It is incredible what has been taken away from motorists. Also very sad and utterly unforgivable.
There are of course the little things like freedom of actual movement in so many small, subtle ways. Fuel duty, VAT on the cost of fuel, never mind car tax. Can you work out exactly what you are paying these days for the privilege of negotiating the pot holed roads?
Well, flat rate road tax for cars registered on or after 1 April 2017 is £200 a year. Older ones with CO2 under 100g/km is an awfully reasonable £20. Zero-emission cars (electricity cars) are £10. Low emission (1 to 50 g/km): £115 (petrol/hybrid) or £135 if it happens to be a dirty diesel. Average emission (111 to 130 g/km): £455 (petrol/hybrid) or £560 (diesel). High emission (Over 255 g/km): £5,690. Then there is the Expensive Car Supplement (Luxury Tax) If your car has the misfortune to cost a fortune, then you must pay an annual supplement for the second through sixth years of registration, subject to some conditions. With Electricity Cars the threshold is £50,000, and the supplement is £440 per year. When it comes to Petrol, Diesel, or Hybrid the threshold remains at £40,000, and the supplement is £440 per year. For cars first registered between March 2001 and March 2017, Vehicle Excise Duty (VED as it is properly called) rates are based on the vehicle’s official CO2 emissions. Rates for the 2026/2027 period range from £20 to £790 depending on the tax band and no, we are not going to insert a boring table. Cars registered before 1 March 2001 then the tax is based on engine size rather than CO2 emissions. Vehicles up to 1549cc cost £220 annually, while engines larger than 1549cc cost £360 annually.
Confusing isn’t it? That is completely deliberate. They clearly want us poor and slightly baffled. That’s the nicest interpretation, mostly their preferred form of personal transport would be a state run train, or bus replacement service. They might let you borrow a pushbike, or hire an exploding electric scooter. The important question is, who are they?
‘They’ is not some weird modern pronoun preference, but actually a great big blob of our enemies and even some apparent friends, who think they know better. Obviously that’s politicians, national and local, add to that the pressure groups, those non-governmental organisations and surprisingly the mainstream media, motoring and otherwise. I would always expect those in charge to apply the tax hammer even more enthusiastically, because if you can afford to run a car then, you can afford to pay a lot more.
The most depressing aspect of all that is the people we thought it was possible to rely on, have let us down. Starting with the car manufacturers who have been in the thrall of the mainly European rule makers since forever. Safety legislation certainly does explain in part why vehicles look the way they do and the best of intentions when it comes to the General Safety Regulation (GSR2). There is a list of electronic assistants which are really just distractions. One of them certainly is, that’s the Driver Drowsiness and Distraction Warning. Not only that there is also intelligent Speed Assistance, Alcohol Interlock Installation, Reversing Detection, Emergency Lane Keeping, to name just a few helpers. Clearly drivers can no longer be trusted to do anything themselves.
Manufacturers also revelled in the Zero Emissions mandate, but we will come to that soon enough. A lot of this is our fault. We can and should blame ourselves of course, for buying SUVs. First the genteel off roader (1970 3-door Range Rovers) came for the Lord of the Manor farmers. Then it was the on-site architects and those medium format fashion photographers. Mostly Range Rovers, remained large, expensive, inaccessible and unnecessary for the majority of ordinary mortal motorists. That was until people in Essex discovered the Suzuki Vitara at the tail end of the ‘80s. It was still something of a slow burn and not everyone could take the Rhino logo seriously. However, the original funky three door Toyota RAV 4 showed that there was fun to be had. Buyers liked the high riding position, the potential to go anywhere, even though that never happened and the fact that it wasn’t another dull hatch, like next doors, made it more attractive. Actually what made the Sports Utility more appealing to school run mums and dads was the fact that a SUV suggested to all the other people carrier pilots, that you went up the Kalahari at the weekend and not the soft play centre with all the other Previas and Galaxies.
So yes SUVs are our fault, except that some were truly wonderful. Handsome, great to drive and rather cool, mostly called the BMW X5. As desirable as a Range Rover, but with added reliability. That makes the X5 designer, Frank Stephenson, more than qualified to tell everyone why modern cars are so ugly. Which he has done repeatedly.
He reckons that BMW in particular is making ugly cars on purpose so that it can go back to making conventionally attractive cars to general acclaim. That’s all a bit 4D chess and clearly hasn’t happened by the look of more recent examples, suggesting that they are on a downward spiral. Especially as the other theory is that BMW have decided to do bad design to show bad design for what it is. That doesn’t seem at all plausible, but the best one as that “BMW have really lost their f***ing mind.”
Oh yes and Stephenson also ‘did’ the original uppercase R50 MINI and the R53 which have aged spectacularly well. Replying to Jamie Kitman about what he thought about the Countryman way back in 2013 for motoringfile.com he said, “Oh, my gosh, I don’t like it. I mean I don’t like the whole new trend at all. I think they just wildly abused the brand. And they’ve gone away from their roots in such a way that now the buyers are not the same buyers.”
Stephenson has also made some great points that designers no longer sketch ideas in pencil or even on the back of a napkin like Issigonis did. When it comes to ugliness in the 2010s and into the 2020s the biggest blame for that trend is the Chinese. They like a bit of bling and want to draw attention to the fact they’ve bought a premium European. Well, that was then, now they’ve got plenty of their own made up Range Roveralike marques to choose from.
Fashions and styles always changed like the seasons. Three door estate cars, some of them known as shooting brakes, came and went. Meanwhile, saloons have faded away, but surely these days as there are more drivers than ever, surely the number of models to have fun and adventure in should be huge. Well, it isn’t. Because I’m writing Bangerpedias all the time, currently I am up to the 1980s, I see in black and white what has happened. Here’s the advert, Ruppert’s Bangerpedias available now from the evil Amazon empire, or me if you just want a cheapo PDF. The trauma I go through to produce these Bangerpedias proves to me is that the variety and type of vehicles made available to our dads and grandads was astounding. Especially if they wanted a sports car. There was absolutely loads of them. Take a look at these ‘80s coupes, Volvo 262, Datsun Violet, Lancia Gamma and Alfa GTV to name just a charismatic few.
Which brings us to batteries. As a start it is far easier to hide those battery packs inside a great big sod off, faux off roader. The sheer brutalism of most designs, that don’t need grilles and weigh a couple of tons were never designed with inspiration in mind. Not that every vehicle has to be. It is just that when even the interesting marques like BMW are faltering, motoring enthusiasts are now living and driving in depressing times.
On the outside modern cars might well be pug ugly, but also on the inside it’s gone all iPad. Sick as you might be staring at a screen in your job, or in life to get things done, the torture continues as you negotiate drop down menus to fiddle with the heater fan. The economy of building new cars is that it is now far cheaper to glue an old Dell to the dash than buy in all those clocks and switches from Mr Smiths and actually have to think about where buttons should go. The signs are that manufacturers are now realising the error of their lazy interior design ways. Volkswagen agree that touch sensitive sliders and touch pads are unsatisfactory. Even clutter free Polestar have put buttons on the steering wheel of their 3 to stop drivers being distracted. This still leaves us with a generation of cars that are and will be very hard to live with.
Modern cars have also become curiously unreliable. You would have thought that manufacturers would have worked everything out by now, but you are only a wet belt issue away from financial meltdown. Built in obsolescence and only making motors to see out their warranties, has always been part of the business plan. There are Japanese exceptions, but the simple truth is, stop-start, keyless entry, and infotainment systems constantly draw power and lead to battery drains. Smaller engines that are turbocharged creates higher internal pressures and heat, which can lead to premature engine wear. parts like traditional, reliable metal handbrake cables have been replaced by faulty electric motors and modules. Modern vehicles rely heavily on sensors. Just one faulty sensor or a bugged software update can trigger the car to go into “limp mode”.
All this has happened under the watch of the Mainstream Motoring Media. They haven’t just let their readers down, it is themselves. Their one job is to tell the truth the about what’s going on in the automotive world and actually stick up for the interests of their readers. But no.
They could and should have questioned the Zero Emission Vehicle (ZEV) mandate that requires car manufacturers to ensure a steadily increasing percentage of their annual new vehicle sales are zero-emission (e.g., pure electric or hydrogen). These targets are rising annually to 33% in 2026, then reaching 100% by 2035. Vehicle manufacturers receive “ZEV allowances” for every zero-emission vehicle they sell. If they exceed their annual target, they can bank or sell excess allowances; if they fall short, they can buy allowances from competitors, borrow against future targets, or face compliance penalties. What a mad government mandated, industry approved system this is.
Then if you have a historic you are above it all, so pre 1986 vehicles are in the clear, even though you have to go through the administrative procedure with the DVLA. But we will go down the older car route soon enough.
Which brings us to remarkably reassuring images that we have used to illustrate this feature. They are slightly out of date, originating in September 2025, but they are contemporary. We could easily have used a genuine ‘70s press, or PR picture and we have repeatedly at Free Car Mag, but this makes a point. The point is that you can, with a bit of effort and without the pernicious use of AI bring back the age of beauty, grace and real style.
So just in case you wondered, the press release is headed, Maserati meets Acqua di Parma for a collaboration shaped by the Art of Travel. There is of course the usual PR nonsense wrapped up in all this as we find out that “The Acqua di Parma x Maserati collection includes a bespoke Andiamo Car Diffuser, finished in Acqua di Parma’s signature yellow and embossed with the Maison’s emblem alongside Maserati’s iconic Trident – an elevated companion for every drive. The Passepartout Leather Charm rendered in genuine leather with yellow stitching and the Maserati logo on the charm, complete with a 12ml Colonia Eau de Cologne. Completing the Acqua di Parma x Maserati collection is the Art of Travel Coffret, presented in Acqua di Parma’s iconic hat box. Inside, the special edition Andiamo Car Diffuser is paired with a Luce di Colonia refill and a set of driving gloves in Maserati blue nappa leather, trimmed with yellow piping. The gloves, designed for comfort and grip, are fingerless, perforated at the knuckles, and fastened with tone-on-tone laser-etched buttons.”
Considering the two companies have gone to so much bother, although there is a mention of the wonderful contemporary Maserati models available from your local showroom, there is no mention of the astoundingly beautiful Ghibli Spyder that we see in the photographs. According to records there was only around 125 built. Never mind it has been overlooked, we’ve all seen and can appreciate the beauty on show. Indeed, it is rather telling that both companies choose to recreate ‘60s-‘70s sophistication vibe. The past was clearly more stylish, cooler and the cleverer way to promote a bespoke car diffuser. At which point you really should be very annoyed. Annoyed if you have any recollection of the recent past and utterly incandescent if you don’t.
Where does that actually leave us in 2026?
With a battery SUV Ferrari designed by some bloke who works for a computer company.
So what can we do?
Nothing really. You won’t ever be able to vote your way out of this cultural, industrial and spiritual mess. Perhaps at the very lowest level you simply don’t join in. Best to simply drive old Maseratis. Live off grid in the countryside, ideally with a catalogue model, while you both ferment potatoes into fuel.
Otherwise it has to be bloody revolution to punish all those responsible for stealing what we had automotively. Never mind everything else.
Quite simply, this is the Crime of the Century.
