My week in cars

MONDAY

I’m still coming down after my drive in a £400k Rolls-Royce Spectre EV at Goodwood a week ago, one of the experiences of the year.

It is always tough to step into a really expensive car and say sensible things straight away. It’s so patently intended for people in a different league – owners of a dozen fine cars and with bizjets ready to roll – that you really should change your mindset before opening your flytrap.

What stays with me is the wall-to-wall magnificence of the Spectre – not just the expected beautiful paint and build quality but also the way a perfectly proportioned and beautifully restrained two-door body can work in a vehicle fully 5.5 metres long. Some expensive EVs have trouble with ride control, but not Spectre – it’s marvellous. And I loved how the visibility and steering precision soon made it shrink.

Looking back, I reckon that in an era when wealthy people spend millions on less substantial, less useful, less developed supercars, £400k for this beautiful, usable machine makes it almost a bargain.

TUESDAY

Bombshell news that Fiat could be planning to fit an electrified petrol powertrain to the purpose-designed EV platform of the 500e is being correctly taken as evidence that the hybrids we thought of as stopgap models will last much longer. Especially since Fiat will take until 2026 even to get the first one into a showroom.

This curious turn of events does set one speculating on what other EVs might be ‘improved’ by fitment of a petrol engine (the Ford Mustang Mach-E might ride and sound better with a nice 5.0-litre turbo V8 up front, for instance). But I can’t help thinking of this as a retrograde step that reflects badly on the governments who create car market conditions. We all know where we’re going – let’s continue the EV journey without stumbles like this.

WEDNESDAY

News that EVs will be easier to clock than today’s petrol crop is rather depressing, although surely the practice of recording growing mileages on annual MOT tests will continue to help.

Clocking is fraud, of course, and needs elimination, but it’s still the source of amusing folklore – such as the many tales of villains who found ‘Hello again’ scratched on the backs of the dials they had just removed.

I was once well and truly snared by a false mileage on a healthy-looking Saab 900 Turbo – although, technically spea