The Range Rover Sport is a fancy SUV that can go off-road and is also comfortable and fast. It's made by Land Rover, a company famous for tough and luxurious vehicles.
The Noble M600 is a very fast sports car made by Noble that has a V8 engine, which means it has eight cylinders to make power and sounds very powerful.
Car
Noble M500
The Noble M500 is a very fast sports car made by Noble that has a V6 engine, which means it has six cylinders to make power.
The Jaguar I-Pace is a fully electric car shaped like a small SUV. It was Jaguar's first electric car, but they didn't make many other versions of it. It looks different from usual Jaguars because it has a short front and more space inside.
A cyber attack is when hackers try to break into a company's computers to cause problems. This happened to Land Rover and made them stop some work for a while.
A plug-in hybrid is a car that uses both gas and electricity. You can charge its battery by plugging it in, so it can drive some distance just on electricity, saving fuel and pollution.
Regen braking is a way cars save energy when you slow down. Instead of wasting the energy, the car uses it to recharge its battery, helping it go further on electricity.
The Toyota Hilux is a very strong and tough truck that can handle rough use and hard driving. It became famous because it was shown on a TV show where it was tested in very harsh conditions and kept working.
Ariel is a company that makes very light and fast cars that are built mainly for fun driving.
LIVE
Hello, welcome to a bonus episode of the AutoCard podcast, My Week in Cars, which is
where Steve Cropley and I read out your letters.
Actually, I think I'm reading them to you because unless you have any on your inbox,
I think I'm just reading you the letters and seeing what you think.
No, you're not lazy on this one. You were out at an event all morning and I was not,
so you've had a busier day than I have. Let's put it that way. You've had a much busier day
than I have, I would have thought. Neil Briscoe writes to us. Hello, Neil. Neil,
from the Irish Times here, he says, do you remember last week I talked about a Range Rover
Sport that had been put into a river on a launch? Yes. Neil writes to us, had to get
it in touch. I'm outside my son's school listening to the latest podcast. Your tale of
the Range Rover Sport getting into a bit of a sinky situation on launch. As it happens,
I was on that launch the very next day and we stopped to ask the poor unfortunate Land Rover
person who was standing guard in the piddling rain at that particular bend in the river,
why he was there? Preventing a repeat occurrence was the answer with no little shard and void.
If I recall, it was a supercharged model too, so whoever it was filled their bingo guard,
so to speak. By my memory, I think it was the foothills of the Pyrenees, not Italy,
says Neil. You may well be right, mate. My memory on that is not very good either.
I think we flew out in and out of Perpignan. I still somewhere have a photo taken by a Land Rover
photographer of me giving the sport the utter Harry Flatters up a sand slope with dirt and debris
fountaining out of each side. We failed to destroy the test cars, but two of my colleagues did
manage to drive the supercharged car so hard that they had to be rescued from an empty tank of fuel.
Oh, God. Have you ever run out of fuel on a car launch? No, never. No, not once, you? I've not
run out. I've had to refuel a couple of times. It's unusual, but I've had to do it once or twice.
Yeah. BMW M5 with the V10 engine was the first time I had to do it. Oh, right. We did some high
speed runs on an airfield in Germany and then they went, okay, well, and it was only a day
launch, so it wasn't a very, I don't think it was a massive, massive route. And then they went,
okay, well, when you leave here, go to that petrol station there and you will meet somebody there
who will fill the car for you. Oh, well, that's okay. That's okay. Yeah. I thought Neil was,
for a moment, Neil was going to confess to being the bloke there. Oh, he was not. No, I didn't
tell you who it was. Did I? No, I didn't tell you who it was, did I? No. But I will tell you
off air today, if I remember. Thanks for that, Neil. Very kind. And it was... Yeah, hope you're
well, Neil Grace. Good car, that. Yeah, really good car. And that's, I still remember the slope
they were testing the, or demonstrating the four-wheel drive system on a sort of a cliff face
that you, because I listened back to proofread, proof listen to the pod and I said, oh, I was
walking up to try and get a photo. I think that really rather undersold what I was trying to,
what I had to do, you know, which was really scrabble on all fours up this slope to try and get
a photo of a car they were driving up. Wow. With this Range Rover Sport. It was really impressive
stuff that cars can do. I'm always amazed what cars can do. Yeah. And tyres. Yeah.
Keep learning more about that, don't we? Yes. Yes. Let's have a letter from our friend Pete
Boutwood of Noble Cars. Oh, yes. Who says, as a minor artisan low volume supercar manufacturer,
we're delighted by the current trend towards electric performance cars. Perhaps we should
explore why customers purchase on the face of it such impractical and whimsical thing
as a sports car. The more cynical amongst us might assume it's a form of self promotion,
as we talked about on the pod on Wednesday, actually, an impressive piece of automotive
extravagance in which to be seen a car merely to impress. However, much more likely in our experience
is to have ownership of a car that is both fun and rewarding to drive. It's my view and that of
many of our owners that a major part of the enjoyment of performance car ownership is the sound,
the beauty of pure mechanical song. I can't tell you the number of owners who tell me that in the
event of a long tunnel, the almost childish joy they get from lowering the windows to hear the
resonance of a finely tuned V8 or indeed V6, which the Noble M500 has a V6 and the M600 had a V8.
Very few would want to experience that in an electric wine or an artificial intelligence
inspired facsimile of the combustion engine. One would like this acoustic replication to
using carbon sticky back plastic instead of carbon. Warm regards, Peter. Thanks, Pete.
Yeah, there is something about the proper engine, isn't there, that sports car manufacturers
have also decided is quite important. Yeah, yeah. Did you remember there was a bunch of people
who called themselves tunnelers who actually, there were people who sought out tunnels in order
to go through them at making a lot of noise? At great speed. Yeah, I'm not sure, but certainly
making noise. Harder to do these days, I guess, because of cameras and etc. Yeah, but no, but I
think in Pete Boutwood's case, I think that plenty of buyers or the buyers will come to him because
at his sort of fairly small production rate, you will get to know the bloke that runs a company,
won't you? And you know, the actual, I think that that's an exciting part of ownership of a
really small volume car. I think so too. Yeah, I think so too. And so, you know, that's an attraction
to me, always has been. You know, I keep on thinking of my, you know, I had aerial atom experience
and it was always good to just go back there and talk to the blokes that run the company, right?
Brilliant. Yeah, even a company that does more than that, I mean, if you buy a caterer, more
Morgan, you'll still be involved. When you go to people, you'll talk, you'll really feel like you
know the company. Actually, that is a thing, isn't it, that Bob Lashley, who was one of our listeners,
hello, Bob, and former CEO of Caterham, used to say about some people, they'd bought a 20-year-old
caterer and they kind of felt invested in the company, even though actually they'd never
never given Caterham any money at all. Like I had, you know, I kind of feel invested in the company.
I owned one Caterham that I bought used and I had it for about a year. So why do I, you know,
why do I still feel like I'm invested in the company in some way? You know, but people do,
don't they? They feel loyalty and special, you know, that it somehow really matters to them,
even if, you know, ultimately they're not really a buyer in the first place.
That's a good time, Bob, wasn't it? I always remember the first time I ever met him,
telling me about how they had some component supply problems and they,
and, you know, like everyone. And it was based on the fact that some bloke in some family company
in the Midlands had shaken hands with Colin Chapman 70 years ago. Oh, really? And they were,
some of the deals were based on, still based on kind of gentlemen's agreement with Colin Chapman
in the days of the Lotus 7. Actually, Bob has reminded us a few things. This is just
reminded me to check through his texts. When we were talking about the Caterham and,
when we were talking about the Caterham Alpine sports car project, that wasn't an electric one.
That was kind of the C120, which was purely internally combusted
until the two sort of parties fell up. David Toohy picked up the pieces and created the A110,
the Alpine A110 from it. Right. And actually, I think I was told back in, now I remember,
back at the time, but Caterham, this is some time ago when we were writing about it in the MAG,
that the Caterham wanted it to be front-engined and Alpine would have liked it to have been
mid-engined. And then the project never really, really hard to reconcile those things.
And Project V, which is the battery electric one, is an entirely separate system. And also,
do you know, do you remember, sorry, that we talked about the Nissan PIXO the other day?
I think a reader said their PIXO was terrible. Bob reminds me that it's actually a rebadged
Suzuki Alto, and none of one of my responsibilities, because Bob used to be
head honcho, one of the head honcho's at Nissan.
He was, he was. He's been around the block, hasn't he? Good old Bob. What a man.
Yes, I hope to see him again soon. Let's do another letter from
Nick Bacon Malone. It's quite a long letter. Nick, thanks for it. I'm going to gloss if you
don't mind a little over your stuff. He's got a Jeep Wrangler Rubicon, which is, which is called,
likes it very much, does 25 to the gallon ish, recently did a 768 mile trip in it.
Excellent. I like, we like, we like Wranglers for road trips, don't we? We have a good time in them.
But anyway, he says Jeep are working hard to promote and be better from all angles and have a
great product. Let's hope Stellantis lets them retain some Jeep Flair. But what Nick really wants to
talk about is Jaguar and the Type 00 looks and feels sensational for your initial impressions.
What now, with the electric transformation in slight disarray and hence other manufacturers
moving back to hybrids and so on, where does this leave Jaguar? Also, why was the eye pace
never developed more and why were spin-offs not created?
Well, I think it, where it leaves Jaguar now is in a position where they have to hope that
the car will sell on, on its merits that aren't necessarily electrification. It's still going to
be an amazing looking thing. It's going to drive pretty well as we know. It's going to be, you
know, an instantly recognizable car. Lots of kudos. I think I've got high hopes for it, actually.
I think it'll be all right. But, and I have seen an unclosed one, although they wouldn't
let us photograph it. And it looked nice to me, really nice. But they're protected by the fact
that Land Rover is such a fantastically profitable business, aren't they? And I mean, I know they
had a few ups and downs lately because of the... Oh, the cyber attack that shut them down for
ages and then they had to suspend exports for a while to the United States, didn't they?
And they were writing pretty big checks to the U.S. government to sell cars there for a time,
too. So all of that resulted in a... There was a loss, wasn't there? But the year before it was
like a record profit, wasn't it? Pretty much. They make a lot of money. I think they're more
protected than people who are just trying to launch cars. As for the eye pace, the eye paces
was just built to different rules, wasn't it? They decided that a Jaguar would be a very low,
long nose car with a short boot. The eye pace was a short nose car with a sort of SUV
cabin package and that didn't suit the current administration's view of a Jaguar. I think that's
a long and short of it. Yeah, that's interesting, isn't it? It's... Does it feel... Does the eye
pace feel like a true Jaguar to you? If you were to go, here's the Jaguar history. Does eye pace feel
like... Does it sit comfortably? It's almost too big inside, you know, because... Too airy and...
Well, you get used to your bum on the floor and no space. We're close coupled, as I used to talk
about it. So it was a... It did break the rules, for sure, but then a few cars did, didn't they? I
mean, the various SUVs, F-Pace and the smaller one. Yeah, E-Pace. So it was an era of rule-breaking
for them, but I think it was just along came a better idea. The car that I would love to see,
and I would still... I really hope they haven't just destroyed models and sent it away forever,
is the stillborn XJ, the electric XJ that got killed when first Ian Callum left and then
Julian Thompson and... As directors of design, they just decided to do something else. Everybody
that you talk to, whoever saw that car says it was lovely and looked terrific and apparently,
it was a, you know, it was a billion-pound project that just went west. It's amazing, isn't it? It
really is. I do find it... I mean, I know we talked about this with Julian Thompson when he was saying
that about the number of design studios that GM have around the world. Yeah. And these advanced
design studios who can employ a large number of people, make a large number of vehicles
in advanced design thing, present them to people, and then that will be that, effectively. You know,
some elements of it, some will become new cars, but others, maybe nothing will ever come of them,
but others, just little elements of them will be picked up and used in a car elsewhere. And
the idea that... That process, that business of picking things up, saying, you know, this bit,
you know, the cowl's good or the tail lights are wonderful, but the rest of it, we're going to
allow to go into, disappear into oblivion. It's funny. Yeah, it's really... And there were some
MG Rovers weren't there kicking around, models and company things, and they were at Long Ridge
for a while when they parked outside, I think. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, I got another letter. I'm going
to find it in a minute once I've finished reading this, because you remember Jeremy Clarkson said
that he didn't know where the Toyota Hilux from Top Gear had gone. I know where it is. So I'll
read that in a minute, but this is the modern media world, mate. I've got messages on Instagram,
email, the other email on my WhatsApp and all of them. And I'm just trying to find,
I forget, because I'm dimwit where they are. So it only occurs to me that, oh yeah, so and so said
this. And where was that? All you need is a nice notepad. That would be the best way, wouldn't it?
Well, it'd be helpful. Yeah, I do have one. But I take all my notes off of jobs,
but I don't, yeah, I, yes, I should note down, so and so wrote to you on Instagram that day,
you'll find it. Yeah. Anyway, Gareth Tarr writes, talking of figures. Gareth Tarr,
photographer for Brooklyn, didn't he? He's the... Oh, really? Yeah. Oh, well, maybe. In fact,
I believe it is that one, because that's where he lives. Yeah. When considering the Audi RS3
Competition Limited, which was announced in the news this week, it's a sort of special edition,
I think it might be a runout edition, but might not be, depending on the future of that engine,
which I spoke to the Audi CEO about a few weeks ago. It's difficult to look beyond the astonishing
£90,000 price, says Gareth, needing double the price of a Volkswagen Golf R. When one sees cars
with such ambitious price tags, the temptation is to scout AutoCars backpages for alternatives
available at that budget. And reminded on Jim Bowen of ATEEZ TV show Bullseye, when revealing the
star prize to the hapless contentant who fell short, this is what you could have won. Among the
cars you could have bought for the price of an Audi RS3 are a Porsche 718 Cayman GTS or BMW M4,
both for considerably less, a Lotus Amira about the same, or for a bit more budget, you get a BMW
M5 and a Porsche 911 starts at £103,000. The RS3 may have a fabulous engine and trick suspension,
but at its heart, it's a Golf, albeit a very special one, but it's swimming in a part of the
sea, populated by more desirable propositions. Thank you for that rather nicely written email for
a start, especially the Jim Bowen reference. I'm all over that. Something in that?
Yeah, well, I suppose it's a test of Audi's brand strength, isn't it? Because some people
just want an Audi. I mean, there's a hell of a lot of people who do just want an Audi, and they
will be more interested in it because it is an Audi, perhaps that's it. But I wouldn't be thinking
those sorts myself, but I suppose if it's special enough, there have been some. I mean, those
lightweight BMWs have been pretty pricey, haven't they? Oh, the i3 and the i8. Yeah,
they were special, weren't they? Yes, they were. I got distracted by another message arriving.
Paul Williams, have we answered that question? No, maybe we haven't finished the RS3 question yet.
No, I think so. That engine may not be finished. The thing is, it's Euro 6. It hasn't,
or Euro 7, but it doesn't meet the next level of incoming emissions regulations. It's quite
expensive to get it through it, but the decision according to Audi CEO, Gernot Donner, hasn't
yet been taken on whether or not to bin it off. It's a lot of money, basically. But it might
swing on the fact that they're throttling back a bit on electrification in favour of image cars
that could be. Yeah, that actually it could fit in. And actually, a 5-cylinder, maybe a 5-cylinder
hybrid, might be an answer. But as he said, it's a true Audi engine, and he likes the engine very
much, and they've had one in the range pretty much since 1976 or something. So, as Chance
Paul Williams says, plug in a hybrid is like the BMW 3 Series Peugeot 3008. I'm thinking of the
quick versions. Do they run out of juice in normal use on long journeys and quickly end up being an
underpowered 1.6 with too much weight and no performance? I'm in a place where these are
an option to replace my Skoda Octavia VRS estate. It's a lease and going back in July.
No, so you plug them in and they're fully charged when you start your journey.
Then it depends what drive mode you put them in, doesn't it, effectively? You can deplete the battery
if you want to do a long journey using part battery and part combustion engine,
and you'll just get very good MPG. You can drive them just on EV, and in most of them, Paul, you
can hold the level of EV charge you want to so that you could take the motor away, but then when
you get to a city, if that city were to have regulations that only let you in if you ran on
electric power, you could swap at that point. You can press the buttons. But even if the battery is
depleted, you've effectively got a series hybrid so that it's still more efficient than a pure
combustion engine because you get regen braking and it charges the battery. They're a good thing.
Surprise you sometimes. I suppose if you sort of beat them up, you can
change things, but if you drive relatively normally, they can surprise you with their
efficiency all the time. You still get the nice low-speed step off and so on, don't you?
Yeah, you do. I like that. Yes, I like that too. Let me read out another, if I'm still trying to
find this thing about the... What's it called? The Top Gear Toyota Hilux. I'm still trying to
find that. I will find that. The thing is, mate, is that there is a... Talking of forgetting things,
I think I forgot to tell anybody this podcast is sponsored by Anderson.
Anderson, did you forget to do that at the top of the show? I can't remember.
No, I can't remember either. I think you might. No, I think you might have had a go at it.
Did I? Okay. Anyway, anyway, it is sponsored by our friends at Anderson. Right, here we are.
Oh, you've got it. Hold on. Yeah, Stephen Robson says,
I've just listened to your podcast with Jeremy Clarkson. I've got an answer for you
of where the indestructible Toyota Hilux is. It's in the Grampian Transport Museum alongside
the amphibious cars. And there it is. Okay. There it is, beaten up in the Grampian Transport Museum.
Also there is the... Do you remember the car they made, which auto car road tested? Oh,
yes. I don't know what the hell that was for. The Eagle Hammerhead Eye Thrust, I think.
Eagle Hammerhead Eye Thrust or the other? Yeah. Auto car road tested it. I had the good sense as
I was road test editor at the time to be on holiday the week. Very sensible. But I was told that
I think it had like an air conditioning... You know, in those kind of air conditioning units,
you strapped to the outside of a building. Yeah. I believe it had one of those. I believe...
I remember it showing up. Oh, really? The car? I remember all the fasteners being unloaded and
they... I mean, I think it drove, you know, approximately 10 yards past the office. Yes.
And then I think it went to Chobham for a photo shoot. I think it went to Meyer for some performance
figures, possibly. Possibly. Or maybe they did them all at Chobham, maybe. Yeah. Yeah. I think
there was a great test and... It's a very Clarkson name, isn't it? Hammerhead. Yeah. Yeah. I believe
something came loose in the braking. Yeah. In a slightly terrifying way. But let's do another...
Let's do a letter we haven't done. Malcolm Jennings writes... We were talking about
go-kart tracks and motocross tracks and things next to motorways the other day. Oh, yeah,
it's really good. Yeah. Yeah. And noise regs. Malcolm Jennings writes to say that good go-kart
track, I know, is under the runway at Madeira Airport. Wow. So the runway at Madeira Funchal,
I think, is raised on still... Not the entire runway, but a good proportion of it is actually
raised on still, it's like 30 meters or plus in the air. Yeah. Amazing. Have you seen it? No.
Well, not that I can... No, I mean, I don't know if I... I can't remember if I have. I certainly
don't remember seeing that runway and I would if I did. But apparently it gets really windy and so
there's quite a lot of go-arounds and diversions off of it. Oh, I see. But yeah, right underneath
that runway is a go-kart track. It makes sense though, doesn't it? Probably even keeps the rain off.
Yeah. Oh, yeah, because it's covered. I mean, no, it would whip in from the side if it was
breezy, because I had a look at the pictures. And, yeah, I mean, Donnington Park is on the
flight path at East Midlands Railway. At East Midlands Airport. Yeah, it is. I don't know if
that is useful from a noise perspective. I'm sure it must be. I'm sure it must be, you know,
allow you to have a few, at least have a debate with the people who might just like the noise.
You get a whiff of jet fuel sometimes, don't you? You do, yeah. If you stand there in the
panel. Yeah. Kevin Brock writes finally to say, the news that Abarth is set to go back to combustion
power. Abarth? Abarth? Abarth, I think. With the version of the Grande Panda was the best piece
of car news I've seen for years. It really made my day as I'm a fanatical Abarth fan. And the last
couple of years have been a bit depressing, the just two EV models representing this great company.
Sales have been poor. You said they sold 291 cars last year. I'm surprised it was that many. I've
only ever seen one Abarth 500 and it could have been a press car. So the 500 and 600 look fantastic,
but it just doesn't suit the EV silent running thing. Electric power has taken their soul and
the fake engine noise. The 500 is a bit of a weird fake engine noise. Yeah. Yeah. Why they didn't
develop a simulated gearbox like Hyundai did for the Ioniq? Still not ideal, but much better than
the fake drone of the 500 and 600. Maybe the fake engine note is not the Abarth 500 we can hear,
but Carlo Abarth spinning in his grave horrified at what's happened to his company.
Whenever I drive my own with its burbling exhaust, it makes me smile even if I'm in a bad mood
and cheers me up, which is what all good drivers' cars should do. I've never had a car with as
much character and soul, irrespective of how fast other cars are or how good they look. The only
further stumbling block to the Abarth Panda is whether the unimaginative and dithering
Fiat UK decide to bring it here. Have they not decided that yet?
Don't know. I've not heard that they have, I must say. Yeah. If they want Abarth to start selling
cars again, they will have to. So, yeah. So this is the new Fiat 500 platform, the E500E,
which is also an Abarth 500 variant. There's going to be an engine derivative of the Grand
Egg Panda, which is the same platform, or is it a different platform? Oh, no, it's a different
platform. Different platform. So that's the Peugeot 208, et cetera, platform, is it?
Okay, gotcha. But Peugeot is going to introduce a sporty 208 GTI, and that's going to be electric.
Yeah. Is that right? I think so. Yeah. It's confusing, you know.
It is a bit, isn't it? It is confusing. This business of the transition turning back on
itself is calculated to confuse motoring journalists, isn't it for sure?
Yeah, I can't, and this is just the established manufacturers, mate. I drove past a local
car dealership the other day that had changed some of its branding to Skywell, and I thought,
oh, there's some dealer group called Skywell taking it over. No, that's another manufacturer.
There's an amazing, this morning, there was an excellent presentation by the
bloke called Martin Sander, a VW director, and he put up a slide just by way of conversation to show
us the number of Chinese manufacturers there are. All it was, it was just 50 badges, 50,
why though? And he said they're not all successful, but some are, a lot are.
And I was thinking about this this morning, you know, people say, oh, I just want a car,
get me from A2B, and therefore they will buy Chinese, whatever, because it costs
300 quid a month or whatever it is. It is worth remembering that, sorry, Steve's just showing
me on my good grief. It's a bit of a rubbish picture.
That's not a rubbish picture, but it's screened entirely full of badges.
How many of those badges do you reckon you would know if somebody didn't tell you what they were?
Oh, I thought about 10.
Yeah, I reckon I'm about there as well.
BYD is simple enough because it says BYD on it, but some of them I just think, oh, I couldn't get
that. But BYD has got another three, you know, there's Yang Wang and there's
is Denzer, and there's another one, unpronounceable one in the middle that
is sort of the equivalent of Denzer.
So it goes BYD, Denzer, this other one, and then Yang Wang, which is right up the top.
Which is fine, but who is really going to buy Yang Wang in the UK?
Because it's just a bad name, isn't it?
What have you got?
Of course, BMW, Audi, Porsche? No, I bought a Yang Wang.
Are we really going to do that, or are people just going to go now?
I can't buy a car.
It is a career, but they're making such relentless progress.
And it is an important, you know, they had a Yang Wang SUV at Goodwood.
Do you remember Goodwood?
The one that turns in its own length.
There is an electric supercar as well, isn't there, of Yang Wang origin
that can sort of bounce on its hairsprings.
But yeah, on that note, you can see why people do, because they're at a price point
where it's just where some people who don't mind.
But also, there is a bit of dismissiveness sometimes of people going, well, they're just,
you know, they're just boxes, just to get from A to B.
But it's worth remembering, a lot of European-made cars are not that special either.
They're just boxes that get people from A to B, not just European-made,
but Korean-made, Japanese-made, American-made, whatever.
They're just boxes, really.
So it's actually, there are people at Chinese car and bike manufacturers
who put a flat-eight cylinder engine into a motorcycle.
So there are enthusiasts over there as well.
Because why would you want to go and design cars for a living if you weren't keen on cars?
I follow a bloke on Instagram at the minute, who lives in Japan,
and he drives a Lotus 6 up into the hills with a bunch of friends who've all got
British 60s, 70s cars.
British Beat is their little group club that they go around,
they drive them in the hills above I.O. as anyway, somewhere.
What's to say that in 20 years' time we won't be following somebody on Instagram,
or less, in China who does exactly the same?
Because car enthusiasts, we all, people who like cars like cars.
Yeah, I think it's entirely possible.
It's so interesting the way things are moving.
One of the things that came up today was that there will be a decline in the volume of private cars
as autonomous cars come along, and California's already got good Waymo cars driving around,
and there will just be a smaller demand for private cars in the future.
That's what the likes of VW are already coping with.
So where the Japanese are, sorry, the Chinese are in that, I'm not quite sure.
I sort of, this pod's going on a bit longer than it's meant to,
but the driverless car thing, if the technology is so expensive, if it needs
lots of LiDAR, radar, camera equipment all around, if that's expensive to put on a car,
you'll only ever put it on taxis.
So therefore, all it does is it eliminates the need for a driver,
because if you have two drivers or three drivers a day on a vehicle, like on a bus,
you can save maybe £100,000 a year by getting rid of all of the human drivers.
You'll have some costs going back in, because you've got to have people looking after the cars,
but they will be marginally cheaper to, if the kit costs £100,000 as it might do,
over three years it pays for itself, and that's fine.
But it doesn't actually make private cars any cheaper, and it doesn't necessarily make taxis
a lot cheaper, because you've still got quite a lot of costs to set up and maintain them.
So basically, all you're doing is putting somebody out of a job with them,
and I used to think, and in some ways I still do, it's nice that people who are
in firm can get places in their own private transport, but actually, the more I think about
that as well, you see some people who can't, they barely walk at all, and they'll get in a car
and drive off. Actually, what goes first is not your mobility of walking, it's the mobility,
it's sorry, it's not the mobility of driving, you don't think, oh, good driverless cars will
help people say in my village get around, it's because they can still drive now, it's the walking
they can't do, it's the driving they can still do, people drive much longer than they walk.
So I don't know if there's actually a need from that point of view either.
Until I can get into one, my car, my own car, and start working on my way to work, or go out for
dinner, or go to the pub and come home, and it does all of the work, but it's my own car as well,
and I don't know if we'll ever get there, because otherwise it's just another taxi,
but there happens to be nobody in the driver's seat, but it's no cheaper for me.
The claim was that Waymo in California does charge less quite a lot.
Oh, really?
But I've got no evidence.
Interesting though, isn't it?
The other thing that confronts manufacturers is, assuming there is this cohort of driverless
cars, what makes you want a VW over an Audi, or a Porsche, or anything else?
What interests you, I just won't give them monkeys, will I?
I'll just get in it.
You'll just get in it?
It won't matter, do you?
Yeah.
I mean, who cares what taxi turns up, what bus turns up?
And everything's got a comfortable seat now.
So there's such a lot of challenges ahead.
There are such a lot of challenges ahead that unless you run a car company like Ariel,
like the horse, mate.
If you ran a horse company 130 years ago looking after horses, you'd be thinking,
oh my goodness, I can't believe this.
But if you just, horses have found a place, haven't they?
Yep, they have.
They've had their best time.
In fact, people spend big money on them, don't they?
Spend loads of them.
You don't get me started.
People do spend considerable amounts of ongoing money for elderly horses that don't do anything,
as I apparently, so yes.
But they're having a good life.
Yeah, dear Snowy is having a nice life.
Excellent.
Yeah.
Well, let's wrap this up because she needs to be fed and I may go and do that.
Listener, thanks for joining us.
We'll be back on Wednesday with a proper My Week in Cars podcast.
And thanks for joining us for your letters.
Keep sending them to autocartatamarket.com.
Or if you subscribe to the mag, if you buy the mag off the newsstands,
you can find my email address, Steve's email address in there.
Or you can drop one of us a note on our social media channels.
And we'll try and find them.
Or maybe we probably won't be able to find them until several weeks down the line.
But keep writing to us, autocartatamarket.com.
And big thanks to our sponsor, Anderson.
Anderson-ev.com, just search Anderson.
They've got a really terrific lineup of very good looking, very nicely made,
British designed, built, maintained chargers.
Thanks, Steve.
See you soon, mate.
See you Wednesday.
About this episode
Steve Cropley and Matt read and respond to listener letters covering a variety of automotive topics. Highlights include tales from a Range Rover Sport launch, the importance of engine sound in sports cars from Noble Cars' Pete Boutwood, and discussions on Jaguar's electric future and the fate of the I-Pace. They also debate the high pricing of the Audi RS3 Competition Limited, the appeal of Abarth's return to combustion engines, and the rise of Chinese car brands. The episode wraps with thoughts on autonomous vehicles and the evolving car ownership landscape.
