#BrownCarGuy – News, Views & Reviews!
Mazda’s flirted with electrification before – remember the MX-30? Stylish, well-built, and charmingly unconventional, but with a range so short you’d start worrying halfway to the shops. Even Mazda later admitted it needed work, adding a rotary range-extender to make it more usable.
I get a truck and I’m a kid with a Tonka Toy again. Okay, I won’t bash it into the table leg or drop it from the kitchen counter, but I still want to drive it with a big grin on my face. So when Isuzu asks if I would like to review the 2025 Isuzu D-Max V-Cross, despite the fact that I reviewed this generation of the pickup twice just a few years ago… I found myself struggling to decline.
Full transparency, I didn’t so much want to review it, as I just wanted to rock around in it! And when it turned up, I wasn’t disappointed, because they sent their Instagram special. A D-Max that had driven into the accessories warehouse and come out wearing EVERYTHING! More on that in a bit.
Sometimes, car manufacturers end up with a ‘safe bet’ seller. Occasionally by design, but usually by chance. You may think that’s a golden egg for any car maker, but it can also be a poisoned chalice. It becomes so invaluable that the company simply can’t afford to get it wrong.
For Kia, that car is the Sportage – its best-selling SUV, the top performer across Europe, and, rather astonishingly, its global bestseller too. So when the Koreans tweak the formula, it’s a big deal.
The Polestar 3 is the car that feels like the brand has been building towards since its rebirth. The Polestar 2 gave it a foothold in the EV world, while the Polestar 4 grabbed headlines with its blistering pace and its radical deletion of the rear window. But this is the responsible grown-up of the family.
Before we get into all the details of the Polestar 4, let’s answer a question that might be preying on the mind of the uninitiated – what exactly is Polestar? Well, it used to be the performance and motor-racing arm of Volvo. After Chinese giant Geely took over Volvo, Polestar was separated into a standalone brand in 2017 to focus on producing only electric cars.
Some cars are more than the sum of their spec sheets. Some cars are hidden gems. Some cars are unexpected delights. Some cars actually make sense on multiple levels. Some cars are the new, £22k, 2025 Suzuki Swift AllGrip Ultra Hybrid tested here.
If you like eager little hatchbacks that will dart in and out of city gaps, provide usable passenger and boot space, engage you with heel-and-toe downshifts and cheeky handbrake turns, sip fuel while being refined at motorway momentum, and even scrabble over churned-up gravel while wading through rain pools. Then you’ve landed on the right road (off-road) test!
The new 2024 Toyota Land Cruiser J250 has arrived – and if you’re in the UK, this is your Land Cruiser. While much of the world gets the full-sized 300-series Big Daddy Land Cruiser, we get this slightly smaller, slightly leaner sibling, also known globally as the Land Cruiser Prado, or simply the Prado. But don’t dismiss it as the runner-up – because, frankly, by our standards, it really ain’t small, plus this might just be the best-looking Land Cruiser of the modern era.
It’s been a long time coming, but I finally got my hands on the all-new MG Cyberster GT – and yes, it was worth the wait. I missed the launch, missed the press events, nearly missed this drive too, thanks to a temporarily closed track at Millbrook. But I’m stubborn (or mildly obsessive), and I wasn’t going to leave until I got my go behind the wheel of what is arguably the most important sports car of recent times!
There are many questions in life for which we have thus far failed to find a satisfactory answer. For example: why does toast always land butter-side down? Or what precisely is the purpose of a rubber chicken? And most pertinently on this occasion, what happens when you take a classic Fiat 500 – a car only marginally larger than a ripe melon – and stuff it full of EV batteries and magnets instead of a noisy two-pot and Italian expletives?
This compact 2025 BMW M235i xDrive Gran Coupe has more horsepower than the 1992 E36 BMW M3. So does that make it a bona fide junior ‘M’ car? With the keys to the turbocharged four-door in my hands and the Hill Route at the Millbrook Proving Ground beckoning, there is only one way to find out!