#BrownCarGuy – News, Views & Reviews!
Someone has just spent $40 million on the world’s most expensive toaster. That is the sensational headline emerging from Monterey Car Week, where the first production chassis of Ferrari’s controversial electric Luce crossed the block at RM Sotheby’s.
Imagine you own a perfectly good petrol car. It works, it is reliable and it might be only a year or two old. According to a startling new scientific study, the environmentally responsible thing could be to scrap it and buy a brand-new electric car. Yes, really. New Scientist summed up the finding with the wonderfully provocative headline: “It’s good for the planet to scrap a new petrol car and buy electric.”
Whether you are writing a fast-paced spy thriller, a mystery, sci-fi, or contemporary drama, crafting authentic characters from underrepresented backgrounds can be one of the most rewarding – and intimidating – parts of story development. Get them right, and you’ll win new friends and appreciative fans. Get them wrong and there could be derisive boos, or worse still – you could be cancelled!
The next James Bond should not be Brown. He should not be Black. He cannot be Asian. And he certainly cannot be a woman. Can I actually say all of that now? Well, I’ve said it. I suppose I had better explain what I mean.
Imagine ordering a brand-new Toyota AE86 bodyshell for around £7,000. Fresh steel, a perfect floor, an unblemished roof and not a single crusty sill, suspicious patch or wheelarch apparently reconstructed from newspaper, filler and the lid of an old biscuit tin.
For more than thirty-six years I’ve made my living in the media. I’ve written for newspapers, edited magazines, presented television programmes, hosted radio shows, produced online content, attended hundreds of international launches and interviewed some of the biggest names in the automotive industry. I’ve seen the media world from almost every angle imaginable. Then, six years ago, I started BrownCarGuy on YouTube, not because I had to, but because I genuinely believed something remarkable had happened. For the first time in the history of broadcasting, ordinary people had finally been given a chance to compete with the biggest media organisations on the planet.
The other day I found myself driving around London. Well, “driving” might be stretching the definition somewhat because most of the time you’re crawling along, staring at the back of somebody else’s hatchback while trying to remember whether this particular road is still 30mph, has become 20mph, or was quietly changed last Tuesday while you weren’t looking. And it got me thinking that perhaps the future of motoring isn’t going to be electric versus petrol, hydrogen versus batteries or even SUVs versus saloons. Perhaps the real battle is going to be something entirely different. Perhaps the future is going to be driverless cars versus restomods. Bear with me, because the more I thought about it, the more it actually started to make sense.
Every day, millions of motorists pull into petrol stations across Britain, glance at the pumps and make a decision that feels sensible. “I’ll treat the car to the premium stuff.” After all, it costs more, so surely it must be better? Well… not necessarily.
The British car industry has just issued one of its strongest warnings in years. Not about Chinese competition. Not about Donald Trump’s tariffs. Not even about electric cars themselves. This is about Government policy.
Remember when fixing your car was… well, fixing your car? Let’s say you clipped a wall and cracked a headlight. The dealer quoted you £500 for a replacement. You laughed politely, wandered down to your local scrapyard, picked up a perfectly good used one for fifty quid, fitted it yourself in an hour, and everyone lived happily ever after. Those days are disappearing. On many modern cars, fitting a second-hand headlight, ECU, instrument cluster, infotainment screen or other electronic component can trigger warning messages, disable functions or simply refuse to work altogether.