TESTER’S NOTES
There’s an enjoyable story in the latest issue (dated March) of our sibling title Classic & Sports Car about a TVR Griffith, an MG RV8 and a Marcos Mantara.
Or at least it’s a story that I was enjoying, right up to the point when I remembered that I had read a group test of those three cars (along with a Morgan Plus 8 and a Ginetta G33) when they were new, which was 1993 but seems like about three weeks ago. And yes, of course I’ve bored several office colleagues about this.
Perhaps this will be no surprise to you, but increasingly I understand what people older than me say about still feeling young: there’s no appreciable difference between the nub of me now and the one from 30 years ago, except I get up earlier, like more cheeses and trim my nose hair more frequently. Otherwise, same idiot, different day. I still like Griffiths.
I mention this because the car market of today is quite different from the one of the mid-1990s, and Autocar’s inbox is broadly evenly split between people who think that modern cars are becoming ever more dismal and people who think the world ever improves.
I suppose it has always been this way. I mean, those once-annoying millennials are now bitching about having to manage zoomers. But electrification in particular has amplified the reaction and the noise around cars.
Largely, I’m of the thinking that things ever get better. I think there were certain peaks in the mid-2010s that haven’t been equalled since; recent misfiring driver assistance systems have made me want to burn more cars than ever; and all of the UK’s electricity salesmen combined won’t convince me that a BEV is the right choice for everybody. But I also think it’s easy to forget that, for example, a late-1990s Daewoo Lanos was unspeakably bad in a way that we don’t have to tolerate today.
It’s not the quality of today’s cars that underwhelms me but rather the quantity that overwhelms. In 1993, I could have told you the trim level and price of a car by a glimpse of its wheel. Today, I could stare for several minutes at a premium SUV and still be a little foggy about its name. I may be the UK’s only person sad about the Ora Funky Cat having its name changed t
