Business as usual?

The widespread calamities of the past year have affected the car industry more than almost any other. Why then, asks Ed Wiseman, are there so many great new cars to choose from?

WIf you want a car that can cruise at 200mph, you can have one, some can even read road signs

e probably don’t need to explain why this year’s crop of cars is a little smaller than usual. Sure, we’ve had a number of exciting new launches – some of which will be covered in the next few pages – but the annual car harvest is a bit more compact than it was a couple of years ago, with manufacturers carefully prioritising product releases and manufacturing capacity. The pandemic, natural disasters, political upheaval and widespread supplychain disruption have disproportionately impacted on the car industry, which was already facing considerable headwinds.

But, somehow, it doesn’t feel like there’s any real shortage of new cars to be excited by. Those that are coming on sale in this uncertain post- lockdown world are still phenomenally impressive, the world’s automotive engineers still designing and building machines that would have been unthinkable 10 years ago.

The Hyundai Ioniq 5 looks like something from a sci-fi comic book and boasts an advanced electric powertrain that makes the oncefuturistic 2009 Nissan Leaf look like a primitive toy. The new Audi RS3 is a hatchback that produces 395bhp – comfortably more powerful than a Lamborghini Countach or a Ferrari Testarossa. And the Dacia Sandero, while extremely ordinary on a mechanical level, is still more affordable in real terms than any car on sale in the 20th century.

And that’s ignoring the relatively prosaic advances in safety and economy, which continue to make our roads less dangerous and less polluted. Then there are the even smaller advances in comfort and technology, which make the cars we occupy that little bit nicer. And for those of us who need a car to perform off- road, machines such as the new Land Rover Defender feel like spaceships compared with the illustrious models that came before.

Pretty much any of the cars in this supplement are an improvement on the models we featured in last year’s. Because while the industry has been rocked by the storms we’ve all endured over the past 18 months, it continues to do what it does best – innovate.

Of course, that’s not exclusive ive to the automotive sector. Engineers eers and designers in all fields push humanity further into the future with th every passing day, often with h more meaningful, impactful results ults than the relatively minor technological nological advances mentioned above. Medicine, computing, aerospace – we’ve all watched the news over the past few months and been amazed at vaccines and rockets and all the other r feats of engineering that make our world so remarkable.

The difference with cars is s that you can go into a dealership and purchase the fruits of this process. Thousands usands of immensely intelligent and d highly skilled men and women have e worked for years to make, for example, ple, a car that can safely safe park itself, and now you can go and buy b one. Hydrogen fuel cell cars exist. If I you want a car that can cruise at 20 200mph, or hit 62mph from a standstill i in under four seconds, you can have one. on Some cars can even read traffic signs signs, for heaven’s sake.

I could t talk at length about the various developments dev that have been made available avai to us humble car buyers ove over the past few years, but there would be little point; most of us still buy a n new car based in no small part on whi whimsy. But remember that behind ever every one of the models on sale are thousands thousa of people spending millions of d days and billions of dollars, yen, euros and pounds to make cars safer, clean cleaner, faster and better with every passing passin year.