#UnitedKingdom

While SUVs and crossovers have become increasingly popular in Western Europe in recent years, compact MPVs have done very well there during the past quarter-century. One model that proved to be a solid showroom hit was the Citroën C4 Picasso, and I documented one of these machines during my recent trip to the scrapyards of Northern England.

A British friend of mine recently asked my opinion on several vehicle models, saying he was browsing company cars. What I assumed would be a quick chat quickly devolved into my being educated on British tax codes, especially the benefit-in-kind (BIK) taxes applied to any items of value provided to employees. While familiar with the concept, I was not ready to traverse the graphs and tables required to determine how much you’re on the hook for depending upon what type of vehicle you’ve chosen.

I took a four-day trip to Northern England a couple of weeks ago, primarily to visit one of the only American-style self-service junkyards in the UK. While there, I also dropped by quite a few traditional dismantlers (known as "breaker's yards" over there), and one of them was Sherburn Motor Spares in Leeds, a business specializing in Italian and French vehicles. While there, I found a special-edition Alfa Romeo that never made it to our side of the Atlantic: a UK-only Brera S, hot-rodded by Prodrive.

Last week, I joined fellow car writer Andrew Ganz on a four-day trip to Northern England, with one of Great Britain's two Ewe Pullet-style self-service junkyards as our primary destination. This was the U-Pull-It in York, and today's Junkyard Scrapyard Find is one of the more interesting products of the Société Européene de Véhicules Légers during the 2000s.

The United States doesn't have a monopoly on shady car dealerships.

UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced on Wednesday that he’s delaying bans the government had previously made for gasoline-powered vehicles. The scheme was to have the United Kingdom restrict citizens from purchasing new combustion vehicles by 2030. But Sunak has questioned the previous timeline’s viability, opting to push things out to 2035.

This probably isn’t a huge surprise for anyone with at least one foot planted in reality. EV mandates have frequently been accompanied by target dates that are wholly ridiculous. Manufacturers aren’t producing these vehicles in sufficient quantities, the supportive infrastructure isn’t in place, and there's a significant portion of consumers that appear disinterested in buying non-traditional powertrains.

While electric vehicles get the most press whenever they go up like a match, it’s important to remember that combustion vehicles pioneered burning themselves up back when the horse was still considered a viable transportation option. Things are better now of course, with flaming cars being primarily relegated for important riots, large-scale sporting events, and decoration along the West Side Highway. We can also add high-speed chases taking place in the United Kingdom to the list because there’s reportedly a bunch of BMW police vehicles that are giving new meaning to the term “heat.”

For the last few weeks, various departments scattered across the U.K. have been issuing advisements not to use certain diesel-powered vehicles in pursuits that exceed the speed limit. It’s a rather curious request, though one that’s allegedly tied to a serious incident from 2020 that killed Police Constable Nick Dumphreys.

If there’s anything that’ll get my stomach into a twist, it’s the government talking about the merits of reducing people’s ability to own things. Fortunately, the 36-hour flu I just experienced made me nigh-invulnerable and someone had forwarded me the latest on what U.K. Parliamentary Under-Secretary for the Department for Transport Trudy Harrison had to say about personal vehicle ownership. She’s very keen on public transpiration but not so interested in the plebian masses having access to their own, individual modes of transport.

Earlier this month, she told a virtual audience at shared transport charity CoMoUK that the United Kingdom needed to move away from “20th-century thinking centered around private vehicle ownership and towards greater flexibility, with personal choice and low carbon shared transport.”

Despite manufacturers still managing to turn a profit, the automotive sector hasn’t been in the best of health these last few years. Growth appears to have plateaued in most Western nations, encouraging companies to cater this business toward other markets, supply chains have also been negatively impacted by the pandemic — with semiconductor shortages hindering production schedules on a scale we’ve not seen since the Great Recession.

It’s a bad situation and rumored to get worse if the warning cries of economists are to be believed. But there’s also mounting evidence to support their claims. The Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT) recently reported that vehicle registrations in the United Kingdom fell by roughly 35 percent in September vs the same timeframe in 2020. This is relevant because the month typically represents the second-busiest period for the country and numbers were already low due to production stops created by coronavirus lockdowns.

Today’s study comes straight from the memoirs of Captain Obvious. Apparently, an economic recession isn’t what you want when you’re vying to sell factory fresh automobiles beyond the confines of rock-bottom prices. There might even be a correlation between being broke and lacking the ability to purchase items in general. At least, that was the takeaway from a cutting-edge assessment recently conducted by Auto Trader in the United Kingdom.

In an attempt to keep tabs on the public’s level of interest in reference to electric vehicles, the outlet has been surveying people at semi-regular intervals. Back in January, it asked 2,300 consumers ‘waddya buying,’ only to learn that 17 percent had their hearts set on a battery electric vehicle. That’s impressive considering less than 10 percent of automobiles in the UK utilize electricity for propulsion and most of those happen to be hybrid models. But the trend toward BEVs has shifted rather dramatically since the COVID pandemic took hold.

A follow-up questionnaire from August (this time with 2,700 respondents) shows demand has waned immensely. Only 4 percent of respondents said they were planning on getting themselves a battery electric vehicle.

With COVID-19 lockdowns suppressing auto sales around the globe, everyone expected April to be a rough month. However, we doubt the United Kingdom expected monthly deliveries to come in at the lowest level since the end of World War II. Registrations for April peaked at 4,321 in the UK, representing the lowest monthly figure since 1946 — when the nation was still rationing materials as it attempted to rebuild after a prolonged military conflict (and factories were just starting to transition back to manufacturing passenger vehicles).

While it’s possible some registrations are simply delayed, the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT) says it doesn’t believe that to be a significant factor. Retailers typically register the vehicle for you and, with with precious little else to do, you’d think they’d have finished whatever paperwork they had lying around. Most of them, of course, weren’t capable of operating normally due to government mandates, allowing the few outlets offering at-home delivery to make up the lion’s share of sales.

Aston Martin was not under the illusion that 2019 would be a stellar year. After issuing a recent profit warning, the British automaker fired off another this week after realizing it ended up being a worse year than initially feared. Aston’s stock has lost 3 billion pounds in market value since the company’s initial public offering in 2018.

While retail sales were technically up last year, climbing 12 percent, total wholesales fell by 7 percent. According to the manufacturer, gains were made thanks to the redesigned Vantage (introduced in 2018). Unfortunately, that also caused some headaches. Despite being a six-figure car, at Aston Martin the model is technically an entry level, and its high take rate actually resulted in a lower average selling price across Aston’s business for Q4. Combine that with an overall increase in leased vehicles upping financing costs and you’re beginning to see part of the problem.

The UK’s Derbyshire Constabulary celebrated a major victory this week. The triumph of justice was even given its own official announcement. Did the department finally tamp down the area’s rising violent crime rate?

Nope. They caught an automotive journalist speeding — one year after he did it.

Joe Achilles was testing an Audi R8 RSW on the A57 Snake Pass last November, later posting footage on his Facebook wall. Derbyshire Constabulary’s Roads Policing Unit noticed the video while “investigating an entirely different matter,” according to its release, and set out to prove just how fast he was going.

The United Kingdom’s Department for Transport will test noise-detecting cameras across the country over the next 7 months to see if it can adequately detect and identify vehicles modified to emit obnoxious levels of noise when the driver pins the accelerator. The systems are relatively new, though the government says it will recommend further development of the system for deployment across the UK.

As things currently stand, it’s illegal for any new vehicle to exceed 74 decibels in Europe. While your personal car can exceed those sound limits within UK borders, as there’s no formal limit to vehicle noise, it is illegal to modify your car’s exhaust system to make it louder. Sort of a Catch-22, because if your car exceeds 74 dbA, it probably means you’ve modified it.

With Europe and China promoting aggressive emission mandates, including proposals to eventually prohibit the sale of internal combustion vehicles, electric cars look to be a shoe-in. The UK’s Committee on Climate Change recently recommended moving up the country’s 2040 deadline to end the sale of gasoline or diesel cars to 2035 as part of a wider target to cut the country’s net greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2050.

Unfortunately, battery electric vehicles still represent less than 1 percent of the region’s new car sales. While EV sales rose 63 percent in April vs the previous year, the adoption rate doesn’t appear to be on the same track as regulatory measures pushed by various authorities.

According to government-commissioned poll from 2016, range anxiety appears to be the primary culprit in the United Kingdom. Most respondents cited recharging their battery as their biggest hangup, with elevated EV costs playing second fiddle.