#BrownCarGuy – News, Views & Reviews!
I first drove the MG Cyberster earlier last year on a brief test at Millbrook Proving Ground. Enough to intrigue, enough to raise eyebrows, but not enough to truly understand it. This time, MG handed me the keys for a week. Living with a car exposes its truths. Its cleverness. Its quirks. Its brilliance. And occasionally, its foibles.
I’ve always had a soft spot for the Toyota C-HR. When the original arrived, it felt like a small act of rebellion from a brand better known for playing things safe. It was sharp, angular, unapologetically different, and crucially, it didn’t try to hide its personality. Better still, in its early years you could even buy one with a petrol engine and a manual gearbox, complete with rev-matching. A crossover that actually wanted to be driven. That alone made it stand out.
The 2026 MG S6 EV arrives without theatrics, yet the moment you walk around it, sit in it and drive it, you realise MG has shifted up a gear. This is the brand’s new family-sized electric SUV, the one many households have been waiting for. It sits on the same modular platform as the MG S5 EV but stretches everything further. A 77 kWh battery, rear-wheel-drive or dual-motor all-wheel drive, up to 329 miles of official WLTP range, and prices sitting roughly between forty-one and forty-four thousand pounds. MG is not pretending this is “budget” anymore. It is aiming for the mainstream.
Japanese car companies have always been on the leading edge of engineering. Innovating, developing, breaking new ground – surging ahead of the crowd in surprising new ways. And Suzuki’s latest new car… doesn’t conform to any of that. Well, apart from the ‘surprising’ bit.
Because the new E Vitara isn’t truly Japanese at all. It’s more like a takeaway tikka delivered by a samurai. And given how much Brits love a good curry, Suzuki’s first fully electric car – designed and built by Maruti Suzuki in Gujarat, India – rolling off the boats onto our roads at barely believable prices, is surely going to go down a treat. You won’t even need the Alka-Seltzer for this one.
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.
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.
