The Geneva motor show saw countless new cars revealed and a number of important announcements from the world's biggest car makers. What it also gave us is some suitably gossip-worthy snippets of motoring news, including the reasons behind Skoda's late arrival, the delay faced by EV buyers in the UK and more.
VW’s final diesel V8
One hidden gem on Volkswagen’s Geneva motor show stand was a new V8 diesel-powered Volkswagen Touareg. It’s likely to be a swansong for V8 diesels in VWs, and sales and marketing boss Jürgen Stackmann hopes it’ll become as sought after as the old V10 diesel Touareg. The V10 was considered mighty when it was launched with 553lb ft. The new V8 gets 664lb ft and hardly an eyelid is batted.
Nearly a Geneva no-show
Skoda’s Vision iV electric SUV concept arrived very late to the show – for reasons you couldn’t make up. Czech sources say two separate trucks bringing the car from Skoda HQ broke down, the second one having gone to rescue the stricken concept from the first, before a third then got pulled and was held by the Swiss authorities. By which point it was too late to make it to the VW Group preview evening.
You can bet on Brexit
There was much muttering at Geneva from PR teams of UK-based makers about how many Brexit questions they and their chiefs would face. Rumour has it that one manufacturer even started a sweepstake on how many times the B-word was mentioned in interviews.
EV buyers face long wait
Want one of the latest EVs? Don’t count on it this year, as every EV sold in 2019 will count against makers from 2020 at crunch time for this round of CO2 reduction targets. Car makers will not be handed ‘super credits’ to stop financial penalties for cars sold over CO2 limits until next year. Hence you’ll struggle to get an Audi E-tron, for example, and why Hyundai’s Kona Electric is effectively off sale until 2020.
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So let me get this straightt, the new EV's automakers...
...have talked some much about and have been so we'll received by automotive journalists. The buy public can't get this year (who the automakers build them for), because the manufacture have already received the most credit allocations from from the government for this year. So they'll make the few (percentage wise) interested buyers wait until NEXT year to get the EV they want today, so the automakers can use that purchase toward more credits next year?! Crazy and short sighted, in that, there will be more competition by then and the purchase they could have gotten today, maybe bought from a different automaker next year.
Aargh!
It's "bored with", not "bored of".
Diesel V8