2025 is coming to an end and here in Europe, the real Christmas spirit is currently losing the fight against an area of high pressure giving lots of sunshine, but not much snow. That’s a shame, since a bit of the white stuff helps lighten up what is otherwise the darkest season of the year.
What lightened up December this year was thus not the snow, but rather what came out of Brussels earlier this week. Drumroll: the EU has eased the ban on combustion engines (ICE’s) from 2035. The talk is now not of a complete ban, but rather a 90% CO2 emission reduction target by then, a formulation that also leaves the door open for fuels considered emission-free, such as e-fuels. Whatever the percentage, the real news here is of course that at long last, manufacturers have managed to convince the geniuses in Brussels of the disastrous implications of their policies.
German chancellor Merz was especially happy, given the size of the German car industry…
Some things are more important being right about than others, and I would count this as being at the very top of my list. I’ve written for years that the cap won’t last, and even though it’s not entirely lifted, the EU has now left the door open to further amendments, and as sure as Santa has a big white beard, you can be of this only being the beginning.
Manufacturers were obviously thrilled at the news. I’ll let them be represented by Håkan Samuelsson, CEO of Volvo Cars, one of the brands that set out on a fully electrified fleet years ago and were adamant of this being the only future. Now Mr. Samuelsson sings a different tune. Apparently he’s discovered that “you cannot force people to buy something they don’t want”. A shame you don’t read this blog, dear Håkan, it would have saved Volvo a lot of money and you a lot of trouble!
Looking back at the most popular posts during the year, it seems the love of the wonderful Alfa Romeo GTV6 is still as strong. I wrote this post back in 2021, more than four years ago, and I’m obviously thrilled that so many of you still find it worthwhile. In the post, I said that you could find a good GTV6, i.e. the six-cylinder version, for around EUR 20.000. In hindsight it would have been a good time to do so, since the GTV’s are getting rarer by the day, and a good one is now close to double the price from four years ago.
As cool as ever, but increasingly expensive!
One of my most exciting drives this year was clearly the Porsche 991 Turbo S back in April, and the post on that was also highly popular. It turned out not to be the car I was looking for (and still am, by the way), but it’s no doubt a fabulous car and above all, a fantastic engine. Having said that, I personally still prefer the 997 over the 991, and I would certainly not mind having either in my garage. I guy next to me at a Christmas lunch this week has a garage consisting of a 911 (964) and a Landrover Discovery. A pretty ideal setup, were it not for the fact that the Disco spends a bit too much time in the repair shop. The 964? Not so much.
Beyond these two posts, it’s a pretty even mix of various topics that gets read more than average, which hopefully indicates that you like and appreciate the rather unplanned mix of stuff you find on this blog. With that said, suggestions are always welcome, so if you feel there’s too little or too much of anything, please don’t hesitate to say so in the comments.
So what does 2026 have in store for us? As mentioned in the last post, F1 is in for a major overhaul with more significant changes than at any time in the last 10 years. I’ll come back on this in a separate post before the start of the next season, but it actually bodes for even more excitement, which is great.
Don’t know about the looks, but a new M3 is always exciting!
In terms of “normal” cars, a new BMW M3 has been announced, or rather a new 3-series, of which the M3 will obviosusly be the main feature. There will certainly be both electric and hybrid, or perhaps even pure combustion engine versions, and let’s hope that the M3 turns out a bit smaller and above all, lighter than the current M5. There’s also rumours of Chevy Corvette SUV – yep, you read that right, but it’s not more than rumours at this point.
Other new cars include a replacement of the Audi TT, a new version of the discontinued BMW i8 (and here, a post on the previous version is coming soon), a smaller Mercedes G-Wagon, whatever that means, and of course, Ferrari’s first electric car, the Elettrica. It won’t look like the Purosangue but is said to be a four-seater, with a lot of the components developed internally at Ferrari. Apparently it won’t be silent either, but rather make electric noises. Grazie Ferrari, but I think I prefer the singing of a V12.
All in all, 2026 should be a decent car year, especially now that there’s also some hope for the future of the cars we love. I wish you all a happy holiday season, wherever you may be, and look forward to bringing you new stuff in 2026!
Hardly a day goes by without negative news from the car industry, especially the premium German brands. Talk is of falling sales, rising inventory and risk of bankruptcy. And a look at the car market tends to validate the concerns – gone are the days when a new Porsche 911 GT3 was worth more three months after delivery. The same goes for the Ferrari 296 and other models from previously infallible brands. This isn’t a completely new phenomenon, but rather one that started with the hybrid supercars a few years ago. the Ferrari SF90 provides a good example of a car that has only fallen in price since new, in spite of having more horsepower than any Ferrari before it.
Car pundits scratch their head, advancing various theories. Electrification is certainly one explanation, and one I’ve touched on here as well. The billions that went into producing EV’s that no one bought could certainly have been put to better use. Car Youtubers also advance the view that manufacturers have forgotten the enthusiasts, and again, Ferrari is mentioned as the prime example. Let me however present you with a far simpler theory, that I’ll develop further below: whether in supercars, sports cars or family hatchbacks, the world has moved beyond Peak Car, and except for what goes on in the market for the ultra wealthy, buyers don’t find the large piles of money new cars command worth it anymore, as they don’t see new models being fundamentally better than previous generations.
The new 5-series. Had someone told me it was Chinese, I would have believed them.
As an example from last week, I watched a German car Youtuber comparing BMW’s new 5-series station wagon in the top diesel version, the 540d, to the previous 540d from the G31 generation, the same generation as my 540i. The G31 was from 2021 and had more than 130.000 km on the clock but was fully loaded equipment-wise, and in immaculate condition. It was for sale at EUR 39.000, whereas the new car with less equipment cost far more than EUR 100.000. The question was whether the new car was worth the difference. The answer wasn’t clearcut.
On the positive side, the new car consumes about 10% less fuel than the previous version, thanks to a mild-hybrid system. It is said to drive slightly sharper and has a bigger infotainment screen (I’ll let you be the judge over whether that’s a positive or not). The list of negatives is unfortunately far longer. It starts with the bland body style, where the side is now completely flat, given it’s cheaper to press that way than with the more dynamic lines and shapes that characterized the G31. When you open the door, there’s no metal door sill with the M logo greeting you anymore. In fact, there’s no door sill at all. The plastics are of the cheapest type throughout, and both the seats themselves and the leather on them seem of lesser quality than on the previous model. Finally, the new car is down 17 hp on power, but weighs 200 kg more. You can thank the same mild-hybrid system for that.
It used to be that when a car brand such as BMW introduced a new generation of one of its large volume models, no one would even question whether it was better the previous generation, that was a given. And yet, at the end of my 20-minute Youtube clip, the conclusion was not at all obvious, even when the older car had more than 130.000 km on the clock. Up to you whether you would invest around EUR 70.000 more for the new 5-series – I know I wouldn’t.
The G31 M5, here in CS shape. Oh how far we’ve fallen…
To me, the G31 is the better car, but it’s not perfect. The fact that in 2020, BMW wasn’t capable of building parking sensors that work with less than a 2-3 second delay is a mystery. This means the car will sound warnings the whole time given the number of sensors, but they’re so delayed so that in the end, you have no idea where the obstacle is. The cameras aren’t of much help, as the angles and lines are so confusing I still haven’t figured them out after more than 35.000 kms. The gesture control is certainly more a gimmick than an essential feature and not one I would have optioned had I bought the car as new, but it’s quite enfuriating not being able to move your right hand without changing radio stations. The lane keep assist is completely useless, as the car floats between the two lines to an extent that makes it look like whoever’s driving is drunk.
Of course, other features are more useful. The adaptive cruise control is one, and it works great, even in stop and go. The side warning against crossing traffic when you’re in reverse has saved me a couple of times. Having recently driven down to southern France at not very legal speeds, I would claim 8.5l / 100km is an excellent value, as is the sublime comfort of the car. It’s just that pretty much all those things were there already around 10 years ago. What wasn’t, and what’s been introduced in the last years, except for larger screens, are things like gesture control or 67 different interior colours. And complicated hybrid systems that make cars hundred of kgs heavier.
In terms of family cars, my peak car is probably around the mid-2010’s. My E63 AMG was a great example. It had enough modern features, some of which worked even better than on the 540i. It had one interior light color which was all I needed. And above all, it had a wonderful V8 engine, without any complicated hybrid system, and with around 560 hp that had no trouble whatsoever with the 1850 kg weight. Everything felt solid as a rock.
The Ferrari 296 GTB. Too much power.
If you look at sports cars and supercars, I would claim the logic is the same. Sports car buyers aren’t especially interested in hybrid systems in general, and especially not when they make the car 200 kg heavier. They don’t need all the infotainment features, and would prefer switches to tactile surfaces. And very few people would feel they need over 800 hp – in fact a regular criticism of the Ferrari 296 is that at 830 hp, it has too much power. Remove the hybrid system and you’re left with 660 hp at less weight. If you had the option, would you even think twice about it?
That said, Ferrari has a brand value like no one else, and you only need to look at the stock price over the last years to see that they’re clearly doing quite a few things right. They may well have forgotten about the enthusiasts, at least those with limited resources, but they certainly haven’t forgotten about their best clients, since over 80% of new cars go to existing Ferrari owners. This means that the brand from Maranello can allow itself things that othe manufacturers can only dream of. Ferrari is the Hermès of the car world.
That enviable position is something none of the big German brands have, and as argued previously, the active dilution of BMW’s M-division and Mercedes’ AMG by sticking corresponding logos on a few models of every line-up has made the whole thing worse than it needed to be. These guys are all volume producers, as is Porsche, and if people stop buying the new cars in volumes, especially the top models, there’s a big problem.
Not even the pretty stunning 992.2 GT3 preserves value llike its predecessors
To come to some kind of conclusion, I don’t know anyone interested in cars who thinks what’s on sale today is exciting, or anywhere near something that could be referred to as Peak Car. On the other hand, I know a lot of people who talk about the cars built 10-15 years ago with some nostalgia. In a couple of weeks, I’m sharing a Glühwein with a reader of this blog who’s thinking of the BMW 635 CSI as a possible daily. I haven’t planned drinks with anyone who has questions on the new, 2.6 ton M5 Touring.
Things are not about to look up for our beloved German brands anytime soon. They can’t revert to things as they were before, even if they wanted to, and I’m not even sure they understand the issue, even though it’s pretty much painted on the wall. That also means that many of them are probably doomed in the longer term. We don’t need to be, however. We don’t even need to move to other brands, but rather think about what we really value in our cars, which of the ones we’ve owned we look back most fondly at, and which of those would cover our daily needs. Many of those will come from the same brands as before.
I seem to recall having one of these in the garage. Still looks far better than any new BMW!
For me, that means the 2010-2015 era for everyday cars, and perhaps the 00’s for sports cars (I’d pick a Porsche 997.2 any day over a 991.1, or why not make a deal on a 997.1 that has had the IMS issue fixed? The price difference in the market is hardly motivated). Your era may be another one – for another one of my readers, it’s for some reason the 90’s Land Rover Discovery. The point is that there’s no absolute Peak Car – it’s up to you and your preferences. The only thing absolute is that it’s not what comes out of the factories today. A well-kept, low mileage example from whatever era is your Peak Car will most probably make both you and your wallet happier, and holds it value better, than what they’re trying to sell us today.
To borrow from John Cleese in the legendary Monty Python scene from the animal shop with the dead parrot, the V10 is no more. It has ceased to be and gone to meet its maker, and for all those of us who felt it was something truly special, that’s obviously very sad news. That said, there’s a bit of a delay in this post given production of the last V10 engine took place in late 2024, but if you haven’t gone into mourning yet or perhaps hadn’t realized it, the time has definitely come to do so. Let’s therefore look back into what made the V10 so special, the most prominent street cars that featured it, and, should you decide to help preserve the V10 for coming generations, which cars you should consider!
The V-shaped, 10-cylinder engine has been around far longer than many people think. Its roots go back to the 1940’s, but its history in street cars is far shorter, starting in the early 90’s. In the era when naturally aspirated engines were still the way to go, the V10 became a good alternative for when a V12 was too big and heavy, but a V8 wasn’t powerful enough. It produced more power than a V8 and often also ran smoother with less vibrations. And whereas it was less powerful than a V12, it typically had more torque, and was obviously also smaller and lighter. And then there was of course the sound that many still consider unequalled. I won’t even try to describe it in words, but let’s just say that if you’ve heard a V10 in higher rev’s, you’re not likely to forget it!
The V10 era was arguably the best sounding in modern F1 racing!
V10’s were also the main engine used in F1 during two decades. They appeared in the late 80’s after FIA’s ban on turbo engines, when manufacturers during a couple of years used everything from V8’s to V12’s (imagine that today…), Notably thanks to its greater efficiency and lower weight, the V10 then became the F1 engine of choice in the late 90’s and the first half of the 00’s, when all cars ran V10’s in what’s probably the best sounding period of F1 history. The fun ended when FIA made the small, 2.4 litre V8’s mandatory in the mid-00’s, making V10’s became a thing of the past.
In terms of street cars, surprisingly few brands have featured them in their line-up. The first was Chrysler in the 10-cylinder Viper. In the true American spirit of there being no substitute for cubic inches, the V10 was developed from the Chrysler V8 to which two extra cylinders and an aluminum block from Lamborghini were added. The initial version displaced no less than eight liters, putting out 400 hp, which in subsequent versions would increase to 8.3 liters at most, and over 500 hp.
The gigantic Viper V10 looks good, and sounds even better!
BMW also built a V10 engine, however only one, which was featured in the E60 5-series and the E63 6-series from the (Chris) Bangle-era between 2000-2005. At 507 hp, the 5-litre engine was the most powerful, naturally-aspirated engine BMW has ever built, and also one of the most high-revving V10’s ever produced. Importantly it also featured in the 5-series station wagon called E61, the only M-wagon ever built until the current M3 and M5 Touring, and perhaps the most collectible of the three models today.
The brand family that made the V10 most famous is however Audi-Lamborghini. Audi bought the Italian brand from Sant’Agata in 1998, and when the Gallardo was presented five years later, it was with the same base V10 engine that would be featured in the Audi R8 a few years later, from 2009 onwards. It displaced 5 litres in the Gallardo and 5.2 litres in the R8, but with a similar power output at around 520 hp in both. To round it all off, both cars were also available with a manual gearbox. And whereas the R8 later also came with a V8 option, the Gallardo was ever only available with the V10, as was its later replacement, the Huracan. The special version Huracan STJ, presented in 2024, would be the last production car to feature the V10, in its final form delivering all of 640 hp.
The Lamborghini Huracan STJ – a worthy end to an era!
Whatever you think about our coming electrification or lack thereof, the probability of the V10 making a comback is slim, to say the least. So if you want to add an example of this wonderful engine to your garage, you’ll have to look at pre-owned cars. Should you? The answer is a resounding yes, as long as you know what you’re doing. BMW’s V10 wasn’t directly derived, but borrowed heavily from the early 00’s F1 engine the company ran, meaning it’s at heart a race engine and needs to be serviced accordingly. That may be obvious if you buy an R8 or a Huracan. Somewhat unfortunately however, as you’re able to buy both the V10 M5 and (especially) M6 for below EUR 50.000, all buyers don’t realize that. Just as little as previous owners may have.
Therefore, buying a more recent and certainly more expensive R8 or Huracan is probably a safer bet, but as always, if you do your homework properly, nothing fundamental speaks against a BMW V10 either, or a Gallardo for that matter. Personally, I would park an early Gallardo in my garage and make sure it’s a manual. It may have been Lambo’s first mass-produced car, but it was certainly also the best. Now ask yourself when you last saw one? Exactly. Especially in manual form, the Gallardo is certainly a coming classic, with a design language that is as much early 00’s as it gets.
The E61 M5 Touring – one cool family car!
That said, you can’t really fault anyone buying an R8 or a Huracan either – far from it. And the guy that packs his family and luggage into an M5 Touring with a V10 up front before heading south for the summer vacation will obviously always be a hero. The V10 options may thus be few, but they’re all great, so there’s clearly hope that this wonderful engine will live on for many years to come!
The last time I bought a new car was in 1999. You could also say it was last century, to make it a bit more dramatic. I remember it clearly, firstly because the car in question was a beautiful, dark blue Saab 9-3 Convertible with a beige leather interior, but also since it was only shortly thereafter that my wife became pregnant with our daughter. Judging by comments from friends and family, the normal course of action would have been to say “too bad”, sell the convertible and buy a family station wagon. I didn’t.
Instead, together with my better half, who to her credit fully supported me in this, we set about finding a baby pram that when folded, would be small enough to go into the Saab’s boot, at least with the rooftop up. I seem to remember that the one we ended up with was rather expensive, but if you folded it properly and removed the wheels (of the pram that is, not the car), you could just about squeeze it into the boot.
More practical than you would think!
The point here is not to further investigate the baby pram market. However, when we eventually bought a more traditional family car, it was the first of many to follow on the used car market. My reason for this is the same as for most people: I’ve mostly bought my cars privately and have wanted to avoid the massive depreciation all but a very small number of exotic cars see in the first two to three years. The smell of a new car is certainly great, but to me, it hasn’t been worth 30% or more of the car’s price.
When talking about depreciating car values, in the last years the discussion has mostly been about EV’s and the astronomic depreciation they saw in the first 2-3 years, i.e. from 2019-2020 and onwards. This was certainly an effect of the highly inflated prices many of them were sold at as new. On one hand they were more expensive to produce, but carmakers also knew that many of them would be leased by companies, making price is less of a factor given all the incentives companies in most countries were handed out by the state, i.e. you and I.
Three years later, corresponding to the typical European lease period, many of them hit the used market at the same time as the popularity of EV’s started to crumble. Today, you can easily pick up an early 2020 Taycan for 30% of its price as new. The question is rather if you’re brave enough to do so, given quite a long list of issues those early cars had, and what even in EV terms was quite a poor range.
An early Taycan may be cheap, but it’s a car for the brave (without range anxiety…)
However, although it’s been less discussed, the depreciation of traditional internal combustion cars (ICE’s) hasn’t made anyone happy either. When I sold my Saab convertible in the early 00’s after about two years, I remember losing roughly 30%. That’s far less than what the typical ICE loses today over a similar time period. And given that, now that we’re a few years further down the line, does it still hold true that EV’s depreciate more in the first years than ICE’s? In a very unscientific way, that’s what I’ve spent part of this week looking at.
For this exercise, I’ve taken an EV and an ICE in the same category and from the same brand, produced in 2022-2023, and with less than 50′ km’s on the clock. EV’s have a lot of horsepower, so I made it a condition for the ICE’s to have around 500 hp as well, but steered clear of the M-cars and AMG versions. For the EV’s, I made a theoretical range of at least 400 km a condition, knowing that will in reality be far less. Equipment-wise, I tried to get comparable cars with similar equipment levels.
Looks weren’t part of the criteria – there wouldn’t have been enough EV’s to choose from otherwise…
I looked at this across four categories: SUV’s, four-door sedans, sports coupés and shooting brakes. That also means that I made it a condition that the same brand had both an ICE and an EV in the same category in 2022-2023. I picked the BMW X5 and iX for the SUV category, the MB EQS (sedan) and S580 for the sedans, the Audi e-tron GT and TT RS for the sports coupes, and finally the Porsche Taycan and Panamera for the shooting brakes. And before you tell me shooting brakes isn’t really a category, the reason for including them is that both of them look bloody good! Interestingly, both also sell far better as shooting brakes than as sedans.
Before going into the results, this whole exercise is obviously not more than an indication. The cars aren’t perfectly comparable, as notably the exact equipment may vary. You could obviously compare models from different brands, but that makes it more complicated as brands depreciate differently. And you can certainly argue that an e-tron is not very comparable to a TT, given it’s a proper four-seater. That’s however the best I could think of given the condition of having an ICE and an EV from the same brand. The prices are my estimates of what you would have to pay after a bit of negotiation, and they are from the Swiss market. However, that’s usually a good approximation at least for the rest of Europe.
What the above results show is that all EV’s in the sample from 2022-2023 have indeed lost more value than their ICE counterpart, but that the difference isn’t huge, and smaller than a couple of years earlier. That’s however not because EV’s have become more stable in value, it’s rather the ICE’s that depreciate faster than they used to. What also seems to be true though, is that it’s not only ICE’s that eventually find a floor – as said, you can pick up a 2020 Taycan at 30% of the price as new, but those values seems to have stabilized now, five years later.
The Audi e-tron and BMW iX have certainly not been good to your wallet if you’ve bought them privately, but in both cases, part of the reason is an inflated price as new. That said, the regular BMW X5 is also not a car you would have wanted to buy as new. The Taycan has retained about half its value making it the best EV over the period, and the Panamera is the only car that has held its value significantly better than the others.
The Panamera Hybrid is arguably a better choice than all the others.
Where does this take us? Well, as little as I wanted to back in the early 00’s, I still wouldn’t buy a new car today, if it’s my money we’re talking about. That’s especially true if it’s an EV, but that said, even EV’s eventually see an end to their depreciation. So if it’s an EV you’re after, I would buy a Taycan or an e-tron, but rather one from 2022-2023 than the first two years. However, if like most, you drive a lot of short distances but don’t want to buy a second car for your longer trips, then I would argue that the best choice is none of the above, but rather a modern hybrid.
Taking the Panamera hybrid from 2022-2023 as example, it has a depreciation that is no different to the ICE version and offers you around 50km of electric range, whilst also lowering your fuel consumption overall. Some other hybrids will have even better electric ranges. The downside is extra weight over a regular ICE, but automakers have become very good at hiding that, especially the one from Zuffenhausen. Finally, if you only drive long distances, then nothing has changed and a 2-3 year old ICE remains the best choice!
I like Audi. I’ve only owned one myself, but growing up, my father had two Audi 80’s, a red one that looked like, well, like cars did in the early 80’s, and that I was adamant he fit a rubber spoiler to such as to make it more alike the more powerful E-version, which if memory serves me right had all of 113 hp… He then traded it for the last Audi 80, the one that looked like a soap, which he for some reason ordered in beige metallic, like the one below. I’ve so far only owned one Audi myself, an A6 3-litre diesel that I ran as company car back in the days you had those, some 20 years ago. It was a great car and so far the only car I’ve owned that I’ve managed to fill up with the wrong fuel.
Not Audi’s greatest design achievement
It was on the way back to Zurich from Lugano in southern Switzerland that I stopped to re-fuel at the last station before the 17km long Gotthard tunnel. The Audi was the first diesel I ever had, so by habit I grabbed the petrol hose which, being thinner, fits into a diesel tank opening. I made it three km into the tunnel before the car stopped, and only then did I realize my mistake. I managed to roll onto an emergency parking, opened the door, and was first struck by the heat in the tunnel, and then almost by a truck that ran by half a metre away. No doubt one of the scariest moments in my relatively peaceful life!
An emergency truck came within 10 minutes (they’re pretty alert on each side of the tunnel as to avoid any mishaps, which I’m eternally grateful for!). He loaded up the car and drove us to the nearest garage in a small Swiss moutain village. The garage owner looked all happy when he realized it was a quattro, as that meant the car had two fuel tanks that are separate, meaning he would earn twice the money. You see, the way to empty a tank, at least back then, is to put the car in a rotating frame which turns it on its side so that the fuel runs out. Which in my case had to be done twice. He no doubt thought I was a complete big city idiot, but he congratulated me on having filled up when the tank was practically empty. Had it been half full, he said, the engine would have run, but you would have ruined it completely. Oops.
This, in the other hand, is one of the best in all areas!
Coming back to Audi, more recently, before buying my current BMW 540i, I thought long and hard about an RS4 of the 2011-2015 B8 generation instead, with the fabulous 4.2 litre, naturally aspirated V8. Reason prevailed then, but in my quest for something more GT-like, I’ve recently looked closer at the RS5 coupe from the same generation. More on that to follow in later posts. The point I want to make, and which both those cars examplify brilliantly, is that they’re not only good-looking, but also built with an interior quality that is so solid it feels like nothing could break it. That by the way also goes for the D2 Audi A8 that I wrote about last year. Unfortunately, it seems to be something Audi’s engineers have since forgotten how to do.
European, and especially the German luxury car brands are all struggling to find their place in a world that somehow is supposed to become fully electric, but where the goal posts keep moving. Certainly no easy task and manufacturers have my sympathy, at least to a certain extent. As the completely unrealistic political EV targets have been revised, Mercedes, BMW and Audi have for now settled on a combination of ICE’s, hybrids and EV’s, such as to be covered whichever way the wind blows next.
Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission. She’s never been publicly elected. Had she been, you bet the policies she advocates would be different.
As part of this process, Audi last year decided to let the model names reflect the power source so that cars with an even number, like the A4, would henceforth be EV’s, and cars with uneven numbers, like the A5, would be ICE’s. It was of course too bad they had just launched the A8 which is an ICE, so they added that this would only apply to new models. Like the new A6 that was introduced at the beginning of this year. Except for the fact that the A6 is not only an EV, but also available with various petrol and diesel engines. I would love to have listened in on the meetings in Ingolstadt when the decision on this complete mess was taken!
Luckily, it didn’t prevent the design department from continuing to do a great job. Taste is individual but personally I love Audi’s current line-up in terms of exterior design, from the muscular A3 up to the Q8, especially as coupe, but also including the spectacular E-tron coupe. The cars look bloody good, with the difference between EV’s and ICE’s limited to minor points like a different front grill. I’m glad to see that this validates a point I made in post a couple of years ago, that the innovative design language that Audi and other brands limited to EV’s at the time, as it was said to be the only future, is now carried over also to ICE’s, as it becomes clear we’ll have them for far longer than some people imagined.
ICE and EV look very similar, meaning they both look great!
What Audi seem to have forgotten however, is how to build an interior that is as solid as in a B8 from 10 years ago. Seeing the new S6 station wagon (which, just to clarify, is an EV) at my local Audi dealer last week, I went in for a closer look. Opening the door, you’re greeted by an interior dominated by the mandatory giant infotainment screen. Audi have opted for a horizontal layout that goes from the door to the middle of the car. It looks nice and modern, although perhaps unnecessarily big, until you realize that next to it is another, optional screen for the passenger. That smaller screen is in a different shape and shows parts of the information from the main screen. But given the main screen stretches well into the passenger’s field of vision, why on earth would anyone need it? Obviously Audi isn’t the only manufacturer doing passenger screens, but that doesn’t make it better.
Audi making sure you’re never bored!
As also seems to be mandatory today, the S6 has tactile controls on the steering wheel as well as on the inside of the door. Apparently these have become so fashionable because tactile surfaces are cheaper to produce than traditional switches, and they certainly feel like it. The S6 has a plethora of functions on the door side in addition to the window controls, all within one tactile plate that feels like it moves when you touch it. Forget about adjusting anything here while driving!
Slightly further below the door handle is however where it gets really bad. The plastic used for door pockets and most of the trim below your waistline is hard plastic of the really cheap-feeling kind, the type that makes nasty sounds when you scratch it. We’re talking many quality levels below what you find in a B8 from 2014, or indeed what would have been deemed acceptable at the time. Plastic of course has the benefit of not only being cheap, but also light. And that’s something the S6 definitely needs, given it’s a car that being the EV it is, weighs in at an almost obscene 2.500 kg. That’s more than my old Range Rover with that wonderful V8, and without any interior plastics of any kind.
A lot going on there!
The list price for the S6 in Switzerland is CHF 105.000, around USD 125.000. You read that right, and that’s before options, of which the list is long in Audi’s world. Based on early tests, the S6 is a great family drive, but quality-wise it feels like it’s worth half its price and above all, it feels far cheaper than a Chinese EV that costs far less whilst giving you a better range. It’s simply not good enough. The ICE-hybrid version of the same car is less powerful but can be filled up at any petrol station when you run out of battery power, and doesn’t cost as much, even fully optioned. It still won’t give you better plastics or real switches though.
Of course, Mercedes and BMW are not much better than Audi, and all of them are worse today than five years ago. At which time they were already worse than five years prior to that. It’s a sad truth that my E63 Wagon from 2014 had a better interior quality than my BMW 540i from 2019, which in turn is miles better than the new 5-series. It’s becoming increasingly clear that the peak of German automobile building was around 10 years ago, in the mid-2010’s. The residual values of cars from that generation compared to later generations will confirm that story, and also show you that I’m not alone neither in thinking so, nor in appreciating it.
Quality-wise, the W212 was close to perfection, and it’s worth more today than when I sold mine 5-6 years ago.
Let me therefore make a humble suggestion to the management teams in Ingolstadt, Stuttgart and Munich. You’re currently on the road to perdition, so please reverse course while you still can as it’s getting really late. There is good news though: a vast majority of your clients don’t want EV’s anyway, so just leave that market to the Chinese, especially since you can’t compete with them anyway.
What most of your clients love on the other hand is the great cars you used to build. So stop the screen size race with functions we neither want, nor use. We don’t need to talk to our cars, or have it point out the next restaurant. Scrap the tactile surfaces and give us real switches. Adjusting the seat position on the side of the same seat worked absolutely fine. We want the solidity of an RS4/B8 or an E63/W212, combined with the playfullness of an M3/F80, all at well under two tons. We all know ICE’s will still be around for a long time, and adding a sufficient number of hybrids will allow you to comply with legal requirements. Therefore, go back to building the best ICE cars in the world before it’s too late!
if you’re wondering about the headline, it’s to be pronounced as an expression of pain at something that is, but doesn’t have to be…
Oh how quickly things can change! Three months ago, most of us would agree that we were in a very different place, and nowhere more so than at Tesla, who at the time was valued at more than all other car companies in the world combined. Yes, you read that right, as incredible as it may sound. And even after it’s lost close to 50% of its value this year (with the stock trading at around USD 240 as I write this), that still values the company at around USD 800bn, about three times the value of Toyota, or 12 times the valuation of GM or Mercedes-Benz. Perhaps most relevant, it means that Tesla is currently valued eight times higher than BYD, the leading Chinese EV brand that has now surpassed it in number of cars sold.
The BYD Seal – a superior competitor to Tesla’s Model Y
The first quarter of 2025 was not kind to Tesla. Not only has the stock price imploded, the company has also seen sales dip heavily in several key markets, with a corresponding loss of market share. And nowhere more so than in China, the most important market of them all and of course, the home market of BYD and other Chinese EV’s. During the first quarter of the year, Tesla’s Chinese deliveries were down 13% as compared to 2024, with its EV market share dropping to 7%, down from 12% a year earlier.
Q1 2025 was also the first quarter when BYD delivered more pure EV’s than Tesla (BYD sells plug-in hybrids as well). In 2024, the two companies sold almost exactly as many EV’s at 1.75m each, but this year, BYD is projected to double that number, and given the brand isn’t present at all in the US and so far on a very limited scale in Europe, most of these will be sold in China and across Asia. And yet, even at a stock price of USD 240, Tesla’s valuation is eight times higher than that of BYD.
Tesla’s stock price evolution year-to-date. Not what many expected.
If it was just to prove that Tesla’s valuation makes no sense, we could probably stop right here. However, there’s a lot more to say and as we’ll see, it only gets worse from here. Tesla has no doubt been instrumental in making EV’s part of today’s car landscape, but I would argue they’ve now fallen so far behind Chinese brands such as BYD that their market share, and thereby stock price, will only keep on falling. I would even say that it’s doubtful whether Tesla will continue to build cars in the coming years, and if that’s even what they aspire to.
To understand why that is, let’s start with the line-up. Models S and X have now been on the market for 13 years, with the Model 3 not too far behind at nine years. That’s an eternity in modern car cycle terms. Their battery packs have seen continuous improvements, but both the exterior and interior have seen nothing more than a quite mild face-lift over the whole period. The Model Y, the best-selling car in the world in 2024 (obviously quite an achievement!), has recently seen a similar cosmetic update, but it’s six years old by now. We’ll never see the Cybertruck in Europe (thank God for that…) just as little as any of us will probably ever see the roadster or the sub-$25.000 car Elon has been promising for years. That means that Tesla has an older model line-up than all the other car brands, the valuation of which it exceeds by up to 12 times.
The Tesla Roadster is suppose to come out next year. I wouldn’t bet on it…
Next, there’s the quality which was terrible in the early years but has gotten better such as to be more or less ok today. As a comparison however, I was in a Polestar store the other day and checked out the Polestar 4, the SUV coupe without a rear window. Polestar may market themselves as Swedish, but they’re owned by Chinese Geely and all models are these days built in China. Except for a bit of Nordic interior design, it’s therefore a Chinese car. In terms of interior quality however, it’s on another planet compared to not only Tesla, but also to any EV coming out of Germany these days (and even worse, of any ICE car the likes of Audi, BMW and Mercedes have in their current lineup).
Beautiful materials, plush seats, no hard plastics anywhere, lots of space and all the features you could wish for. Everything is solid and well put together and as I’m lead to believe, Polestar is hereby not the exception, but rather quite representative of modern Chinese EV’s. They even drive well, in the not very passionate but comfortable way EV’s do. Given Tesla’s European charging network is now open to other brands as well, if I were in the market for an EV, I wouldn’t hesitate a second between a Polestar 4 and a Tesla Model S. I’d actually be prepared to pay a premium for the former, but I wouldn’t have to, given it’s 20% cheaper.
The Polestar 4 – one of the nicest car interiors I’ve ever seen, any category.
Then there’s the whole self-driving thing. Basically since the first Model S came out, buyers have been given the option to add thousands of dollars to the price by opting for self-driving packages that were set to become reality “soon”. Well, in over 10 years, “soon” hasn’t happened yet, which makes you think that at least in Europe, some kind of consumer protection body should step in. How can you be allowed to sell options for functions that never become reality? And for each passing day, Connectivity Day is becoming less likely to happen, quite simply because Tesla’s technology isn’t even close to where it needs to be.
If you’ve been to Austin, San Francisco or a few other American cities in the last years, you will have seen or perhaps been in a Waymo driverless taxi. Based on the Jaguar I-Pace, they transport people around the cities like a normal taxi without any issues. Given they’ve been doing so for some years now, it makes you wonder why they haven’t spread to more places, which may have something to do with their price tag of over USD 250.000 per car. The price is explained by the fact that a Waymo is equipped with not only cameras, but also a radar system and Lidar (Light Detection and Ranging), all necessary for self-driving.
A Waymo in Frisco. USD 250.000 cars usually look differently…
Tesla doesn’t have that. In fact, Tesla is the only brand promoting self-driving on a large scale which relies completely on cameras. That’s of course because it’s a cheaper technology, but it brings the slight disadvantage that cameras struggle to see some things that a radar or Lidar system pick up. Driving in the dark is one of those things you would need to be really stu…. brave to do in a self-driving Tesla. Youtube also has illustrations of someone putting up a picture looking like the continuation of the road at some distance in front of a self-driving car. The Waymos and other radar cars all pick up that it’s not the continuation of the road, and stop. Teslas just run through the picture. Trust me, with the current system and without major developments, no Tesla will ever be fully self-driving, whatever the regulation says, and whatever was promised at the time.
You’ll notice that at no point so far, I’ve mentioned Elon Musk’s politics. Doing so doesn’t improve things. This is not a political blog, so let’s just say that the position he’s assumed in the new US administration doesn’t sit well with his cult-like following, who now start putting stickers on their cars like the one below. No doubt this has also contributed to the falling sales numbers, as apparently, if you buy a Tesla, it’s important that the CEO shares your political positions. I guess I should call BMW then, to make sure the current CEO Oliver Zipse shares my beliefs?
The problem with cults…
More seriously, the problem is of course that if your sales were based on cult-like, non rational behaviour and the cult then disappears, you’re in trouble. In the case of Tesla, what remains is a heavily top-run business where the guy at the top is no longer fully committed to the company. At this point in time, given all the other issues the company is confronted with, that’s not a very good sign.
You’ll also notice than when Elon talks about his companies these days, it’s usually not so much about the cars as it is about AI robots, energy storing and space travel. Given the man is obviously quite talented and probably not as crazy as his once followers believe, I have no doubt he’s very aware of everything I’ve written above, but doesn’t really care, as he may see Tesla’s future elsewhere than in the car business. The problem however, is that no one outside of his head has an idea of what that business is, and thus how to value it.
Coming back to what we can measure, Tesla is a car company on a slippery slope that is likely to continue downwards. EV’s will not take over the world anytime soon but China will most probably take over most of the EV market, such is on one hand the quality of what they build and on the other the size of their domestic market, where various kinds of incentives go towards promoting EV’s.
BYD’s new factory is bigger than San Francisco. Elon, they’re coming for you!
Tesla’s home market is far smaller, and the wind has turned against it. They may get some protection from tariffs, but they don’t solve the fundamental issues of the company. And Elon would do well to remember the 70’s, when the US tried to protect Detroit from superior Japanese cars by imposing tariffs. It made Japanese cars more expensive but Americans still bought them, because they were better.
Then again, none of this matters if Tesla’s future isn’t in the car business. I don’t have more of an idea than anyone else of what goes on inside Elon’s head, but I’d say it’s more likely that Tesla focuses on other things than cars, rather than that they turn the numbers around and bring a new model line-up to market in the coming years.
Whatever the scenario, it remains that Tesla is hopelessly overvalued as a car company and the brand’s cult-like followers are now to a large extent gone. And if you’re in the market for an EV, you’d do well to look at a few options before signing a check for the 13-year old Model S. The Chinese are coming big time, and it will be interesting to see how things evolve in the coming years!
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!
That’s far more hood than any EV will ever need…
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!
This is what a naturally aspirated V12 still looks like!
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!
Podcast of the year!
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.
We went from the A110 to this – that’s not progress
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!
Buying an E-type as an oldtimer may be a particularly good idea!
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!
I travel quite frequently to London on business and on my last trip a few weeks ago, I had some time to escape the work routine and actually enjoy the city a bit. Of course, London is just as little representative of the UK as New York is of the US. Still, the things we consider as British are very present in London as well: rain for one, especially at this time of year, but then also the pubs, the Guinness they serve, the men in tweed jackets who drink it… And then, there’s of course the cars. Rolls Royce, Bentley and Aston Martin certainly rank as more fancy, but the brand most people associate with the UK, and also the one most of us can reasonably aspire to, is Jaguar.
Rule good old Britannia!
Unless you’ve lived under a rock the last two weeks, you’ve no doubt seen the storm erupting over the video announcing Jaguar’s re-branding. To say that it’s been criticized is a serious understatement. Everything, from the androgyne AI-like people, over the fact that no cars are shown, to the new logo: Jaguar lovers (of which all of a sudden, there seems to be a suprisingly large number) have been on the barricades over the sacrilege of destroying Jaguar’s image and by extension, the Britain they cherish. And since we’re on video clips, this one illustrates that view pretty well.
You certainly don’t need me to write yet another post on how terrible the rebranding is, there’s already plenty of those around. And actually, even though I believe Jaguar’s (I’ll still write that with a capital J, thank you very much) days are counted, I’m not sure the rebranding is the cause. Because just as little as the UK can today be summarized as a pint of Guinness in a tweed jacket or whatever way Jeremy Clarkson would like it to be, Jaguar was very far from a healthy car brand to start with. And, whetheryou like it or not, Britain has moved on, as has the rest of the world.
This was a long time ago.
Jaguar is part of the Land Rover group, which in turn is owned by the Indian Tata Group. However, contrary to Land Rover itself who under Tata has profited, and continues to profit from the SUV trend, Jaguar’s model line-up hasn’t really done so. There were two small SUV’s, the E-Pace and the F-Pace, both of which are quite alright (and one of those especially so, more on that below) but also quite far from the British spirit described above and also from the the poise of the Land Rover line-up, which I guess you could call less understated and far more in your face design-wise, which seems to be what people want.
Then there was the I-Pace, an EV SUV which wasn’t very remarkable at all. The four-door XE sedan and XF station wagon were even less interesting, and the line-up was rounded off by the only car Jaguar really deserve credit for, namely the F-type coupé and roadster. However, the F-Type is a 10-year old model by now and thus one due for replacement quite soon, and anyway a two-seat sports car is not something a brand can build its existence on.
An excellent drive and good-looking too, for those wanting something else than a 911.
To summarize all of this in numbers, Jaguar sold around 150.000 cars in 2019, a number that they couldn’t have survived on long-term, had they remained a stand-alone brand. This year, that number was down to 50.000 cars before Jaguar earlier this year suspended all new car sales, hence the usage of past tense in the paragraphs above. They do this to re-launch – surprise surprise – as a fully electric brand in 2026, which is of course what the rebranding campaign is meant to illustrate.
Jaguar was thus quite far from doing well at the launch of this campaign, and anyway, very few marketing campaigns through the years have had enough effect to make or break a brand, as some of the comments around this would have you believe. I’d even question whether rebranding in Jaguar’s case is such a bad idea, when you see the convulsions some car brands have ended up in, trying to combine EV’s and ICE’s. If your ICE sales numbers are dipping and your line-up is old and mostly uninspiring, and you’re convinced a new era is around the corner, maybe a rebranding is the right way to go?
Will the whole thing end with a contested re-branding video?
Unfortunately, there is a couple of issues. The first of those is timing, and the second is a five-litre V8. Starting with timing, my reasoning would have been far more convincing had this happened two-three years ago, when everyone (well, almost) was still convinced that EV’s would take over the world. Now, we’re at a stage where EV sales are crumbling in every single market (except perhaps China where to put it mildly, you can force people’s hand…), and car manufacturers are doing all they can to pedal back on their “full EV” commitments. In that market, Jaguar now wakes up and goes full EV in a way that doesn’t allow for any pedaling back, should it not succeed.
Then, there’s the five-litre compressor V8 that is one of the greatest engines out there. I had it in my Range and in the Jaguar line-up, it’s fitted in the top-of-the-range F-Type and F-Pace models. The F-Pace received quite a complete overhaul in 2022 and the five-litre V8 version called SVR has had motor journalists drooling all over it, calling it the best small SUV out there, and perhaps the best car in the market in terms of engine sound. That’s a sound it shares with the F-Type, a less spectacular but very capable coupé-roadster in an attractive packaging.
Going out with a bang – the lovely, 5-litre compressor V8!
Jaguar has thus sacrificed two great V8 models for a full EV experiment, debuting not now, but in two years, but already now being two-three years late. They do so with cars that so far no one has seen, but that they claime will be REALLY luxurious, and REALLY expensive. If you’re wondering how that could possibly go well, you’re not the only one. But it’s the full strategy they’ve embarked on, rather than a rebranding campaign or a new logo, that is Jaguar’s real problem.
Meanwhile, for all intents and purposes, what we used to know as Jaguar just ceased as a brand, meaning that if you can track down a new F-Type or F-Pace in V8 form, you could be down for the deal of your life, since dealers will be really anxious to get these out of their shops. And in the pre-owned market, I strongly suspect both of those will hold their value better than most at their respective, depreciated price point, and especially in the case of the F-Type, perhaps even become a collectible down the line. Until that day comes, I promise you’ll never get tired of listening to that V8!
The three letters AMG are legendary not only in Mercedes circles, but more generally in the world of car aficionados. I told the story of Messrs. Aufrecht and Melcher from Grossaspach on this blog back in 2021, including that AMG these day is fully owned by Mercedes, who in my view has diluted the heritage of the company at an increasing pace, fitting AMG logos on so many models and engine types that you quickly lose count. Unfortunately they’re not the only ones, as down in Munich, the “M” inflation at BMW is just as noticeable.
Long-term readers may also remember that I was the very happy owner of a W212 MB E63 AMG estate a few years ago – with hindsight, probably the best car I ever owned. The W212 didn’t have the legendary, 6.2 litre, naturally aspirated V8 of its predecessor, the W211, but the bi-turbo, 4.4 litre V8 was still a fantastic engine, and contrary to the W211, it got the power down on the road thanks to four-wheel drive, a pretty decisive argument for me, living in an Alpine country (and probably elsewhere as well if you want to keep you tire budget under control).
The W212 E63 AMG wagon – to this day, one of the best cars ever built, in my modest view
The W213 succeeded the W212 in 2017 and in the AMG E63 version featured a slightly smaller, 4-litre V8 that I haven’t driven but only heard good things about. That engine also made it into the smaller C63 (as well as into other models), but contrary to the E-class, the smaller sibling was rear-wheel drive only. Had that not been the case, given our needs for space have diminished with the children moving out, I would most probably have parked one in my garage by now.
What all these models have in common is that they were “real” AMG cars. As such, the chief engine engineer’s signature is found on the engine block and the whole car has been thoroughly reworked by the AMG team at Mercedes, rather than only the turbo pressure being turned up on a four-cylinder (as we’ll see later…) and various AMG logos being fitted. And of course, under that signed engine block, there’s eight cylinders, because ultimately, a V8 is a large part of the true AMG experience. And that makes the decisions taken by Mercedes on the new C63 AMG, launched in 2023, totally incomprehensible.
The new C63 is a pretty car, best enjoyed when parked…
The development of the new C63 obviously started a few years ago when the whole car world was set on downsizing and electrification faster than you can say “where will all the rare materials needed come from?”. Mercedes was at the time very much at the forefront of these developments with the ambition to be fully electric by 2030, something they’ve stepped away from today. In that spirit, you have to believe that it was too early to fully electrify the C63 – but surely no one would mind a bit of downsizing, right?
As it turns out, the answer to that is a resounding yes. Because the reception the new C63 has received is no doubt the worst any AMG car has ever had, and probably the worst of any other Mercedes model as well. What the engine builders over in Stuttgart have done is to basically take half of the old V8, i.e. make it a 2-litre 4-cylinder, out of which they’ve managed to squeeze 469 hp, thanks to the biggest turbocharger this side of the moon. They’ve then combined that engine with a 150 Kw electric motor on the rear axle, for a total power output of 671 hp and around 1050 Nm of torque. And yes, this time the C63 is indeed all-wheel drive…
Mercedes even wanted to highlight the four cylinders by placing plastic lids on the engine block…
Those numbers are obviously complete bonkers, and there’s no doubt the engine is an engineering masterpiece. Until quite recently, that kind of power required a far larger volume, and achieving a seamless collaboration between such a high-pitched engine and quite a powerful electrical motor is no small feat. I take my hat off to the engineers that pulled this off, but at the same time, I’d be very hesitant to pick up such a complicated construction three-four years down the line when it’s out of warranty, as the list of things that could go wrong is a long one.
Unfortunately though, things don’t even need to go wrong for the engine to cause disappointment on a scale rarely seen. Sure, there’s enough power, but somehow Mercedes was so deep into electrification dreams that they confused the massive power output of EV’s with character. Of which all AMG V8’s have had plenty, and the 2-litre four-pot has none. It sounds terrible, doesn’t deploy power anywhere close to how a V8 would, and also makes you hit the limiter rather frequently because they hybrid construction delivers power too fast for you to react.
There’s other problems too. Most decent hybrids these days will manage at least 60-70 km on electricity alone, if not more. The C63 will at best do 10 km, because although its electric motor is strong, it only has a 6 KwH battery. Still, that doesn’t prevent it being around 200 kg heavier than its competitors. In addition, there was apparently no better way to integrate the battery than to create not one, but two bumps in the luggage compartment, heavily reducing both its volume and its practicality. Then, there’s the price, where the C63 starts at around EUR/USD 20.000 more than both the Audi RS4 and the BMW M3 Touring, its most natural competitors.
Not one but two space-stealing bumps – was this really the best you could do?
It’s thus no big surprise to learn that the C63 isn’t selling. Exact numbers are hard to come by, but it seems it’s bad enough for there to be internal discussions at Mercedes about pulling the car from the line-up. I don’t think that will happen, but you can bet what you have dear that the next C63 won’t have a four pot under the hood, and given the updated E63 hasn’t been presented yet, you could well imagine discussions going on here as to what to do with it. Because if this story needed to get any crazier, the variant below the C/E 63 is the 53, currently a hybrid as well with around 600 hp combined, however with the petrol unit being a six-cylinder engine. Go figure.
Back in 2016, Porsche tried to pull a similar stunt with the Boxster, replacing the flat six with a four-cylinder engine, all in the name of downsizing. That car got similar reviews to the current C63 and it took no more than three years for the flat six to make a return. My bet is that it’ll take less than three years this time around, and maybe this time, this can be a lesson for Mercedes for the future: either you build true AMG cars or you don’t. And if you understand who the buyers of those cars are, you would know better than to mess with that V8!
Between US elections, the wars in Ukraine and the Middle-East, and whatever else may have passed through your news flow this summer, chances are that you’ve missed something that’s gone a bit under the radar. And that, my friends, is more or less a complete turnaround in the business plans of the world’s leading car manufacturers, and the roaring comeback of the good old combustion engine!
The ICE is making a comeback at a level that no one would have expected just a couple of months ago. Doing so, it proves a few points that won’t be new to readers of this blog, but that I’m happy to note anyway, since it’s always nice to be right: firstly, if you want to sell stuff, there needs to be demand. Secondly, if something cannot hold in the long term, it will break sooner or later. And thirdly, it’s unwise to bet against the world’s largest car company, especially when it’s Japanese. Let’s dig in and look at what you may have missed while sipping your pina colada at the beach!
To set the scene, let’s start with something that EVO, the UK car magazine that this blog takes its inspiration from, noted in its editorial back in July, namely that within just the last month, three new combustion engines involving five global car brands were announced. In all cases, it was about ICE’s optimized for hybrid usage with electrical motors, efficiency measures, adaptations to sustainable fuels etc. Other signs that the combustion engine is far from dead have also flourished over the last year, perhaps nowhere more so than in Modena with the Purosangue’s naturally aspirated V12. The fact that Ferrari shares are among the best investments you could have done over the last years also don’t really speak in the direction of a quick demise of the ICE.
Owning Ferrari stock would have given you more than 700% in the last 10 years, most of it in the last two years. Hell, you could buy an ICE-powered Ferrari for that!
It’s also interesting how differently car CEO’s speak today, compared to just a few months back. The first one that made me swallow my coffee the wrong way was Peugeot CEO Carlos Tavares, who during a car show went on camera, stating in the blunt way only a Frenchman can that electrification is nothing car manufacturers have chosen – it’s something Brussels (meaning the EU) has imposed. His body language made clear he enjoyed it about as much as a rotten slice of foie gras. Unfortunately, Stellantis (the group Peugeot belongs to) have replaced him since the interview.
A few weeks later it was Ola Källenius, the Swedish CEO of Mercedes-Benz, who until recently was very happy to tell everyone about Mercedes’s fully electrical future but now sings a different tune, whereby combustion cars are still very much part of the Mercedes mix, alongside hybrids and EV’s. That’s of course a direct consequence of the lukewarm reception Mercedes EV’s have gotten from the market, especially the soap-like EQS. Now the talk is of a new S- and even E-class coming with as options combustion, hybrid and electrical engines.
What a new S-class could look like – far better than the EQS! (Illustration Larson)
A few months earlier the same message had come from BMW in Munich, confirming several combustion engine initiatives over the coming years. To round it off, in the same week as this is published, Volvo joined the long list of manufacturers stepping away from an all-electrical future, in Volvo’s case by 2030. The talk is now of reaching 90%, however including various types of hybrids.
None of this is really surprising. Because what all these car CEO’s seem to have forgotten, but actually should know better than various politicians and other policy makers, are the laws of supply and demand. And what has become painfully clear is that there is no demand for EV’s on the scale the political class would like there to be (if you need to read up on why they won’t do anything for the climate and are currently one of the most unethical industries around, see here, here, and here). From a European perspective it’s actually even worse, since the day, should it come, when demand improves, it’s not European, but rather Chinese manufacturers who stand to profit from it.
Let me give you a couple of pretty staggering examples of this in real life. The Porsche Taycan is generally hailed as the best EV around from both a driving and a charging perspective (if not range). Two years old and with less than 30.000 km’s on the meter, it can easily be had for 30-40% of the price as new – that’s a depreciation of over 50% in less than two years for the best car in the segment! And with the new model out, those numbers will certainly not improve going forward.
A Polestar 2, a European EV favourite, far less good than a Taycan but also far cheaper at around 75-80′ as new, will without problems be yours for 30-35′ with the same kind of mileage as the Taycan. And should you like soap, the numbers for the Mercedes-Benz EQS are similar. It’s getting to a point where European car dealers no longer want to trade in EV’s, not just because of the insecure value, but also since they tend to sit in the courtyard far longer than traditional cars.
A year ago, it would have been in front of the dealer’s entrance. Today, it’s hidden in the backyard.
What’s happening is that disappointed owners, either outright or through various types of leases which typically have a 36-month life (at least in Europe), trade in their EV’s and when doing so, opt for a conventional car to replace it with. That’s the case in up to 90% of cases in the US, as various reports have shown. Why? Well, unrealistic range promises, especially in winter, a lacking charging infrastructure, and various technical and quality issues with many EV’s all make for a not very attractive cocktail. As energy prices rose in parallel to the ownership and will continue to do so for every windmill and solar farm that is set to replace conventional energy, it turns out the savings over a traditional car aren’t that big.
The combustion engine technology is now over 150 years old, removing the technology risk that is very much present in the EV market, and that all the talk of battery revolutions only contribute to. Two years ago it was just a matter of time before solid state batteries once and for all solved the range and charging issues. Now, it’s instead sodium batteries that will do the same, and are simpler to develop. Who in their right mind would buy an EV, more expensive than a traditional car, with a technology that risks being obsolete in a year? You take this together with all the other EV issues you know well by now, and the logical conclusion is that other than in cities or for shorter trips, the ICE still reigns supreme.
As this sinks in, the effect is that conventional manufacturers go back to what they’re good at, i.e. technological innovation around the combustion engine, and EV manufacturers that are not very well capitalized start going belly up. Fisker already did (making it the second time the Dane Henrik Fisker manages to bankrupt the same brand), others are heavily at risk (Polestar starts having pretty severe cash issues and a share price that is at rock bottom) or not in control of their destiny (Lucid who are at the mercy of the Saudi money tap). All this is normal – every new industry has a lot of companies who don’t make it. It was just the buzz of the last years that may have made it look different.
Marcus Brownlee called the Fisker Ocean the worst car he had ever tested. Six months later, the company was bankrupt and owners have hopefully learnt to check the health of the brand next time around.
What is not normal is however the elephant in the room called China, that as said previously, I believe will dominate the low- to mid-priced EV market going forward. Why? Well, with a home market of over a billion people, unlimited state subsidies and a supply chain of rare metals especially from Africa that has been carefully crafted over the last decade, China has done everything Europe should have done to be successful, had they really meant business. Instead, the EU now wants to put tariffs on Chinese EV’s, which less than a month after it was announced, was countered by China doing a deal with Saudi Arabia, where Chinese EV’s for Europe will be produced with no tariffs. And there won’t be any sanctions or tariffs on Saudi going forward either, that oil they also sell, is very helpful when it gets cold.
Going forward, the world will thus hardly be fully electric, and this is where the world’s largest brand Toyota comes in. Although they were heavily criticized by the environmentalist lobby, the Japanese stuck to their guns and continued to produce and perfect hybrid solutions. Their logic is simple and should have been easy enough for every car company to understand: if the supply of rare metals and other input materials is limited, then splitting a large battery pack into four smaller packs for four cars, rather than a big one for one, makes a lot of sense. Hybrids also eliminate all the issues linked to range, charging, and under-capitalized car brands no one has heard of.
A Toyota hybrid drvetrain – expect to see more of these going forward!
So where does all this leave us? Well, conventional manufacturers will be all too happy to reverse course and fall back on what will be the conventional car market going forward – meaning hybrid solutions around the combustion engine. And should there be an evolution around e-fuels, we can probably do without the whole hybrid package as well. On the other side, there will be EV’s at various price points, working well for cities, shorter trips or people preferring the technology. And yes, should we in the end get a battery revolution in terms of range, charging and more sustainable input materials, maybe they will take over -but that’s neither for tomorrow, nor next year.
It’s pretty incredible that it’s taken us this long to get us to the only place that made sense from the beginning, but as said initially, if something cannot hold, it will break sooner or later, and the dreams of 100% EV’s just did. Personally, i’d be delighted to consider a hybrid. I’d have nothing against driving fully electric on shorter distances, and reducing my fuel consumption on longer trips. The ethical issues linked to rare metal excavation are still not solved, but I guess you can’t have everything, and things are at least improving in this regard. Mark Twain once replied to a letter by saying that “the report of my death was an exaggeration”. Mid-2024, the same thing is just as true for the combustion engine!
Most things don’t change drastically from one moment to the other, but rather by small increments happening continuously. Taking separately you don’t notice them, but taken together, in the end they make a big difference. Money, or rather means of payment, are a good example: at first, we all had cash. Then, credit card adoption in Europe was good up north and bad in the south (and nowhere as bad as in Germany, in the middle…), but only for larger purchases. Then in the last years with Covid, cards became widely adopted so that today, you can use them for every purchase. Seen in total, in perhaps 10 years, we’ve thus gone carrying a bulky wallet with cash and cards to carrying nothing but a phone on which your cards are stored, since in between, someone invented the card tap function as well.
This is not how it was when we were kids…
As it turns out, my hunt for a small city car to use at our place on the Riviera is illustrating the described sequence of incremental changes quite nicely. Our cars may still be powered (in majority) by internal combustion engines, but pretty much everything else about them has evolved in so many small steps over the last 20 years so that if you landed from another planet today, you’d hardly think it’s the same technology anywhere on the four wheels.
Staying true to my own brief of finding something small (such as to be easy to park), cheap (both to buy and run) not too attractive (such as not to be stolen) and preferrably French (as it seems appropriate) had me circle in, over the last weeks, on the Renault Twingo – a legendary French city car that most Americans have never seen, but which is a perfect representative of the segment. Without going into details, it hits the above described brief bang on, and in addition, has a back seat you can move forward and backwards such as to give more space for luggage (a world first when it was presented!) and on some versions, a very cool canvas, or glass sunroof.
The Twingo – a true French legend of which over 2.5 million were built in the firs series
The first series of the Twingo was built from the early 90’s to 2006 in a more or less unchanged shape, with two engine options: there is the 1.2 litre, 58hp base engine, from 2000 complemented by the 75 hp, 16v version. Except for the above equipment, it also came with an optional four-speed auto box. 30 years later, Mk 1 Twingos have become not only old but also cheap, however not dirt cheap, and seemingly trending somewhat upwards, given they’re also slowly but surely becoming scarce. This of course gave me a familiar tingling – maybe this wasn’t just a cheap car, but also a bit of an investment? All this led to quite a fanatic search for good Twingos in the last weeks, and to me testing out a couple of them – a 60 hp manual, and a 75 hp automatic, both in the (for this project) highly attractive price range of EUR 3.000-4.000.
Starting with the positives, both cars started at the first turn, although they’d clearly been standing for quite a while – I guess the collectors’ market hasn’t really taken off just yet. Opening the door, the first thing you notice is the excellent visibility, with large windows in all directions, making you wonder why we felt a need to increase the size of body panels at the detriment of glass areas of modern cars? I sat down in the surprisingly high chair and set off on a test ride in the 60 hp, manual car.
Visibility is great. Otherwise, it’s pretty much cheap plastics everywhere
58 hp, of which at least some have certainly found other pastures in the last 20 years (the car was a 2002 model) certainly doesn’t make it fast in any way, but weighing in at 800-900 kg meant it still felt fine. The A/C was cooling as it should and the manual box was ok. Less ok were the breaks, since every time I hit them it felt like the front wheels would fall off. They didn’t, and the seller assured me this was only because the car had been standing for a long time. Right.
The 75 hp version was better equipped, with a power-operated glass roof and leather seats – as luxurious as it gets in a first series Twingo! As part of the luxury package it also had the automatic gearbox, which quite effectlvely ate up all of those extra 15 hp, and then some. It literally took 2-3 seconds to switch gears and in the process, the box made sure most of the power was lost. Given the inefficiency of the gearbox you really didn’t need the brakes that much but they were anyway ok although a bit soft, although this car had been standing just as long as the other one.
The so called “Initiale” is the top Twingo version – a real ocean of luxury!
As I sat there on a too high mounted seat, turning the steering wheel the five turns it felt like it needed from left to right, and trying to locate where all the noises that shouldn’t be there came from, it struck me that I haven’t been active in this part of the market for, well, many years, and that you can’t expect too much. However, what also struck me is how old the cars felt. The whole build, the missing isolation, the terrible auto box, the powerless breaks. As someone born in the early 70’s, I still think of things from the 00’s as relatively recent (sounds familiar?), but the Twingo just proved that they aren’t – and by extension, that I’m old.
Some readers may now want to remind me that I used to be the owner of a TR4 Triumph that was much older than the Twingo, built in -65. But that’s precisely the point: with an oldtimer, you marvel at how engineers and workmen managed to build something so great so long ago. But a 20-year old car is not an oldtimer, it’s something you instinctively compare to a modern car, and then understand it isn’t. And by the way, my TR4 drove far better than any of those two Twingos!
Dear old friend, I was just reminded of how great you were!
All this means that the search will be a bit longer than I had initially imagined, and will most probably go through a number of small, incremental changes before we end up with something that, if I listen to my inner voice, will probably be a bit more modern, a bit more powerful, and a bit more expensive. I guess that corresponds to the general evolution of over the last decades. However, cars haven’t just evolved, they’ve also become better – much better. The question is of course, 20 years from now, if we conclude the same thing again? If history is any guide, that’s highly probable!
If you’ve studied economics like me, the name Hyman Minsky may be familiar. He was an American economist who developed the financial stability theory, basically saying that stability breeds instability. Think of a sand pile: at some point, adding one more grain, although infinitely small in itself, will make the pile crumble. That’s more or less what we’re witnessing right now for the sand pile called “Ev’s for all”, crumbling far quicker than even I had imagined. I wasn’t planning to return to the topic anytime soon but sometimes events force your hand, and there’s just too much that’s happened in the last weeks and months not to take note of, as it is kind of important for the whole car world.
The starting point as I remember it was sometime back in February when two things happened. Mercedes boss Ola Källenius, roughly at the same time as presenting the stupidest EV of them all this side of the Hummber EV, the electric G-class, came out and said that electrification of the whole Mercedes fleet would take longer than expected. That’s of course another way of saying that demand is lacking. Mercedes have pushed the date for the last combustion engine forward from 2030 to 2035, where it most certainly won’t stay.
Time will tell, but this could go down as the symbol of when the tide turned…
Roughly at the same time, the FT ran an article on Lucid Motors, where Lucid boss Peter Rawlinson said that his company cannot rely on “bottomless wealth” from its 60% Saudi owners. In other words, the sheiks in the country of many sand piles are thinking of turning off the tap, if they haven’t done so already. Lucid has close to USD 5bn in the bank but is currently burning USD 1bn per quarter and lost close to USD 3bn in 2023. Given they’re not close to making a profit anytime soon, they will thus need to fundraise again before the end of the year to survive. In the current market, I wish them luck.
Luck is also what Rivian still needs, and this one hurts a bit more since I find it a really innovative company that have brought something new to the market, and have plans for continuing to do so in the future as well. A friend of mine drives the Rivian SUV and is thrilled about the car, its features and gadgets. However given a lack of Rivian car buyers, the company urgently needs to save money and announced in March that production has been paused in their new factory in Georgia and that instead, they will fall back on their old production plant which is cheaper to run. And whilst we’re on SUV’s, if anyone is curious about Fisker, they’re so close to the brink that they can go belly up at any point in time, and contrary to Rivian, the SUV called Ocean they’ve launched is crap in most testers’ view.
A small opening side window in the back is the only attraction of the Ocean. Literally.
Moving on to the EV wannabes, Porsche is making all kinds of strange sounds around the all-electric new Macan. The idea was that the combustion one would be taken out of production in 2025-2026, and the all new E-Macan, launched as we speak, would then fully replace it. Now, the talk is of not replacing the ICE one until 2030. The issue for Porsche is that the new Macan is built as an EV from the first screw, meaning it’s not made for a combustion engine. Therefore, it’s most probably the old Macan that will be updated such as to live a bit longer. That’s certainly very far from what Porsche, blinded by the general EV trend, originally intended. It’s really terrible when client demand isn’t where you want it to be.
To round it all off, even the king of the hill Tesla has come down the hill, at least a bit. Firstly in stock price, where it’s down about 1/3 this year, making it by far the worst performer of the so called Magnificent Seven. That said, it’s still worth more than twice what Toyota is. Then there’s production numbers, where Tesla not only ships less cars than a year ago, but also produced around 70′ less cars in the first quarter than analysts were counting on. Tesla has also lost around 1/3 of its market share in the all-important Chinese market, falling from 10.5% to around 7% as per the Chinese Passenger Car Association, all due to the intense Chinese competition discussed in earlier posts.
As the headline says, things improved in March, let’s see if it’s the start of a new trend.
You’ll note that all of this has to do with falling client demand, and nothing has to do with the other fundamental EV issues, such as not even being close to having enough metals and related stuff to produce the EV’s our politicians plan for, and that the battery production with all its required input materials is both highly polluting and highly unethical. That comes on top of the waning demand, and as Ineos’ founder Jim Rathcliffe says, you can’t force EV’s down people’s throat – although I’m sure at least some politicians will try.
I yelled at European luxury automakers pathetic efforts to build competitive EV’s a few weeks ago, and also said the cheap part of the market risks being taken over by Chinese EV’s. That’s exactly what’s happening, and in addition, growth has stalled in the developed world for all the reasons we’ve already gone into. A challenging capital raising environment means that many of the new EV brands risk going under, and (especially European) politicians who are still incapable of delivering a charging network commensurate to the growth they want to see have done the rest. I’d say they should take most of the blame.
At the same time, I was surprised earlier this week to see the Biden Administration’s projection for what the US car market will look like in 2050. As can be seen above, EV’s aren’t expected to take over anytime soon, although they are projected to grow quite a lot. Hybrids continue to grow too, which we’ve been discussing here, and what for example Toyota has said all along. Most people drive short distances, and thus splitting a big battery pack in one car into five smaller packs in five cars makes most sense when materials are limited. Anyhow, by 2050, 2/3 of all cars are still expected to be what should be called combustion engine cars, since by then, I’m willing to bet we’ll have other stuff than fossil fuels to power combustion engines with, which also means they may be around for far longer than anticipated.
If you really want an EV, then as I’ve said before, there really is no better alternative than a Tesla, pretty much wherever you live. But if you don’t, be aware you’re part of a growing crowd and that your petrol car will be fine for years to come. As I was finishing this post, I saw the news that the European car safety organization Euro NCAP has come out with new rules, requiring a car’s essential functions to be handled by physical buttons, not over a screen, for a car to get the maximum five safety stars starting in 2026. Trying to sell a car in Europe that has less than five safety stars is all but impossible, so this will obviously cause further pain for many, especially most EV manufacturers. If we keep going at this pace, the future starts looking really bright!
Is the European, and especially the German car industry heading for a fall? As we enter the new year, it’s a good time to ask the question. Why? Because the full turn towards electric, the inability to sell EV’s without subsidies, bringing cars to market that nobody wants and a whole block of new brands from China undercutting the market are all part of what I believe will be a very bleak future for European manufacturers, unless a change of strategy happens pretty soon. Let’s dig in.
With financial conditions turning for the worse in the last couple of years and inflation making a rather spectacular return, it’s no big surprise that consumers think twice about capital expenditures such as getting a new car, especially when there’s so much insecurity as to what the future of mobility will look like. And what goes for consumers also goes for states, especially when those in Europe have a whole set of geopolitical worries to think about, and spend money on.
With the US pulling back, Europe’s bill for Ukraine will keep increasing
Therefore, in their infinite wisdom, European politicians in various countries have decided to scrap or heavily reduce subsidies on new EV’s. This is not because they’ve read this blog and come to better thoughts, at least I don’t think so. Rather, they probably believed their own propaganda and that everyone had bought fully into their electrical mantra, so that subsidies were no longer needed. Oh how wrong they were…
According to EV-Volumes.com, a database tracking worlwide EV sales, the sales growth rate has fallen from over 100% YoY to around 10% in the last two years. And let’s remember this is starting from a low base, so that when Ola Källenius, Mercedes-Benz CEO says like he did a few weeks ago, that Merc’s EV sales in the last year grew by 70%, it really doesn’t mean that our streets are crowded with EV’s from Stuttgart.
But wait you’ll object, haven’t you told us that the Tesla Model Y and 3 are among the bestselling cars even in Europe? Yes I have and indeed they are, but this is a sign of Tesla doing this right rather than a general market trend. We’ll come back to that a bit later, however anyone doubting the correlation between EV sales and subsidies can look back to a I wrote piece back in 2018 using the example from Hong Kong.
The word “subsidy” is missing after Hong Kong in the title…
In April of 2017, EV subsidies on more expensive cars like Tesla were removed in Hong Kong, and during the rest of the year, sales dropped from almost 3.000 sold in the one month of March of that year, to a few dozen during the remaining nine months. And then Hong Kong went over to China who are very keen to subsidize the EV sector in general, so now sales have short up again. That same mechanism is exactly what we’re now seeing in Europe.
As we start 2024, EV’s still make up less than 2% of the European car fleet. That’s how big what the press likes to describe as “tremendous success” really is, and that shows you how very far we still have to go if the EU is serious about its ban on combustion cars in 2030. It’s also a bit of an issue if, as an automaker, you’ve committed yourself to go all-electric, and then produce cars that in value for money are frankly so awful that they shouldn’t have made it to market in the first place.
BMW has just presented the top-of-the-line new electric 5-series called the i5 M60. The new 5-series generation is over five meters long, or as big as a 7-series used to be, to offer enough room for the electric version’s battery pack. That pack also means the EV version weighs in at over 2.300 kg, around 500 kg or half a ton more than the combustion version of the same car. In spite of that it only has an 80 KwH battery, meaning a realistic range of something like 250-400 km depending on driving style, season and conditions.
It really looks far better than it is…
The inside is nice as it should be, however quality-wise, the previous generation that I drive myself is as superior as a Merc S-class is to an EQS. The increased use of cheap materials is of course to save weight, and instead electric gimmicks like games and movies are the new selling points, supposed to keep you entertained while you’re charging. For all this, the i5 M60 with options will cost you around EUR 150.000, or almost double of what the diesel version of the same car costs – which as said, weighs half a ton less, has a range of about 900-1000 km on one tank and takes two minutes to refuel.
If you think that really is a lot of money you’re completely right, but it’s still less than you’ll need to buy the new Lotus Eletre, which in its cheapest version starts roughly there and goes up to a rather incredible EUR 200.000. It’s an even bigger car, Range Rover-like in size, as gimmicky and plasticky as the Beamer on the inside, but with even more range issues and an efficiency loss vs. a Tesla of over 50%. It also has an infotainment system heavily over-estimating the remaining range, creating a real possibility that you’ll be stranded with an empty battery.
These are two rather awful examples, but at least they look rather stylish and have an excellent wind drag coefficient (or CW-factor) of below 0.30, which is obviously critical for an EV. So what does Mercedes do? It’s preparing to give us an EV version of the G-class, called the EQG, that will launch in 2025 at prices above USD 150.000. The current G-class has a wind drag factor of 0.54, but I’m sure Mercedes will bring that down to below 0.30, right?
And here I thought a low drag coefficient was important for EV’s. Silly me!
In the year 2024, no one in their right mind should put up this much money to buy a BMW they can drive 300 km, or for that matter, give 200.000 to an English manufacturer with less than a stellar reputation for a car that cannot be relied on to tell you how far you still have to go. It’s frankly both embarrassing and scary to see that in the decade they’ve had to prepare for what they knew was coming, leading car manufacturers still can’t manage to build a car that is better, or range-wise not even as good, as a 10-year old construction from Tesla, costing half the money.
Tesla on the other hand are doing great, and models Y and 3 are now established as some of the best-selling cars in Europe. They may look the same as they always have, but constant efficiency improvements mean that on a technical level, they’ve maintained the distance to other manufacturers. Also and critically, the strategy to launch a functioning charging network themselves rather than relying on governments, was a genius move. This is still a factor that heavily hinders sales in some markets, especially when many park in the street and can’t charge overnight.
Tesla proves that there can indeed be a demand for EV’s if the packaging, price and range are reasonable. A Tesla Model S was never a luxury car, but at its current price point and with considerably more range than the three examples given above, if I were to buy an EV today, it’s the only one I would consider.
10 years old and still ahead of a pack that still haven’t figured it out
Of course not everything is about luxury cars, and the bulk of sales is of course in lower segments. But of course, cars there may be cheaper but they’re certainly not better than the top of the line, rather the contrary. Also and increasingly, the competition in these lower segments doesn’t come from the US, but rather from China, as a number of Chinese EV makers are now entering Europe, with an increased number of cars on our roads.
They’re of course cheaper than both Teslas and European EV’s, also thanks to very generous, Chinese state subsidies, and the almost complete integration of the production line, from the mines in Africa over the battery production in China, to the finished car, is of course a far more efficient way to produce. To this, you should also add a 1.5 billion domestic market, meaning they definitely have scale in their favor.
The cars themselves are, at least so far, inferior products. But exactly how inferior? In terms of range, they’re pretty close to European EV’s not only in the luxury segment but overall. In terms of build and ride quality they’re getting there, especially since this is much easier than for a traditional car, given EV’s score points not primarily on how it drives, but rather on how much it costs and how many gimmicks it has.
They’re coming for us…
In summary therefore, EV sales are stalling, subsidies are being removed, and the Chinese undercut European manufacturers in price. Surprisingly enough, all of these seem to have been fast asleep at the wheel for the last years. And at the end of this decade, we’re supposed to stop producing combustion cars, which still made up 80% of car sales in 2022 and are thus, you have to think, what people want to buy.
If Europe wants to keep a car industry in the future, manufacturers need to start building cars that people want, which make economic sense, and that can differentiate themselves against Chinese imports. That probably means leaving a large part of the lower EV market to the Chinese, and instead reverse the full electrification strategy, rather reverting to diesel and petrol hybrids, in a mix with modern, non-polluting diesels.
Manufacturers will tell you EU politicians haven’t given them any choice, and this is all policy. But policy can be influenced and if they want to have a brand at all in a few years, they should probably get in a car (preferably not an EV), drive over to Brussels and make the case for why the current strategy and timetable for the phasing out of combustion cars is a death threat to the industry and thereby to the one million people it directly employs.
In view of the mass protests against fuel prices by farmers in Germany in the last weeks, which have now spread to France, that might actually be an argument these people are inclined to listen to. At least they wouldn’t be able to claim that they hadn’t been warned.
It seems yet another year is coming to an end and at least if you ask me, it’s been one that’s passed quicker than most! I guess that may be a sign of our accelerating society, where everything seems to move at an ever increasing pace. Except for the adoptions of EV mobility that is, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. As usual, in expectation of a hopefully good 2024, I’ve compiled a few paragraphs of stuff that we’ve seen, may see, or is just interesting to think about, following the first letters of the 12 months of the year. Enjoy the reading and the holidays!
January
The J for January this year is for Japan, not because of the exciting cars they bring to market (they don’t), but rather because they’ve become the last bastion of some kind of realistic thinking around future electric mobility, continuing to largely ignore full EV’s in favour of various types of hybrids, and with a number of projects also in e-fuels. It’s actually a rather simple calculation to see that if for all the reasons we know, your battery producing capacity is limited, then splitting what you have between several cars and complementing it with a combustion engine is far more efficient than building a small number of full EV’s. Let’s hope Japan can export its thinking to other countries in 2024 – but I wouldn’t hold my breath…
February
The February F is for Ferrari, and the fact that the Maranello company is doing better than ever before. Looking over the last 10 years, production numbers have more than doubled, the product range receives praise from motor journalists and is up to date. and had you bought the stock five years ago, you would have tripled your money. Not only that, if you were one of the lucky few to get your hands on a Purosangue, the most elegant SUV (kind of…) on the market, you could re-sell it for around twice what you bought it for – if you find one. There’s currently not a single one for sale in Germany, as an example. In two words already used when I wrote about the FF a few weeks ago: Forza Ferrari!
The first Purosangue I’ve seen in Zurich, as late as last week. Worth a fortune!
March
We’ll take the March M to mean money, since no month starts with an E, in which case I would have said Euros. Because it’s largely in Europe that money is getting increasingly scarce, and nowhere more so than in Germany, where the government is trying to find enough money to fill a small EUR 17bn budget hole that was “discovered” a few weeks ago. One of the measures taken is an immediate scrapping of the EUR 4.500 cash premium for buying an EV, and I’ll let you guess how that will affect already slowing sales numbers. Things are getting harsher, or let’s say less subsidized for EV’s in many other countries as well, so at least for now, the party looks to be over before it even started. Except for Tesla that is, more on that in May…
April
Before May though we have April with A for AlfaRomeo, that returned to full form five-six years ago with both the Giulia and Stelvio Quadrifoglio, a 500hp sedan and mid-sized SUV that received praise all over, and to everyone’s surprise, saw Alfa all of a sudden being able to compete with cars like the BMW M3. Given many of us enthusiasts are Alfistis at heart, this looked like the new dawn we had been waiting for since the 80’s – but then nothing happened. No further exciting models, an ageing line-up, and with as latest addition the small SUV called Tonale, which is unexciting, uninteresting, and overpriced. C’mon Alfa, time to wake up before it’s too late!
The Giulia was the most positive Alfa Romeo surprise since the 80’s!
May
Even though this is a blog for those of us favouring combustion engines, I’ll take the second M for the year to mean Musk, as I continue to be fascinated by the man. As mentioned last week when writing about the Cybertruck, it’s amazing what he has achieved with Tesla in only 10 years, and at the same time, it’s rather pitiful how the traditional industry still isn’t managing to produce good alternatives. This is something we’ll come back to next year, but looking at it now, the Model Y is the best-selling car this year in Europe, it ranks no 4 in the US, and the motoring press seems to agree on the Model 3 currently being the best EV out there. So was I wrong about e-mobility not taking off? No, but Tesla is the shining exception. I still don’t want one, but I’ll take my hat off for Elon!
June
J for June or a Jubilant Max Verstappen, who took his third consecutive F1 title in 2023 and by June of last year, had basically already settled the whole thing. Max is the best driver on the grid and also has the the best car from what is currently also the best team. He also has the aggressiveness and sometimes carelessness that can be irritating but, that almost every true champion has, and although the other teams came closer towards the end of the year, as discussed in the last round-up of the 20230 F1 season, it seems unlikely that he will not be on top again when we sum up 2024. Well done Max!
July
The second J is for Jaguar, that a bit like Alfa, I can’t really get my head around. Jaguar has all the tradition and brand name you can ask for, but currently a line-up which is not only small, but also pretty unexciting. In Europe as we end 2023, there’s only three models: the obligatory EV SUV called the I-Pace, a conventional one called the F-Pace, that is mildly exciting at best, and the F-Type sports coupé or convertible, that in V8 shape sounds really good, but is also getting rather old. The sedan called XF isn’t even on sale here anymore, neither is the smaller, E-type SUV. Given Land Rover has a fully up to date line-up, let’s hope it’s time for Jaguar in 2024, but it currently doesn’t look like it.
As mentioned in the post, it’s a good-looking car, but it’s getting old…
August
The second A of the year is for August and the auto shows, which are no longer the same, especially not in… you guessed it, Germany. The IAA used to be one of Europe’s largest auto salons, that would alternate with Paris every other year, and that has been at home in Frankfurt for longer than anyone can remember. In its old form it’s gone, replaced by a smaller event that will alternate between different German cities, and of course focus on EV’s. The show saw a 30% drop in visitors during Covid and somehow never recovered, at the same time as auto makers prefer invest the millions these events cost in more lucrative parts of the world, i.e. Asia and especially China. At least we still have the Auto Salon in Geneva – for now…
September
The only month with S in its name is September, that will here represent senses. This is something I’ve thought quite a lot about lately, and that became painfully obvious when re-acquainting myself with the wonderful Ferrari FF recently. Like most cars featured on this blog, it very much appeals to all your senses at once. But the EV’s we’re supposed to drive going forward don’t have much going for them in this regard. I think there’s very few people who would choose between accelerating to 100 km/h in sub-3 seconds in an EV, compared to doing it in sub 4 seconds in a V8, V12, or for that matter, turbo four-cylinder. And that’s before even looking at the car, since for efficiency reasons, every EV looks like a soap. How will our senses get any form of excitement from our future mobility? You tell me…
October
The O of October goes to Opel (Vauxhall in the UK), a brand that will never be a regular feature on the blog, as with very few exceptions, Opel builds practical cars of average looks, average quality and average size, that have absolutely zero attraction for anyone with an interest in cars. So what are the exceptions? I can think of three: the Speedster, a sister car to the Lotus Elise which was said to actually work, the Lotus Omega, an early kind of super-saloon from the 90’s that Lotus helped develop, and of the course the Opel Manta, that in certain circles in its native Germany has a very loyal following which has even been caught on film, as you may remember from the post back in the spring of 2022. So here’s to Opel, probably for the last time.
The Manta – probably the only Opel to ever be featured on this blog!
November
The N for November stands for Nio, one of the many new Chinese car brands, mostly electric, that sell literally millions of cars in China and that are now increasingly making it to Europe. Others include names such as BYD, Aiways and of course also MG, that has gone from a stylish UK builder of roadsters to a Chinese producer of basic EV SUV’s. Supported by their domestic market and rich on capital, many of these groups have now become a serious threat to especially European manufacturers, who still can’t get their act together when it comes to electrification and also can’t compete on price, something we’ll look closer at in 2024. The Chinese of course have the huge advantage of also controlling a lage part of the global battery market, which certainly helps!
December
We close out with a D for December and for the good old Defender, Land Rover that is, in the generation prior to the current one (that is also cool, but doesn’t quite have the same personality). Although becoming less frequent, you still see them more or less regularly, and they still have as much presence. These days, they also represent a simplicity that is otherwise long gone in a world where cars are judged by the size of their infotainment screens and the number of interior light colors. They still hold their value really well, even though you’d be forgiven for thinking that should no longer be the case. I have no idea where they will go, but I wouldn’t be surprised if people continue to be attracted to them, in our increasingly complex world. I’ll have a 90 version please, in dark green or black, with the optional Recaro seats!
It’s still the only car you’ll ever need – and the coolest!
if you’re a cyclist like me, you’ll know that punctures can happen in many different ways and are completely unpredictable. Two years ago I rode 3.000 km in a season without a single flat tyre, only to have three of them within two weeks the next year. And whereas some punctures are very much like sticking a nail in a balloon, others are of the fizzling kind and you won’t notice them until next time you want to take your bike (typically to the train or bus, that you’ll otherwise miss…).
There are now a growing number of signs that the from the outset completely unrealistic project referred to as the Green Revolution is experiencing precisely that type of fizzling puncture. From north to south and east to west, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the climate goals set by different states, notably with regards to the automobile world, are by all objective measures as good as dead in the water. And it highlighted once again that at the end of the day, politicians will always do what gets them the votes. That’s not a surprise to readers of this blog but still, what’s happened lately is noteworthy.
Somewhat more connected to reality than most Euorpean politicians
10 days ago in the UK, PM Rishi Sunak announced a five-year delay on the planned 2030 ban on new combustion cars. He did so saying that the government could not impose “unacceptable costs” linked to reducing emissions on British families, and that moving too fast on green policies “risks losing the consent of the British people”. That’s a level of realism pretty remarkable for a politician, even though there was of course never any consent by neither the British, nor any other people in this regard.
There is little doubt that Sunak isn’t the last politician reversing course, or for that matter, that he looked to Germany to see what can happen when you ignore the will of the people long enough. In the country anyone putting their trust in clean energy should look twice at, the lack of public support for the government’s policies is now showing in regional elections in a way politicians from traditional parties never could imagine.
The planned partial ban on fossil-fuel heating boilers that would force people to replace perfectly functioning ones with electrical systems running on green energy at an installation cost of up to EUR 20.000, contributed to the anti-establishment, anti-immigration, anti-everythying AfD party scoring over 20% in regional elections in former eastern Germany. For historical reasons that may feel especially scary in Germany, but what’s happening there is very close to happening in a number of other countriees across Europe and by the looks of it, in the US as well.
“The East (meaning eastern Germany, where AfD has most support) rises!” this election poster says
Germany has a target of putting 15 million EV’s on the road by 2030, seven years from now. There’s currently about 1.5 million, meaning around 13.5 million are missing, which in turn exceeds the current annual EV production. So, 13.5 million Germans need to be forc… sorry, incentivized, to buy an EV in the next seven years in a recessionary economy. By the looks of it, that will be rather difficult, as the Japanese would say when something is completely unrealistic. Firstly there is barely an economic incentive anymore, with a fast-charging KwH now costing 80 Eurocents at a German supercharger, roughly the same cost as running a diesel. Secondly, there’s all the other reasons we’ve discussed previously on this blog. Thirdly however, there’s something else that has emerged in the last weeks.
Not only Germany, but the whole of the EU is now talking about limiting imports of Chinese EV’s in order to protect European manufacturers. That’s the same thing as definitely shelving any European EV 2030 targets, as the main obstacle to people not buying EV’s, next to range anxiety, is the cost. China of course has a huge advantage here, with an EV industry that is both heavily subsidized from the state, and with manufacturers controlling the full battery production chain, knowing that the battery pack makes up 40% of the cost of an EV.
BMW’s EV flagship, the i7: ugly, expensive (150′ EUR), and at 2.700 kgs, heavier than most SUV’s. It’s also more expensive to run than the 500 kg lighter diesel version…
Germany’s car manufacturers cannot compete on cost and have therefore left the budget EV segment largely open to the Chinese. French brands are trying to get a foot in, but can still not compete notably with the scale of Chinese EV manufacturers, with BYD this or next year surpassing Tesla as the largest in the world.
I’m personally all for free trade but that’s certainly not what China practices, so you can have sympathy for Europe not letting state subsidized Chinese EV’s kill the domestic production market. However, that doesn’t mean that you can force European consumers to buy cars they don’t want and can’t afford, as is now illustrated by the falling sales numbers in several markets. Something thus needs to give, and what will give is no doubt the climate goals, since in the end, politicians will always do what it takes to win most votes.
That was further illustrated twice this week, first in Sweden where the new right-wing government is slightly less disconnected to the people than its predecessors, and thus presented a budget that increases emissions short-term. Of course the press in the self-elected, moral superpower was scandalized, but the government knows they have public support. And in California, gorvernor Gavin Newsom this week announced the lifting of an anti-smog ban in the state in an effort to bring down retail gas prices. Newsom has been very efficient these last years in de-stabilizing California’s power grid, but now obviously senses that the wind is changing. As does Donald Trump of course, who my American friends tell me will win next year’s election.
It was the catalyzer, i.e. technical development, that solved the smog issue in LA – not a ban on cars
A fizzling tire can continue to fizzle slowly until it’s completely flat. Alternatively, the hole can increase in size and thus let the air out quicker. What it cannot do however, is repair itself. Once there’s a hole, it needs fixing, something that doesn’t only apply to bicycle tubes. It certainly looks like the people, aka the voters, have had enough, and that we’ve finally reached a point where last years’ crazy policies slowly but surely come to an end. My guess is that Sunak along with a number of PM colleagues in other countries, will need to revise that 2035 date to… whenever. The sooner the better, since we can then perhaps instead start dealing with real solutions to the world’s problems!
You remember Dieselgate? If not, it was the emissions scandal in 2015 when it emerged that Volkswagen, keen to sell more diesel cars in the US and doing so under the slogan “clean diesel”, had manipulated the software of several diesel engine types so that these produced less emissions only during test cycles, not in real life thereafter. It emerged that a total of 11 million cars with the same software had been sold in other regions as well, notably in Europe, and after a few months of management denying any knowledge of anything at all (What? Do we build cars??), the group’s chairman Martin Winterkorn had to resign.
Martin Winterkorn having a bad day at work…
Of course this was nowhere close to the first scandal in the car industry. To stay in modern times, just the year before, issues emerged around GM’s management after it had delayed a major recall regarding ignition switches which could lead to the engine turning off while driving. In 2009, Toyota scared the world as some of its cars accelerated unintentionally, which of course no one at management level knew anything about. And in 2016 and 2019, as if Dieselgate had never happened, Mitsubishi and Fiat Chrysler were caught violating emission regulations or lying about fuel consumption. The list goes on and on, and now it seems we’re there again. This time however, it’s the stock market darling that has been found with not one but both hands very deep in the battery p… sorry, cookie jar.
Toyotas accelerated by themselves, long before self-driving…
As Reuters uncovered a couple of weeks ago, since about 10 years, Tesla has been programming their cars to show rosy range projections and use these in their marketing. More precisely, the software was set to show a longer, unrealistic range until the battery was half depleted, and then to switch to a more realistic one. The result (and desired effect) was of course that customers bought cars believing they would have a longer range than they actually did. Many of them would then complain to Tesla and book an appointment to investigate the issue. In between the contact and the appointment however, Tesla would tell them they had performed a remote diagnostic on their car, that everything was fine with the battery, and that the appointment was therefore cancelled.
With time, the number of complaining customers apparently became so great so that Tesla created a separate team with the task of killing complaints by proceeding as described, something that saved Tesla around USD 1000 per cancelled appointment. Apparently it was common for the responsible team to sound xylophones and dance on their desks for every cancellation. Personally this reminds me of “The Wolf of Wall Street” which is an excellent movie, but perhaps not the culture the renewables’ hero company is meant to portray. In a test from April this year by the engineering organization SAE International, it was shown that most EV manufacturers lie about range, but none more so than Tesla, whose three tested cars in reality had a range that was on average 26% inferior to what was claimed. Ouch.
That’s 2.5 tonnes to push..
The range of an EV will vary with conditions, driving style and temperature, as will that of a combustion engine, however then mostly depending on driving style. This leads to the two important differences with EV’s we all know of: firstly, that low temperatures limit the EV range disproportionally (and this by the way also if the car is parked in the cold during for example your ski holiday, as a friend of mine discovered in the French Alps last year…). Secondly, the fact that charging, although slowly improving, is still not comparable to filling up at a petrol station, neither in speed, nor in availability. What Reuters uncovered however helps solve the mystery around Tesla’s superior range claims. As it turns out, it had little to do with more efficient battery integration as a consequence of internal battery production, and more with dirty business practices, not too far from Dieselgate. Who would have thought?
Staying on the electrification theme, one thing that has been noticeable in Europe this summer is an increased number of EV’s from Chinese brands. It seems these are making rapid progress in Europe, doubling their market share from 4 to 8% (as a group) of EV sales since 2021. The biggest brands include MG (yes, sorry to say it’s Chinese these days), BYD (short for Build Your Dreams, the second largest EV manufacturer globally after Tesla) and Lynk & Co (owned by Geely). My understanding is that of these, only BYD is present in the US, however building buses rather than selling cars. In Europe however, given none of these brands have any brand recognition, they sell on the only argument of being cheaper than Western EV’s. And now Western car executives are getting nervous, promising to offer cheaper their own, cheaper EV’s going forward.
This is what an MG looks like these days
This means that range numbers, real or invented, will not be improving in the coming years. You see, the costliest part of any EV is the massive, 400-600 kg battery pack. It’s also the most controversial, as I’ve illustrated on this blog with a focus on cobalt, but where you could say the same about many other materials as well. Many of the metals in current lithium-ion batteries will quickly become a scarce resource since we are nowhere near extracting the quantities required for the electrification of the world, especially since the green movement in their infinite wisdom do everything they can to stop any additional mining. This also leaves us at the mercy of great countries like China and Russia, where China already sits on the extraction of a lot of these resources, and something like 15 of the 18 major cobalt mines in the Congo. When metals get scarce, China will of course make sure their manufacturers are supplied first.
Lynk & Co, becoming increasingly frequent on European roads
This bodes well for Chinese EV manufacturers, however given it takes decades to build a brand, they will keep selling on being cheaper for the foreseeable future, meaning keeping battery costs down. The way to do that is to substitute metals where possible, especially cobalt (horray!), against cheaper alternatives. Substitutes are however not as performing as metals used so far, meaning less stability and less range. Assuming Western manufacturers get their hands on enough metals to be part of the race at all, and that they indeed wish to build cheaper cars, they will obviously have to do the same. This will not change until we have some kind of technological revolution in batteries, which looks to be well beyond 2030.
The moral of the story is thus that EV builders are no more honest than traditional car manufacturers (if anyone really thought so), but also that Chinese EV’s will tend to make EV’s globally even less competitive. That they contribute nothing whatsoever to a cleaner planet is well known to those of you reading this blog regularly – otherwise please see here, here and here. In Germany, the MG ZS or Lynk pictured above are yours for EUR 35.000-40.000. They will take you something like 300 km, best case. The same money will buy you a VW Tiguan, equal in size, better in quality, with a modern, low emission petrol engine taking you twice as far and then needing five minutes to fill up. It’s also built in the West, not by underpaid workers without rights in a Communist dictatorship. Seems like a sensible choice to me!
It’s been a while since we did a roundup of news from the car world, which isn’t because there hasn’t been any, on the contrary, rather because there have been other things to write about. There’s of course a lot happening that you could theoretically write about all the time, but a few more specific things happened this week, making me think it’s high time to provide you with a very arbitrary selection of the most important recent news from all our favourite pasttime. Let’s dig in!
To start of on a positive note, Aston Martin‘s owner Lawrence Stroll, pictured above in his usual, low-key style, apparently let the Aston team know in no uncertain words that the new DB12, expected next year, was a tad too expensive to feature a 10-year old infotainment system from Mercedes. This was of course the case both in the DB11 and in the DBX, as I wrote about back in Oct -21. I don’t think Lawrence reads this blog but if he would, then there’s a small chance both the DB11 and DBX are, by any objective measure.
No, it’s not a DB11, it’s the new DB12. Why change a winning look?
Given Aston sources not only the outdated infotainment unit but also the even more important engine from Mercedes/AMG, Lawrence’s hope was probably to get his hands on the MBUX system, but that didn’t happen. Instead therefore, Aston have developed their own system, which according to the first test drives is a pretty laggy thing, quite a bit off the MBUX or BMW’s latest unit. So getting better, but still not there. The DB12 does look very promising though, more on that next year. And for those not interested in infotainment but rather in driving, expect quickly deteriorating second-hand prices on the DB11!
You may have seen that the DB12 will no longer feature a V12, in spite of its name, but only an AMG V8. That’s however plenty compared to what Mercedes have put in their new E63. This is a theme I’m sensitive about, having owned, and on a day where the starts really didn’t align, sold, an E63 2014 with the fantastic, bi-turbo V8. The E63’s before and after have until now all had V8’s, but the new one doesn’t. Neither does it have a V6. It has precisely four cylinders, combined to an electric engine. One of the most legendary four-door power cars out there has become a four-cylinder hybrid…
Find one mistake with this picture…
That could theoretically have been fine even if it’s a lot to take in. Some hybrids work great though, such as the V60 Polestar that I drove the other week. It didn’t convince me but it wasn’t the fault of the hybrid solution. Trouble is, again according to early reports, the rest of the new E63 isn’t that great either, especially the chassis, which obviously makes the whole thing totally unacceptable. No one, I repeat no one, ever asked for a hybrid E63, so why on earth did they build it? If Mercedes finds that eight cylinders doesn’t go down well with the electrification strategy they’ve chosen, then just don’t build any more E63’s. I wouldn’t be surprised if demand for previous V8 ones picks up though!
Otherwise the world’s electrification journey rolls on, with Tesla setting new records in sales numbers, shipping close to half a million cars in the first quarter. The stock is up more than 100% so far this year, so great for shareholders – so far. However, Tesla must also have set a new record in terms of various types of discounts both in the US and elsewhere so as always with Elon’s companies, how much they’re actually earning is rather difficult to figure out. That goes for Rivian as well by the way. The company that didn’t even build 50.000 cars last year still spent roughly as much money as Tesla in the first quarter, namely around USD 6.5bn. They claim bottle necks in production are now behind them and that’d better be the case if Rivian wants to survive in the far less favourable financing environment we’re now in. The target for this year is 50.000 cars, and we’ll see if they get there.
Rivian isn’t out of the woods yet…
Interestingly, Toyota continues to refuse getting in line with everyone else, instead digging in to their hybrid technology. That earns them lots of bashing from the green lobby who are as bad as doing the maths here as when it comes to counting emissions from battery production. Toyota on the other hand remain as calm as Mount Fuji, simply stating that in total, hybrids achieve greater emission reductions than trying to supply the whole world with EV’s does. I haven’t verified their numbers but my intuition, combined with the fact that they are after all not only the world’s second largest company, but also Japanese, tells me they’re right.
Toyota also came out with another piece of news recently, namely that they expect to put solid state batteries into production in five years. Don’t focus too closely on that number since they’ve promised that before, but clearly, the solid state technology is making progress. In practical numbers in the case of Toyota, this means an indicative range of 1200 km for much less battery weight and only 10 minutes of charging. As discussed back in January 2021, solid state batteries would be a true revolution, but we’ll see when we get there. When I wrote that piece I said three-four years, which obviously was too optimistic. Sometime around 2030 is perhaps a realistic target.
The Mahle engine – is this what will revolutionize the EV world?
Solid state batteries are better than the current lithium ion ones, but they’re not without issues, meaning metals. Which is why a piece of news from Germany this week caught my eye. The German engine building company Mahle, that I had never heard about, is developing a new type of electrical engine that not only promises to be even more efficient than current ones, but in addition, does without any metals. It’s called the Magnet-free Contactless Transmitter (MCT) and as the name suggests, works without magnets. They’re replaced by an electricity-induced tension field, and the energy then flows inductively, reducing frictions and thereby energy loss as well as wear and tear. The technology has apparently already been proven to work in various prototypes.
Mahle is currently in talks with several manufacturers, targeting to make the engine ready for mass production in three-four years. This is a fantastic example not only of how to develop batteries, but also how it has always been, and always will be, innovation that leads the world forward. We’ll see if it’s Mahle’s technology, alternative fuels or something else that becomes the new standard at the end of the day. I remain convinced that it will not be EV’s as we currently know them. Until we’re certain, it’s difficult to find a more compelling proposition than an Aston DB11 with a V12, even with an aged infotainment!
When I grew up, I remember my parents speaking of most political leaders with (sometimes great) respect. Churchill was still in vivid memory for many, as was JFK. De Gaulle in France was seen as a true statesman and in general as I remember it, although people didn’t necessarily agree with the political leader of the time, there was a fundamental respect for those leading a country.
Oh how times have changed in this regard. It’s a long debate well beyond this blog to try to define where things went in the wrong direction, but what it’s lead to is no doubt an environment where at least some political leaders deserve far less respect than used to be the case. Then again, the blame on that falls on us since in the end, we’re the ones who somehow, directly or indirectly, elected them…
This is not the face of reason. Jennifer Granholm, US Energy Secretary (Source Fox News)
An example in the category of those not deserving much respect is US Energy Department Secretary Jennifer Granholm, who a few weeks ago stated that she fully supports efforts from the Biden administration to require (among others) the U.S. military to implement an all-electric vehicle fleet by 2030. Granholm says that global events like the war in Ukraine aren’t good for (fossil) energy security, conveniently “forgetting” that the US is pretty much self-sufficient in oil.
The team at Doomberg (an excellent geopolitical newsletter I highly recommend to anyone interested) calculated what it would take to electrify the main US battle tank M1 Abrams, weighing 60 tons. The answer is a battery pack weighing 2/3 of the vehicle itself, i.e. 40 tons, and being roughly the size of the tank itself. I’m sure the US military is thrilled at the prospect, and probably also curious as to how Granholm plans to ensure war zones are well covered with charging stations!
No, this isn’t it either. Robert Habeck, Germany’s Finace and Climate Minister
Idiocy is certainly not limited to the US. In Europe the undisputed champion is of course Germany, a country that used to be the backbone of the European economy but that now has transformed to a schoolbook example of failed energy policy. Germany’s Finance and Climate Minister, aka Green Party leader Habeck fully supports the recent decision to turn off the remaining German nuclear plants, while seeing no problem with those in war-torn Ukraine, a country currently being bombed on a daily basis and very much in “nuclear radiation” distance from Germany, continuing to be operational. Nope, I’m not making this up.
Another European privilege is to have a large bunch of politicians in the EU Parliament in Brussels representing the EU member states. They have now – hallelujah! – discovered that there is a risk that neither the lithium, nor certain metals required for the “energy transition” will be available to Europe in the quantities needed over the coming 10 years or so. Well, had they read this blog, for example in early December, they would have saved some time coming to this assessment…
Somehow preferable to a cobalt mine
In order to find a remedy to this annoying reality, various prospecting projects will soon start, aiming to find suitable excavation sites for metals and lithium in Europe itself. There are, hmm, a number of problems with that. Just to name two, there is of course the small fact that the quantities you can hope to find in Europe are far from being sufficient. Also, as opposed to the Congo where we do business by closing your eyes bribing everyone and letting children do the dirty job, that doesn’t really work in Europe.
Take Finland as an example. There is apparently cobalt in various places across the beautiful Finnish landscape of lakes and forests. But, surprise surprise, the Finns would like to keep that landscape as it is and not transform it into a giant cobalt mine. Of course there will be similar resistance in other places as well, meaning that any excavation at all, which again will not cover Europe’s future needs, is at least 10-20 years away, well past the deadline Brussels has set itself.
If your car smokes like this, you should probably see a garage anyway…
Fortunately though the world hasn’t gone completely crazy just yet, because when you really start to lose hope, a few voices of reason have started to emerge. One was heavy lobbying from French and German automakers, resulting in the ban on selling new combustion engine cars being pushed forward from 2030 to 2035, and then also being changed such as to continue to allow combustion as a technology for cars running on clean fuels (more on that below).
Other sensible voices showing resistance is starting to form have included the CEOs of notably Renault and Stellantis who strongly opposed the planned Euro 7 emission rules for diesel and petrol cars, saying the multi-billion investments these would require of manufacturers would only result in a very marginal reduction of greenhouse gases, hardly being worth it if we’re anyway supposed to go all electric a few years later. Or put differently, there’s about 1198 better ways to spend your money…
They are of course right, although if you agree with me (or even if you don’t, but can count), the truth that I’m sure they’re aware of is that full electrification will not happen any time soon, bar a sudden revolution in battery technology. For those new to the blog, this is something I wrote about notably in the post I’ve linked to above (and again here) from December.
A GT4 running on synthetic fuels – no mines required
Interestingly, a lot of people are now all of a sudden also talking about synthetic fuels (see my post from two years ago here on the topic), tacitly admitting as much. This has notably become a big debate in the UK, with pressure being put on politicians to start encouraging promising technologies in the field. Since the post on the topic I linked to above, Porsche has increased production of its synthetic fuels, proving that the technology works, although the cost is still prohibitive and viability of this as a solution at scale is still insecure.
The recognition that the future is perhaps not 100% electric is however best seen in EV prices, when in notably the US market, pre-owned combustion cars are increasing in price again whereas used EV’s have started to fall like stones. As I wrote about back in August last year, that used to be the case for some EV’s but not for others, notably not for Tesla.
If it’s so great Elon, then why are you cutting the price?
Of course, if like Elon Musk you start cutting the prices of new cars (in itself a good sign itself that things aren’t going that well), that’s hardly beneficial for residual values, but even factoring that in, it’s clear that price falls across all EV’s are heavier than before, and bigger than for (at least some) conventional cars. Could it be that when an increasing number of countries have cut subsidies, or when like here in Switzerland, EV’s will need to pay road tax from next year, and when the electricity price has increased quite dramatically, the whole EV thing isn’t as fun any longer?
We’ll see where all this takes us, but at least the question on what our future car landscape will look like has become a bit less one-dimensional. There’s of course many more issues with the planned electrification that I could have added to those above, making me all the more convinced that the future of new cars is somewhere in the triangle modern hybrids – new battery technology – alternative/synthetic fuels, probably in some combination. But while we figure that out, I can’t help hoping that someone with a sense of humour parks an M1 Abrams tank in Secretary Granholm’s driveway.
The CW-value, known also as drag coefficient and meaning how smoothly a car (in this case) passes through air, is a notion that has been part of the automobile world since at least a 100 years. In 1921 Edmund Rumpfler’s “Tropfenwagen” (drop car) became the first aerodynamically designed automobile, to be followed over the coming decades by cars like the Chrysler Airflow or the Tatra 77. I first become aware of it at a young age when my father bought a new Audi 80 B4 in the early 90’s that looked like a bar of soap, much like its larger brother did, the Audi 100. No doubt Audi had paid a lot of attention to wind resistance and if memory serves me right, the car had a CW-coefficient just below 0.3. That became a bit of a benchmark from then on that proved difficult to beat, with many cars managing 0.27-0.28, but few going below that. And then we got the horsepower race that we’ve seen over the last years, where less attention was paid to efficiency, as it could just be compensated with a more powerful engine.
The “Tropfenwagen” – the world’s first aerodynamically-designed car
The reason things like the CW-value are more important than ever is of course EV’s, as the fight for every km or range needs to go over as little resistance as possible, especially since every EV is penalized by its weight. Mercedes set a new CW-value record with the EQS (another soap-like car) at 0.20. And then just a few weeks ago, the Stuttgart brand also started showing their project car EQ XX to a wider audience, which has a hitherto unrivaled drag coefficient of only 0.17. That also means that equipped with a 100 KwH battery pack, it is the first EV to have a range of over 1000 km (735 miles). This week we’ll look at what makes the EQ XX an example of efficiency, and what it teaches us in a broader sense?
A CW-value of 0.17 is a new record!
The EQ XX is a prototype car which if it goes into production one day as is rumored, it will not be in its current format. The prototype however looks rather nice, far nicer than any other EV Mercedes currently produces. It’s not reminiscent of Rumpfler’s drop car, but clearly the drop form has been the inspiration, especially over the extended tail. Looking at it from the front, some of the air inlets are also quite similar to a Porsche Taycan. But it takes more than that to get the CW-value of a car down to 0.17, so what has Mercedes done? Well, starting up front and next to the very visible are inlets and outlets, there are also active flaps under the front bumper that will vary their position depending on conditions and speed. There are of course special tires and wheels to reduce air resistance, and the long tail of the car ends with an active, extendable rear diffusor, which at speed reduces wind turbulence. A bit surprisingly the EQ XX doesn’t have side cameras but rather standard mirrors, but there’s a logic to this as well since apparently, the gains in reduced wind resistance of cameras is lost again by the power consumed by the screen that becomes necessary in the gauge cluster or the dash.
Four seats and a bit cramped in the back…
On the inside (and seen from videos and photos, given Mercedes for some reason didn’t invite me to the launch…), emphasis is on recyclable materials for one, and low weight on the other. Every metal surface is firstly not metal but rather 3-D printed recycled plastic, and secondly, as perforated as possible without it breaking into pieces. There’s a giant micro-LED display going across the whole dash which is said to consume much less power than a regular screen. There’s no sunroof since the roof of the car all the way down the rear window (which is thus also absent) is covered by solar panels. This is something I’ve never understood why you don’t see on more cars (with the exception of the Fisker Karma and perhaps 1-2 others I’ve forgotten about). Of course panels have become much more efficient and on the EQ XX, they are said to power many of the interior functions, producing somewhere around 4 Kwh in a (bright and sunny) day.
Solar panels cover the roof and the rear window
As impressive as the low wind resistance is no doubt that the fact that the EQ XX weighs in at only a1700 kg, very remarkable for an EV with such a large battery pack. Through that and its efficient shape, it only needs one 180 Kw engine while still managing a time to 100 km/h under seven seconds and a top speed limited to 140 km/h (87 mph). And as mentioned, it has a range that quite easily seems to trump 1000 km, with as much as 1200 km set as record on test drives. The official consumption number is 8.7 KwH per 100 km, which is roughly half of a normal, rather efficient EV. What does it sacrifice? Except for the very limited top speed, it doesn’t offer much room on the inside and as far as I’ve understood, no boot (there is also no frunk given the air outlets). Driving it seems to be an exercise in efficiency, as the dash will constantly show if you’re consuming or generating power, and also how much different functions in the car consume in real time. It also has wind sensors around the car with the wind taken into account for range estimates.
The power consumption of different parts is shown in real time
Summing it up, from an efficiency point of view, it’s as much the low weight as the wind resistance that impresses with the EQ XX. After all, a Mercedes EQS with only a slightly higher wind resistance at 0.20 is nowhere near 1000 km of range given it weighs at least 800 kg, or almost 50% more. And this is of course the efficiency lesson in an electric world – wind resistance is important, but reducing weight by reducing the comfort features of traditional cars is as crucial. This also highlights the inherent conflict in building heavy luxury cars or SUV’s as EV’s, and so when Mercedes tells us it will bring the G-Wagon in an electric version, you have to wonder where the efficiency thinking went.
It’s really positive to see that advances in materials (recycled plastics etc.) and production methods (especially 3D-printing) will bring weight gains to an increasing number of cars, and at some point when the realization kicks in that we are nowhere near the battery materials required to electrify the whole world (see here if you want more thoughts around that), this will come to benefit combustion cars and hybrids as well. I would guess that exterior design will then also become a bit more the focus again as was the case with Audi back in the 90’s. That’s a good thing, since the world can well do without any more G63’s or 3-ton EV’s. I therefor think we’re heading towards a future that will be of a mix of different drive trains, but if the more traditional of these become more efficient and thereby consume less fuel, that can only be a good thing, both for the wallet and the environment!
“A young woman named Priscille stood in one of the pits with a plastic bowl in her right hand. She rapidly scooped dirt and water with the bowl and flung it onto a sieve a few feet in front of her. Her motions were precise and symmetrical, as if she were a piece of machinery designed only for its purpose. After the sieve was filled with gray-colored mud and sand, Priscille yanked the sieve up and down until only the sand remained. That sand contained traces of cobalt, which she scooped with her plastic bowl into a pink raffia sack.
I asked Priscille how long it took her to fill one sack with the sand. “If I work very hard for twelve hours, I can fill one sack each day,” she replied. At the end of the day, the women helped each other to haul their fifty-kilogram sacks about a kilometer to the front of the site where négociants purchased each from them for around $0.80. Priscille said that she had no family and lived in a small hut on her own. Her husband used to work at this site with her, but he died a year ago from a respiratory illness. They tried to have children, but she miscarried twice. “I thank God for taking my babies,” she said. “Here it is better not to be born.”
This terrifying quote is taken from Siddharth Kara’s book “Cobalt Red – how the blood of the Congo powers our lives” that you may remember me mentioning in the first post of the year, before it appeared but after Kara had appeared on Joe Rogan to talk about it.
As a reminder, he has done what no EV buyer or Western politician promoting the “green energy revolution” has ever done, namely travelled to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and at considerable risk to his own life, visited all the large cobalt mines around the country that together make up around 70% of the cobalt that powers the Western world’s electrification.
That it doesn’t power the DRC itself or provides it with any riches is well illustrated not only by the $1-2 the diggers earn per day, but also by the fact that the country’s own electrification has so far reached less than 10% of the population. Not measured in EV’s, but in lightbulbs.
When your family is starving, school is not an alternative
The DRC is basically filled with all the minerals, metals and precious stones you can think of, yet its population is one of the world’s poorest. Over the last 150 years it’s been plundered more times than anyone can remember and when it wasn’t by Western colonialists, it was then just as effectively by one in the long line of ruthless dictators who enriched themselves on the back of an increasingly poor population.
The latest robbery is for cobalt of which there is plenty in various parts of the country. Some of it can be found on the surface with a simple shovel, but most of the reserves require tunnels to be dug. A fair amount of such tunnels are artisanal, dug by simple workers with shovels, mostly so small that only young children fit in them. Artisanal tunnels crumble regularly, on average once a week somewhere in the country, thereby severely injuring the children or burying them alive.
You read that right. In spite of no news channel bothering to show you this, 10-11-year old children are regularly buried alive at dozens of meters under ground in complete darkness. 80% of the mines are owned by Chinese operators who share the profits with the dictator in power at the time. Paying taxes, that would potentially support the development of local communities, is however something they do all they can to avoid.
If you ever felt your office was too small, this is the entrance ot his…
When Priscille and the thousands of other diggers across the country have carried their heavy sacks to their “négociant” (the dealer who pays them), these are transported away for further refinement on enormous, diesel-powered trucks.
The traffic to and from the main mines is so intense that there is often long colons of trucks blocking the roads for miles, together with the mine operations themselves contributing to the terrible air quality plaguing most of the primitive villages the diggers live in, and heavily polluting their waterways and lakes.This is a big problem given fish is an essential food for many.
When the trucks reach their destination, their load is mixed with the load of all the other trucks and from that point on, there is no way of separating cobalt from one place from that of another. There is thus no way for any company, Chinese or Western, to claim that their cobalt hasn’t been excavated through child labor. Then again, Kara didn’t find one single mine on his travels where hundreds of children were not heavily at work.
Mines do not appear out of nowhere. They have been developed by mining companies starting around 30 years ago and have seen an exponential growth in the last 10 years when the race for cobalt really got going. There used to be villages, jungle and forests where the mines are today, and the few people who live long enough to remember those days will tell you they were never rich, but they had a decent life.
That changed when the miners came, chopped the trees, burnt the villages, polluted the local water and with time the air, and everything then got worse again when more recently, the Chinese mining companies took over.
Today the same people struggle to survive in primitive sheds and have no other choice than to work in the mines. I guess someone who earns $1-2 a day is technically not a slave, but it’s a very subtle difference. Most don’t live beyond 30 years. And like Priscille, those without children will thank God for that, that many strangely still believe in.
There used to be villages and trees here
Kara’s book appeared in January and is no literary masterpiece, but the fact that its content hasn’t lead to an intense debate and calls for an immediate stop to this murderous practice, which indirectly is subsidized by Western governments through EV subsidies out of our tax money, says a lot about our society.
Around 120 years ago, Belgian king Leopold II spread terror across all of central Africa, killing millions, at the time for rubber. Back then, Westerners could be forgiven for not knowing what was going on, given the lack of information. Today and especially after Siddharth Kara’s book, the information is there for anyone who is interested.
This makes us all guilty because there is cobalt in pretty much every appliance you have at home, but the quantities are measured in grams and not in kg’s as in EV’s, where a large EV battery pack contains around 10 kgs of cobalt. There are currently around 16 million EV’s in the world and children are dying in the Congo every day for them to function.
International climate agreement calls for that number to increase more than five-fold over the coming decades. Putting aside the simple fact that at no point in human history have we succeeded in doubling (much less increasing five-fold) the amount of any input material in a 10-year period, you wonder how many children are yet to die, buried alive, handicapped with crushed legs, or from the poisoned water and air, until the dime drops.
50 kgs in one sack means $1-2 per day
Since reading the book and realizing the full scale of the catastrophy, I’ve taken upon me to try to spread the word about it. Engaging on Twitter on the subject with so called environmentalists (not a practice I would recommend to anyone with heart problems) typically gives two types of reactions. The first is a pretty astounding level of whataboutism, along the lines of oil and natural gas excavation being terrible as well. I’m sure it is, but to my knowledge children aren’t systematically killed on oil wells.
The other is to refer to the constant progress made on batteries and that soon, these problems will be behind us – so let’s close our eyes until that’s the case? It’s true that batteries will evolve but it’s neither for next week, nor for next year. And yes, you can build EV batteries without using cobalt (Tesla does for a fair part of their cars), but that reduces the energy density (i.e. the range), the stability (notably increasing the fire risk) and the longevity. And what replaces the cobalt is mostly nickel, of which Russia is the world’s leading producer.
You’ve seen it before, but this is a graph worth repeating
What goes on in the DRC is far from acceptable in a world that at least on the face of it makes a lot of noise on equal opportunities for all and not just the few. Not a single phone and certainly not a single EV should be built until the mining companies in the DRC can clearly demonstrate that child labor and artisanal mining is a thing of the past, that workers are paid a decent salary (we’d still be well below $10 per hour here, so it wouldn’t kill them), that they’ve built schools for the diggers’ children, and that they’re taking serious action against the environmental catastrophies they continue to cause.
I’m far too old and cynical for thinking that will happen, but I do think it’s at least our duty to try to shed light on this terrible practice. The children currently digging in the mining districts of the Congo are doomed anyway, but perhaps we can contribute to a better life for the next generation. It’s a small hope but if you don’t believe in that, it’s very difficult to believe in anything.
He will never drive a Tesla
Siddharth Kara’s book can be bought on Amazon here. Joe Rogan’s podcast witih him can be found here. If you’re new to the blog, you may want to read one of my previous posts on the topic of the unsustainability of EV’s that you’ll for example find here.
The Thrill of Driving 