Cars I’ve driven a number of electric cars sold on their “sporting character,” and the verdict keeps coming back the same: plenty of shove, rarely any sport. These cars put on a convincing show to 60 mph, then hit a wall whose cause isn’t the battery everyone blames but the motor’s field weakening, compounded by the near-universal single fixed ratio. Eco tires, a chassis tuned to match them, power that swings with state of charge and pack temperature, braking handed to a regen-friction blend that is never quite repeatable: on every one of these counts, sportiness demands a consistency that electric cars don’t yet deliver. There’s nothing reactionary in saying so, since what’s missing is identifiable and therefore fixable. What lingers is the unsettling question posed by the Ioniq 5 N and its simulated gears: if the simulation becomes indistinguishable from the driver’s seat, will there be anything left to object to?
Cars Before long, driving a car by hand will be illegal as ordinary transportation, the way smoking on an airplane eventually became unthinkable. It won’t start with a decree but with an insurance premium. The Cybercab launch in Austin, Waymo’s 200 million driverless miles, and France’s six-week reversal on Tesla’s FSD all point the same way. This piece makes that case, states plainly what could prove it wrong, and ends with a confession: writing it mostly made me want to go driving.
Society On France’s “free flow” stretches of motorway, the barriers are gone, replaced by a seventy-two-hour countdown nobody told you about. Miss it and the bill climbs to 10 euros, then 90, then 375, for a toll that was worth six. Motorway companies can obtain your mailing address, but they only write once the penalty has accrued. Article 529-6 of the Code of Criminal Procedure lets them record the offense themselves and keep the proceeds. A business model that thrives only on the user’s ignorance isn’t progress, it’s a trap.
Cars On July 9, 2026, Volkswagen announced the unthinkable: its lineup cut in half, options slashed by 75 percent, four German plants under threat, and up to 100,000 jobs on the line. Days earlier, news broke that BYD had twice tried to take control of Renault, rebuffed by a French state playing the hero while Geely was already inside the house. The prevailing narrative blames China; it has the wrong culprit. Entrenched codetermination, an EV calendar set by decree, capital locked up by the Florange law: Europe’s auto industry isn’t dying of competition, it’s dying of fifty years of protection that excused it from adapting. Creative destruction deferred doesn’t disappear, it accumulates until the break, and the wolf never had to force the door: we sold it the keys.
Cars I haven’t given up on the 24 Hours of Le Mans out of weariness: the racing has never been stronger, yet the experience offered to the spectator has never been worse. Soaring prices, crowds crushed onto the Dunlop bridge, public access points sold off to private enclosures, and a logistical rout that begins well before the turnstiles: you pay more and more to see less and less. The root of the problem is simple: the ACO is an automobile club that masters the track, but welcoming hundreds of thousands of people is a profession in its own right, one that should be handed to specialists in managing large public crowds. That it can be done, the Nürburgring proves every year, drawing as many people as Le Mans across twenty-five kilometers where you can finally breathe. Until the Sarthe treats its spectators with the same seriousness it gives its drivers, I have taken to voting with my feet, and heading to Spa.
Cars Ferrari has unveiled its first electric car, the Luce, designed by Jony Ive and his studio LoveFrom: 1,050 horsepower, 550,000 euros, and the silhouette of an iPhone on wheels with nothing Italian left about it. The reception has been brutal. Montezemolo fears “the destruction of a myth,” Briatore piles on, and the stock has plunged six to eight percent in a matter of hours. Behind the car lies an entire Europe, one capable of regulating its decline but no longer of building its future, ready to sacrifice Scaglietti and Pininfarina on the altar of a transition nobody asked for. Which leaves the real question: does our civilization still have anything to offer, or must we now look to Cupertino for what Maranello once knew how to invent?
Cars Two euros to inflate your own tires is air resold at forty times its cost, a markup of nearly 4,000%. The richest part is that the motorway network, no stranger to easy rents, guarantees free air precisely where safety demands it, while your corner station bills you for it. You can invoke maintenance, real estate, or razor-thin fuel margins all you like: between a defensible few dozen cents and two euros collected, the gulf stays wide open. A small, barely approximate calculation of the most discreet racket on the forecourt.
Cars A phone maker just beat Audi and Porsche at the Nürburgring with the YU7 GT, and its electric motor already speaks our language: torque, efficiency, rpm, internal components. Mechanical fascination isn’t dying, it’s just changing addresses, and the very name of the unit, “V8S EVO,” gives away that the mystique of the combustion engine is still the most powerful selling point of all. But let’s distrust formulas that are too neat: this is neither an eternal recurrence nor a clean substitution. It’s a molt. The machinery persists and even hardens, the geek joins the mechanic rather than replacing him, and the sensual side reinvents itself in the whine of a rotor at 28,000 rpm. One question remains: will we know how to pass the old thrill on to those who will only ever have known the new?
Cars There are passions that don’t merely occupy the mind: they colonize it. Mine has a name (the automobile) and a scent: burned fuel mingled with hot rubber. I wanted to capture what really happens when a man, a machine, and a road cease to be three separate things. A tribute to the internal combustion engine, to the precise gesture, and to the brief communion that no algorithm will ever be able to delegate. And, in the final line, a confession I couldn’t keep to myself.