The year 2024 is pretty much done and boy has it been an eventful one! Conflicts and wars are not the topic of this blog, but just looking at the car world, few of us would have thought so much would happen during the coming 12 months when we sipped our New Year’s champagne a year ago. Perhaps most notably, at the time it very much seemed we were set on pushing on with the electrification phantasy and that as a consequence, large-volume combustion engines were very much a thing of the past.

Well, just as little as Max Verstappen won his fourth world championship title without any opposition, that didn’t happen. What did happen though, is that the threat to Western automakers from China became very real, and will certainly continue to be so in 2025 – tariffs or not. What else can we expect? Well, taking the first letter of the coming 12 months and finding a word starting with the same letter on a car related topic, here’s what I think. If the past is any indication it won’t be much more than a somewhat qualified guess, meaning 2025 will be another year full of surprises!

January: it wasn’t long ago that Jaguar announced its complete rebranding with a marketing campaign that made everyone in the car world and lots of people outside of it shake their heads. I wrote about it back in November, in a post you can read here, and basically argued that if Jaguar was a healthy company to start with, it wasn’t a branding campaign that would break it. The problem is of course that it isn’t. A week after the post, Jaguar presented the first concept car for its all electric future, which surprised everyone again, given it’s most prominent feature was a long hood, which of course you don’t need for an EV. Anyway, the new line-up is set to hit the market in 2026. I’ll stick my neck out and say that won’t happen, and that Jaguar may not be around 12 months from now.

February: Just as everyone was writing off the large combustion engine as a concept, Ferrari presented the 12 Cilindri, its splendid new GT featuring a derivative of the 812 Superfast’s naturally aspirated, 6.5 litre V12, here putting out more than 800 hp, without any turbo-chargers or hybrid solution. Long live Maranello and contrary to what was the common belief a year ago, I still believe the rumors around the V8 and V12’s imminent death are largely overdone!

March: the new F1 season kicks off in Australia on March 16 2025, and Max Verstappen will of course have his mind set on his fifth world championship driving title. Will he succeed? That’s of course impossible to say but the competition looks fiercer than in many years with Norris and Piastri at McLaren, Leclerc and eight-time world champion Lews Hamilton at Ferrari, and Russell (more than Leeson) at Mercedes. I’ll stick my neck out (again) and say that this becomes a bit too much for Max, and that Lando Norris and McLaren will be world champions in 2025.

April: the month of April is often characterized by what we call April weather, meaning quick changes between sun and rain – a bit like a modern hybrid switches quickly between electricity and petrol or diesel. And whereas new sales of EV’s continue to be dismal, growing by only 8% in Europe in the first half of 2024, according to stats from The Economist, hybrid sales grew by over 50% over the same period. That’s of course what I’ve long argued on this blog, i.e. that if we don’t want everyone to park two cars in their garage, then a hybrid is a much wiser solution than an EV for most people. That’s therefore a trend I very much expect to continue!

May: think how much richer the car world has become through the various media channels we now have at our disposal! There’s of course the private Youtubers as well as the more official Youtube channels of leading car magazines such as Evo, but lately, I’ve even discovered some really nerdy car podcasts that are highly enjoyable – none more so than Chris Harris’ The Car Podcast. Together with some of his blokes, Chris will hear answer some life-critical questions, such as which car to buy for a budget of 30.000 if you want it to work both as a family car and on track. Essential stuff with a healthy touch of British humour!

June: I really don’t set out to pick on Japan, but somehow it seems I still do every year, quite simply because we don’t see anything exciting coming out of the land of the rising sun anymore. Sure, Toyota are doing really well by sticking to their hybrid technology, but what about the others? I heard an interview with ex-Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn the other week, talking about how insignificant Nissan has become, but you could say the same about Honda. Or Mazda. They all lose market share, and nothing exciting is on the horizon. Will that change in 2025? Don’t think so.

July: what I’m pretty certain won’t change neither in 2025, nor in the years therafter, is the steering wheel. We won’t convert to joysticks, yolks or anything else. And with the exception of Tesla, all other car brands will retain the good old stick as turn signal, quite simply because it’s vastly better than two buttons on the wheel. And we all know Tesla knows so as well, but hey, anything’s good for cutting a few dollars…

August: Renault did really well when they decided to resurrect the classic Alpine brand, and the A110 coupé has received a lot of praise as one of the most fun cars to drive out there. Unfortunately, the market for two-seaters with practically no luggage space is limited, even at the A110’s quite modest price point, so it was obvious that Renault would need to do more if they wanted to keep the Alpine brand. And of course, they couldn’t resist doing so by promising to launch a range of EV’s over the coming years. Given ambitions for sold cars are modest, they may well make it.

September: next year will mark the 15-year anniversary of the Swedish brand Saab’s disappearance, which many of us regret to this day. But actually, the traditional Saabs most of us regret are far older than that. I saw a first-gen Saab 900 Aero the other day, and it was my 22-year old son, not me, who said “that’s a cool car”. It is, and a practical one at that. I know, because my father had one, and my wife and I also had a wonderful 9-3 convertible around 20 years ago. Unfortunately the engineers at Saab were always better than the marketing people, which is what ultimately led to the brand’s demise. Saab will certainly not be reborn in 2025!

October: with the general insecurity surrounding the car world, it’s not fully clear what will happen to our dear oldltimers. I don’t doubt for a second that the real fanatics dream of the day when these polluting, terrible old things will all be forbidden, but I think that will remain a dream. Oldtimers are often owned by people with large wallets who tend to be large taxpayers as well, that the state doesn’t want to rub the wrong way. Oldtimers will be with us for many years to come, and I expect their secondary values to continue their upward path!

November: Nio is one of the new Chinese EV brands we may have to get used to, and it’s about as remarkable as any of the others, i.e. not at all. Were it not for the fact that it has one more trick up its sleeve than the others, as next to charging it normally, it’s also been built for a so called battery swap. That means driving to a battery swapping station where in five minutes, your whole battery pack is swapped against a new one. What a brilliant idea! Now we don’t only need to build traditional charging stations around Europe, but also plenty of battery swapping stations, where in addition, a number of fully charged battery packages need to be kept. And this only for Nio, since as of now, no other brand is equipped with this technology. Seriously – who comes up with these ideas? This one will not be long-lived, and thank God for that.

December: to round it off, dodici means 12 in Italian, and I can’t really get over the Ferrari 12 cilindri, and the fact that they really did it – they built another coupé with a naturally aspirated V12. And then some journalists took it to a track and told us it was more a GT than a true track car, as if someone really cares. The point is that it exists, and that Ferrari went against everything they were told, for the love of the car. And for that, we love them dearly!