Unforgettable moments from a year in cars: Our highlights of 2024
2024 saw some magic moments that stood out for the Auto Express team
From Las Vegas to Scotland, via an early morning dash through Paris in a Lamborghini, there’s never a dull day at Auto Express. Yes, there’s plenty of hard work and graft that goes into putting all of our news, reviews, and features together, but there are also many ‘pinch me’ moments.
Whether it's being strapped into a rally car in the middle of a desert or dinner with Ferrari’s test driver who tells all about the company’s new EV, you had to be there - and we were, so we could tell you all about it. Read on for the Auto Express team’s highlights of 2024.
Alex Ingram - flying high with Dacia in the desert
Before May of this year, I could honestly say that I’d never been airborne in a car at more than 110mph. Certainly not on dirt. But that all changed when I had the privilege of joining Dacia in the south of France during a test session for the Sandrider: its new challenger for the gruelling Dakar Rally.
The all-black testing livery lent the Sandrider the vibe of Batman’s rally car, but I was strapped into the passenger seat beside someone much more exciting to me than Gotham’s grumpy anti-hero. My driver was Cristina Gutiérrez, Extreme E racer and the 2024 T3 class winner at the Dakar.
Having spent much of the day testing already, she was on the pace straight away, showing
just how mind-bendingly quickly two tonnes-plus of rally raid racer can be blasted along stone-ridden uneven dirt tracks.
Indeed, the calmness with which Gutiérrez said “here’s a jump” before we soared several metres into the air at more than three figures showed just how confident she is of the Sandrider’s abilities (and her own). Yet the rally suspension was so sophisticated that the landing was unremarkable – I’ve been jostled around more touching down at Heathrow. The only trouble is, I want one for the daily commute.
Steve Sutcliffe - Finding out about Ferrari’s new EV
We were about to sit down to a typically swanky dinner the night before driving the new Ferrari 12Cilindri. I had a picture of a mysterious prototype on my phone that sort of looked like it might be a Ferrari. In essence, it was a Maserati Levante caked in disguise that might have been clothing Ferrari’s new EV. Truth is, the news team at Auto Express had no idea what the photograph was actually of, so they asked me if I could try to find out.
So I showed it to my friend Rafa, Ferrari’s head of road car development – a genuinely lovely guy who I’ve spent many a day either driving or being driven by at all sorts of speeds, in all sorts of road and racing cars over the years. And he looked at me and said: “On or off the record?”
“Up to you,” I said. “But you know I’m a journalist so…” And then he started talking, casually to begin with, but with enough detail to confirm the car we’d snapped was indeed a prototype mule for Ferrari’s new EV – known internally as the 244.
The story appeared a week later, but I’ll never forget the circumstances – or ease – with which that news story landed. Had it been a member of the PR team I’d shown the picture to, they would have shrugged and said “no idea”.
Richard Ingram - Booze cruise with Bentley
Let me get one thing straight: cars and alcohol should never mix. But when I was given the opportunity to say farewell to Bentley’s iconic W12 engine with a 400-mile road trip to Scotland and a £40,000 bottle of whisky at the end of it, who was I to say no?
Regular readers will know what an electric-car advocate I am, but the petrolhead buried within is going to struggle when engines like those in the outgoing Bentley Continental GT and Flying Spur are laid to rest. My effortless waft up the M6 past the Scottish Borders showed the powertrain at its absolute best – covering almost half the distance before most people had sat down at their desk for the day.
Yet we all need to unwind, and a tour of the Macallan Estate – nestled in the hillside just outside Craigellachie – followed by a dram of its new Horizon single malt (a tie-up with Bentley, no less) was just what the doctor had ordered. Although now I’ve got a taste for it, I’m dying to try the £2.1 million 1926 Macallan Valerio Adami – the most expensive whisky ever sold at auction.
Ellis Hyde - Grime and punishment on a day with Bowler
Of all the ‘I can’t believe this is my job’ moments I’ve had this year, the most memorable was somehow getting to drive a competition-ready Bowler Defender rally car. The Walters Arena in Wales might not have been quite as picturesque as the dunes of the Sahara, but it was certainly doused by appropriate weather, which cycled between rain, hail, sleet, snow and thunder all day.
And while a two-tonne-plus Defender might sound like the antithesis of a modern rally car, it flew along the straights of our incredibly muddy test circuit, and slid around corners at astounding speeds. The driving experience was incredibly raw, not to mention addictive, yet the Bowler Defender proved to be remarkably approachable from a driver’s perspective – and that’s coming from someone who’d never even sat in a race-prepped car before that day.
This is what allows Bowler to offer a comprehensive training programme to build confident rally drivers out of successful executives and passionate petrolheads, which I got a taste of with the team’s expert instructors. The notion of value for money kept cropping up during my discussions with Bowler and various competitors in its Defender Rally Series, and initially seemed at odds with the idea of a £130,000 four-cylinder-powered Defender.
But after having had a go myself, it’s a bargain.
Dean Gibson - Car makers gamble on future at CES in Vegas
I set a pretty high bar for my 2024 highlight in the first week of the year, courtesy of a visit to the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. I was there to see Kia’s entry into the commercial vehicle sector, and while the concepts are still a few years away from reality, Kia is serious. Three van sizes with integrated loading systems and even interchangeable modules mean the Korean firm could really shake up the CV market.
However, Kia’s presence was dwarfed by that of sister firm Hyundai, which showcased its latest tech, ranging from cars with four-wheel independent steering and autonomous excavators to robotic dogs – plus the Supernal autonomous electric flying taxi.
Other highlights included driving a BMW iX remotely as part of an autonomous valet-parking demonstration, Sony showcasing its latest Afeela EV (now with input from Honda), Mercedes previewing some in-car tech, and Chinese firm XPeng displaying two flying-car concepts. If there’s one place where the lines between motoring and technology are blurred like no other – with artificial intelligence apparently being the buzzword solution to every problem facing the planet – then CES is it.
Steve Walker - Golf is on right track in test
In October I paid a flying visit to the Lausitzring race track in north-east Germany for a few laps in the updated Volkswagen Golf R and its uppity underling, the Golf GTI Clubsport.
The track, which hosts German DTM and Formula 3 races, has a NASCAR-style banked oval lined with towering grandstands, but we stuck mainly to the in-field circuit and public roads in the surrounding area.
The Mk8 Golf R hasn’t met with the glowing praise lavished on the Mk7, but VW has partially addressed the car’s issues with the latest update, producing a greater feeling of connection with more of the same all-wheel-drive, point-to-point capability that R fans love. It was the GTI Clubsport that shone, though, with its front-wheel-drive set-up coming alive on the track. The days of the petrol hot hatch are numbered, so it was good to have a blast in these two.
Jordan Katsianis - Navigating France in a new Lambo Revuelto
After flying into Paris late, I was a bit bleary eyed at 8am the next day, but then I became fully awake at the sight of a matt grey Lamborghini Revuelto parked up by the hotel with its doors aloft and the key being handed to me.
This was going to be fun. I was told that in this pre-production model, the Revuelto’s navigation and stereo weren’t functional, and that we’d be stopping in Reims for lunch around 100 miles away. Right, okay. A brand new, half-million pound supercar with more than 1,000bhp would be mine to navigate through the streets of central Paris without assistance. But the problems only began when I reached Reims.
It’s a pretty standard mid-size French city, but within its centre is an old town with foot-tall kerbstones, paved roads and a sea of Citroen C3s and Renault Clios that act as the local battering rams. At one point, while trying to find a car park near the lunch stop, I found myself at a particularly oblique junction which, even with the help of rear-wheel steering, had me wedged. So, with the door up, I exited the car and had to ask every one of those cars behind in my broken French to “please back up, s’il vous plaît”. Thankfully, those behind were fans of the striking Lamborghini and were more than willing.
Darren Wilson - A whole new look for Auto Express
The last major Auto Express logo rebrand happened in 1997. Since then we’ve changed the design, fonts and layouts on numerous occasions, but not since 2015. Change was clearly overdue. So with 2024 bringing new owners and fresh ideas, that investment happened earlier this year.
Working with Katie McLurg leading the internal branding design team, I was able to adapt the new-look website fonts (and logo) to work in the magazine. The brief was tough: modernise and evolve but don’t alienate, while streamlining magazine content to maximise print and website efficiency. Basically, deliver the essence of our market-leading magazine and bring subscribers and newsstand readers along for the ride.
I hope we’ve succeeded. We have an experienced editorial team committed to bringing the best magazine possible. We remain first for news, drives and tests, and as these review pages prove, just about everything else in between.
Paul Barker - Charging around europe in a day
One of my favourite days of the year was also the longest, in terms of my time behind the wheel. I’ve always been a fan of a European road trip, so didn’t take much persuading to jump on board with the idea of seeing how many countries we could charge an electric car in across a single day.
Starting with a sneaky charging session in Folkestone before we left on an early Eurostar,
we managed to include the UK, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, France and Germany, before making it to the final charging stop in Switzerland at five past midnight following a battery-sapping run down a German autobahn at the Renault Megane’s 99mph top speed to get over the border into Basel. Luckily it didn’t turn into a pumpkin as we rolled through Swiss customs at exactly midnight.
The big thing about this trip was that we did almost no planning, instead plotting the next leg
on Renault’s Mobilize app while we were charging. No back-up plans or second choices, and with the exception of the German charge, where time was starting to become a deciding factor, no motorway stops. And the nearest we got to a problem charge was in Belgium, where all the higher-powered chargers were in use when we arrived. More than 600 miles of trouble-free EV road-tripping in a single day. Plus another 400 home the next one!
Tom Jervis - We get the bug for a certain VW Beetle
I often went to Walt Disney World when I was younger, and one of my favourite things to do was watch the Lights, Motors Action! stunt show in which Herbie was ‘accidentally’ sawn in half – just like in The Love Bug. Fast forward to today and certain cars have the ability to make me feel like a child again, but few have had the same impact on me as driving the real (and very much intact) Herbie.
The only film car outfitted with a Porsche 356 air-cooled Super 75 four-cylinder engine in order to keep up with the Ferraris, Lamborghinis and Austin Healeys on set, the big-screen legend is now owned by VW Beetle specialist and Love Bug fanatic, Luke Theochari.
For a character with no lines in the original script, Herbie is surprisingly vocal, thanks to his throaty custom exhaust.
However, despite the extra grunt, KONI shock absorbers and Porsche brakes, Herbie still drives very much like any other Beetle, with vague steering and a finicky gearbox. While that might be seen as a bad thing, it only adds to his character. In this job you drive a lot of cars, but getting behind the wheel of Herbie is a story bound to interest anyone.
Alastair Crooks - Hyundai Ioniq 5 N stuns both on track and off
If you’re a keen Auto Express reader and an even keener topographer, then you may have noticed that a lot of our international drives take place on the majestic flowing roads around Montserrat near Barcelona. That was the location of our second drive of the Ioniq 5 N (the first being in Korea) and as ever, the landscape and tarmac provided a superb environment to test this new electric hot hatch.
While temperatures soared, the N stayed cool, and even when we arrived at the nearby Parcmotor Castelloli race circuit, the car was ready to be thrown around the unforgiving 2.5-mile track. It’s one of the most memorable circuits I’ve been to and a worthy highlight in itself, but the Ioniq 5 N was even more impressive, earning its well deserved five-star review – an opinion that was sustained by my colleagues when they tested it in the UK.
I used to think the Porsche Taycan was the car I’d point sports-car loving EV sceptics to in the hope of changing their opinion – but the Hyundai has well and truly grabbed that mantle now.
Chris Rosamond - Skoda provides ray of hope with solar-power trip
A road trip to the Sahara was always going to be an eye-opener, but I wasn’t prepared to be blown away by a power station. The Noor solar station in Ouarzazate, Morocco, looks like a computer-generated backdrop for science-fiction fantasy, where 7,400 tennis court-sized mirrors track the movement of the sun and focus its rays at the tip of a 240-metre high tower which reaches a sizzling 580-degrees Celsius.
Incredible installations like Noor in exotic locations will be central to global plans to shift energy production to renewables, but I had no idea the place even existed.
I was more familiar with the 282bhp Skoda Enyaq Sportline electric SUV provided for the onward journey to the fringes of the Sahara, though, so the fact we travelled quietly, comfortably and relaxed to our destination, over some pretty epic Moroccan roads, reinforced my thoughts about the car’s qualities, rather than offering any surprises. The saturating dust didn’t make it through the Enyaq’s filters, happily, so we didn’t arrive at the Sahara desert as travel-stained as the hardier locals using donkey transport, either.
Among the dunes, we even met a hardy couple who had circumnavigated the entire African continent in an Enyaq. They completed the trip without a single mechanical mishap, which speaks volumes about the simplicity and strength of EV technology generally, and the Enyaq in particular.
Just follow the link for the rest of our 2024 Review of the Year pages...
