It’s an age thing

The 29 November issue contained a couple of letters that struck a chord. As another reader of 70-ish years young, I too will never buy an EV unless I have no alternative, and I too find less and less relevant content in the pages of Autocar, but that’s not your fault. You have a job to do, and that job is not to pander to the prejudices of any particular sector of your readership but to keep us all abreast of the details of what is available for us to buy, whether we wish to or not. Generally not, in my case.

Neither is it your fault that there seems to be a conscious effort by manufacturers to distance their EVS as much as possible from their ICE forebears in a number of design areas, and nowhere is this more evident than the interior. It’s led inevitably by Tesla, and the latest Model 3 encapsulates the trend. For my generation, nothing was cooler than a Jaguar dashboard, and when your first car was an EX-GPO Morris 1000 van, extra dials and switches were immediately added – although the impossibly desirable tachometer was also impossibly expensive. The ‘dashboard’ of the Model 3 therefore seems calculated to offend, but I’m sure that offending me is seen as acceptable collateral damage by its maker.

If your target audience gets its music via a smartphone rather than a jukebox or a Dansette, that’s what you end up with. I find this style of interior ambience depressing and I can’t fathom how anyone could have their spirits lifted by getting into the new Model 3. But that’s my problem, not Autocar’s, and fairly evidently not Tesla’s either. Bill Gysin

Cambridge