DAILY: Nissan Shelves Cheapest LEAF, BMW Readies Electric iX4 and Spain’s Bid To Become Europes EV Factory | 23 Feb 2026

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Their cars to Europeans.

Cherry's diesel, Ute, Hybrid, and BYD's Budget People Carrier.

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Nissan has shelved the Base Leaf S variant for the 2026 model year in the United States,

leaving buyers with a higher entry point.

Nissan confirmed the entry-level Leaf S trim with its 52 kilowatt-hour battery,

and 174 horsepower motor will not reach US showrooms.

The US Nissan Leaf lineup starts at $29,990.

That's for a car with 303 miles of range.

That matters because the Leaf S spec would have undercut the starting price of the Chevy Bolt,

which is, I think, in its proper Base trim $28,995.

Nissan now hands a little bit of breathing room to its rival,

targeting the affordable Urban EV slot, so Chevy Bolt,

and the arriving Kia EV3 will play somewhere around that price point as well.

Nissan blamed market trends and demand.

It gave no timeline for a future US launch of the Air Leaf S trim,

and the trim remains neither cancelled nor confirmed.

BMW has shut the door.

On the petrol and diesel era of the X4,

the second-generation X4 ended production in South Carolina last November,

and BMW confirmed that marks the end of it for combustion.

The replacement arrives as a pure EV.

Third-generation X4 will debut later this year.

The iX4, spy shots circulating online, show the vehicle in testing.

BMW will build it in Hungary at Debrecen,

where it carries the internal code, the NA7 vehicle.

Production at Debrecen will begin in November this year.

BMW now treats their Hungarian facility as more than a new factory.

It's adding a second shift to meet strong demand.

The site's becoming the cornerstone of BMW's electric SUV strategy.

Of course, Hungary gives you market access into Europe,

and yet the labour and supply chain costs are so much lower as well.

I told you recently about the BMW M badge going electric too.

Check out a recent podcast for details.

Spain is next in the news.

It already ranks as one of Europe's large automotive manufacturers,

but now it wants to turn that base into being Europe's EV factory.

And well, it's got some competition.

Not least because of countries like Hungary, which I just mentioned.

Also Turkey wants big investment.

Slovakia has a huge automotive industry.

In fact, fun fact, Slovakia makes more vehicles per head of population

than any other country in the world.

So, Spain says we can do it though.

Our pitch rests on labour, moderate wage costs, abundant green energy,

and spare capacity.

After all the diesel cars we were making,

well nobody wants to buy them anymore.

And car makers have noticed.

Stellantis built its European EV strategy around Spain.

In Madrid they make the EC4 and EC4X.

Zaragoza turns out the Corsa E and the E208.

Vigo builds the E208 in the electric vans.

LeapMotor will move some production to Spain as well.

That's the Chinese joint venture with Stellantis.

Volkswagen Group is planning more from Spain.

I've told you recently how Martirelle is preparing to build

the Coupre Reval and VW ID Polo.

They're small urban cars.

The ID Cross and Škoda Epic.

They're battery company PowerCo building in Spain as well.

And the battery and van makers add more weight to the argument.

CATL, the Chinese or the world's biggest EV battery maker,

is setting up a second battery centre in Spain

in partnership with Stellantis.

And Mercedes-Benz is keeping its plant

as the production home of the electric vans.

So the minute EQV, EVTO, and Spain's also away into the European Union.

For Chinese brands, Cherry started making the Omoda.

That's the Omoda 5 EV in Barcelona.

BYD is considering Spain for its third European plant.

Geely is also looking at the viability of Ford's former Valencia building.

And that lets Chinese manufacturers avoid any kind of EU import duties

because they are building the vehicles on European soil

with European labour.

And so now the European Union has to look at,

well, is there some sort of minimum amount of parts

and things like that to try and just ensure

that investment goes here.

All right, let's move on.

This is really a story about nothing,

but I've noticed it go everywhere.

So I thought I'd address it.

Lamborghini has killed its all-electric Lanzador concept

and shelved its near-term plans to go fully electric.

The CEO of Lamborghini has pivoted the brand

to plug in hybrids by 2030.

The Lanzador debuted in August 2023 at Monterey Car Week

as a high-riding 2 plus 2 electric coupe.

The concept ran motors on each axle,

torque vectoring, rear-wheel steering,

and they were going to start production in 2028.

Now, the CEO, Stefan Winkleman, called the move of cancelling their EV,

a year of continuous internal discussion, talking to customers,

dealers, the markets, analysts, and global data.

He said acceptance for battery-electric vehicles

with Lamborghini buyers had dropped.

Yeah, you're not kidding.

He went further, calling continued full EV investment

an expensive hobby and financially irresponsible.

Yeah, you're not kidding.

You're Lamborghini.

And so if they want to pay me an extortionate amount of money

to come and consult anyone,

like Lamborghini, Ferrari, McLaren, Bugatti,

I'll happily put on a nice suit

and go and consult with them in their nice, ranky boardrooms.

And you know what I'll tell them?

There's no point going EV.

Look, that battery technology is coming down the line.

There'll be a point in time where battery technology reaches

such a density.

Look, I mean, the technology is very high at the minute, isn't it?

However, where you can put it in front and behind the driver,

probably behind for a kind of mid-engine feel,

which means there's no skateboard platform.

So you can literally put the seats as close to the tarmac

as possible and it'll do 600 miles.

And by the way, supercar fuel tanks are tiny.

You talk about range anxiety.

Go buy a supercar.

They don't drive very far and they'll be very lightweight.

But we don't need to worry about that.

What we need to worry about is the cars

that you and I drive every single day,

being as good as they can, about the buses

and possibly the trains and boats and planes going EV

or hybrid or something one day.

But let's clean up the air.

Let's not worry about the handful of people

that buy a Lamborghini every single year,

driving it once a week, doing a thousand miles a year

in their nice expensive sports car.

There was a lot of press about this.

Now, partly because negative EV press must get clicks,

I'm guessing because it's not really a big deal.

And yet everybody seemed to latch on to that story

in the last 48 hours or so

and use it as a stick with which to hit electric vehicles.

It's absolutely fine.

These companies look Ferrari included, by the way.

I love the fact that they are doing it

because they become halo cars and they're interesting

and things like the Yang Wang

or maybe I should pronounce it a little more Yang Wang,

which is the U9X, which is 300 plus miles an hour.

We're not short of electric cars that go very fast

and some of them very well round corners.

But if Lamborghini doesn't want to go electric,

honestly, that's fine.

We're the rest of us will be OK.

We've all got good cars to drive to go get a pint of milk.

Let's move on.

The acoustic vehicle alerting system,

AVAS has been mandatory on EVs since about 2019,

depending on which country you look at.

These are warning sounds that typically happen

beneath 12 miles an hour or 20 kph

to alert pedestrians and cyclists.

Above that, you tend to hear tire noise.

I would say the times that I've almost run somebody over

with my electric cars are supermarket car parks

because when people are crossing the road,

people cross the road and they look most of the time.

When people are in a supermarket car park,

a multi-story car park,

they tend to use their ears more for some reason.

I don't know, maybe I'm making this up,

but in my experience, people would just walk in front of my car

when they're doing their shopping

and the amount of times I've slammed on the brakes,

people would jump out of their skin

as they realize that they see a car

that was about to run them over.

So look, these low-speed sounds can be annoying,

but they're useful, they're important.

Some car makers went further.

They built extra sound profiles.

Some of them have sporty sounds.

Some of them like Tesla have external speakers

that you can load custom sounds onto.

A growing number of manufacturers

now project artificial engine sounds

outwards by allowed speakers.

The UN ECE Working Party

is now addressing this topic though

and debating amendments to vehicle noise rules

to extend formal approval.

The decision is pending and expected soon.

Negotiations are expected to produce a concession.

If a vehicle has ESAS,

exterior sound enhancement systems,

the driver must switch them on manually.

That stops them playing by default on every journey.

I don't mind them playing by default, by the way,

as long as it's at low speed and it just alerts people.

It's not really a big deal for me.

Some of the sounds are better than others,

but they are genuinely useful.

Right, we'll take a break, we'll come back

and let's talk about Europe's car pricing power

and why we need to think about

how people are going to fix our EVs in the future.

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All right, welcome back to the podcast.

Now, this is interesting in terms of Europe's

current pricing of electric vehicles.

So what happened during the post-lockdown era?

Well, it was described as value over volume.

The carmakers realized that they had supply chain issues,

parts shortages, everybody was coming out of those lockdown

times with a bit of extra money in the bank

because they hadn't been outspending it.

And so the carmakers raised or at least held their prices

very high.

And they sacrificed building market share or volume

to drive up their profits.

They blamed things like chip shortages for the shortage

of cars, waiting lists.

I remember an 18-month waiting list for some

Audi electric vehicles coming out of maybe 2021 post-lockdown.

And if you put an order in for a brand new Audi EV,

a year and a half's wait.

That era is well and truly over.

Supply caught up, the dealer lots filled up,

and buyers can now cherry-pick deals.

And the squeeze is showing up in the numbers all these years later.

Renault took a €733 million hit, that's $865 million last year,

from its prices having to fall and be more competitive.

That wiped out gains from any higher volumes and cost cutting

that they did.

Renault CEO called the pressure structural.

He blamed its rivals that chase volume and not value.

In the UK, the lobby group here, the SMMT,

which is the carmakers organisation, the lobbyist politicians

and on behalf of the industry, put a price on the squeeze.

They say that British automakers had to do £5.5 billion,

$7.4 billion, of discounting and potential lost revenue last year.

Discounts roughly £11,000 per vehicle.

That's almost $15,000.

Chinese brands are adding weight to the downforce.

Chinese brands doubled their collective European market share.

6.1% over all last year and almost 10% in the month of December.

So MG, Cherry, BYD and Geely.

The UK, for instance, sees cars like the Cherry Tigo 7

and the Geely Star Ray EMI plug-in hybrid BYDC Lion 5,

which are sub-30,000 cars.

That's more than £10,000 below the equivalent German cars

like a Volkswagen Tiguan plug-in hybrid.

And that price war mirrors what happened in China

where the government had to issue market conduct guidelines at home.

And now many of the Western carmakers are really feeling the pinch

that they're having to drive volume instead of driving up prices

because the Chinese are pushing the prices down.

Let's move on.

Just 26% of automotive technicians hold an EV qualification

according to the Institute of Motor Industry.

The number gaining EV qualifications has actually dropped recently

and the IMI projects the EV Qualified Workforce

will need to or will reach, at least here in the United Kingdom,

193,000 technicians which are qualified to work on EVs in 10 years time.

But that falls short of projected market demand.

And the head of research at the IMI says the training pace

is currently misaligned with zero emission vehicle targets

and falls short of what's needed.

If we're going to buy electric vehicles,

well, we need the girls and boys to fix them when they inevitably go wrong

because all machines do go wrong.

The skills gap is still uneven.

Independent workshops are unable to invest ahead of demand.

Why would you retrain if you're a small business

that maybe has between five and 10 employees?

Why would you invest ahead of demand?

Whenever I have any work done,

I was trying to choose local businesses.

I've not been back to a main dealer in,

oh, I mean, since Dieselgate.

Yet an independent dealer,

I always try and support local businesses where I can

when I'm buying a pint of milk from the local dairy

in which is not far from here.

Someone called Kingston Lacey.

This is full of digressions, this podcast.

There's a big national trust.

We love old country houses in this country

and there's a dairy farm not far from me.

So if I can buy my milk from there,

then I will do it.

It's more expensive, but I want to support it.

If I can go to a local car mechanic, I will do.

I want to support local businesses

that spend the money in the local area.

And yet they're not going to have the money

to invest in local technicians.

It's just not feasible.

That says work to be done.

Okay, let's move on.

Toyota build the hydrogen Mirai

as the world's first mass-produced

hydrogen fuel cell vehicle,

but now it trades at a heavy discount.

Year-old Mirai examples shed 65% of their original price

which surprises me

because I didn't think you could buy them anymore.

I thought you could only lease a Mirai.

The second-generation cars

that had a sticker price above $50,000

can be bought for $10,000 if you look in the US,

even use $2024s trade at around $15,000.

The car itself, the Toyota Mirai was launched in 2015.

Second generation came in 2021 with 30% more range,

Toyota followed with an infotainment

refreshed two years ago.

None of that fixes the problem with the Mirai.

They only sell it in California.

It's the sole US state with any hydrogen fueling network

that's meaningful

and that network shrank as well.

Recently, Shell walked out of the hydrogen business

for light-duty work citing supply complications.

You're not kidding.

Fuel economics moved the wrong way too.

Hydrogen prices have been rising

from $13 per kilogram in 2021

to $36 per kilogram today.

It costs over $200 to fill up a Mirai.

It's not convenient unless you live next to a hydrogen fueling station

and I personally wouldn't want to live next to one

because they have a habit of going bang.

Hydrogen surely has a place for shipping

or aviation or something in the future.

But driving around sitting on top

of a very explosive hydrogen tank

is not my idea of fun

when we've just pivoted away

from sitting on top of a very explosive tank of petrol.

So owners have been taking Toyota to court recently.

Hundreds of Mirai owners have now got a class action lawsuit

in Los Angeles seeking $5.7 billion.

Plaintiffs alleged Toyota knowingly sold vehicles

knowing there's no infrastructure needed

and represented the convenience of buying a hydrogen car.

I have a little bit of sympathy for that

but also do your own research

before you spend $50,000 on a hydrogen car

because the brochure told you to.

Am I being overly harsh on Mirai owners?

I'm sorry if I am.

Let's move on.

Finally, Gordon Ramsay, the Michelin-starred chef.

13 Michelin-starred chef

and obviously famous media personality

but that sometimes overshadows

the fact very highly trained

in France exceptional chef

and deserving of every bit of success that he's got

has been spotted driving

another one of his supercars

around central London.

This time a plug-in hybrid Aston Martin

this is called the Valhalla

and he took his wife to the Savoy.

I used to walk or cycle past the Savoy every day

on my walk to work

in a very beautiful hotel is.

I've been in a few times

for meetings and things like that.

Yeah, I didn't feel very at home

but it was a very swanky hotel

and Gordon Ramsay couldn't open the door

for his wife when he pulled outside.

This is an Instagram reel

or Instagram video that I saw of him turning up.

People sort of just fans I think noticing the supercar

out pops Gordon Ramsay

gets to his wife's door

and pretends he can't open it.

Now obviously he got in the car himself

so he knows where the door handle is

but it's one of those hidden door handles.

There's either Dorman running over

they've got the top patent tails and stuff

swanky Dorman trying to help him

and he shouts out,

anyone got the manual

which is I think a lovely kind of self-deprecating

thing to do

because let's face it

you just bought yourself a million-powered car.

The Cameo puts this rare car on display though.

The Valhalla is Aston Martin's

first series production plug-in hybrid

spending years in development.

Customer deliveries have just begun.

Ramsay's car appears to be a colour called Chimera Blue

with satin carbon fibre body work

inside L-wood blue accents.

Inside the carbon fibre seats are trimmed

in Aurora blue leather.

The Valhalla pairs a four litre

engine with electric motors

integrated electric motors into the gearbox

and two electric motors on the front axle as well.

So that layout gives the Valhalla all-wheel drive

and electronically controlled rear diff too.

The V8 does I think pretty much most of the work

it's an 817 horsepower

but the three electric motors

drive it to over a thousand horsepower.

Total system output 1065 horsepower

with almost 300 horsepower

coming from those three electric motors.

0-62, 2.5 seconds.

Top speed 217 miles an hour.

Although as the cameras, the fans,

were still shooting on their phones

as he left the Savoy,

he pulls out and then gets stuck in traffic.

So won't be doing that top speed in London.

Aston Martin has limited the production

to less than a thousand units worldwide.

It starts at $1.1 million.

But let's face it,

when you're spending that much money,

you never just buy what is stock, do you?

Like, oh, what's your base level trim?

So they'll all be personalized,

like every Rolls Royce.

And I think he probably gets a supercar a year,

according to the supercar blogs.

A Ferrari Daytona SP3

and Aston Martin Valiant also in his garage recently.

For now, for the rest of us,

the likes of you and I,

the Valhalla remain the sort of plug-in hybrid

that remains on the wish list

and not in the garage.

And that's your podcast for today.

Thanks for listening.

Thanks to our premium partners,

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in Australia and New Zealand.

Have a good one.

See you tomorrow.

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DAILY: Nissan Shelves Cheapest LEAF, BMW Readies Electric iX4 and Spain’s Bid To Become Europes EV Factory | 23 Feb 2026

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