Opinion

This week my brain dredged up Dr Seuss's Green Eggs and Ham.

In it the unnamed narrator insists to Sam-I-am that the titular dish disgusts him, only to eventually try it and, sure enough, love it. For green eggs and ham substitute an electric car with synthetic gearchanges, and for our presumptuous unnamed narrator Porsche.

The rise of the virtual gearbox: Why EV sports cars are faking it

Executives at the German company have for years insisted that 'ugh, it isn't in our DNA to do something so revoltingly pretend; Porsche will never stoop to such a gimmick' - or words to that effect. Meanwhile, the rest of us have been quietly won over by the e-Shift in the Hyundai Ioniq 5 N.

Then we found out that Andreas Preuninger had recently had a go in Hyundai's 641bhp EV. Preuninger is the man who has over 25 years sculpted Porsche's GT division in his own image. The screechiest, lightest, most salivatory Porsches of the modern era are his babies, and his takeaway from the 5 N was that its pretend gearshifts were the most impressive thing about it. Welcome to the club, Andy.

I'll admit to being relieved that somebody high up at Porsche has taken notice. Electric performance cars are upon us and, whatever the sales charts say in the near term, are only going to grow in number. If you're a manufacturer, there's no point being dogmatic about not having this or that 'gimmick when we're so early on the innovation curve. Not when one of the first of those innovations can so instantly and fundamentally boost your enjoyment of the car.

I can remember trying the 5 N for the first time on a track and immediately thinking: 'Holy hell, Hyundai is properly onto something here.' If you're the kind of person more inclined to praise a car for having pedals perfectly set for heel-and-toe downshifts, loving the e-Shift function felt pretty rogue, but did it add depth to the driving experience? Without a doubt.

For one thing, simply being in one of many gears gives context to road speed. With a single-speed gearbox, endless torque and slick modern damping, you can become removed from how fast you're travelling. Vision becomes your only cue. If I have an awareness, consciously or otherwise, that I'm halfway up third gear, I instinctively know I'm in a vaguely sensible place. Top of fourth? It's getting silly. Most supersonic EVs reduce you to speedo watching.

It's also true that, in an ICE car, a downshift or two is the curtain-raiser for a juicy corner. You brake, shuffle down the 'box to settle yourself or elicit some weight transfer over the front axle, and turn in. Maybe you blend all three. It's fun and interesting. You establish rhythm. A single-speed EV is comparatively binary-less fun, interesting and rhythmic. It's the particular ebb and flow of multi-geared power delivery that matters, not how the power itself is generated.

Of course, if the tuning is poor, then such a synthesised system isn't worth having in an EV (hello, Lexus RZ). But the tuning of the Hyundai system is exceptionally good, to the extent that it may have blindsided Preuninger. You can forget that your right foot isn't controlling an engine. Lifting off at 6000rpm in third generates a subtly different amount of drag to doing the same at 6000rpm in second, and the sense of momentum building and the digital crankshaft accelerating as you pull through gears is spookily natural (the least convincing bit of the set-up in the 5 N is the exhaust note-also the easiest problem to solve).

The system is rewarding enough to have you frequently using the shift paddles, at which point you begin to wonder if, instead of paddles, why not a third pedal and a gearlever? Calibrating a single-speed electric driveline to behave like one with a six-speed manual gearbox would be frighteningly complex. For a start, there are endless ways even to feed in a clutch after shifting, and if the system were to feel intuitive, these would need to be accounted for.

It's a bit of a mad idea, but someone will try to do it at some point, and why shouldn't that be Porsche - newly receptive to the idea of fake shifts and in recent years a true stalwart of the manual gearbox? This is why Porsche's potential involvement in this space is encouraging. It will approach the synthetic shifts in a Porsche way - through the lens of an enthusiast. Anybody who has pulled for a 9000rpm upshift in a 911 GT3 fitted with the jewel-like Sport PDK gearbox knows how seriously they take the business of cog-swapping in Zuffenhausen. Just painstakingly recreate that digitally and pop it in an electric Cayman, please.

Why are the British so good at making sports cars?

It's a question put to me in an interview recently, to which a previous interviewee had said that, in times gone by (maybe even now), only the British would be barmy enough to stand in a small, cold shed and decide that a world-class small sports or racing car might roll out of the doorway.

I think there's a bit more to it than that, and that in creating what is today a world-leading array of companies, from niche sports car or component makers employing a handful of people to top-level racing conglomerates (10 of the 11 Formula 1 teams have their headquarters or significant operations in Britain), opportunities played their part too.

Weather is one of those opportunities. It's not so cold here in winter that standing in a shed with a little heater in the corner is beyond us; if it snowed consistently for six months of the year, we would go skiing. And it's not so warm that in summer you can't stand or drive around a disused airfield without melting; if it were, we would nap more.

Then there are those airfields. Since an Australian friend of mine once noted that "you guys are obsessed with the war" and I thought she might have had a point, I'm wary about how often I bring it up. But when it comes to the question 'what makes Britain a leading car racing nation?', World War II is impossible to ignore. Britain liked motorsport and sports cars before 1939, but it was afterwards that our global dominance became really established, because the war left plenty of facilities for use.

Pick a British race circuit or test track and I'd say there is as good a chance as not that it was once a wartime RAF base, later turned into a motorsport centre. As the launch site for the liberation of Europe, Britain had dozens of airfields which, when later disused, had inviting runways and perimeter roads.

In 2020, I wrote a feature about former RAF bases that could have become race circuits but didn't - and barely scratched the surface of it. In the late '40s, it wasn't always easy to get ministry permission to go racing but airfield perimeter roads and runways weren't in short supply.

When prospective racers first arrived at RAF Silverstone in 1947, having gained the land-owning farmer's permission for a weekend race meet, a man from the Air Ministry, which still technically ran the place, came and turfed them off. They quickly arranged to go to nearby Towcester race course instead, but within touching distance they could have also tried their luck at RAFs Bicester, Finmere, Upper Heyford, Croughton and more - and since then, three of those have hosted car testing. The racers returned to Silverstone - permission in hand - in 1948, and by 1950 it was hosting an F1 grand prix.

Post-war, aluminium was also plentiful, with an excess of it from scrap military aircraft (and a steel shortage) the primary reason that the Land Rover was developed with an aluminium body. Being light, available and easy to manipulate with hand tools, aluminium was the perfect material to introduce to a shed and plonk on top of, say, an Austin 7 chassis.

And yes, the Austin 7: let's not understate its importance either. It popularised motoring in the '20s and '30s and was winning races even then. As early as 1939, the 750 Motor Club was established "to promote sporting use of the Austin 7".

Being small, cheap, light and built in large numbers, there was ample supply of its simple, A-shaped chassis. It's what Lotus founder Colin Chapman first used to make racing specials (without the Austin, there would today be no Caterham). And 7 Specials are still a big part of the '750' scene today. I've had as much fun racing a 7 as I have anything, and many of the biggest names in motorsport history cut their teeth on 7s.

Just barmy people in sheds, then? Maybe, but you can find those the world over. Every species needs a habitat in which to thrive - and for the fast car enthusiast, Britain has had plenty of it.

Everything we read about the Nuvolari suggests Audi has little intention of perpetuating the hierarchy that saw the R8 play second fiddle first to the Gallardo then the Huracán.

This new supercar is going to have even more power than its Temerario cousin, as well as a full carbon body. Limited production will also make it precisely as exclusive as a LaFerrari. These are not the trappings of a machine people will easily be able to denigrate as being an ‘overgrown TT’.

And yet I do hope Audi retains some of the maturity that set the R8 apart from almost every other mid-engined supercar. Some of the stunning fluidity that characterised the first-gen car was traded for more dynamic aggression in later years, but an Audi R8 of any period was always the car we’d scrap for when it was time to drive home from a group test in Wales. It would dispatch 250 autumnal miles as charmingly and nonchalantly as an Aston Martin DB11.

So how might this Nuvolari present, relative to the Lamborghini? The Temerario is highly strung, unquestionably. In order to hit 10,000rpm, the engine is tuned in such a way that the lower portion of the rev-range can be a bit of a dirge. It needs commitment to feel special.

It is a similar story with the complex chassis, which wants load and agitation – to be taken by the scruff – before it begins to reveal magnificent poise and dexterity for a near two-tonne car.

The Audi uses the same powertrain and architecture as the Temerario but so sensitive and infinitely tunable are modern systems that the two could well feel almost entirely unrelated.

We’re not just talking about damping rates, castor and ride-height here. There’s the calibration of the rear-steering, the throttle-by-wire maps and the torque-vectoring ability of the e-motors on the front axle, not to mention old-fashioned sound-deadening, the tactility of the materials in the cockpit, and minute adjustments hip-point. The potential for divergence is substantial.

Audi’s new technical boss Rouven Mohr, who joined directly from Lamborghini and the Temerario, is obsessive about this stuff. During a chat at Sant’Agata after the launch of the Revuelto, I can remember him saying something to the effect that ‘these days any engineering undergrad can draw completely perfect suspension geometry – the real magic is in the tuning of the electronic systems.’

The Nuvolari is his chance to demonstrate this thinking with a machine not only very different to the Temerario in character, but different in itself – able to deliver R8-esque touring manners one moment but then take the fight to a 911 GT3 on track.

If you long for the good old days when BMW model numbers referred to the engine capacity (just don't mention the 3.2-litre 745i, the 1.8-litre 316 or countless others that didn't), I've got bad news for you: the car industry's product planners are hard at work devising new and arcane naming schemes in an effort to not make EVs sound like inkjet printers.

These systems need to be designed, with roughly equal importance, to help customers make sense of batteries and motors on the one hand and to gently upsell them to the more expensive model on the other. I'm not sure they're succeeding with the former, but they're getting the hang of the latter.

I've written in the past about how it's a struggle to make fast EVs truly appealing. When a normal Audi A5 gets a four-cylinder engine and the S5 gets a V6, you know which one you really want. But when the base Q6 EV is silent and already very fast, why would you pay more for an SQ6 that feels broadly the same but has less range?

One possible solution is to subtly downplay the cheaper one and hope nobody notices and just upgrades. If you value order and mathematical regularity, you might have noticed something odd about the line-up of the new Volvo EX60. It goes P6, P10, P12, which begs the question of what happened to the P8. What Volvo has done is give each one a different-sized battery - something it can easily do by filling the pack with more or fewer cells. Notably, the P6's battery is substantially smaller than the P10's.

Because the P6 only has a single motor and is therefore a bit more efficient than the dual-motor P10, the gap in range isn't huge (380 versus 410 miles), but it definitely exists. This hierarchy gives you a neat range walk, in which each version has both more power and range than the one below it. More is better. So buy the spendy one. Simple. BMW has done something similar with the new iX3, giving the single-motor 40 variant a smaller battery than the dual-motor 50. Which brings us back to the case of the missing P8.

Manufacturers don't tend to comment on future products unless they're backed into a corner or want to soft-launch something, so there's nothing official, but it's easy to see what a P8 would look like: big battery, and single motor for a range of around 450 miles. It would be the EX60 we'd recommend, but I don't actually think Volvo will build it. I suspect the illogical naming is partly to keep the option open just in case but mainly to give people another reason to pony up the extra £3000 and go for the one that's not just two but four Ps better.

This whole thing also makes me wonder how much range a person really needs. Until now, the answer has always been more, because when that 300-mile WLTP range turns into a 200-mile real-world range, and you subtract another 50 for comfort, and have to deal with a patchy charging network, you need all the safety net you can get.

Now that we're seeing 500-mile WLTP ranges, 400kW charging and forests of fast chargers popping up at most service stations, you might well be happy to settle for a bit less. When I'm road testing a car, I tend to do between 500 and 600 miles in the week that I have it. The road test involves draining the battery for the low-charge acceleration run and the charging test, and with really long-range EVs like the iX3, that takes a bit of planning. If you do 50 miles a day, it might not need charging for a whole week.

Of course, the counterpoints are being able to drive to the south of France without inconveniencing yourself and the luxury of being able to stop when and where you want, instead of your lunch break being dictated by your car.

So on reflection, I don't think we've seen the end of the range race. Modern EVs probably have 'enough' range, but 'enough' is tedious, isn't it? It's nice to have a bit more. As batteries get smaller and cheaper, small and affordable cars will really benefit and luxury cars can rekindle the days of 1000-mile diesels.

But what to call them? I look forward to the Volvo EX60 Knight Industries Two Thousand. Actually, that does sound a bit like a printer with delusions of grandeur.

Perhaps the most eye-popping news coming out of the Stellantis investor day on 21 May was that the 14-brand company is working with JLR to “create synergies across product and technology development”, focused on the US.

After dropping that bombshell, executives firmly sealed their lips, leaving a void to be filled by fevered theories. What are we talking here? Land Rovers based on Jeeps?

But later in the day, CEO Antonio Filosa added this detail in his Q&A session with analysts: that the deal could include “capacity-sharing”, ie JLR building cars in Stellantis’ US plants.

Suddenly it started to make sense. Filosa went on to say that “the new trade conditions makes our installed capacity [in the US] very attractive to many other competitors or potential partners”.

North America is now JLR’s biggest market, as China’s wealthy car buyers shift to local brands. But that shift has coincided with the US’s sudden divergence from the rest of the world. Under Donald Trump, emissions legislation has been gutted, removing the need to electrify ICE vehicles in any way. You don’t even need stop-start any more.

For a relatively small global player such as JLR, creating cars just for the US is expensive. Ideally, car makers want legislation to converge globally. Instead the world’s biggest markets are fragmenting at a speed that is horrifying executives.

At the same time, the US has increased tariffs on imported cars – 10% from the UK and 15% from the EU. Suddenly all Land Rover models are way more expensive than locally built competition, including BMW and Mercedes-Benz SUVs.

So enter Stellantis. The question is, how deep could this collaboration go? You don’t need to puff too hard on the magic tailpipe to imagine the ‘Defender Heritage’, a Hemi V8 off-roader atop the Jeep Grand Wagoneer’s frame, leaning hard on classic design cues and filling out spare capacity at the Stellantis plant in Warren, Michigan.

Depending on how well this collaboration goes, JLR could even produce the next Defender entirely in the US, leaving its Slovakian plant to build electrified models more suited to the European and Chinese markets.

Both JLR and Stellantis need (and have promised) to improve quality levels, but their partnership could well dig JLR out of a hole created by the rapid collapse of globalisation.

By the age of 14, I had driven a Group C Jaguar XJR-9 around the Nordschleife, conquered the Col de Turini in Colin McRae's Impreza and crashed a Veyron at 250mph. At least that's what I told my mum. 

Sim racing is, quite simply, the most accessible and tangible way to revel in cars when the real thing is beyond your means. I'll spare you the sob story but, as the middle of three children to a single mum in suburban London, there was simply no way I was getting behind the wheel of a go-kart or out on a farm in a knackered old Land Rover: we couldn't afford it. 

What I could afford, though, was a Logitech G27 steering wheel and pedal set, purchased for the princely sum of £150 by saving up all my Christmas, birthday and pocket money for a year. 

Bolted to my bedroom desk and hooked up to a PlayStation 3 with a fan so loud you would have thought Concorde was taking off, it was a lifeline for someone utterly obsessed with cars but with no opportunity to really get involved. And there was genuine craftsmanship honed in doing so, too. 

Thanks to the lifelike handling offered by games such as Gran Turismo 6 and Dirt 3, I learned the basics of car control: the bum-puckering looseness of a Toyota MR2's rear end when slowing from high speed while cresting the hills of the fictional Deep Forest Raceway; the utter silence of steering feel that descends when you hit a patch of Alpine ice in a classic Mini; the sheer joy of putting terrible tyres on a BMW M4 and attempting to slide the entirety of the glorious Streets of Willow circuit.

No longer was I a misfit schoolboy battling quadratic equations and, er, the Battle of Trafalgar: I was Ayrton Senna, John Cleland, or whoever I damn pleased - just as soon as I'd eaten my tea and done the dishes, anyway.

Racing games are a fantastic teaching tool. Don't take my word for it: take that of the legions of professionals who got their break in this world. Rally driver Jon Armstrong, for example, won the World Rally Esports Championship in 2018 and today competes in the actual World Rally Championship. And Formula 1's leading light, Max Verstappen, is almost as passionate about digital racing as the real thing.

As for little old me, I passed my driving test first time out with zero minors. Yes, that's a brag, and no, it's not a championship title, but it's an achievement that I credit entirely to those years spent in my bedroom learning the fundamentals of operating a car. Because by the time I was finally in the driver's seat, I already knew roughly how to make the machine work and could just concentrate on doing so safely, within the confines of the rules.

If you have a budding young enthusiast in the house at a loss as to what to do in their spare time, get them a good force-feedback wheel and pedal set and some games to play with it. Gran Turismo is a great start. You might just have a future champion on your hands - or, at the very least, you'll make them a much safer, more engaged driver when the time comes.

Local legend has it that Henry 'Harry' Frederick Stanley Morgan - just known as HFS these days - built his first motor vehicle because he was tired from cycling over the Malvern Hills.

The facts are, I think, a little less romantic. The eventual founder of Morgan Motor Company had plenty of access to cars from the earliest years of the 20th century, when he ran a garage and hire car business in Malvern Link, but it is true that in 1908 he bought a twin-cylinder engine, constructed a single-seat three-wheeler around it and only later decided to put it into production.

It took a while to gain much traction. The production vehicle made an appearance at the 1910 Motor Cycle Show at London's Olympia. The initial single-seat design was so unpopular that Morgan quickly gave it two seats. Still, in 1912 we reported that it remained "a little known runabout known as the Morgan", which in its early days "had made no great stir".

That was until HFS took it on speed trials, in which it "performed so remarkably well in competitions during [the first] year that it was no surprise to find it perhaps the greatest centre of attraction" at a later show.

Cheaper to buy and tax than many four-wheeled cars and with competition success in its sails, it was in such demand during the following years that Morgan could barely keep up.

Eventually four-wheeled rivals became sufficiently cheap as to give it a harder time. Morgan persisted making only three-wheelers until 1936, when it introduced the four-wheeled 4/4. Three-wheelers remained on sale alongside four-wheeled cars until 1952, at which point Morgan decided to concentrate on the latter.

That was until 2011, when it reintroduced a trike, the 3 Wheeler, with an S&S-built V-twin making 80bhp and a weight as tested by us of 580kg, full of fuel. I fell for it hard enough to give it five stars in our road test, which you could perceive as entirely appropriate or completely absurd, depending on your outlook. But the remit of the road test is to assess how fit for purpose a vehicle is, and given the 3 Wheeler's remit was to put a smile on its driver's face, which it did not only for everyone who drove it but also for just about every bystander, what more could you have asked for?

Towards the end of the last decade Morgan was planning to give it a makeover, but in the same way that it recently got carried away with facelifting the Plus Six and instead turned it into the Supersport, its designers and engineers let their imaginations run wild, resulting in the 3 Wheeler's replacement by the Super 3. Morgan's first clean-sheet design since the Aero 8 of 2000, it arrived in 2022 with a superformed aluminium monocoque, "unashamedly functional" detailing and design inspired by the jet age. I liked it even more than I liked the 3 Wheeler.

I don't think it has sold quite as well as Morgan hoped it would, and it's impossible to know what effect, if any, Andrew Flintoff's painful crash in one on Top Gear had on its popularity. But to my mind it has remained a really endearing car to drive and a beautiful piece of product design - a shape you could put in an art gallery.

Instead, I've put one on my driveway. The Super 3 you see pictured here, which has done the rounds as a demonstrator and was the car pictured in our road test (9 November 2022), is now mine. And I still can't quite believe it. I've just been over to the window to look outside and make sure it's real, and there it is, sitting alongside my Audi A2 and old-shape Land Rover Defender in an utterly dreamy three-car line-up.

Registered in 2021 and with 25,000 miles on it, it's one of the earliest and must be among the leggiest Super 3s, but you wouldn't know it to drive it. And two days into ownership, I'm starting to think that perhaps this is a car I will keep forever, letting the adventures roll beneath its wheels, and the memories build like the patina it will eventually take on too.

There will be more on these pages about it for years, I imagine. For now, I'm smitten.

Couldn’t it have just been beautiful? The Ferrari Luce is having a Jaguar moment online following its unveiling last week. The markets have spoken. Luca di Montezemolo has spoken. But nobody has quite spoken as much as assorted users of various social media disgraces. And the feedback there is not good. 

I don’t love the outside of the Luce, but I do think it’s a shame that some of its technical innovations haven’t been getting a hearing. What a half-million-pound Ferrari does while it’s cornering is of rather limited interest in isolation, of course, but if the Luce is engaging, how it could influence other, more affordable electric driver’s cars is something I want to know a lot more about. 

Its sound signature apparently isn’t a fake noise, it’s the actual noises from the mechanicals, as they happen, just amplified into the cabin. Are these good? Do they help? They are, at least, authentic. 

Then there are theflappy paddles, which are not gearshift paddles. Instead they change retardation and power output, and one comes hand in hand with the other – faster slowing, with slower going – so that you’ll be tempted to get big engine braking into corners, then have less power on the way out, when 1000bhp-plus would be too much anyway. Does this work? And if it does, because the Luce has 1036bhp, would it still be useful in, say, a hot hatch with 200bhp? 

Then there’s the interior, which is, I believe, now that I’ve seen it and felt it, the best in the world at the moment. So tactile. Such high perceived quality. And seemingly so usable. I don’t think there’s anything better. 

But these moments are being lost because – and I don’t think it’s controversial to say this – the Luce is not a beautiful car. 

Perhaps, though, it was meant to be. During my exposure to the Luce, at a roundtable discussion about aerodynamics, one of Ferrari’s engineers had a small styling model of the Luce. With a gloss black passenger cell and a silver body around it, this showed really well the demarcation between passenger cell/glasshouse and body, something that Marc Newson, cofounder of design agency LoveFrom, talks about in our news story. 

But what I noticed about the model was just how striking it was. Sleek. I couldn’t take a photo of it, because Ferrari insisted that I had stickers over my cameras’ lenses all weekend, but I don’t think that it had the same profile as the production car. It looked lower, shapelier, more, well, beautiful. 

Was the Luce originally meant to look like that? It’s not unusual, of course, for the first sweeps of a designer’s pen to look rather more striking, depicting rather bigger wheels and an impossibly low ride height, than the car that makes production. But given that LoveFrom is an agency invited into Ferrari, would they have had as much control over how the finished design looks as, say, a strong, influential in-house design boss sitting in boardrooms insisting that a particular roofline or body sculpt was essential and engineers dare not change it? 

Electric cars tend to be tall. But in the Luce’s case, Ferrari was insistent that it had a complete battery pack, with a lid on top, sited beneath the cabinfloor, so that it could be replaced at a later date (90% of all Ferraris are still on the road and the company wants the ability to replace a battery pack decades down the line). But this inevitably adds height. 

With that in mind, Jaguar’s designers insisted that the Type 01 had separate battery modules with ‘foot garages’ between them so occupants could be placed lower in the car. BMW’s Neue Klasse EV platform uses the top of the battery pack as the cabin floor. 

Did the Luce gain height and lose grace because of engineering challenges met along the way? If you imagine it lower, with the gaps between the spoilers and bodywork enhanced, does it look better? And might it have looked better if arguments about lines here and there had been had and won? 

Newson told us about how LoveFrom’s relationship with Ferrari was “surprisingly not fraught”. Maybe it should have been.

When I was 11, I was fortunate enough to see a green 1961 Aston Martin DB4 GTZ in the metal.

Ever since, I've been obsessed with the genius of Zagato. Now, I'll be the first to admit that I'm not exactly qualified to talk at length about the intricacies of car design, and I'm also aware that, as a topic, this is about as subjective (and divisive) as they come for us car nerds.

But for me Zagato is the single greatest name in automotive design, elevated above the likes of even Pininfarina, Bertone, Giugiaro and other similar greats.

Founded by aeronautical designer Ugo Zagato, the Milanese coachbuilder opened its doors in 1919, and a vision for lightweight construction underpinned its design language from the outset. Zagato evolved over the next few decades, but that core requirement for lightness never stopped informing the company's output.

As different eras came and went, some truly stunning vehicles blossomed from those hallowed sketchpads. Particularly during the golden age of the 1950s and 1960s, the cars being penned by Zagato were elegant and dainty, with rounded overhangs and curvaceous, streamlined bodies that were made of aluminium and wrapped around shortened wheelbases.

Small, lightweight cars appeal to me greatly (ironic, because at 6ft 5in I would look ridiculous in any of them), and this is one of the fundamental reasons behind my love for Zagato, and where much of my appreciation for its designs lies.

The 1954 Maserati AG6/54 Stradale GT Zagato and 1963 Alfa Romeo TZ1 are perfect examples of this. They appear to be almost compacted around their own axles yet still capable of maintaining an effortless style and proportional elegance that will make you go weak at the knees. It's a mesmerising combination.

Then there's also the fact that many of Zagato's design choices were made to be functional in motorsport. I adore the fact that the company's signature and most attributable feature, the double-bubble roof, was dreamed up in the early 1950s as a way of increasing space for racers' helmets while maintaining a low roofline. Luckily, it just so happened to also look exquisite on any car it appeared on.

I also love the truly eclectic and random selection of cars that the beautiful, pointed Z emblem has appeared on throughout the company's 107-year history. Zagato has done design work for a staggering 46 brands, ranging from Ferrari and Maserati to Jaguar and Bristol to Toyota and Renault. Even the humble Hillman Imp got in on the act. If anything, this fascinating variety of starting points only makes Zagato's ability to design gorgeous cars all the more impressive.

Today, Zagato continues to design a pleasingly broad selection of seriously desirable products, such as the magnificent Alfa Romeo Giulia SWB Zagato and, more recently, the first offering from newcomer Bovensiepen. However, like most of the company's archive, Zagato cars today are usually one-offs or built in such agonisingly low numbers that you probably won't ever see one.

But that this is the only real criticism I can level at Zagato probably says quite a lot.

Are we seeing the beginning of the end of plug-in hybrids?

China has been leading the world in PHEV production and sales, accounting for 76% of the global total in 2025. But this year something weird has been happening.

The overall car market in China has been slowing, with retail sales down 20% in April. The local China Passenger Car Association attributed the fall to rising oil prices as buyers gave petrol cars a swerve.

But also hit hard are PHEVs and range-extender EVs, down 22% on the same month last year, reducing their share to 19%. Meanwhile, sales of pure EVs were up 2.4%, raising their share to 40%.

Is this the canary in the coal mine for PHEVs?

China has pioneered the use of bigger batteries and smaller engines to allow what are essentially EVs to travel further. Buyers of more premium cars especially have bought into the concept, led by the likes of Li Auto. Meanwhile, BYD pivoted its entire ICE strategy into PHEVs.

So-called new energy vehicles in China were always forecast to do badly this year as the country ended purchase tax exemption on PHEVs and EVs from January. But that doesn't explain why PHEVs have been hit while EVs have been unscathed. European premium makers have failed to translate their success at selling PHEVs to European buyers over to China.

In a market that should be ripe for buyers seeking the same premium combustion experience with lower taxes, their offerings have been even less well accepted than their EVs. For example, of the 144,000 cars BMW sold in China in the first three months of the year, just 0.1% were PHEVs, and Mercedes-Benz has said it's phasing out PHEV sales there.

You wouldn't think there was a problem from looking at UK sales. In less than a year, Chinese brands have gone from zero to absolutely dominating mainstream PHEV sales here, grabbing a 44% share in the first three months. In April, they took the top six slots in the PHEV chart, led by the Jaecoo 7.

Of course, PHEVs here have a shelf life ending in 2035 if the government's current plan persists. In the EU, a recent tweak to rules will allow a certain percentage after 2035. But the surprise slump in China might foreshadow a future in which EVs are good enough to dump the inherent compromises in doubling up drivetrains.