#BrownCarGuy – News, Views & Reviews!
The Changan Deepal S05 arrives in Britain with 303 miles of claimed range, rear-wheel drive and enough technology to keep a small branch of Currys busy. Has this unfamiliar electric SUV earned a place on your shortlist?
The Kia EV2 is the smallest and cheapest electric car the Korean manufacturer sells in Britain. That usually means a worthy little urban runabout built to a price, with the interior ambience of a bare cupboard and unpainted bumpers. But the EV2 has other ideas. It arrives with the upright stance, bold lighting and visual confidence of something at least one size larger – and a couple of grades more expensive.
Geely is one of the world’s largest automotive groups, owner of Volvo, Polestar, Lotus, LEVC (maker of London’s new hybrid black taxis) and nearly a 10 per cent stake in Mercedes-Benz, so it already knows a thing or two about building desirable cars. The question is whether that expertise has filtered down into the new Geely Starray EM-i, a plug-in hybrid SUV that arrives in the UK with bold claims, impressive specifications and pricing that looks incredibly competitive.
Let’s get one thing straight right from the outset. This is not the MG you think it is. Forget bargain hatchbacks. Forget sensible family SUVs. Forget everything you know about MG because the IM5 is operating on an entirely different plane. In fact, if somebody covered the badges and asked you to guess what this was, I suspect very few people would say MG. And to be fair it does look generic Chinese EV. But here’s what you need to know: this thing is utterly bonkers.
The new Aion V has landed in the UK, and I got an early first drive at SMMT Test Day at Millbrook, where some of the latest cars are laid out like an automotive buffet and you try not to come away with indigestion, or an existential crisis about how quickly the car industry is changing. This is Aion’s new electric family SUV, and while the badge may still be unfamiliar to most British buyers, the proposition is anything but vague: 317 miles of WLTP range, £36,450 OTR, around 204PS, lots of equipment, loads of space and one of the most interesting ownership packages currently being offered on any new car in Britain.
The Nissan Micra has always been one of those cars that quietly got on with the job. It was never glamorous, rarely outrageous, and yet somehow became deeply woven into British motoring culture. Your mum had one, your driving instructor had one, your mate learned to heel-and-toe in one, and somewhere out in the sticks, there’s probably still a battered K10 surviving on sheer stubbornness and WD40 fumes. But now the Micra enters a whole new era because this all-new sixth-generation model is fully electric, thoroughly modern, heavily digitised and, perhaps most surprisingly of all, good value and rather likeable.
There was a time when cars didn’t need mood lighting, over-the-air software updates, lane departure nags, adaptive personalities or a touchscreen larger than a student bedsit television simply to survive the school run. There was a time when a humble hatchback existed purely to provide practical, affordable and dependable transport, and somehow, almost accidentally, managed to become charming in the process. This 1988 Nissan Micra GSX Automatic is one of those cars.
There are moments in this job when you climb into a car and within the first thirty seconds you already know you’re in trouble. Not mechanical trouble. Emotional trouble. The sort where your brain starts quietly whispering dangerous things like “you could absolutely own one of these; you could own one; you deserve to own one…” while your wallet begins sweating nervously in the background. That was me at the SMMT Test Day the moment I slipped behind the wheel of this silver BMW E46 330Ci Coupe, a car bought and modified by eBay as part of its “Tech Transformation Project”, intended to demonstrate how modern aftermarket technology can revitalise older cars without destroying the character that made people fall in love with them in the first place.
This is the Kia PV5 Passenger, and no, I don’t normally review commercial vehicles, but this one sits in that interesting space between van, MPV, taxi, family bus and rolling sci-fi appliance. Kia calls it a Platform Beyond Vehicle, or PBV, which sounds like marketing nonsense until you understand the idea. Because electric vehicles use a flat skateboard-style platform, Kia can build different bodies on top of it: a proper van, a passenger version like this, a chassis cab for conversions, and potentially all sorts of specialist versions in future. You know, I’ve been taking about this flexibility for years – looks like manufacturers are finally starting to exploit it.
The EV5 is Kia taking its best-selling formula – the Sportage – and rethinking it for the electric era, not just swapping out the engine for a battery, but genuinely reworking the whole idea of what a family SUV should be when you start with a clean sheet, and if they’ve got this right then this could end up being one of the most important EVs on sale right now, because it slots along the combustion-engined powered Sportage as the electric equivalent. And the Sportage is a best-seller for Kia.