Big Little Car

Another video from one of the YouTube Channels I subscribe to...

This is a review by the petite Imogen Bhopal of the Hyundai Ioniq 3 on Robert Llewelyn's Everything Electric CARS channel.

I say "petite"...

...she looks quite large here:

 

Or is it just a small car?

 

Then again? 

   

Is it a small woman and a big car?

 

At the start of the review, she states that they only had 30-ish minutes with the car.

 

And the more I watched it, the more it looked like she and the car were nowhere near each other.

 

She and the car appear to be digitally combined. 

 

Like Marc Almond & Gene Pitney in the video to the brilliant "Something's Gotten Hold Of My Heart."

 

Then, all of a sudden, just before 6 minutes into the review, she opens the boot!

 

She also climbs in to it:

 

This really excites the commenters.

But I suppose the biggest takeaway is that you can stash the body of a petite person under the boot floor of a Hyundai Ioniq 3.

Which I suspect isn't what they were really going for.

Build Your Dreams - like swimming or flying cars.

Autocar this week had this story.

It is titled, "BYD's bold plan to take on Mercedes, Ferrari and more"

To which my gut reaction was, "Then why does it look like a Mclaren?"

Not that I could read the article because it is hidden behind Autocar's paywall and I'm not paying £19.99 a month or £199 a year just to read some articles that would only be of interest to some people in the automotive industries.

That car is a Yangwang U9 and Yangwang is the posh arm of BYD - my only previous mention of whom I was grudgingly impressed by.

So I looked further into the Yangwang U9 and found this Australian article basically saying it can actually jump over potholes.

And it looks like it can!

There is footage.

And then I found Robert Llewelyn talking about it and its sibling the Yangwang U8.

The U8 is a Land-Rover lookalike that can swim.

There is footage.

He even forgives the U8 for being a hybrid.

There doesn't seem to be a Yangwang U2 though.

So it won't be trying to save the World (or "byd" in Welsh)

Don't go Changan

Just watched Robert Llewelyn reviewing another boring SUV.

A very big boring Chinese SUV.

And it's electric - at least in Australia and the UK it will be - they have a hybrid version in China which gives Robert an excuse to be snidey about fossil fuel burners.

Anyway, here's the video:

It's going to be a Deepal in Oz and a Changan over here - doesn't seem to be any logic in the naming. But it won't be anything in the US because they aren't getting it.

The video title is, "Why Is This Super Cheap Luxury SUV coming to OZ & UK but NOT USA?!?"

Despite the capitals and exclamation marks, they don't go on to answer the question.

But it's probably something to do with Elon not wanting the competition.

The stand-out bit of the video for me though was about four minutes in when Robert casually dropped in to the story that the car was recording and filming everything that was said in it and around it!

What!?

Someone in China is listening in to everything.

I'm hoping that this is just because it is a press car for the Australian launch and they are trying to gather as much insight and opinion as possible - and they must have been up front about it or he wouldn't have known about it.

But what if the Chinese government have this installed in all Chinese cars?  Robert wasn't sure where the recording devices were.  Do I need to take a closer look at my 5 year old Volvo?  Although that was built in The US so hopefully not.

Well just to be on the safe side, that President Xi seems like a really decent chap.

Leap of Faith

 Those bloody Chinese ripping off western cars...

I mean just look at that uglified Fiat 500 clone - Fiat must be furious.

Actually it is Fiat that is going to be importing it into Europe!

It's called the Leapmotor T03 and Autocar have the story here.

They seem to think that it could leapfrog the competition to become the cheapest electric "proper" car on sale here.

One of the YouTube Channels I subscribe to is The Fully Charged Show.  I'm a bit in two minds about it because I really like Robert Llewelyn but I was really put off by this video. The woman presenting it may or may not have been correct but her attitude and arrogance made me feel like she was going out of her way to prove that synthetic fuels would never be viable so the whole piece felt too biased to be useful.  Then the chap on this piece just seemed to be trying too hard - he's talking about the forthcoming Citroen e-C3 which is another contender for the cheapest electric "proper" car on sale here.

Which is why I suddenly starting talking about YouTube subscriptions.

It wasn't a leap into the dark.

Carpool

I'd never heard of this before but a new series starts on the Dave channel this Thursday involving Robert Llewelyn (Red Dwarf, Scrapheap Challenge) driving a different celebrity guest around in a Toyota Prius each week whilst interviewing them.

It's actually not that new because he's being making these shows for ages as Internet-only shows. I found his site and found a whole load of them to view. I watched the Phill Jupitus one and the David Mitchell one which were enjoyable - the PJ one was too sweary for inclusion in my Blog so I've embedded the one where Robert interviews my favouritest smarmy person - motoring journalist Quentin Willson:

There's a lot of pro-electric car stuff in that episode but it's done in such a way, by at least one petrol-head (Willson), that you can actually see the logic in the arguments and if the loony eco-mafia types had this sort of mentality instead, there'd probably be a lot less scepticism and disdain and milk-float references aimed at the whole electric car movement.

The previous guests on his show seem to be a varied mix of people with Sir Patrick Stewart probably the most famous. There's also nearly the full set of Robert's colleagues from Red Dwarf - so next time I've half-an-hour to kill, I may just give this a go.