The car world's biggest news stories this year

Welcome to a new ICE age

Meanwhile, over on the mainland, a battle raged all year between European Union lawmakers - who said ICE cars had to become cleaner to use - and car makers, who said it would be pointless to impose huge investment into lowering tailpipe emissions while they were working hard to replace fossil fuels with zero-emission systems anyway.

The bone of contention was the planned onset of strict new Euro 7 emissions regulations, which would have necessitated fitting costly new electronic catalysts and data-capturing hardware to each new ICE car.

The implications were huge, with small, affordable models like the Volkswagen Polo and Skoda Fabia facing early retirement because they could no longer be sold profitably. Volkswagen brand CEO Thomas Schäfer estimated the new tech would have added as much as €5000 to the manufacturing cost of each car.

But then a shock: the European Parliament backed calls from the industry to tone down the requirements, and so (assuming that the European Commission ratifies the changes) Euro 7 is now set to be scarcely more punitive than the current Euro 6 framework.

Heavy goods vehicles and buses will still face tougher tests, and MEPs say there should be more of an emphasis on testing particulate emissions from tyres and brakes, but the move could be no less than a lifeline for the affordable ICE car.

Skoda CEO Klaus Zellmer told Autocar that the "more realistic" regulations had "extended the potential life cycle" of the Fabia and even suggested another entire model generation could be possible. Did Ford kill the Fiesta too soon?

Mass appeal

The car was invented in the Victorian era, but it wasn't until the likes of the Fiat 500, Volkswagen Beetle, Citroen 2CV and BMC Mini arrived several decades later that the European masses were able to take to the open road. It was then that the idea of owning a car truly became an attainable prospect for millions - and that's about to happen all over again.

Because electrification is such an expensive game, the first wave of mass-produced EVs has been disproportionately skewed towards the premium end of the spectrum, and there hasn't yet been any real penetration below the £25,000 mark - but many manufacturers are now in a position to reverse that trend and a new age of the people's car beckons.

In 2023, Volkswagen said it was working "flat out" to make the £17,000 ID 1 a reality and Renault revealed an electric take on the Mk1 Twingo that should reach showrooms at around the same price in 2026.

So too has Opel-Vauxhall hinted at plans for a new city car to sit underneath the Corsa, and while Dacia hasn't put a price on its upcoming electric Sandero, the use of amortised Renault underpinnings and potentially sodium-ion batteries could make it as cheap as today's petrol model.

China make some sense of it all

The 2022 version of this story referred to Stellantis CEO Carlos Tavares's wish to see the EU impose tariffs on Chinese-made cars in a bid to stop established European firms from losing ground to newcomers like BYD, MG, Nio and many more.

This year, that view was contrasted by his Renault Group counterpart, Luca De Meo, who is of the more capitalist opinion that these Chinese disruptors deserve to compete in the European market on merit and companies like his own stand to learn a lot from their approach to gaining market share.

"The only thing we can do is to accept that, to actually look at them and be humble, but not play the victim," he said.

The sticking point is that as the European car industry gets back on its feet in the wake of the Covid pandemic and semiconductor crisis and in the face of huge geopolitical uncertainty, its brands have to square off with Chinese rivals that enjoy the enormous advantages of substantial state subsidies, cheap manufacturing costs and stable local supply chains.

However, de Meo's opinion is rooted in recent memory, as he likens today's uneasy competitive environment to those from the 1960s through to the 1990s. "When the Japanese and Koreans came, it was the same thing" he said. "They can play the game."

"If you sum up all the non-European brands in Europe, [their market share is] 25%, not 95%," he added, concluding that "there's no reason why we shouldn't allow people who do good stuff for the European consumer to enter the market, to offer people what they want."

British industry rises from the ashes 

For a long while, it looked like a perfect storm of Brexit, Covid and a global supply chain meltdown had battered the British automotive industry so badly that it could never recover.

The bad news just kept coming: Nissan changed its mind about building the new X-Trail in Sunderland, Honda closed down Swindon, Ineos swapped Grenadier production from Wales to France and Dyson's plan to build a Tesla Model Y rival ran out of road.

With all that added to the long and laboured demise of Britishvolt, domestic car production falling to a half-century low and the imposition of costly new decarbonisation initiatives and trade rules, the outlook became bleaker by the day.

But then the wind changed direction: in the space of a few months, we had confirmation of two new electric Mini models to be built in Oxford, a range of electric SUVs for JLR's Halewood factory and - perhaps most significant of all - Nissan's allocation of no fewer than three new electric cars to its Sunderland factory.