Steve Cropley
TUESDAY
Back in the office after a rushed Geneva show, the burning topic remains: was it a success? My own view is that it most certainly was – in the sense that it was a day well spent. Of course, it was tiny from the point of news value, but we still came home with plenty. Personally, I returned with a certainty that the all-new Dacia Duster (especially the three-pot hybrid 4x4) perfectly carries on the good work of the outgoing car that had been largely unaltered since 2009. There’s surely one of these in my future.
One of the ironies of this year’s show was that Fiat – whose fury at the way the 2020 event imploded so expensively seems as great as ever – actually added to the viability of the Geneva season by remotely announcing its “five new City Car concepts inspired by Panda” as an apparent spoiler (see p12). Fiat could have kept its powder dry until its much-ballyhooed 125th anniversary in four months’ time.
WEDNESDAY
Here’s an everyday tale of cheerful EV charging folk: a large slice of the Autocar editorial team has spent the first of two days at Bicester Heritage, the beautifully curated classic car hub just north of the busy Oxfordshire town, working on a 12-car comparison of under-£40k electric cars. It has been a fascinating exercise despite the wind and rain, but at 6.30pm it was time to foregather at the Bicester Holiday Inn with half a dozen of the cars that needed juice (the hotel has a bank of 7kW overnight chargers) before taking burgers and ice cream and settling for the night.
These Genie Point chargers turned out to be impervious to our credit cards, so we spent 20 minutes in the drizzle downloading the app half a dozen times, supplying all manner of unnecessary and intrusive details and watching LEDs on the chargers impetuously change colour until they finally yielded the desired electron flow. As our little crowd moved from charger to charger, a little cheer went up every time another flashing blue was obtained. It struck me how remarkably good-humoured this whole crowd scene was – which it absolutely wouldn’t have been if I were there on my own.
THURSDAY
Lots of moaning today, mostly the lingering, low-speed manoeuvring noises EVs make when going about in reverse or at very low forward speed, so as not to mow down citizens used to hearing approaching engine sounds. We’re all scratchin
