

And final month, Toyota offered me with some knowledge backing that up: 48% of GR Yaris homeowners personal one as an ‘additional car’, when the category common is just round 10%.

Many have a GR Yaris “next to a supercar”, mentioned a delighted chief engineer Naohiko Saito. “This is something we’ve never seen before.”

Given this, and that Toyota has bought 100% extra GRs than it had anticipated to by now, it’s little surprise that it has felt emboldened not solely to place the automobile by a facelift however to counsel that it’s going to make it a everlasting fixture within the vary – for so long as it’s nonetheless capable of promote it.

“This isn’t the end of development,” mentioned Saito on the occasion the place I drove a pre-production instance of the facelifted automobile.

“Smells and noise are something we don’t want to give up. We want to make sports cars for the next 100 years.”

By the tip of this decade, although, 80% of recent vehicles bought within the UK should be zero-emissions, and whereas it has solely a 1.6-litre engine, the GR Yaris isn’t a type of.

Still, I reside in hope of a protracted existence – and that Toyota resists the temptation to hike the value an excessive amount of, now that it is aware of the wherewithal of many patrons.

More excitable quotes, though much less glad ones, come from ABC News in Canberra. The Street Machine Summernats automobile occasion has come to city, and with it has come “moron tourism”, in keeping with Mark Richardson, Australian Capital Territory’s performing inspector of street policing.

Australia has some strict anti-hooning legal guidelines – hooning being the phrase for “any antisocial behaviour in a motor car”, in keeping with the authorities – however they don’t dissuade semi-organised burnout occasions.

Opinion

Matt Prior: why electrical SUVs will rewrite the off-road rulebook

I’m intrigued by James Attwood’s current drive of the Audi Q8 E-tron Edition Dakar.

It’s a automotive that directly could possibly be simply dismissed as an costly folly: only some will probably be just a few made, it prices some £20,000 greater than an everyday Q8 E-tron and Audi will cost you one other £8600 for a wrap that appears like its Dakar Rally raider, simply to make sure that you gained’t wish to be seen in it.

Yet on the similar time, it feels to me like a related, early and still-rare foray into electrical off-roading, which is a factor that someday must turn into not extraordinary.

And in the best way that, say, the multifaceted Hyundai Ioniq 5 N can change what we anticipate from efficiency vehicles, so an electrical 4×4 might redefine what we anticipate from off-roaders.

It gained’t simply try to copy what an internal-combustion 4×4 can do now however rewrite the e-book on it.

Jaguar, for instance, by no means pitched the I-Pace as an off-roader, but on its launch in 2018 it took us not solely to a race observe to pattern how effectively it might rotate into corners but in addition up stupidly steep gravel tracks, by way of riverbeds and extra.

The I-Pace has a little-publicised wade depth of 500mm, which individuals don’t routinely got down to problem.

But, in fact, not needing oxygen for a whole bunch of explosions each minute, the best electric car might theoretically wade as deep because it needed. Just pack scuba gear for the occupants.

There’s extra: as Attwood notes, the Edition Dakar has no extra underbody cladding than some other Q8 E-tron.

Partly that’s as a result of it’s not a severe rock-crawler but in addition partly as a result of EVs have already got heavy armour for his or her batteries and have fewer spinning or delicate ancillaries that want it.

Finally, and most significantly for going off street, there’s the ability supply. The manner an engine delivers its energy is basically ruled by the best way it’s designed.

For occasion, large journey or scrambling bikes have large-capacity, few-cylinder engines as a result of they make good quantities of torque but in addition as a result of the uneven, pulsing energy supply can assist a tyre discover higher traction than a smoother torque supply.

An EV can ship torque to wherever it needs, at any time when it needs, solely the way it needs.

Opinion

CES 2024: brief on automobiles, nonetheless one of many world’s largest automotive exhibits

Missing in motion at CES: the Tesla Cybertruck. You’d have thought the most recent mannequin from the agency that has accomplished probably the most to speed up the automotive trade’s tech transformation could be a shoe-in for the world’s main tech present, however no.

An early hearsay that the divisive electrical pick-up truck was a part of the fleet on Tesla’s underground Vegas Loop, which hyperlinks halls on the metropolis’s huge conference centre, have been rapidly scotched. Would it have even match into the tight tunnels anyway?

That Tesla itself wasn’t at CES wasn’t so shocking, given its patchy attendance at motor exhibits (Goodwood Festival of Speed however), however you’d have thought some enterprising automotive tech firm would have gotten maintain of a Cybertruck to make it a characteristic on their stand, on condition that deliveries have now began.

Love or hate it, you would not move it by. Perhaps the scrutiny from the world’s tech press was an excessive amount of to resist for Tesla as the corporate irons out early teething issues.

Also lacking from the fray this 12 months have been the US massive three of General Motors, Ford and Stellantis (which owns Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep and Ram).

Stellantis mentioned it had pulled out to save lots of prices incurred by the gruelling UAW union stand-off final 12 months, and it is possible the opposite two felt the identical.

Ford had been a daily attendee because it confirmed off an electrical Focus in 2011, and Chevrolet two years ago took the covers of its electric Silverado pick-up.

Honda and Kia each stepped in with unveilings of thought-provoking ideas, Volkswagen and Mercedes-Benz teased the new Golf and electrical G-Class respectively, whereas Turkish EV maker Togg confirmed a brand new saloon.

BMW is a CES common however dialled again its participation this 12 months, demonstrating smaller-scale tech advances, akin to augmented-reality glasses.

CES is undoubtedly now one of many world’s largest auto exhibits in an period when conventional shows of metallic are dwindling. But it wants extra of the tangible illustration of the long run envisaged by the tech-focused suppliers that flip up in nice numbers yearly, this 12 months being no exception.

Bosch, Hyundai Mobis, Magna, Marelli, Mobileye, Qualcomm and plenty of others did not disappoint, with early perception into what’s coming in automobiles 5 years’ time. But they want the producers to ramp up the thrill in tandem.

Opinion

Matt Prior: We will not ditch our automobiles till practice journey improves

It’s 4.15am and I’m in my kitchen ready for the kettle to boil whereas flicking between the Google Maps and Waze apps on my telephone.

I’ve to be at a lay-by in Teesdale between 9.30am and 10am in a automobile that’s fuelled sufficient for the day, and I want to select up a videographer from Leeds on the best way.

My telephone says Leeds is 1hr 30min from our vacation spot, so I ought to get to the videographer by 8am. And he’s 2hr 50min from my gaff close to Bicester, so I might go away virtually an hour later than now, at 5.10am.

But that – and also you’ll have recognized this as you learn it – could be a mistake. Because by the point I get to Leeds for 8am, there will likely be a great deal of folks attending to Leeds for 8am. So the kettle boils, I fill a mug and off I’m going.

Initially it seems like I’ll be daftly early: 7.20am. But I’ll need extra tea and a bun on the best way, and if I gas the automobile close to Leeds, it should final the day. My estimated arrival time creeps onwards.

After a relaxed gas cease, I arrive at 7.55am. Spot on.

The second part of the journey is extra predictable. We’re the one folks attempting to get to a lay-by in Teesdale by 10am, so site visitors is expectedly mild and we’re there by 9.35am.

It couldn’t be less complicated. Or might it? There are variables and choices to go round if it goes awry, which I learn about solely by expertise. Different leaving occasions give completely different outcomes. But a close to fixed, no less than, is how a lot it should value.

A number of weeks in the past, I took a practice to Birmingham. As with the automobile, I stood in my kitchen figuring out journey occasions. Being naive, I might have gone to the station and purchased a ticket.

Opinion

Which manufacturers are in finest form as ZEV mandate comes into impact?

The ZEV mandate, which dictates that 22% of every automotive maker’s gross sales within the UK should be electric cars, has now lastly come into impact – and a few are in much better form than others. 

Data from Automotive Services International (ASI) on 2023 new-car registrations to the top of October revealed which you could depend on one hand the standard makers which are already over the edge of compliance.

Every automotive offered above the 22% will entice a £15,000 fantastic, until a automotive maker defers the gross sales to a future 12 months.

Opinion

Our favorite automobiles of 2023: Peugeot 205 GTi Tolman Edition

Is ‘restomod fatigue’ a factor? I’m unsure, however whether it is, then I’ve definitely been affected by one thing prefer it over the previous yr or so.

The early exponents of this updating artwork have been pretty easy of their strategy, serving up a sharper driving expertise whereas retaining the donor automobile’s retro appears to be like and character.

Yet just lately the scene seems to have modified, the emphasis shifting to outlandish money-no-object initiatives that seemingly obliterate the unique machine’s character in pursuit of the coffee-run (ugh!) bragging rights of a well-heeled few.

However, the Tolman 205 GTi proved that it doesn’t must be this fashion.

For starters, it truly appears to be like just like the automobile it’s primarily based on, to the purpose that even eager lion lovers will most likely dismiss it as a inventory instance, albeit a fantastically saved one.

And whereas the period-perfect exterior and inside disguise some closely modded mechanicals, not one of the many modifications dilutes the quick French hatch’s core enchantment.

James Disdale driving Tolman Peugeot 205 GTi

If you’ve pushed a 205 beforehand, then a blast within the Tolman will convey joyful reminiscences, and in case you haven’t, then you definately’ll quickly perceive what the fuss was about.

Yes, it’s sooner than the outdated automobile (a bespoke 200bhp twin-cam 16-valve 1.9-litre motor sees to that) however the razor-sharp throttle response and traditional hot hatch big-engine-in-a-small-car vibe stay intact.

And whereas there’s a welcome injection of precision, management and braking energy, the Tolman handles with the identical old-school Gallic aptitude as the unique, its acrobatic agility, fluid journey and limitless throttle adjustability serving up engagement and leisure no matter pace or circumstance.