It should be easy to dismiss the unfashionable Jeep Grand Cherokee. It is, after all, a 5-metre long, four-wheel-drive leviathon in an age of small, nimble eco-friendly cars. No itsy-bitsy, cute-as-hell electric power for this baby, just good old Detroit steel forged into an V6, just as the Good Lord intended (now he’s reneged on the original V8-deal, leaving Lucifer in charge of the eight-cylinders-and-counting Skunkworks division). Hell, the only…

Hoonary isn’t just the preserve of the young; membership of the VSCC – which positively encourages their members to take their vintage machinery out for a damned good thrashing on a regular basis – is flourishing. It has to be said that the average age of their members is nearer 70 than 17, but these old guys have more skill and bravery and enthusiasm and stamina than we can imagine….

Last year comprised a series of exclamation marks that punctured an otherwise uneventful twelve months. In times of recession industry hunkers down to protect what it has, and in a double-dip recession the temptation becomes even stronger; financial meltdown is an ever-present threat for the meek and bold alike with mass-market manufacturers feeling the pinch especially keenly; the squeezed middle is a very unhealthy place to be at the moment and…

The invitation to drive the Audi RS4 in Germany was welcome, not least because no-one does a car launch like Audi. From the dried flower display discreetly stenciled with the Audi logo to the peerless organisation, nothing is left to chance. Few manufacturers, if any, pamper, flatter, and bolster an ageing hack’s ego like Audi, and the chance to spend a couple of days with them is not to be…

The Panda TwinAir is a snarky little bastard. Square, but snarky. And it goes like stink – but only if you drive it properly. Here then, is the Motoring Journo Guide to Driving a Panda Like You Stole It. The first thing to remember is that you don’t have much power, so momentum is everything; hoard it like your first porn stash and you’ll be unbeatable. Waste it and you’ll…

The Audi S5 Cabriolet is a beautiful car, yet it is, in the final reckoning, an annoying and unsettling one too. Strong words of course, but true. The beauty of the thing is obvious in every sensuous curve and subtle nuance. But annoying? Unsettling? Let me explain. It is a truism in motoring journalism that we like our cars rear-wheel-drive and enclosed with a solid roof. We sneer at anything…

The ‘Squeezed Middle’ is a much abused term, most frequently applied to the law-abiding middle classes who don’t have the wherewithal to dodge taxes through off-shore film investment schemes and are too morally-grounded (or too far in hock…) to give up work and suck from society’s withered but ever obliging teat. It applies to manufacturing too; luxury consumer goods and bargain-basement imports are both thriving while the middle ground struggles…

The wisdom-of-the-crowd – the aggregation of collective knowledge, experience, and wisdom to become better informed – has few serious critics. Idiosyncratic noise will inevitably distort the opinion of an individual and lead to a degradation of interpretation; after all, a solitary view can also be expressed as a skewed survey with a sample size of one. So the received wisdom that the BMW 3 Series is a great car is…

The ability to travel off the beaten track is important to an awful lot of drivers, even if most refuse to acknowledge that they’ll never do anything more adventurous than exploring a muddy field now and then. The result is an explosion of SUVs, off-roaders, and crossovers all of which are heavier, taller, thirstier, and less stable than they need be. This is a Bad Thing for the driver, the…

Peugeot suffered a drop in form in recent years – and it’s entirely its own fault. The problem is that Peugeot is best known for producing small, sporty hatchbacks and when it didn’t offer a sub-1.4-litre engine option in the 207 – a capacity that accounts for more than 40 percent of the market – it excluded a lot of potential buyers. This was a Very Silly Thing to do….