Gordon Murray Automotive’s T.50s Enzo is limited to 25 units at £3.1 million each, and every single one will spend its life being thrashed around private circuits by people who could have bought a LaFerrari but chose this instead. That tells you something.

This is the track-focused variant of Murray’s T.50 road car, and it exists because the road car had to make compromises Murray clearly didn’t enjoy making. The T.50s doesn’t bother with number plates or sound regulations or the kind of suspension tuning that stops your spine compressing on a British B-road. It weighs 852 kilograms. Current F1 cars are heavier.

The engine is a Cosworth-designed 3.9-litre naturally aspirated V12 that revs to 11,500 rpm and produces 725 horsepower. No turbochargers. No hybrid system. No electrical assistance of any kind. Just twelve cylinders and a redline that sits higher than most motorcycles. The transmission is a six-speed manual with something Murray calls Instant Gearshift Technology, which is his way of making a manual gearbox shift as quickly as a paddleshift system without ruining what a manual gearbox is supposed to feel like.

The central driving position returns, flanked by two passenger seats in the same three-seat layout Murray used on the McLaren F1 in 1992. That car is now worth between fifteen and twenty million pounds depending on provenance, and it remains the reference point for anyone arguing that analogue purity still matters. The T.50s is Murray’s attempt to prove he was right the first time.

The rear-mounted 400mm fan is the kind of detail that separates actual engineering from marketing gimmicks. Murray used a fan on the Brabham BT46B in 1978 to generate ground effect, and the FIA banned it after one race because it worked too well. The T.50s uses the same principle, sucking the car onto the track surface without relying on massive wings or complex diffusers. It is not there for show. Think about that for a second.

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Pagani still builds cars this way, in tiny numbers with obsessive attention to engineering theatre. Bugatti’s Bolide attempts something similar with 1,825 horsepower and a forty-unit production run, but it leans heavily on brute force rather than Murray’s lightweight philosophy. The Mercedes-AMG One brought genuine F1 technology to the road, but it is a hybrid with 275 units planned and the kind of complexity that requires factory technicians to keep it running. The Aston Martin Valkyrie, designed by Adrian Newey, comes closest in spirit, but even that weighs more and costs more.

Murray founded Gordon Murray Automotive in 2017 after decades spent working for McLaren, Brabham, and various engineering consultancies. The company is based in Windlesham, Surrey, and the T.50 production began in 2022 at its own manufacturing facility. The road-going T.50 is limited to 100 units at £2.36 million each, and those sold out almost immediately. The T.50s was announced in January 2021, and it sold out faster.

Frank Stephenson’s involvement adds another layer of credibility. Stephenson designed the McLaren P1, the Ferrari F430, the Maserati MC12, and the original BMW X5. He knows what a proper supercar should look like, and he knows when to get out of the way and let the engineering speak for itself. The T.50s looks purposeful rather than aggressive. No enormous wings. No fake vents. No styling cues borrowed from jet fighters or anime. It looks like it was designed to go quickly around a track, which is exactly what it was designed to do.

The price is almost irrelevant at this point. Three million pounds is less than a Bugatti Chiron and a fraction of what a McLaren F1 sells for now. The people buying a T.50s are not cross-shopping it against anything else. They are buying the last naturally aspirated V12 supercar that Gordon Murray will ever design, and they are buying it because they understand that this approach, lightweight, manual, screamingly high-revving, and built in almost no numbers, will not exist in ten years.

The first cars were delivered in 2023. All 25 are spoken for, and the waiting list closed before most people knew it existed.

Sources: Gordon Murray Automotive official press materials, historical McLaren F1 production data, Cosworth engine specifications

JCB took the engines from two of their construction diggers, converted them to run on hydrogen, mounted them in a streamliner, and sent Andy Green out onto Bonneville at 406mph. That is now the hydrogen land speed record. The engines were never designed for this. They were designed to swing excavator arms around building sites in the rain.

The car itself is the old DIESELMAX streamliner, the same one that set a diesel record of 350mph back in 2006. JCB stripped out the compression ignition diesel setup and rebuilt both JCB444 engines to run on spark ignition instead. Hydrogen burns faster and hotter than diesel. The combustion chamber pressures are different. The fuel delivery system is different. The whole thing had to be re-engineered while keeping the basic block and architecture intact.

It worked. More than worked... it went 56mph faster than the diesel version ever managed.

Lord Bamford, JCB’s chairman, has been pushing hydrogen combustion for years now, mostly as a way to avoid batteries in heavy machinery. Batteries make sense in a hatchback. They make less sense in a 20-tonne excavator that runs all day on a motorway construction site with nowhere to charge. Hydrogen combustion engines can be refueled in minutes and use existing engine manufacturing knowledge. This is a very loud, very public engineering demonstration. Sound familiar?

Andy Green drove it. He is the only person to have broken the sound barrier on land, in Thrust SSC back in 1997, at 763mph. He also drove Bloodhound LSR to 628mph in the Kalahari a few years ago. For him, 406mph in a hydrogen-powered digger engine probably felt like a Sunday drive. The Bonneville run looked smooth. No dramas. No slides. Just a clean pass and a new record.

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The engineering challenges were not trivial. Hydrogen has to be stored under immense pressure, which means heavy tanks and complex plumbing. The fuel burns so cleanly that there is almost no lubrication from combustion byproducts, which diesel engines rely on. The ignition timing and fuel mapping had to be completely rewritten. And all of this had to happen inside a streamliner body that was doing over 400mph on a salt flat, where any failure would have been spectacular and final.

The streamliner itself stayed mostly the same. Same body. Same basic aerodynamics. JCB did not redesign the car... they redesigned what was inside it. That is a harder trick than it sounds. It means the hydrogen setup had to fit within the same weight distribution, the same cooling requirements, the same structural limits as the diesel version. There was no starting from scratch.

JCB has been developing hydrogen combustion engines for their construction equipment range as well. This is not a science project. It is a serious attempt to offer an alternative to battery electric in markets where batteries do not make commercial sense. A hydrogen-powered excavator can refuel in the time it takes to grab a coffee. A battery-powered one needs hours on a charger, assuming there is a charger on site at all.

The 406mph figure puts hydrogen ahead of the current electric land speed record, which stands at 341mph, set by the Venturi Buckeye Bullet 3 in 2016. It is still a long way behind the outright record, which is Green’s own 763mph in Thrust SSC. But that was a jet engine. This was two digger motors running on the lightest element in the universe.

The fact that it worked, and worked well enough to set a record, says more about hydrogen combustion than any white paper ever could. JCB now has the data, the publicity, and a working prototype that proves the concept at the most extreme end of performance. The engineering is no longer theoretical.

The DIESELMAX hydrogen streamliner is now the fastest hydrogen-powered vehicle on earth. It uses engines designed to dig holes.

Sources: JCB, Bonneville Salt Flats official records, Thrust SSC historical data, Bloodhound LSR programme archives

Gernot Döllner took one test drive in Audi’s upcoming Q9 SUV and decided the flush, pop-out door handles had to go. Development money already spent. Engineering solution already worked out. Didn’t matter.

The handles were the Tesla kind. Retract flush with the body when you walk away, pop out when you approach, all in the name of slicing through air a bit more cleanly and adding a few miles to the range figure. Audi had committed to the idea. Then the CEO got in the car.

Whatever happened on that drive, it was enough. The Q9 will now have traditional door handles.

This is the tension at the centre of electric vehicle design right now. Aerodynamic efficiency is not optional if you want competitive range figures, and flush surfaces help. But every fraction of a percentage point you claw back in drag reduction has to be weighed against whether the person standing in the rain outside your £80,000 SUV can actually work out how to open the door.

Tesla has been using pop-out handles on the Model S since 2012. They have also been linked to accessibility problems in emergencies, including incidents where first responders or occupants could not get doors open quickly. Cold weather causes issues. People unfamiliar with the car stand there jabbing at smooth bodywork wondering if they’ve been locked out. It is a solution to a problem that most buyers do not realize they have, in exchange for a new problem they definitely will.

Mercedes-Benz put them on the EQS. The reviews have been mixed, which in automotive journalism means they are annoying but not annoying enough to recommend against the car entirely.

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The Q9 is Audi’s flagship electric SUV. It needs to be taken seriously, which means it needs range, presence, and the kind of interior quality that justifies the price. It does not need a door handle that requires a YouTube tutorial.

What makes this decision interesting is not that Döllner overruled his engineers. CEOs do that. It is that he did it after the money was already spent. Most companies would have shrugged, said the tooling was paid for, and moved on. Audi binned it anyway.

That suggests either unusual commitment to getting the user experience right, or an admission that the development process failed to catch an obvious problem early enough. Possibly both.

The broader pattern is clear enough. Automakers are starting to pull back from the more annoying features that came with the first wave of electric vehicle design. Tesla itself has quietly reinstated physical controls in some areas after years of insisting everything should live on a touchscreen. BMW dropped gesture controls from several models after customers found them more irritating than useful.

Flush door handles looked like the future in 2012. In 2025 they look like the kind of feature you add when you are optimizing for magazine reviews rather than real-world use.

The Q9 will arrive later this year with door handles you can grab without thinking about it. That is probably the right call. It just took a very expensive test drive to get there.

Sources: Audi

Maserati discontinued its V8 engine in 2024, declaring the Nettuno twin-turbo V6 the new flagship combustion option as part of a planned full-electric pivot by 2030. Twelve months later, something inside the company is stirring. Sources suggest internal momentum is building to bring back both big-displacement power and manual transmissions, the kind of reversal that would make Maserati the latest premium brand to blink first in the face of customer reality.

The timing would be awkward but not unprecedented. Stellantis CEO Carlos Tavares admitted in 2024 that electrification is “technology chosen by politicians, not customers,” a rare piece of executive candour that signals the wider group is rethinking its timeline. Maserati went all-in on the V6. The MC20 supercar uses a 621-horsepower 3.0-litre twin-turbo straight out of the Nettuno programme, not a V8. GranTurismo and Grecale models transitioned to electrified powertrains between 2023 and 2024. Manual gearboxes had already been phased out by 2020. The last one departed with the GranTurismo MC Stradale around 2019.

None of that was done reluctantly. Maserati announced its electric future in 2021 with the confidence of a brand that believed it could sell heritage buyers on kilowatt-hours instead of litres. That confidence now appears to be cracking.

It would not be the first luxury carmaker to backtrack. Dodge extended V8 Hemi production beyond initial phase-out dates after customer pushback. Lamborghini delayed full electrification and committed to the V12 through the 2030s. BMW reintroduced a manual transmission option for the M2 in 2023 after feedback made it clear the take rate mattered less than the fact of its existence. Aston Martin keeps developing V12s. Ferrari still builds them for flagships like the 812 Competizione. Porsche refuses to downsize the GT3.

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Heritage brands that removed driver-focused hardware to chase regulatory compliance are quietly putting it back when the market refuses to follow. What looked like inevitability in 2021 now looks like misjudgment.

Maserati’s problem is more acute than most. The brand sells on emotion and theatre, not efficiency or innovation. A V6, however technically accomplished, does not carry the same aural or psychological weight as a V8. Manual transmissions in this segment are not about sales volume. They signal that the brand still understands what its customers want, even if most of them tick the paddleshift box anyway. Removing both was a gamble that the Trident badge alone would sustain desirability through the transition, made for reasons that had nothing to do with what people actually wanted to buy.

If the internal voices win and Maserati does reverse course, it will be presented as “listening to customers” or “offering choice.” Regulatory pressure and corporate electrification targets do not sell sports cars. Drama does. Noise does. The feeling that you are driving something unreasonable does.

Whether Maserati can walk this back without looking chaotic depends on how quickly it moves and what it builds. A new V8 GranTurismo with a manual option would be seen as a win. A half-hearted limited edition that arrives three years too late would confirm the brand lost the plot. The difference between those two outcomes is execution, and Maserati’s recent record on that front has been inconsistent at best.

The MC20 remains V6-only. The electrified GranTurismo and Grecale are already in showrooms. Any V8 return would have to slot into a product line that was not designed with it in mind, which raises questions about how serious this internal push actually is versus wishful thinking from engineers who miss the old days.

Stellantis has been reassessing electrification timelines across its portfolio throughout 2024, so corporate permission exists. The question is whether Maserati leadership believes bringing back what it just killed would look like strength or weakness. In a rational world it would look like correction. In the automotive world, perception matters more than logic, and brands that U-turn too often lose credibility faster than they lose customers.

The last Maserati with a manual transmission was discontinued around 2019. That is five years of absence. Long enough that a return would feel like news, not continuity.

Sources: Stellantis press releases (2024), Maserati GranTurismo and MC20 technical specifications (2019-2024)

Ford shifted 50% fewer Mustang Mach-Es this year than last. Last month alone, the company’s EV sales collapsed by nearly three quarters. That’s not market softness. That’s a rejection.

The Mach-E was supposed to prove Ford could build a credible electric crossover that didn’t need to apologise for itself. It didn’t look like a compliance car. It had the Mustang badge. It drove well enough. And for a while, people bought it.

Not anymore.

The decline isn’t limited to the Mach-E. The F-150 Lightning, Ford’s electric pickup that was meant to convert truck buyers to the electric cause, is also haemorrhaging sales. Dealers are sitting on unsold inventory. Ford has already cut production. The company’s Model e division is burning through roughly $4.5 billion a year.

This isn’t just Ford. General Motors paused Blazer EV sales last year. Volkswagen’s ID.4 is down 22% in the first half of 2024. Hertz dumped 20,000 EVs from its fleet because they weren’t working commercially. Even Tesla has resorted to serial price cuts to keep the numbers moving.

The broader EV market in the US has stalled at around 7 to 8% share. That’s after years of subsidies, charging infrastructure investment, and manufacturers loudly committing to electric futures. Growth has flatlined.

Ford’s response has been pragmatic, if slightly desperate. The company shifted manufacturing capacity away from EVs and back towards hybrids, which people are still buying. CFO John Lawler said publicly that Ford would adjust EV production based on demand signals. That’s corporate speak for “we built too many and nobody wants them.”

There are several ways to read this. One is that Ford’s EVs simply aren’t good enough. The Mach-E is fine, but fine doesn’t win against Tesla or even Hyundai’s Ioniq 5. Another reading is that the EV transition was oversold. Consumers were told electric cars were inevitable, better, cheaper to run. Then they looked at the prices, the charging infrastructure, and the depreciation curves, and decided to wait.

Or keep their old car.

The third option is that the market is cooling because early adopters have already bought in, and mainstream buyers need more convincing. That would be the optimistic take. It assumes demand will return once prices drop and infrastructure improves. Ford is betting on that version of events, but the $4.5 billion annual loss suggests the timeline is longer than anyone planned for.

If you want a Mach-E or a Lightning, you’ll be able to negotiate. Dealers have stock. Ford has motivation. Discounts will appear, even if they’re not officially called discounts.

For the industry, it raises harder questions. If Ford, with all its manufacturing scale and marketing muscle, can’t make EVs work financially, who can? Tesla operates differently. Legacy manufacturers are trying to electrify while maintaining combustion lineups, supporting dealer networks, and managing unions. It’s expensive and complicated.

Rivian cut its production forecast this year. Lucid is burning cash. Even the Chinese manufacturers flooding Europe with cheap EVs aren’t making money yet. They’re playing a longer game, subsidised by Beijing.

The Mach-E launched in 2021. It was meant to be the start of something. Three years later, sales have collapsed and Ford is redirecting resources back to hybrids. The company still says it’s committed to electrification, because saying otherwise would spook investors and regulators. But the numbers say something else.

And that Ford is stuck making cars fewer people want to buy than the ones it’s been told to stop making.

The Mach-E currently lists from around £44,995 in the UK, though actual transaction prices are lower.

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Sources: Ford Motor Company sales reports, Cox Automotive data, Ford CFO John Lawler statements

BMW vehicles equipped with the manufacturer’s Connected Drive infotainment system have begun displaying promotional content for Spider-Man films directly on dashboard screens, without explicit prior consent from owners who in many cases spent upwards of £60,000 on their vehicles. The advertisements appear on the central display screen as part of over-the-air content delivery, reviving a debate about whether premium car buyers genuinely own the interiors they paid for or merely licence them from manufacturers who retain remote access.

The issue surfaced when multiple BMW owners reported the unsolicited promotions on social media, expressing frustration that their dashboards had become advertising real estate without warning. For context, this is not a budget hatchback with a sponsor sticker. These are premium vehicles where the infotainment system alone can cost several thousand pounds as part of an options package.

BMW’s Connected Drive platform enables manufacturers to push software updates, feature unlocks, and apparently promotional content directly to vehicles via mobile data. The system was sold on the promise of convenience and enhanced functionality. Nobody mentioned it would also function as a captive advertising screen.

The practice raises immediate questions about consent. When someone buys a car outright, the assumption has historically been that the interior belongs to them. You don’t expect the glove box to start displaying cereal adverts or the rear-view mirror to promote streaming services. The dashboard screen, despite being digital, was understood to fall under the same principle. That understanding appears to have been optimistic.

BMW’s terms of service for connected features likely include clauses about promotional communications buried somewhere in the multi-page agreement most owners accept without reading. Whether those clauses constitute meaningful consent is another matter. If the advertising was disclosed clearly at the point of sale, it would be less objectionable. If it wasn’t, this starts to look like a unilateral change to the product after purchase.

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BMW is not alone in this. General Motors began testing in-car advertising capabilities in 2023 through partnerships with ad-tech companies. Amazon and Stellantis announced a collaboration in 2024 to develop in-vehicle commerce and advertising systems. Hyundai and Genesis have pushed dealership service promotions through connected apps. Connectivity is being weaponised for revenue generation after the initial sale.

Tesla has displayed promotional messages on vehicle screens, though these have typically related to Tesla’s own products or software features rather than third-party films. That distinction matters. An advert for your own service update is one thing. A studio paying to invade your dashboard is another.

Smart TV manufacturers faced similar backlash when they began displaying advertisements on the home screens of televisions buyers had purchased outright. The justification was that connectivity came with trade-offs. The counter-argument was that a £2,000 television should not behave like a free app. Car owners are now making the same case, except the stakes are higher. A TV is irritating. A dashboard is safety-critical.

The broader concern is what this precedent enables. If movie promotions are acceptable, what about fast-food chains bidding for screen time when you’re stationary at traffic lights? Or insurance companies using journey data to push policy renewals? The infrastructure is already in place. The only question is how far manufacturers are willing to push it before the backlash becomes commercially damaging.

BMW owners are stuck with Spider-Man on their screens unless they dig through settings to disable promotional content, assuming that option exists. The alternative is to disconnect from Connected Drive entirely, which disables features they may have paid extra to access. The value proposition has shifted after purchase.

Connected Drive subscriptions start at around £10 per month for basic services, rising to several hundred pounds annually for full access.

Sources: BMW Connected Drive terms of service, owner reports via Reddit and X (formerly Twitter), General Motors advertising partnerships, Amazon-Stellantis collaboration announcements

Ferrari showed journalists at Maranello a system that replicates gear changes in electric cars without any mechanical connection between shifter and drivetrain. Haptic motors. Torque modulation. Synthesised engine braking curves. The whole theatrical production of a manual transmission, delivered through software and servos.

It works, apparently. Test drivers report the sensation is convincing enough that you could forget there is no gearbox at all. The shifter resists at the right moments. The car lurches forward exactly as a clutch bite would feel. Acceleration curves mimic the power delivery of Ferrari’s V8s and V12s as if ratios were actually changing.

The official line from CEO Benedetto Vigna is that Ferrari must preserve its emotional driving experience as it transitions to electric powertrains. Fair enough. Ferrari’s first pure EV arrives late next year, and the company has committed to electric or hybrid options across the entire range by 2030. That is a hard deadline for a brand whose identity depends on visceral mechanical theatre.

But there is something uncomfortably nostalgic about faking the very thing electric motors were supposed to make obsolete. Instant torque delivery is not a flaw of EVs. It is the entire point. Removing gear changes did not make cars worse. It made them faster and more responsive. Simulating the old way back in is not innovation. It is mourning.

Hyundai’s Ioniq 5 N already does this with its N e-shift system. Lexus showed off a manual transmission simulator in 2023. Toyota filed patents for the same idea. Porsche toyed with it for the Taycan but never put it in production, which suggests even they were not convinced.

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BMW’s M division experimented with artificial gear simulation and ultimately abandoned it. That decision feels telling. M cars are not shy about performance gimmicks, but even they decided this was a bridge too far.

The counterargument is that Ferrari is not selling transport. It is selling an experience, and if customers want the sensation of changing gears, Ferrari will provide it. That is fine as far as it goes. But it also suggests Ferrari does not trust its engineers to make an electric car exciting on its own terms.

The technology itself is impressive. Replicating the feel of a mechanical linkage through haptics and torque management is genuinely difficult engineering. The problem is not whether it works. The problem is what it says about the brand’s confidence in electrification.

There is a version of this where the system is optional. A mode you can toggle on if you miss the old days, then switch off when you want the car to behave like the machine it actually is. That would be honest. Offering it as standard would be admitting that Ferrari cannot make an EV compelling without a costume.

The first Ferrari EV will answer that question. If the synthetic shifter is standard equipment, we will know the company thinks electric driving is not enough. If it is buried in a settings menu, maybe there is hope they have built something that does not need the theatre.

Ferrari has not said whether the system will appear in the 2025 EV. That car is still under wraps, and details remain scarce. What is known is that it will compete with the Lotus Evija and Rimac Nevera in price and performance, which means it will be judged against cars that do not pretend to have gearboxes.

Sources: Ferrari press briefing at Maranello, January 2025

Audi is testing a hands-free driving system for its Q8 e-tron that operates at speeds up to 85mph, a notable spec in a market where most advanced assistance either caps out at crawling pace or never lets you look away. The system marks Audi’s return to high-profile autonomy work after the company quietly shelved its Level 3 ambitions three years ago.

Level 3 was supposed to be Audi’s territory. The A8 launched in 2017 with Traffic Jam Pilot, the world’s first production Level 3 system, which handed full control to the car in heavy traffic up to 37mph. The car was responsible. The driver could read a book. It was approved in Germany and nowhere else.

By 2020, Audi had moved on. Traffic Jam Pilot never reached the US or UK. The regulatory path was unclear, the costs were high, and the liability framework didn’t exist. Mercedes kept going. Audi stopped.

Now the Q8 e-tron gets hands-free capability at 85mph, which sounds impressive until you notice it’s almost certainly Level 2. That means the driver is still legally responsible even when their hands are off the wheel. The car assists. The human supervises. It’s the same classification as GM’s Super Cruise and Ford’s BlueCruise, both of which operate hands-free on highways without the legal complexity of Level 3.

Mercedes Drive Pilot, which is Level 3, operates at 40mph maximum in California and Nevada. The car is liable within that operational design domain. Audi’s new system will likely be faster and less legally complicated, which tells you what the company learned from Traffic Jam Pilot.

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The 85mph capability is still notable. Most hands-free systems operate on pre-mapped highways, and speed alone doesn’t make one better than another. But it does suggest Audi is comfortable letting the Q8 e-tron manage itself at the kind of speeds where driver inattention gets expensive quickly. The system will presumably include driver monitoring, lane-centering, adaptive cruise, and all the usual scaffolding that keeps Level 2 from becoming Level 3 in practice.

Honda launched a Level 3 system in Japan in 2021 for the Legend sedan, limited to traffic jams. BMW has announced plans for Level 3 highway automation sometime in 2024 or 2025. Mercedes is expanding Drive Pilot availability. Audi, meanwhile, is building something faster and simpler.

Traffic Jam Pilot was ambitious and legally unworkable outside Germany. The Q8 e-tron system is less pioneering and far more deployable. Audi chose deployment over liability.

Audi has not confirmed a launch date or specified which markets will receive the system. The Q8 e-tron is already on sale in Europe and the US, so this would likely arrive as a software update or a mid-cycle enhancement. No pricing has been announced.

Sources: Audi, Mercedes-Benz, GM, Ford, Honda, BMW press materials and public filings

McMurtry Automotive has put the production version of its Spéirling fan car on display at Monterey Car Week, priced at $1.3 million and claiming enough downforce to theoretically drive inverted. The electric hypercar uses twin fans mounted underneath to generate over 2,000kg of aerodynamic load on a chassis that weighs approximately 1,000kg.

That downforce figure is not ornamental. The car is claiming 3G of lateral grip in corners, which means passengers experience three times their body weight sideways. Fighter jet territory, delivered on public roads.

The fans work by creating a low-pressure zone beneath the car, sucking it onto the tarmac rather than relying on conventional wings and diffusers. It’s the same principle that got the Brabham BT46B banned from Formula 1 after winning one race in 1978. McMurtry has now made it street legal.

Twin electric motors produce 1,000 horsepower. The company claims 0 to 60mph in under 1.5 seconds, which would make it quicker than the Rimac Nevera’s 1.85-second sprint despite having half the power. Weight and downforce do most of the work here.

The production car carries a larger battery pack than the prototype that set the Goodwood Festival of Speed hillclimb record in June 2022. That prototype completed the 1.16-mile course in 39.08 seconds, breaking Nick Heidfeld’s 41.6-second benchmark set in a McLaren MP4/13 Formula 1 car. The extra battery capacity suggests McMurtry has addressed the obvious problem with fan cars, which is that the fans consume meaningful amounts of energy.

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The upside-down driving claim is mathematically sound. With downforce exceeding the car’s weight, it could, in theory, stick to a ceiling at sufficient speed. Whether anyone will attempt this is another question entirely, and one McMurtry’s legal team has presumably considered at length.

At $1.3 million, the Spéirling costs less than half what Gordon Murray is charging for the T.50, which also uses a fan for aerodynamic purposes but generates far less extreme downforce. The T.50 is priced at $3 million and positions itself as a driver’s car with analog appeal. The McMurtry makes no such concessions. It is an engineering exercise that happens to have a license plate.

Production numbers have not been confirmed, but the company has stated the run will be limited. The prototype demonstrated that the technology works. The question now is whether there are enough buyers willing to subject themselves to 3G cornering forces on the road to justify serial production.

Fan car technology has existed for decades but has rarely escaped the racetrack. Regulations killed it in motorsport. Practicality has kept it out of road cars. McMurtry has solved the engineering. The market will determine whether anyone actually wants to drive something this uncompromising.

The Spéirling weighs 1,000kg and generates over 2,000kg of downforce at speed.

Sources: McMurtry Automotive, Goodwood Festival of Speed official records

Pagani uses approximately 2,000 titanium bolts per car. The hardware bill exceeds $100,000. That is more than a base Porsche 911 costs to begin with.

Not titanium trim. Not titanium accents. Titanium bolts. The things that hold other things together.

Each fastener is CNC-machined from Grade 5 titanium, the same Ti-6Al-4V alloy used in aircraft and spacecraft. Not forged. Not stamped. Machined. Individually. Pagani maintains in-house machining capabilities specifically to control quality on every single one.

A standard automotive steel bolt costs somewhere between fifty pence and two quid. A Pagani titanium bolt costs $50 to $150 depending on size and complexity. The weight saving is 45% compared to steel while maintaining comparable strength. When you are building a car that starts at $2.2 million and weighs as little as physically possible, that saving matters at every junction, every bracket, every point where two components meet.

Horacio Pagani spent years working with composites at Lamborghini before founding his own company. The obsession with lightweight materials runs through everything the firm does, right down to the mundane bits nobody photographs. The Utopia, introduced in 2022, carries this same philosophy. Forty to fifty cars leave the Modena facility each year. Every one of them has two thousand reasons to be lighter than it would otherwise be.

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The titanium does not stop at fasteners. Pagani exhaust systems run $50,000 to $80,000 on their own, also titanium. Suspension components. Drivetrain parts. Koenigsegg has gone further in some applications, using carbon fiber bolts at $100 to $200 each. Bugatti Chiron hardware costs sit around $80,000 to $100,000 in titanium fasteners for the engine and chassis alone. McLaren famously spent $30,000 on gold foil heat shielding in the F1 engine bay. Lexus burned $150,000 per car on the carbon fiber loom manufacturing for the LFA.

This is how hypercar economics work. A Boeing 787 uses approximately 2.5 million titanium fasteners with similar per-unit costs, but Boeing spreads that across hundreds of airframes and decades of operational life. Pagani builds fifty cars a year. The cost per vehicle is absurd because the volume is absurd.

The result is a car where even the bits you cannot see and will never touch cost more than most people earn in a year. Not because Pagani enjoys spending money, but because at this level of performance, every gram matters. The bolts are not an indulgence. They are structural weight that cannot be avoided, so they are optimized like everything else.

You could buy a Porsche 911, drive it for three years, and sell it. Or you could buy the bolts that hold a Pagani together. One of those options will hold value better than the other, and it is not the one with an engine.

Sources: Pagani Automobili, industry manufacturing data, comparable hypercar component costs

A prototype of Hyundai’s redesigned 2027 Tucson has been photographed mid-disaster during testing, with both front wheels completely separated from the vehicle. The images show the SUV grounded on its hubs, tyres and wheels scattered across what appears to be a proving ground. The incident was captured on camera and circulated online, offering a rare public view of the kind of mechanical carnage that typically stays behind test facility gates.

The 2027 Tucson represents a full redesign of Hyundai’s compact SUV, now in its fifth generation since the 2022 model year. The prototype caught testing wears noticeably boxier bodywork than the current car, abandoning some of the flowing surfacing Hyundai has leaned on for the past few years. Inside, spy shots have revealed a massive new screen dominating the dashboard, continuing the brand’s push toward Tesla-style interior minimalism.

Tire separation like this during development testing is almost always a suspension geometry issue, a wheel attachment failure, or the result of deliberately abusive load cases. Engineers sometimes push prototypes to the point of mechanical failure to map the edges of what a platform can tolerate. The problem is when those limits get crossed accidentally or when a fundamental design flaw surfaces under stress.

This is not the first time a major manufacturer has experienced wheel detachment issues. Ford’s Bronco had wheel separation problems that affected actual production models in 2021. Toyota recalled 2022 and 2023 Tundra pickups for wheel detachment risk. The difference here is that Hyundai’s failure happened in a controlled test environment, years before production, which is exactly the point of prototype validation work.

Still, the optics are terrible. No automaker wants images of its future product sitting on its brake rotors circulating online. Hyundai has not commented publicly on the incident, which is standard practice when dealing with pre-production vehicles. The 2027 Tucson is likely still two to three years from production, meaning there is time to identify and resolve whatever caused the wheels to depart so dramatically.

The current Tucson has been a strong seller for Hyundai, consistently ranking among the top compact SUVs in Europe and North America. The 2027 redesign will need to maintain that momentum while adapting to stricter emissions regulations and increased competition from both traditional rivals and new Chinese entrants flooding the market with cheaper electrified alternatives.

Other manufacturers have had similarly embarrassing moments during development. Ferrari’s SF90 prototype caught fire during pre-production testing in 2019. Porsche’s Taycan suffered a similar fate the same year. Tesla’s Cybertruck famously had its windows smashed during a live demonstration in 2019, though that was less a mechanical failure and more a miscalculation of theatrical confidence. These incidents are part of the unglamorous reality of vehicle development, where things break, catch fire, or fall off before engineers figure out how to stop them doing so.

The massive new screen visible in earlier spy shots suggests Hyundai is betting heavily on in-car technology to differentiate the 2027 Tucson. Whether that translates to actual sales depends on execution, pricing, and whether buyers are willing to trade physical controls for touchscreen real estate. The boxier styling is a clear departure from the current car’s sculpted look, possibly an attempt to appeal to buyers who find the current design too busy or overwrought.

The 2027 Tucson remains deep in the validation phase, where prototypes are subjected to every conceivable abuse to identify weak points. Losing both front wheels qualifies as finding one. Hyundai’s engineers will determine whether this was a one-off failure or a symptom of a broader suspension architecture issue. The current fifth-generation Tucson starts at around £31,000 in the UK and remains one of Hyundai’s most important global products.

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Sources: Ford Bronco recall documentation, Toyota Tundra recall notices, public prototype testing images

Ford’s 1.0-litre three-cylinder EcoBoost engine, the one installed in hundreds of thousands of Fiestas and EcoSports and marketed as proof that downsizing works, is eating itself alive. The timing belt fails prematurely. When it does, the pistons collide with the valves because this is an interference design, and the entire engine is destroyed. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has now upgraded its investigation from preliminary evaluation to engineering analysis, which is federal shorthand for we think this might kill someone.

The wet timing belt design runs in engine oil rather than being externally mounted. That was supposed to be clever. It has turned out to be catastrophic.

Owners report sudden engine failure with no warning. One moment you are driving. The next moment you are coasting to a stop with a destroyed powerplant and a repair bill that can exceed fifteen thousand dollars. On a Fiesta or an EcoSport, that is more than the car is worth.

Engines stalling while driving create genuine crash risks. Losing power in traffic or at motorway speeds is dangerous. The NHTSA upgrading the investigation signals they view this as a safety matter, not just a consumer complaint about quality.

The EcoBoost family was sold as engineering achievement. Small displacement, turbocharging to recover performance, fuel economy gains to meet regulatory requirements. The 1.0-litre three-cylinder was the poster child for this philosophy. It won awards. Journalists praised it. Customers bought it believing they were getting modern efficiency without compromise.

Extreme downsizing pushed mechanical limits beyond what the architecture could sustain long term. Making an engine smaller while maintaining power through forced induction creates heat, stress, and operating conditions that components must withstand. When you also run the timing belt in oil and expect it to last the life of the engine, you are asking a lot.

It asked too much.

Volkswagen’s 1.4 TSI engines had timing chain tensioner failures. BMW’s turbocharged N20 engines ate their timing chains. Hyundai and Kia are still dealing with the fallout from Theta II engine failures that led to massive recalls and ongoing federal scrutiny. The common thread is manufacturers prioritizing regulatory compliance and marketing claims over engineering conservatism.

Downsizing works on paper. In the real world, it works until it doesn’t, and when it doesn’t, the customer is left holding the bill.

Ford has not issued a recall. The NHTSA investigation could force one, but that process takes time. Meanwhile, owners are facing engine failures and decisions about whether to repair vehicles that may not be worth fixing. Some have already scrapped cars that were otherwise functional. Others are driving with the knowledge that the engine could detonate itself without warning.

The 1.0-litre EcoBoost won International Engine of the Year six times in a row. That award has aged poorly. Engineering cleverness that results in premature catastrophic failure is not engineering achievement. It is a warranty time bomb that happened to go off after the warranty expired for many owners.

The investigation affects hundreds of thousands of vehicles in the US market alone. Global figures are higher. Ford marketed this engine family aggressively as the future of internal combustion, and the federal safety regulator now has an engineering analysis open into why it keeps destroying itself.

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Sources: National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA)

Nissan reckons the new Elgrand minivan features active noise cancellation tech no other car has. Not the method itself, necessarily. The claim is about how the system detects noise in the first place. Instead of using microphones to pick up sound once it’s already in the cabin, the Elgrand uses acceleration sensors scattered across the body and chassis. Panasonic built the system.

Most automotive ANC setups work by listening. Microphones capture unwanted noise, then the car pumps anti-sound through the speakers to cancel it out. Honda did it in the 2013 Acura RLX. Cadillac did it the same year with Bose kit in the XTS. Mercedes uses it in the S-Class. BMW has Active Sound Control. Hyundai introduced Road Noise Active Noise Control in 2019.

All of them rely on microphones.

Nissan’s approach is different, at least on paper. Acceleration sensors pick up vibrations in the structure itself before they turn into audible noise. The idea is to get ahead of the problem. Detect the vibration as it starts, generate the counter-wave, and the noise never materialises in the cabin.

Whether that makes the Elgrand genuinely first depends on what other manufacturers have been doing quietly. ANC tech is heavily proprietary. Some systems use a combination of sensors and microphones. Some work only on specific frequency ranges. The claim of being unique rests on the absence of microphones and the reliance on acceleration sensing alone.

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The Elgrand itself is a premium minivan sold mostly in Japan and parts of Asia. Not a global volume model. Not something Nissan pushes hard in Europe or the US. Which makes the tech claim more interesting. If you’re going to trial something genuinely new, a low-stakes domestic market product is where you’d do it.

The theoretical advantage of acceleration-based ANC is speed. Vibrations travel through metal faster than sound travels through air. If the sensors are positioned correctly, the system should have a head start on the noise itself. That could mean better cancellation of low-frequency rumble from the road and drivetrain, which is typically harder to kill with microphone-based systems.

The downside is complexity. You need sensors everywhere the structure might vibrate. You need processing power to interpret all that data in real time. And you need speakers capable of producing the exact inverse waveform at the exact right millisecond. Get any of it wrong and you don’t cancel the noise. You amplify it.

Nissan has not released detailed specs on how many sensors the Elgrand uses or where they’re positioned. Panasonic has confirmed involvement but hasn’t detailed whether this tech will appear in other manufacturers’ vehicles. If it works as claimed, it probably will.

Whether the system actually delivers a quieter cabin than microphone-based ANC is something you’d need to sit in the car to know. Press materials say it does. Press materials always say it does.

The Elgrand is on sale now in Japan. No word on pricing for the ANC-equipped variant specifically.

Sources: Nissan Motor Co., Panasonic

Tesla has filed a lawsuit against Aristo-Cast, a Texas-based die casting supplier, alleging the company is demanding $250,000 per week to release tooling equipment that Tesla claims it already owns. The equipment in question is critical for producing Cybertruck structural components and sits at the heart of another delay in a truck programme that has been one long delay since 2019.

Aristo-Cast specialises in the kind of gigacasting technology Tesla has made central to its manufacturing strategy. Large structural parts, cast in single pieces, fewer joins, lower costs. The theory works until the supplier who controls the physical equipment decides they have leverage and uses it.

According to the lawsuit, Tesla owns the tooling contractually but Aristo-Cast is refusing to hand it over without weekly payments that amount to ransom by another name. The supplier holds the tools. Tesla needs them to keep production moving. The math is ugly and straightforward.

This is not the first time Tesla has ended up in a dispute like this. A similar standoff with a German supplier in 2022 caused headaches during the Model Y ramp at Giga Berlin. Rivian had comparable issues in 2023 with the R1T. Ford lost months of F-150 Lightning production to semiconductor shortages in 2021. The common thread is that just-in-time manufacturing only works when every link in the chain behaves predictably, and suppliers who control critical equipment know exactly how much power that gives them.

The Cybertruck has been a moving target since Elon Musk unveiled it in late 2019. Deliveries finally began in limited numbers at the end of 2023, but production ramps have been anything but smooth. Some of that is down to design complexity. Some is down to the challenges of gigacasting at scale. And some, apparently, is down to business relationships that have gone sour in expensive and visible ways.

Gigacasting was supposed to be Tesla’s manufacturing edge. Fewer parts, faster assembly, lower costs per unit. But the technology requires enormous, expensive, highly specialised equipment, and if you do not own the building where that equipment sits or the relationship with the people who run it goes sideways, you are stuck. Aristo-Cast appears to have worked that out.

The $250,000 weekly figure is not a negotiation. It is a statement. Pay or wait. Tesla is clearly not interested in paying, hence the lawsuit, but lawsuits take time and Cybertruck customers are still waiting for trucks that were promised years ago.

Automotive supply chains have always been fragile, but the shift toward more complex, bespoke manufacturing processes has made them more so. When a single supplier controls a piece of equipment that cannot be easily replicated or replaced, they hold all the cards. Tesla had tooling issues before at the Giga Texas facility in 2022, and those were resolved eventually, but not quickly and not without cost. This dispute with Aristo-Cast looks set to follow a similar trajectory unless one side blinks first.

The Cybertruck production line is missing equipment it allegedly owns, a supplier is demanding a quarter of a million dollars a week, and Tesla’s lawyers are earning their retainer. The trucks that do exist are trickling out to customers who ordered them years ago. The ones that do not exist yet are waiting on a resolution that could take months.

$250,000 per week works out to over $13 million a year.

Sources: Reuters, Tesla lawsuit filings, Aristo-Cast

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Flock Safety’s automated license plate reader cameras are being installed across the United States on poles that lack the breakaway mechanisms required by highway safety standards. Some are just stuck directly into the ground. Which means a surveillance camera marketed as a community safety tool could kill you if you hit it.

The problem is basic. Roadside poles are supposed to snap at the base when a vehicle strikes them. That is not a nice-to-have feature. It is codified in the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices and American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials standards specifically because rigid poles cause serious injuries and deaths. Breakaway bases allow the pole to collapse on impact rather than turning into a fixed object that stops a car dead.

Flock Safety has partnerships with over 3,000 cities and communities as of 2023. The cameras themselves photograph license plates and feed the data into searchable databases used by law enforcement and private neighborhoods. But the physical installation of these cameras appears to vary wildly depending on the contractor and locality. Some use proper breakaway poles. Others do not.

If you think your local council checked this before approving the installation, you might want to confirm that.

The ones that don’t are scattered across public rights-of-way, residential streets, and highway approaches where they function as unforgiving obstacles in the event of a crash. State departments of transportation typically require permits for anything installed on the right-of-way, and those permits are supposed to ensure compliance with safety standards. Either those reviews aren’t happening, or they’re being ignored.

The Federal Highway Administration has documented thousands of crashes annually involving fixed roadside objects. Utility poles and rigid street signs have been identified as roadside hazards for decades, which is why breakaway standards exist in the first place. Adding more non-compliant infrastructure to the roadside doesn’t make anyone safer, regardless of what the cameras are allegedly doing for crime prevention.

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A company selling surveillance technology as a safety measure is installing that technology in a way that creates a crash hazard. Communities believe they’re getting a tool that protects them. What some of them are actually getting is a rigid pole on the side of the road that could turn a survivable off-road excursion into something much worse.

Flock Safety manufactures and markets the cameras, but installation practices are handled locally. That creates a accountability gap. If a contractor cuts corners and installs a camera on a non-breakaway pole, who is responsible when someone hits it? The city that approved the permit? The contractor who did the work? Flock Safety for not specifying proper installation requirements? All three?

There’s precedent for this kind of failure. Red light camera installations in multiple states have faced lawsuits and regulatory action for not meeting traffic engineering standards. The difference here is that red light cameras at least go through some level of traffic engineering review because they’re tied to intersection signal timing. Flock’s ALPR cameras are often treated as simple surveillance devices rather than roadside infrastructure, which means they may skip the safety review process entirely.

Transportation safety advocates have raised concerns about the proliferation of roadside infrastructure without proper oversight. Adding thousands of new poles to rights-of-way across the country without ensuring they meet crash safety standards is exactly the kind of thing those advocates warned about. It doesn’t matter how well the cameras work if the pole holding them up can kill someone.

Over 3,000 communities now have Flock Safety cameras installed, and no comprehensive audit of pole compliance exists.

Sources: Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD), American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO), Federal Highway Administration crash data, Flock Safety company information

A car dealership has been hit with a $137,000 fine after repossessing vehicles from service members who were on active duty, a direct violation of federal law designed to prevent exactly this kind of thing. The Servicemembers Civil Relief Act exists for a reason. When someone is deployed overseas, chasing creditors from a desert or an aircraft carrier is not a realistic option. This dealer decided that didn’t matter.

The SCRA, enacted in 2003 to replace older wartime protections dating back to 1940, specifically prohibits repossession of vehicles purchased before military service without a court order while the buyer is on active duty. It also caps interest rates at 6% on pre-service debts and blocks default judgments.

The Department of Justice Civil Rights Division, which enforces SCRA violations alongside the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, does not treat these cases lightly. Penalties can include fines, compensatory damages to the affected service members, mandatory policy overhauls, and in some cases criminal misdemeanor charges carrying up to a year in prison. This $137,000 settlement sits in the middle of a long list of similar enforcement actions.

Wells Fargo paid $24 million in 2019 after admitting it wrongfully repossessed 413 military members’ cars. Santander Bank settled for $2.2 million in 2023. A Nebraska dealership paid $940,000 in 2022. JPMorgan Chase handed over $136,000 in 2016. Capital One settled for $12 million in 2011.

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Auto lending is one of the most common areas for SCRA violations, alongside housing and credit cards. Service members must provide written notice and a copy of military orders to creditors to invoke the protections, which sounds straightforward until you consider what happens when someone receives last-minute deployment orders or is already overseas when a payment issue arises. The law accounts for this. Dealers and lenders are expected to check military status before repossessing a vehicle, not after.

These protections are not obscure. The SCRA has been federal law for over two decades. Financial institutions and dealerships operating in the auto finance space are aware of it. Training materials exist. Compliance is not optional. Think about that for a second. And yet the enforcement actions keep coming, which suggests the fines are still being calculated as a cost of doing business rather than a deterrent.

The $137,000 penalty in this case will be distributed as compensation to the affected service members and potentially as a civil penalty. The dealership will also likely face mandatory policy changes and monitoring to prevent repeat violations. Whether that changes behaviour industry-wide is another question entirely.

The message from the DOJ is clear enough. If you repossess a car from someone serving overseas without a court order, expect to pay for it. The law does not care whether it was an oversight or deliberate. The outcome is the same.

Sources: U.S. Department of Justice, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

Mazda’s ten-year-old supermini nearly doubled sales in January 2024 while the company’s entire SUV range tumbled. The Mazda2, based on architecture from before the current decade and untouched since 2014, is now moving faster than the CX models Mazda has spent years positioning as the future of the brand.

This is not how the script was supposed to go.

Mazda Australia’s own sales data shows the 2 surging at precisely the moment the CX-3, CX-30, CX-5, and the rest of the alphabet soup took a kicking. The little hatchback is older than some of the people buying it. It predates Mazda’s current Skyactiv platform. It looks like what it is, which is a car designed when David Cameron was Prime Minister and people still thought diesel was the future.

And yet here we are.

The context makes it worse. Mazda has spent the better part of a decade trying to move upmarket, chasing premium buyers with bigger margins and fancier interiors. The 2 was supposed to be a relic they kept around for fleet sales and driving schools. Instead it is outselling the cars that actually represent where Mazda wants to be as a company.

You can read this two ways. Either there is still serious demand for affordable small hatchbacks and the industry has misread the room, or customers are panic-buying while they still can because they know what is coming. Both are plausible. Neither reflects well on the assumption that everyone secretly wants a compact SUV if you just give them enough time to realize it.

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The Mazda2 competes against the Toyota Yaris, Kia Rio, and Suzuki Swift in what remains of the light car segment. Three of those four nameplates are still here. The Volkswagen Polo is not. The Ford Fiesta is not. The Holden Barina died with the Holden brand in 2020. The Honda Jazz has been functionally withdrawn from several markets after years of declining sales.

Mazda itself is rumored to be planning significant changes to the 2’s future, which in manufacturer speak usually means discontinuation or a dramatic shift in positioning. The current model has been around long enough to vote. In car years it is positively archaeological.

What makes the January sales spike genuinely interesting is the contrast with Mazda’s SUV performance in the same month. These are the vehicles built on the new platform, engineered to the company’s current standards, marketed as the sensible choice for families who need space and safety and all the other things people say they need when they are justifying spending thirty-five grand on a car that is functionally identical to a hatchback but taller.

The small car segment has been declared dead more times than vinyl. Manufacturers have been trying to kill it for years because the margins are terrible and the development costs are nearly identical to larger vehicles that command higher prices. The 2 should not be having a moment. It should be gently expiring while Mazda’s attention is elsewhere.

Instead it has nearly doubled sales while the models that are supposed to represent the brand’s future are going backwards. That is not a blip. That is customers actively choosing the thing the manufacturer has deprioritized.

Mazda has not commented on what this means for the 2’s future. They do not need to. The industry trajectory is clear and it does not include ten-year-old budget hatchbacks no matter how well they happen to sell in a single month. What January’s numbers do confirm is that the gap between what the industry wants to build and what a chunk of the market actually wants to buy has not closed.

The Mazda2 starts at just over twenty thousand dollars in Australia, which in 2024 makes it one of the cheapest new cars you can actually buy from a mainstream brand.

Chinese automotive groups are sharing up to 80% of components across different models and price points, from door handles and window regulators to complete powertrains. A BYD electric motor in a £15,000 city car is often identical to the one in a £35,000 SUV. Same springs. Same seat frames. Same electrical architecture. European manufacturers spent decades keeping their premium brands engineering-separate from their volume lines. That approach now looks like a luxury they cannot afford.

Geely’s Compact Modular Architecture underpins vehicles across Geely, Lynk & Co, and Volvo. Engines, transmissions, suspension components — shared. BYD’s e-Platform 3.0 standardises electric powertrains, battery integration, and thermal management across multiple vehicle sizes. The cost advantage is not about cheaper materials or lower quality. It is about ordering 500,000 door handles instead of 50,000, and negotiating accordingly with suppliers like Bosch and Continental.

The approach allows Chinese manufacturers to launch new models in 24 to 30 months. Traditional European and Japanese timelines run 48 to 60 months. Tooling costs drop. Development cycles compress. Volume commitments to tier-one suppliers increase, which strengthens negotiating positions further.

Volkswagen pioneered European platform sharing with MQB in 2012, spreading components across Volkswagen, Audi, Skoda, and Seat. Chinese firms took the concept further by sharing across broader price segments. A component that appears in a budget model also appears in a premium one, with minimal variation. European luxury brands historically resisted this, maintaining distinct suppliers and engineering to preserve brand differentiation. That resistance is ending.

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Stellantis created the STLA platform family in 2021 explicitly to compete with Chinese cost structures. STLA Small, Medium, Large, and Frame platforms are rolling out through 2024 to 2027, designed to share components across brands that once kept their engineering separate. Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi launched the CMF platform in 2013 to share 70% of components. Hyundai-Kia’s E-GMP electric platform, introduced in 2020, shares architecture across both brands. Even Toyota and Honda, which historically limited platform sharing compared to Chinese competitors, announced expanded modular strategies in 2023 and 2024.

The shift is not ideological. It is economic. Chinese manufacturers can sell vehicles for significantly less while maintaining margin because their cost base is structurally lower. Western carmakers are not competing on labour costs or regulatory arbitrage. They are competing against a production philosophy that treats components as fungible across price points.

Tesla’s vehicle lineup already uses shared battery packs, motors, and electrical architecture across Model 3, Y, S, and X. General Motors announced the Ultium platform in 2020 for electric vehicles, aiming for scale economies similar to Chinese competitors. The pattern is consistent across manufacturers facing the same competitive pressure.

European luxury brands maintained separate component suppliers to preserve the idea that a premium car was engineered differently from a mass-market one. That idea had a cost. The question was whether customers valued the differentiation enough to pay for it. The answer, increasingly, is no. A door handle is a door handle. An electric motor is an electric motor. If sharing them across models saves £3,000 per vehicle, the engineering purity argument stops making financial sense.

Chinese manufacturers are not cutting corners. They are cutting costs by standardising what does not need to be different. Western carmakers are now doing the same, which is why platform sharing announcements have accelerated since 2020. The competitive dynamic has changed. The manufacturers adapting fastest are the ones launching the most aggressive platform strategies.

BYD’s e-Platform 3.0 allows the company to scale electric vehicle production rapidly while keeping prices below European equivalents. Geely’s CMA platform supports vehicles across three brands without customers noticing which components are shared. The execution is seamless enough that brand identity remains intact. That is the achievement — not the sharing itself, but making the sharing invisible.

Volkswagen’s MQB platform now underpins over 40 different models across four brands. Stellantis is targeting similar scale with STLA. The tooling investment is enormous upfront, but the per-unit cost drops sharply once volume production begins. Chinese manufacturers understood this earlier and built their strategies around it. European and Japanese manufacturers are catching up, but the head start matters.

The door handle in a £12,000 Geely might be the same as the one in a £38,000 Volvo. That used to be unthinkable. Now it is standard practice.

Sources: Geely Auto Group corporate reports, BYD Company platform documentation, Stellantis STLA platform announcement 2021, Volkswagen Group MQB platform data, Hyundai Motor Group E-GMP specifications

Genesis has confirmed that its forthcoming GV90 electric SUV will feature rear-hinged coach doors, with an executive openly comparing the mechanism to the Rolls-Royce Cullinan. The doors will be a headline feature on what Genesis is positioning as its new flagship model, sitting above the GV80 in the brand’s lineup.

Coach doors have been a Rolls-Royce signature since 1925. They disappeared for decades, came back on the modern Phantom in 2003, and have since become shorthand for a very specific kind of automotive theatre. The Cullinan’s doors open to 83 degrees. They make getting into the back seat feel like entering a private club that you probably cannot afford.

Genesis was founded in 2015. It has spent the last nine years building credible luxury saloons and SUVs that compete well on equipment and price but lack the kind of heritage that lets you charge Rolls money. Now it is borrowing one of Rolls-Royce’s most recognisable design cues and fitting it to a car built on a Hyundai Motor Group platform.

Coach doors are not mechanically complex. They are not patented. Any manufacturer can fit them. What they represent is harder to replicate. When Rolls-Royce uses them, it is continuing a tradition. When Genesis uses them, it is making a reference. Lincoln tried this in 2017 with the Continental 80th Anniversary edition, which brought back the suicide doors the brand had used in the 1960s. It worked because Lincoln had the history to support it. The doors felt like a revival, not an appropriation. Genesis does not have that history. It has ambition and a corporate parent with deep pockets, which is not the same thing.

Think about that for a second.

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The GV90 will compete with electric luxury SUVs from BMW, Mercedes, and Audi. None of those brands use coach doors. They do not need to. Their badges carry enough weight on their own. Genesis is still building that weight, which makes the door decision either brave or desperate.

There is also the practical side. Coach doors do make rear entry easier, especially in tight spaces where a conventional door would swing too wide. They create a more open aperture and eliminate the B-pillar obstruction. Rolls-Royce charges a fortune for this, but the engineering is not particularly expensive. Genesis can offer it at a much lower price point, which will either democratise a luxury feature or dilute its exclusivity, depending on your perspective.

Buyers in this segment either want a Rolls-Royce or they want a well-equipped electric SUV with an interesting door mechanism and a five-figure saving. Genesis might have the answer for the latter. But lifting a signature design element from the most prestigious car brand in the world and applying it to a nine-year-old marque feels like the automotive equivalent of wearing a borrowed dinner jacket.

Mazda fitted rear-hinged doors to the RX-8 two decades ago. Nobody mistook it for a Rolls-Royce. It was a sports car with a clever solution to rear seat access. The GV90 is not trying to be clever. It is trying to be flagship.

The GV90 is expected to launch in 2025. Pricing has not been confirmed, but it will sit well below the Cullinan’s £300,000 starting figure.

Sources: Genesis Motor, Hyundai Motor Group