Opinion

It’s taking a while, like closing an ill-fitting lid on a plastic kitchen container. But another corner on the ‘affordable hot hatch’ tub is clicking shut, and, unlike sometimes previously, I don’t think a corner on the other side is about to pop back open again in defiance.

Which is a slightly clumsy way of avoiding the ‘nail in the coffin’ cliché. Also I think it’s vanishingly rare (I could be wrong) that a coffin lid’s opposite corner creeps open again when someone is hammering down the opposite side.

Anyway, what I’m saying is that Ford is preparing to unalive the Focus ST. Production ends in November, and it has been removed from price lists in the UK because all the remaining ones are accounted for.

And this time I don’t think anyone is about to launch a new affordable petrol hot hatchback you could choose to consider instead. Although do go ahead and prove me wrong, somebody, please.

It seems like a very long time, partly because it is, since my mate Jason, when he was a young man, bought a Citroën Saxo VTR on low- or no-interest finance and got free insurance thrown in. It even feels like a long time, although it isn’t, since Hyundai offered the i20 N for under £25k.

The hot hatches that remain on sale today – and there are fewer than a handful, including the Focus ST – are basically £40k cars. So it has sort of been true for a while, but only now, with the demise of the Focus ST confirmed, does the malaise feel as terminal as it clearly has been for quite some years now. The hot hatch era is gone.

Should one be sad about it? I think so. Because not very long ago, if you were young and you wanted to get into cars, you bought an ordinary hatchback with a bigger engine and some tidy suspension, and you had a nice time driving it. Then, when you were older and had a house and some money, you bought a sports car. But the mood was established early on.

What’s the option now? New hot hatchbacks are too expensive, and while some fun electric cars, like the Alpine A290, are becoming affordable, that will be little solace to you if you live in a rented flat, because buying an Alpine will be too expensive, and your rented accommodation has no charger anyway.

A used one? This is a possibility, if it hasn’t already been stolen or crashed. Or how about an affordable used sports car? This is also a nice idea, but it requires one to choose wisely. Since April, cars registered between 2001 and 2017 have had some wacky VED rates applied.

My Audi A2 emits 119g/km of CO2 and costs £35 a year to tax. I like the lovely idea of a bargain Porsche Boxster, which emits 239g/km of CO2 – twice the amount, so naturally that will cost twice as much as the Audi to tax, yes? Actually no. It is £735 a year, 21 times as much.

I doubt that banning new affordable fun cars and making thousands of old ones exhaustively expensive to run was the aim. We live in a time of complex regulation and unintended, unexpected consequences. But if you were feeling ostracised by ‘the system’ or ‘the man’ (or ‘the woman’) and were having uncharitable thoughts when a VED bill of £760 arrived (for 255g/km-plus), I completely understand why.

There are fudges, loopholes, gaps in the system, of course. It’s why Ford’s main performance car in the UK is now a Ranger Raptor and there was a story in a newspaper the other day complaining about the number and size of American V8 pick-ups being privately imported to Britain.

Well, if you make a satisfying domestically approved V8 near impossible to come by, that’s what people will do.

And I believe in the car enough, both as the most brilliant and convenient form of transport and as a fun object for enthusiasts and hobbyists, that at whatever your budget, I can see a way into having and enjoying one.

But as the affordable performance Ford disappears from price lists for the first time in my half-century life, it has never felt quite so difficult as today.

You wouldn’t think an electrically powered tailgate could be the topic of engrossing chatter, because 99.9% of the time it can’t.

But then you find yourself in a room with Denis Le Vot, and suddenly it’s as if Walter Röhrl is explaining that the next Porsche 911 is going to get a V12.

Le Vot, an engineer by training, is the CEO of Dacia. He’s one of those fascinating, shrewd execs who’s been around the corporate block.

Turkey, Russia, Belgium, the US, mostly within the Renault-Nissan universe, and with a stint as a board member at AvtoVAZ, the Soviet state-owned car maker that went private in the 1990s and was then bought by Renault before being returned to the Russian state in 2022.

He has lived a life of unglamorous car-industry realpolitik, making profit where it isn’t easily found. It isn’t hard to see why Renault Group CEO Luca de Meo thought him a superb fit for Dacia – a brand that squeezes margin from cars until the piston rings squeak.

Le Vot loves this stuff, as I discovered on the recent Bigster launch in Provence, where we talked not about how Dacia’s new SUV rides or handles (well enough) but how the hell the company can charge so little for it.

The range starts at £25k, and when you consider the kit on offer, it’s the same as Aston Martin offering its new Vantage for BMW M4 money. It’s tough to see how some of the Bigster’s rivals will survive, especially as it’s reasonably easy on the eye as well as the wallet. A bloodbath seemingly awaits.

Dacia’s approach is triple-pronged, beginning with modularity. Okay, no surprise there (it’s the only way that any car maker short of Ferrari et al can do business today), but the Romanian brand takes it a step further than most.

Save for the tiny Spring EV, all of its cars are identical up to the B-pillar. Le Vot jokes that while it took two years and 3000 engineers to turn Renault’s Clio into the Sandero, it then cost £5 to turn the Sandero into the Jogger.

Adapting it for Duster duties cost a little more, mainly for the reinforced sills and ride height, but from there, for the extra-large Bigster, the only major change has been to extend the A-pillars by 50mm.

Every kilogram is managed, too. The reason the Bigster doesn’t offer a seven-seat interior is because Dacia worked out only 25% of buyers in the segment consider them but the added weight would require strengthening for the rear axle, which would add expense across the range. Ergo the Bigster is a five-seater only, being ruthlessly focused on the main audience.

Which brings Le Vot to his second point: the importance of learning what the intended buyer really wants and then not straying beyond that kit level by so much as an additional USB-C port.

“We’ve been studying the Germans, I must confess,” he says, smirking. The Germans are the big market for cars like the Bigster. They’re also fussy, which is crucial. If our German chums ‘need’ something in their C-SUV, you damn well better offer it. And if they don’t, nobody else will want it and you’re off the procurement hook.

“If the car doesn’t have AC [air-con], then it’s disqualified. But if I offer, whatever, electric seats for the front passenger or AC in the seats? No need: it’s not disqualifying. So we have dual-zone AC [in the Bigster], which we’ve never had before, and we have two-tone paint and an electric tailgate. These are the things we will offer, and if we don’t, they will say ‘I’m not buying’. Hundreds of people. It’s complicated; new territory for us.”

The final part of the equation is the supplier negotiations, where Le Vot’s sojourns in hard-nosed Russia has fortified his resolve. By all accounts, this charismatic Frenchman and his accomplices in accounts are utter bastards.

Le Vot says: “We define the car [at] €25k and the hybrid [at] €30k, then we split this price. It seems obvious, but most manufacturers don’t do that.

"They design the car they want to have, then give the parts to suppliers, negotiating like hell to get the best price, but the best price is a surprise. When you expect €100, you get €110 more often than €95.

"You put it all together and it’s 10% more than you thought. We design to cost. So we say €25k, cut [the car] into pieces [then say] this part has to be €45, and if you can’t make it at €45, we don’t make the part. It takes a little time, of course, but they come back and propose a solution.”

An electric tailgate, then. In short, Germans insisted the Bigster needed one, so Dacia’s suppliers, donning their thumbscrews, invented one at the required cost.

One strut is electric, the other is hydraulic. It’s cheap but it works and is strictly necessary. Inimitable Dacia in a nutshell.

Common logic holds that the Le Mans 24 Hours is at its most magical at night. And sure, it’s incredible watching hypercars blast past in the dark at close to 200mph – but the rest of it can be a bit much.

On Saturday night, the Circuit de la Sarthe morphs into a big party venue, and it can be an overwhelming sensory experience. The humidity that can build over Le Mans in mid-June clings on after nightfall, making it stifling and uncomfortable.

And there’s a mass of humanity everywhere, drinking, partying and swirling in and out of the spectator zones, funfair and campsites. With all this and the bright lights, loud noises and smells of various foods being cooked, it’s loud, bustling and boisterous.

For someone who isn’t much of a partying type, it’s a lot, and I’m always relieved to escape the mayhem.

Besides, there’s a much better time to enjoy Le Mans. You just need to get up early: because compared with Saturday night, Sunday morning at Le Mans is a different world – and, in my mind, an immeasurably better, more pleasurable one.

The humidity fades overnight, and as the sun breaks under clear skies, it’s usually fresh and welcoming. And, aside from the 50-plus high-powered race cars roaring round, it’s peaceful.

The throngs of fans have melted away, aside from a handful of fellow early starters (and the odd late-night reveller asleep on the ground), so you have your run of prime spectator spots.

And the spectating is amazing. On Saturday night the race is essentially the backdrop to a huge party, but on Sunday morning it regains centre stage. It’s a time for purists.

By this stage, the ‘story’ of the race has been established, so you know which cars to keep an eye on and which gaps to monitor.

Cool temperatures mean fast lap times, and even if the race has settled down, it’s far too early for anyone to back off. You can study each driver’s lines, listen to the differences in engine notes and appreciate the striking difference in performance between the classes.

It’s also a great time to realise just how tough this race is. By dawn on Sunday, the cars are approaching two-thirds distance, so there are ‘only’ nine or 10 hours left. That doesn’t sound much in the context of a 24-hour race, but that’s still five grands prix.

That’s when you appreciate how challenging a 24-hour race is and what an experience it is to witness – especially in a calm, quiet moment of solitude.

In a few hours, the temperature will ramp up, the spectator areas will start to fill in readiness for the finish and Le Mans will start to feel like one of the world’s great mass spectator events again. My tip: get up early and enjoy the calm while you can. 

"It’s a tie-dye sort of place," says the woman behind the counter of a petrol station cafe in upstate New York when I ask her what Woodstock is like, because it’s nearby and my road trip has no definitive destination.

I’d thought it was just a quaint town near the Catskill Mountains, but when she explains, I realise it’s that Woodstock – the one from the famous 1960s rock festival that promised ‘three days of peace and music’ and whose cultural impact shook the world.

But despite the fact that the festival actually took place 60 miles from Woodstock and was 56 years ago, the town clearly retains its ‘peace and love’ vibe.

My server wasn’t wrong. It’s normal to see Trump flags and signs in rural New York, because it’s the big city that’s the state’s most liberal part and Americans are more vocally political than the British; an occasional ‘Liberal Democrats Winning Here’ sticker is about as boisterous as we get. But you won’t find many Republican signs near Woodstock.

“Presidents come and go, but Wu-Tang is forever,” reads one alternative. “Make America groovy again,” adds a CND-symbolled T-shirt in a shop window.

Aside from the city, Woodstock is in one of New York’s most liberal areas: it voted 58% Democrat in the 2024 presidential election.

And it is to America what Glastonbury is to England: almost a parody of peace and love. On this Sunday afternoon there is, honestly, a drum circle on the village green, which is bordered by a vegan cafe and a herbal remedy shop.

Then I notice something else: the Subarus. Lots and lots of Subarus. More in one place than anywhere I’ve ever been, by miles. In one car park (I realise this isn’t a scientifically rigorous survey), almost 20% of the cars are Subarus.

It turns out that this isn’t entirely coincidental. This is a fact more widely known in the US than it is in the UK: in the 1990s, Subaru of America surveyed who was buying its cars, and while it had expected the vets, outdoorsy types and teachers it identified as customers, there was also a group that it hadn’t foreseen: lesbians.

When it and its marketing agencies looked into this, the fit made sense: these were women with decent incomes who were less likely to have children and who had outdoorsy hobbies, so Subarus were what they were buying.

Subaru figured that, while there might be pushback in conservative areas, it should start running gay-targeted adverts, combining selling the virtues of the car as a country wagon with a knowing wink for its target audience.

“Get out, and stay out,” ran one advert. “It’s not a choice, it’s the way we’re built,” said another, sort of selling the 4x4 powertrain. “At least we’ve got our *priorities* straight,” read a 2004 Forester advert ostensibly about safety.

While Subaru UK was selling Impreza Turbos to young men who couldn’t get a girlfriend, Subaru of America was selling Outbacks to women who could.

It had thought its campaign might be divisive, and it wasn’t wrong. Lots of consumers, target audience or not, enjoyed the ads, but it also received letters of complaint from conservatives threatening to boycott the brand – although, its research suggested, not from anyone who had previously bought a Subaru anyway.

And those turn-of-the-century adverts gave the brand a reputation in the US that it retains now. If you’re liberal, you’re more likely to buy a Subaru; if you’re conservative, you’re more likely to take against it.

Opinion polling firm YouGov’s bipartisan brand rankings for 2024 found that “28% of liberal Americans [and 33% of gay women] would consider purchasing a Subaru but just 16% of American conservatives feel the same”. Subaru leads all car makers with this 12-point difference, ahead of Honda (10 points) and Volkswagen (eight).

For conservatives’ most favoured brands – Ford, Chevrolet and GMC – the difference the other way was smaller: 29% of conservatives would consider a Ford but so still would 23% of liberals.

There are practical reasons to own a Subaru in the north-eastern US, of course: they have proper four-wheel drive and it snows in winter.

But that isn’t the only explanation for the fact that, while most small American towns reverberate to the sound of Detroit V8s, the bongos of Woodstock are accompanied by the gentle hum of a Subaru’s sensible all-season tyres.

What if we didn’t buy any new cars for a year? That’s a thought experiment suggested by Andrew Oswald, professor of economics and behavioural science at the University of Warwick, writing to the Financial Times recently. 

Oswald used data from the RAC Foundation and Autocar to estimate that UK buyers will spend £80 billion on new cars this year. Which is, technically speaking, a shedload of money.

Relatively, we won’t spend vastly greater sums on public services like education (£110bn) or health and social care (£190bn) – both public expenditures that the government may be looking to trim.

Will we really spend that much on cars? Possibly. We’d need to buy two million at £40k a pop to total £80bn. We bought (or registered) 1.9 million last year. But for the purposes of the experiment, it doesn’t really matter if it’s a bit over or under: it’s still a ton of money.

What would happen, wondered Oswald, if we reviewed our private spending as we do public spending, so thoroughly in fact that we bought no new cars at all this year? “How much harm would that do to our citizens?” he asked.

I suppose the first thing to consider would be the practical harm. It would put thousands of people out of jobs, and a significant part of that £80bn will be tax, with VAT into double-digit billions and another chunk again from first registration fees (which vary dependent on CO2 emissions), plus the Expensive Car Supplement for cars costing over £40k.

The Treasury could lose £15bn or more before one even considers a drop in corporation and income taxes and an additional spend on benefits. I suspect Rachel Reeves would prefer this thought experiment to remain exactly that.

But the esteemed prof is, I think, more curious about what it would do to our overall happiness. “Humans are dragged into harmful ‘keeping-up-with-the-Joneses’ status races,” he wrote. The implication is that we might feel better if we gave up those and looked after one another more.

Enthusiasts don’t buy cars as status symbols, but I don’t think it’s controversial to accept that people do. I’ve had friends and acquaintances ask what car they should buy next while in the same breath telling me how much they like the car they own now. So maybe keep that?

Still, I think it’s curious how often cars are the obvious target when people look at status-driven buying behaviours. I understand that cars are expensive, but we don’t have the same discussions about conservatories, cockapoos or chips, and you can’t even use those to get to work or visit your gran.

What’s also striking is that how many cars we buy seems inextricably linked to the country’s prosperity. A large new car market is perceived as a marker of a healthy economy, in a way that isn’t true of, say, toasters.

Those we buy when we need them. Cars, meanwhile, we buy because the finance term is coming to an end and the cambelt will soon need changing, or the company decides it’s time you deserved something shinier to keep you working there, so off it goes to be replaced by something  a bit better than the neighbours have.

But, as Oswald noted, “modern cars have an enormously long life and are relatively inexpensive to maintain”, so even if we paused buying, we would still be able to get places. And his point about longevity is true.

At least it is for now. But, I wonder, in times of £1800 headlight clusters, multiple electronic control units to let cars meet emissions and safety rules at a cost of thousands a time and what often just generally feels like an inbuilt obsolescence, for how long cars will remain cheap to maintain into their later life.

We buy enough cars when they’re affordable to fix; how many will we get through when driving into a pheasant writes off an older one?

I don’t think the optimum number of cars for us to buy is none, and this is something that will stay only a thought. But if we didn’t buy quite so many and more were simpler and designed to stay affordable, I don’t think that would be a bad thing.

In the six months since Carlos Tavares was ousted from his role as Stellantis CEO, there’s been plenty of speculation about his replacement, whether a high-profile executive from another firm (both the Renault Group's Luca de Meo and ex-Cupra man Wayne Griffith were linked to the role) or a big-name outsider from the tech industry.

You can see why many thought Stellantis would chase a big-name hire: Tavares had plenty of profile and industry standing, thanks to his success at Renault and Nissan and then his strong leadership of the PSA Group before it merged with FCA to form Stellantis.

Yet in Antonio Filosa, Stellantis has found its new leader from within. And while it’s certainly not the splashiest hire, it looks a smart one. The 51-year-old’s strong track record of success is hard to ignore and has fuelled his rapid ascension within the industry giant over the past few years to his most recent role as the firm’s North American chief.

I first met Filosa last year when, shortly after he was named CEO of Jeep, he held a round-table interview session for a small group of European journalists. His charisma was apparent from the start and, over the course of an hour, he answered a diverse range of questions eloquently – and without ducking any of the tough ones.

Of course, there can be a big difference between how someone presents themselves in an interview and what they’re actually like to work with but, as with many great leaders, Filosa seemed to have buckets of charisma mixed with a deep resolve. He felt like the sort of person who could make potentially unpopular decisions seem almost palatable.

Filosa also brings a useful global perspective to Stellantis, which will be vital to improving the fortunes of a sprawling international firm comprising a patchwork of diverse brands. Naples-born Filosa has spent the bulk of his Stellantis career in South America, and his time as Jeep CEO put him in charge of perhaps the only Stellantis brand truly successful in both Europe and North America.

During his career, he has also worked across all aspects of the industry, from planning to financial services, logistics to manufacturing. And his approach has been hugely successful. As Stellantis’s South America boss, he turned Fiat into a market-leading brand there, opened a huge new factory in Brazil and grew Jeep's share of the country’s SUV market from 1% to 20%.

Filosa’s immediate challenge will be the one he has already started working on in his current role: improving Stellantis’s fortunes in North America, a region that was once its cash cow but where it has struggled in recent years. But he must also contend with the uneven success of Stellantis’s various brands, increasingly complex legislation in Europe and growing competition from Chinese firms in numerous markets. Tough job.

Is Filosa the man to do it? Well, he certainly has form in turning around a struggling part of Stellantis, and the experience needed to succeed. And, crucially, while he’s a company veteran, he seems very different from Tavares – which could be what the firm really needs.

When Stellantis was created, Tavares did a strong job of amalgamating the disparate PSA and FCA firms into a largely united company, and in creating space and separation between its many brands. It was an approach that initially delivered results, but in recent years his focus on cost-cutting and rationalisation seemed to wear thin, both with Stellantis employees and the board of management. Sometimes a change of approach is needed and Filosa’s skill set seems suited to the task ahead of boosting performance and delivering results.

And for those who want their car firm CEOs to be, well, car people, good news: during that media session last year, Filosa mentioned that, as well as his two Jeep company cars, he’d bought his own – a Wrangler Rubicon 392, powered by a 469bhp Hemi V8. We’ll take that as a good sign…

The process of choosing a car, ploughing your money into it and then having to explain so many times why you’ve done it inevitably makes automotive culture a bit tribal – and, critically, adversarial.

It’s puerile to laugh or sneer at someone who simply made a different choice and yet, just occasionally, we do it. We can’t help it, because it taps into something ancient in our subconscious that no effort at enlightenment can permanently suppress (that’s what scientists say, I promise).

And so does really good car advertising. Billboard advertising does it best. The art of the billboard has become weighed down in recent years by the potential of digital technology and unconventional creativity, and a certain sense of one-upmanship between the agencies that make them.

There are digital billboards now fed by ANPR cameras that display personalised messages when you drive by. There have been billboard adverts for the Ford Mustang that actually produce imitation tyre smoke. 

The internet tells me there was one in Vienna for high-end kitchen knife brand Tyrolit, the surface of which actually itself slowly oxidised to reveal the outline of the knife over the weeks and months that it stood there (which, I must admit, was a clever idea).

But I like those simple, slightly cheeky billboard ads much more – especially when they’re poking fun or digging out a rival. When done well, they’re the product of an attractively sharp wit with some confidence and self-assurance, and they’re very often a bit knowing and self-deprecating.

They feel like the product of the mind of someone whose team you would like to be on. So does it matter how true they are? Just as with most advertising, there’s a greater tradition of these in the US than in the UK – probably because we have stricter regulation.

But not strong enough, evidently, to prevent Ineos poking fun at rival JLR the other week. It fixed a pair of billboards to a trailer and towed them around between Land Rover’s West Midlands manufacturing and distribution sites.

The billboards themselves depicted a suspiciously clean Defender nose-to-nose with a filthy Grenadier, the tow car was the self-same Grenadier and the message read 

‘Let’s take this outside’. It made me chuckle. I’m not a Grenadier owner and not a particular fan of the car. Furthermore, I know the underlying implication of the campaign to be, shall we say, questionably founded.

I’ve witnessed first hand what a Defender can do around forest tracks and in a muddy quarry to firmly put a Grenadier in the shade with its rough-stuff capability. It’s not the stuff you’d make Ineos ads from.

But it doesn’t matter. Because we all know that one of these cars is bought by people who will genuinely take it off road and one generally isn’t. JLR should take pride in that, because it means the Defender is reaching beyond its grasp and is much the bigger commercial triumph. 

But that does open it up to the odd sledge. It’s the price of success. Renault has done something similar recently, with a billboard ad for the Renault 5 outside its Brentford dealership inviting people to ‘make their neighbours jealous’.

The neighbour of the dealership in question happens to be a Mini franchise, and there also just happens to be a special 5 with a Union flag painted on its roof on the front of the forecourt.

In both cases, I looked, I smiled – mission accomplished. ANPR cameras and special effects didn’t need to be involved.

Here’s to modern automotive industry corporate culture not being so po-faced that it can’t have a bit more good old-fashioned fun now and then.

This week, the screen I will mostly be looking at is the one pictured below, after a hire car lottery ran out of Kia Picantos and provided me with a Volvo XC60. I’m not unhappy about this.

The XC60 is a comfortable car and this is mostly a comfortable screen to look at. It’s easy to be critical and plenty (including me) have been of the direction Volvo has taken with its interior functionality lately, with mass migration of controls to a touchscreen – including essentials like the foglight switches – at the expense of separate-button usability.

Speculation, of course, but this may be one of the reasons the pragmatic Håkan Samuelsson was restored as interim CEO. He’s a steady hand who understands that cars are not smartphones.

The XC60 has been around since 2017, and while its digital instrument cluster has been updated in that time, there’s still a lot to like about the simplicity of its graphics and fonts. It doesn’t overburden a driver with information; 

I could turn off the map if I wanted. And I should also find myself pleased about the fact that it retains two dials, one for the speedo and one for the rev counter, because the genius of a dial is just how much it tells you in such short order.

At a glance, you can see a facet’s upper and lower limits, with a needle that shows how far along that range you are, the direction of travel and the rate of change. Numbers alone can’t do this: they can only tell you where you are right now.

There’s a reason that when film directors want to show an aeroplane in distress, they show a needle spinning anticlockwise very rapidly. We all know what it means.

That should make this Volvo’s dials preferable to use than the numerical script for the speed. Should but, I’m finding, doesn’t.

With dials nestling perhaps too discreetly around the edge of the screen and with a bold numerical font front and centre showing the speed right next to a graphic that apes roadside speed limit signs (usually but far from always, of course, getting the limit correct), I find myself looking at the numbers more frequently instead.

This is down to the size of the digits, but so glacial is the normal rate of change in daily driving anyway that going by the numbers isn’t too much of a drag.

And with a mildly hybridised engine, an automatic gearbox, busy traffic and New York state’s typical upper speed limit of 55mph, it’s not like I’m paying the slightest bit of attention to the rev counter either.

Were the rotary dial bigger and the supposed speed limit a small red telltale needle, I think the display would be more useful. As I find myself nearing a speed limit from above or below, it would be better to have a needle showing how quickly I’m closing in on it, but the instrument has been relegated to minor or cancelled status.

And this is the case all over the car business. Of the new cars I’ve tested recently, only in a Caterham Seven and a Morgan Supersport have I been overtly aware of a speedo needle spinning around a dial – and the Morgan had a supplementary digital numeric display too.

Even in Porsches and Ferraris, where you would expect the needle to move quickly, you find numbers for the speed, alongside, thankfully still, dials for the revs.

I think there’s an inevitability about this. Two large numerals take up less space than even a small dial, and it’s not like one can do away with a digital screen entirely, because modern legislation requires that the driver is presented with ample – often too much – information.

But is there a limit to how good a digital display can look? That in my XC60 is of high resolution, and even if the fonts do date, they will do so with Scandi-cool vibes.

It’s hard to imagine a display looking much more luxurious. I don’t remember the dials in the Rolls-Royce Spectre or Bentley Bentayga looking much better, and I’m not sure that should be the case.

There is talk, then, that analogue dials – such as the speedo that features in the new Bugatti Tourbillon – will become a mark of luxury, in the way that, while the digital or smart watch has in most practical terms replaced the analogue one, the posh watches still have hands.

If it does, I’m for it, because well-presented dials aren’t just for show: they also tell you something that two digits can’t.

"You don’t want to know. It would ruin the illusion, wreck every appealing reverie that those bright motor show lights and cooing onlookers once inspired."

"Did you like it? Think it a shame that it never got built? Great. Let’s not let the facts ruin a lovely, wistful idea.”

As criminally jaded as it must undoubtedly make me seem, this has become the stock response I give when asked what driving a concept car is like. It is, apart from anything else, also a great privilege, a singular opportunity and a huge vote of trust and faith. Any drive like this always feels special one way or another.

But honestly, concept cars are for looking at; for exploring ideas, capabilities and potential. I find them fascinating, especially when they’re technically bold or innovative.

But as far as driving them goes… well, a seafood lasagne might look quite nice once you’ve topped it with sauce and grated cheese, but you wouldn’t actually eat it until it had spent a good three-quarters of an hour at gas mark five, would you?

The thing is, once it has been finished at the very last minute, delivered to the show stand still glistening with tacky paint and then admired by all and sundry, the initial fervour around the unveiling of a concept car soon passes.

From there on out, they don’t often get a lot of coverage. That’s only one of the reasons why hacks like me can end up driving one.

They’re usually rather unsatisfying stories to write, funnily enough, as much as these are often disobliging cars to drive in the first place – principally because how they actually drive is wildly irrelevant.

They can be slow, awkward, noisy, smelly, unpleasant and uncomfortable – but it doesn’t matter. Don’t write it, for God’s sake. Nobody really wants to know. Just pick out the interesting bits.

Filter out and expand on what might just survive to any production version or indirect descendant. Be a journalist.

I began learning how all this works back in 2006, when a chance to drive a brand-new Mazda sports car came along. If you remember the Kabura, give yourself a goldfish.

It was a cool-looking, 2+1-seater, MX-5-engined coupé with a fantastic asymmetrical layout, concocted by the company’s then design boss, American Franz von Holzhausen (who now runs the colouring-in department at Tesla). It was a fantastic idea: a kind of half-an-RX-8.

I loved it. As I remember, it rode like a go-kart with only chassis flex for suspension, steered like an HGV with a knackered assistance pump and spent most of my test drive rubbing its enormous wheels against its arch liners.

Not that I troubled anyone with details like that in the report I wrote, because I desperately wanted that, whatever it might be worth, to give the Kabura every chance against Mazda’s bean-counters. Look how that turned out.

Two years later, I drove Audi’s 12-cylinder diesel-engined R8 show car (the R8 V12 TDI Le Mans) on a specially closed length of Miami highway. That felt like quite the occasion.

This was the supercar supposed to have 738lb ft of torque – but because it was a show car built in a matter of weeks, it actually had a six-speed manual gearbox from an Audi A4 and an ECU that would in fact dole out only 369lb ft.

Among other concept cars that have flattered to disappoint over the years, I’m fortunate to count Peugeot’s 2010 EX1 electric endurance racer (“kindly sit in the door pocket, if you would, sir, and then, as it were, close yourself”).

But then there was the awesome Jaguar C-X75 in 2013 and the incredible Ariel Hipercar in 2022. Those, I’m pleased to report, were very different experiences.

But that’s because they weren’t show cars but prototypes – and those are another story entirely.

If I had all the money, I don’t think I’d buy a new Mercedes-Benz G-Class.

It’s a fine car, of course, but I don’t have the gall to mis-space the letters of my gel numberplates, and big alloys and low-profile tyres on serious 4x4s just look wrong to me.

But hello, here comes the new ‘Stronger than the 1980s’ special edition G-Class, which comes in two choice period colours, receives orange indicator repeaters, wears a black grille and light surround and runs on trad-looking 18in five-spoke wheels wearing chunky 265/60 R18 tyres.

What a difference some very small details can make. It has gone from a car that I’d dismiss very easily to one about which I think: ‘Don’t wrap it – I’ll drive it home.’

I’ve just been on the G-Class configurator (an activity plenty of people avoiding deadlines will be familiar with. There’s now a Morgan Supersport one, by the way), and it’s true that you can already spec classic-style ‘Manufaktur’ non-metallic colours – like sand, a dark green and two blues – on the G-Class.

You can colour the wheel arches and roof in black too. But still those options don’t quite transform the car like these limited-edition details do.

For one, I think the new paint colours are rather more ‘period’ (Mercedes even calls them ‘nostalgia colours’), but the rest is all about those three changes: repeaters, grille, wheels. Mostly the 18in wheels; the minimum standard wheel size on a new G-Class is otherwise 20in.

Is there another car to which three such small options could make such a grand difference?  I don’t think so. Retro design details on modern cars usually look like anomalies, but here, because the latest G-Class design is sufficiently close to the original anyway, it’s the other way around.

It’s a typically specified modern G-Class, in those satin greys that are so popular, and on the big 22in wheels that AMG models wear, that looks like a restomod – an elderly gentleman dressed in athleisure wear.

Some modifiers and restomodders of original Land Rover Defenders make similar mistakes, fitting weird LED headlight units, modern paint finishes and wheels that look far, far too big. The ‘Stronger than the 1980s’ G-Class is our old gent slipping back into his brogues and tweed. He looks right again.

I feel like we’ve talked around this retro subject before. Many car designers don’t like retro designs, because they’re in the business of making new things, not rehashing old ones.

But the G-Class isn’t a new car and some of the aesthetic options you can put on one feel like that white rendering and grey window framing people seem intent on putting on previously characterful houses.

Fashion aside, I think this new G-Class just looks more authentic, more fit for purpose. If one is going to have a big 4x4, why fit wheels and tyres that don’t suit off-roading and paint it such that you wouldn’t dare take it near a thorn bush?

In the past year, I’ve spent time in a new Land Rover Defender 130 on big, shiny black alloys and with satin black paint and in an Ineos Grenadier with neither of those things.

The Defender is the better car to drive: it’s calmer, more relaxing, more comfortable, quieter, brilliantly capable off road and tows for Britain. But I felt sufficiently less conspicuous in the Grenadier that, spec for spec, it’s the one I’d have.

Maybe I’ve never reached a stage in life where I don’t care what other people think. But cars, particularly those bought for a want and not a need, do say something about their owners, don’t they?

This G-Class looks like it has been specced and built and is owned for the reasons it was first intended. And I’d rather drive that, even if it’s a slightly ‘worse’ car than a regular one, which it might be.

Those tyres will probably give it less directional stability and certainly squidgier steering, and as they’re probably heavier might not even improve the ride. Does that make me shallow? Oh well.

The only part of a ‘modern’ G-Class I think I prefer in fact is the interior grab handle, because of the big ‘Stronger than the 1980s’ script on this special edition.

I couldn’t have that written so close to a stereo that would spend at least 70% of its time playing absolute 1980s bangers.