Traffic & Transport
How Europe’s EV makers shrank their product to challenge the bloated SUVs | Electric, hybrid and low-emission cars
The winding backstreets of London, Paris and Rome are a large part of their charm. But they are also a problem for electric carmakers. For a long time, squeezing big batteries into smaller, cheaper cars to fit European streets was too much of a problem, so manufacturers focused on bloated SUVs instead.
But that is finally changing. Battery technology has improved and Europe’s carmakers havecut manufacturing costs enough that they can now sell cars that might have a chance of fitting down a medieval lane or two.
The new Renault Twingo E-Tech is a case in point. Driving the city car through London attracts quizzical looks. Its bulbous headlights live up to the older petrol version’s “frog” nickname, and this particular model has a “mango yellow” paint job.
But small, European electric cars like this will be notable for more than their looks if they can slow the trend towards ever-bigger lumps of metal – and help fend off the challenge from Chinese rivals.
“The world is not going to be saved by big SUVs that are electric,” says Renault’s chief design officer, Laurens van den Acker, who led development on the Twingo. “The world is going to be saved by small electric cars. We need more of them and not less. We need them to become as popular as other cars.”
Car companies are probably not the obvious candidates for saving the world, but they do have a part to play in making vehicles that don’t pump several tonnes of planet-heating carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year. Road transport currently accounts for about a fifth of EU emissions.
Switching from a small petrol hatchback to an electric SUV represents two steps forward and one step back in environmental terms. The larger car will not produce emissions directly, but more bulk and bigger batteries mean higher emissions associated with manufacturing and more energy needed to move compared to a smaller vehicle – not to mention clogging up streets.
Renault’s Twingo (priced from €19,490 in France and probably selling for about £18,000 when it launches in the UK next year) will go up against an increasing number of rivals in the city car and small car segments of the automotive market. Citroën has the ë-C3 and is planning to revive the venerable 2CV name for a forthcoming small electric model. Peugeot, Citroën’s sister company in the Stellantis group, has the E-208.
Renault and van den Acker have already had a hit with the slightly larger Renault 5 E-Tech, the 2025 winner of Europe’s venerable Car of the Year award. The Mini Cooper Electric and the Fiat 500e have also been on sale for several years, and more are on the way, notably the Volkswagen ID. Polo. There is also the very fun niche of even smaller “quadricycles” such as the Citroën Ami and the Micro Microlino.
Reversing the trend
The blossoming of smaller cars comes after decades of vehicles getting bigger. At 4.41 metres (14ft 5in) on average, cars manufactured in 2024 were 5% longer than in 2016, according to Dutch government statisticians. They were also nearly 4% wider at 1.82 metres (5ft 10in) – a particular problem for anyone trying to navigate the canal-side streets of Amsterdam.
Smaller cars had started to disappear because it became harder for manufacturers to make money on them. Safety regulations meant extra kit, which was tricky to package into smaller spaces. And when the shift to electric came, batteries were initially too expensive for cars that had traditionally been the most affordable.
If any brands can claim to be synonymous with small cars, they are Mini and Smart – the latter particularly for its two-seater model, the Fortwo. Smart became a joint venture between Germany’s Mercedes-Benz and China’s Geely in 2019, when it turned its attention to larger electric models, and it is now planning an electric version of the Fortwo, called the #2 (pronounced, awkwardly, as “hashtag two”).
Smart Europe’s boss, Wolfgang Üfer, told an industry conference last month that the #2 was the model everyone, including his own mother, had been asking for. But it has taken longer to develop because of the design challenges of packaging everything into a footprint less than three metres long.
“Making a big car is easy,” says Xuan-Zheng Goh, Smart Europe’s director for product, marketing and communication. “Making a small car is a real big challenge. You need to make some careful decisions.”
Demand for smaller cars has always been there in Europe, he says, but the key to making them financially viable was the falling cost of batteries.
To clamp down further on costs, Renault pushed to design the Twingo in two years rather than four, and did some of the engineering work in China. It also cut the number of parts from between 1,500 and 2,000 found in other cars to only 750.
Within those constraints, van den Acker says, the company sought to make “EVs that you could actually fall in love with”. On the Twingo, that translates to quirky touches such as the headlights and bright colours, a profile in which the windscreen and bonnet form a single line, and sliding back seats to allow for more legroom or boot space.
It is also “French and good taste”, van den Acker adds. ”What you guys in England love.” The trade-off, though, is range: the Twingo has a 27.5kWh battery that gives it a range of 163 miles – easily enough for the school run, but meaning this reporter had to stop to charge for 20 minutes on a weekend return trip from London to Oxford.
Cupra, owned by Volkswagen, is another manufacturer shrinking its product with the launch of its electric Raval. Starting at £23,785, the car is “a gamechanger” for the company, according to Markus Haupt, the chief executive of Cupra and its Spanish sister brand, Seat.
“We said, OK, now is the moment to bring these cars,” Haupt says, pointing to increased demand for electric vehicles in the UK and Europe. “With this car we have the perfect package to convince [customers] that electro mobility is not the future, it’s the present.”
Getting the cost of production down was a crucial first step, Haupt adds. That required billions of euros of spending across the Volkswagen group to produce a new platform – a shared manufacturing blueprint used as the basis for several cars across different brands. Production costs should be about level with petrol cars “by end of this or beginning of next decade”, says Haupt.
Carmakers have another big reason to try to switch to electric for the millions of small cars in Europe: they need to hit emissions targets in order to avoid fines. That will be impossible without making EVs their top sellers.
However, governments setting the rules – including in the UK – have come under a lot of pressure from the industry to slow the pace of change. Carmakers may be able to sell more hybrids to meet their legal obligations – an option for some small cars such as the Toyota Aygo and the Fiat 500 – albeit at the cost of much higher carbon emissions.
Chinese rivals
But, as ever in the European car industry, there is an elephant in the room: Chinese rivals. China’s relatively new cities and wide roads do not necessarily need smaller cars, but the country’s carmakers know there is a market for them in Europe.
BYD, the world’s largest electric carmaker, has the Dolphin Surf city car, while Stellantis is helping to distribute the Chinese manufacturer Leapmotor’s T03. Smart’s cars, meanwhile, are designed in Europe but engineered and made in China.
Haupt said European manufacturers welcomed the competition, but that China’s manufacturers should be pushed to source components and produce cars in Europe, given the huge government subsidies across Chinese industry that last year prompted the EU to impose tariffs on Chinese cars.
The EU’s new “Made in Europe” rules are expected to go further still, giving a strong incentive to manufacturers to build within the bloc (with the UK at risk of being shut out). That may well mean European buyers will always pay more for small cars, but the upside might be more Chinese carmakers setting up factories there.
“I think for Europe, looking where we are standing now on our industrial basis, it will be super-attractive,” says Haupt. ”This would create employment. This would attract investment to Europe.”
Traffic & Transport
‘There was panic’: shock and horror in the Bedfordshire village next to the train crash | Bedfordshire
The weekend in Elstow usually sees jolly locals romping around the quaint, picturesque village walking their dogs or enjoying a pint at the pub. But on Saturday afternoon, the mood was more sombre.
“It’s horrible isn’t it. I hope everyone is all right,” said Nando DiGennaro. “It’s just a one out of a million thing.” The 45-year-old HGV driver is referring to the train crash nearby on Friday that has left the storybook Bedfordshire village, with its Tudor houses and lush, stony gardens, reeling. He said air ambulances hovered above the area into the evening as the scale of the tragedy became clear.
Taxi drivers told the Guardian they had driven stranded passengers all the way to London as they scrambled to return home.
From those onboard when the trains collided, stories emerged of the sheer shock and terror they faced. Brett Byatt, a teacher from Bedford who was on one of the trains, told the BBC’s Today programme he saw most people on his full carriage “bleeding profusely, or a situation where they couldn’t stand, or they couldn’t move their neck, and I saw a woman snap her leg”.
Another passenger onboard one of the struck trains, Dr Peter Knapp, said: “Suddenly there was an impact. I thought it was a bomb, I saw a lot of smoke and people on the floor, bloodied faces. A lot of people crying and screaming. In a video posted on social media, passengers can be seen bloodied and screaming shortly after the impact. “I managed to open the doors and squeeze out. I was in quite a lot of shock, my glasses had fallen off. We were in the middle of nowhere in a field,” Knapp said.
The crash between EMR services between St Pancras and Corby and St Pancras and Nottingham has left one train driver dead and nine people in a critical condition. In total 100 people were injured.
One Elstow local, who did not want to be named, was in the car with her daughter near the crash site when it became clear “something devastating” had happened. “I witnessed emergency services flying around and you could sense there was panic,” she said. “The sense of worry and anxiety of knowing something dreadful had happened was unnerving in itself.”
She said some of her neighbours were on that train. “Some really good friends of mine were on that train and have got significant injuries,” she said, including one with a head injury. Another friend onboard ran out of battery on her phone. “Her husband couldn’t find her until 4am. For him, it must have been tragic not knowing what happened to her.”
The woman said her friend’s son had full view of the crash site from his house. “There was loads of people throwing out water and food over the fence. They did everything they could to try and help those people,” she said.
Her daughter, like many other people in the village, regularly uses the EMR service. “There’s a sombre mood in the village. Everyone’s feeling emotional,” she said.
Another villager, who did not want to be named, was on an EMR train back from London after watching Les Miserables. He knew something was amiss when “one of my party started getting texts saying: ‘Are you OK?’”. Not long after, they all began receiving similar messages.
“It’s a commuter town and so many people use those trains. Even though it was commuter time thankfully it was a Friday,” he said. Nevertheless, he was concerned because “there was a Harry Styles concert and a lot of people from Bedford were going to that”.
He thinks the impact of the crash will be felt throughout the village and the wider area. “Our kids go to the local Bedford school. It’s inevitable that some people connected with the schools will have been impacted,” he said.
“It’s the classic shock of ‘it doesn’t happen to us’,” he said. “The trains are such a big part of local life. It makes everybody realise it could have been them or their children.”
Traffic & Transport
Passenger of Bedford crash says 90% of people on his carriage were injured | Rail transport
A survivor of the Bedford train crash has told how bodies were flung across the carriages, leaving people with broken bones and deep wounds after the rush hour collision on Friday night.
Brett Byatt, a teacher from Bedford, was onboard the East Midlands Railway (EMR) service that rammed into another slower travelling train resulting in a crash which killed the driver, left 89 with injuries and 33 needing urgent hospital treatment.
Speaking to the BBC’s Today programme, Byatt said the train wasn’t going at full speed and estimated they were only about five minutes into their journey when the collision happened.
“The people in first class ended up with stomach and rib injuries, because they went into the tables they have in first class, and EMR trains, the way that they’re structured with seats, was probably the worst way it could have been structured for a train crash.
“They (the seats) face each other in the three by three and the two by three, and … when people flew into one another, the seats that they were on, like, broke backwards into the people behind them.”
Byatt said he believed that 90% of passengers on his carriage were injured.
“I’d probably say from three to four of us were uninjured in a full carriage; everyone else had either a serious wound that was bleeding profusely, or a situation where they couldn’t stand, or they couldn’t move their neck, and I saw a woman snap her leg.”
Immediately after the collision, Byatt and other passengers began attending to people with first aid until emergency services arrived 10 minutes later. He thought he escaped injury because he was standing near the doors, clutching a stanchion.
Asked how he was feeling in the aftermath of the accident, Byatt said he initially felt shocked but was now “pretty angry”.
“I don’t know at whom, who specifically, but it’s more about the, we’ve got one of the oldest railway networks, and signal failures happen a lot, and now I’m just wondering, why would a train driver lose his life over this?”
Tony Miles, a prominent railway journalist, told Today that the train would have had a black box able to allow investigators to ascertain precisely what happened before the crash.
“The signal system has a data recorder, they will know every switch that was pressed, they’ll know every control that was activated in both of the trains, they will have second-by-second data from the trains as to what was going on, so I suspect that there’s probably people who’ve got a reasonable insight into what happened already, but that doesn’t mean they’ll release it,” said Miles.
Eddie Dempsey, general secretary of the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT), said: “We are devastated to learn that a train driver and former RMT rep has tragically died as a result of (Friday’s) crash between Luton and Bedford.
“The thoughts of RMT are with their family, friends, colleagues and the Aslef trade union at this awful time.”
Dave Calfe, general secretary of the train drivers’ union Aslef, said: “Our thoughts tonight are with the family and friends of the driver who died in the crash near Bedford and with the passengers who were injured in the accident.
“We want to thank the emergency services who responded so quickly to help those onboard.”
A team of rail accident investigation branch inspectors have been sent to the site to gather evidence.
Network Rail said on Saturday morning: “We’re deeply saddened that a railway colleague has tragically died following the incident near Bedford. Our thoughts are with their family, friends and colleagues, and with everyone affected.
“Our teams are on site working closely with the emergency services and industry partners. We want to thank the emergency services and the wider railway family for their professionalism and swift response.
“In the meantime, we ask passengers to please check before they travel.”
Traffic & Transport
Heathrow third runway GDP yield may be 90% less than original estimate | Heathrow airport
The economic boost from a Heathrow third runway could be a tiny fraction of previous estimates, new government analysis shows, while the overall trade-off from the bigger airport could set the UK back by as much £62.5bn.
As ministers promised to speed up expansion of the London airport in the name of economic growth, documents prepared by the Department for Transport said the runway was expected to boost GDP by only up to 0.05% – 90% less than the 0.5% previously stated.
The figures, described as historically bad by one economist, put the arguments for a third runway in fresh doubt. The DfT calculates the net present value of the scheme, even if entirely privately financed, to be between -£23.4bn and £-62.5bn. Net present value is defined by the DfT as the overall social value of expanding Heathrow, compared with not doing it, adding all costs and benefits.
That figure incorporates between £29bn-£42.4bn in positive benefits to passengers – primarily, lower air fares – and wider economic benefits.
But the government’s assessment is that those gains are outweighed by the social and environmental impact of building the runway. Profits at airlines and other airports are expected to fall by around £25bn, according to the appraisal.
The chancellor, Rachel Reeves, has championed rapid expansion of Heathrow in the name of economic growth, which she described as “this government’s top priority” as the consultation for the next stage of legislative was launched on Thursday.
The documents state that “external analysis, commissioned by the DfT, has found that the scheme could add up to 0.05% to GDP in 2056”.
Figures previously cited by the government have been in the range of 0.43%-0.5% growth.
Heathrow said the new figures did not capture all the economic benefits, while a government spokesperson said they were “only part of the picture”.
However, Alex Chapman, head of economic policy at the New Economics Foundation said: “In its desperation for a fraction of a percent of GDP growth, this government has lost its way. They said they were backing Heathrow expansion for economic reasons but their own analysis shows it won’t deliver.
“The results from the department’s impact assessment must be some of the worst in history, and reflect what we’ve been saying for the past year: the economic argument for expansion does not add up.”
A DfT spokesperson said: “Net present value is just one part of the overall picture – crucially, an expanded Heathrow could support over 60,000 new local jobs and deliver £40bn of benefits to the UK.
“This will attract international investment and strengthen Britain’s connectivity, and we have been clear that expansion will be financed by the private sector.”
Heathrow said the DfT appraisal model excluded other ways in which expansion could increase the UK’s economic competitiveness and did not capture the value of UK trade.
It said the Treasury had consistently found that a bigger airport would grow the economy and benefit the UK, and was backed by trade unions, regional airports and businesses.
The documents were published as the government announced the next stage in rapid approval of the third runway, with a consultation before a MPs vote, and ministers promising spades in the ground by 2029.
Heathrow’s proposed 3,500-metre runway would divert the M25 motorway and demolish about 800 homes, to add about 276,000 extra flights a year. The scheme is estimated to cost £33bn, although a recent independent assessment for the Civil Aviation Authority said the project was likely to cost between £32.7bn and £52.4bn.
A DfT health impact assessment separately showed that the third runway could significantly harm the health and wellbeing of up to 3 million people living near Heathrow. The official report said an expanded Heathrow was also likely to worsen access to housing, education, healthcare, open space, and transport, as well as affect water quality and community cohesion.
The Lib Dem transport spokesperson, Olly Glover, said: “Labour can’t show how a Heathrow expansion squares with our climate commitments, or that it can be delivered anywhere near legal noise and air pollution limits.”
“Real leadership delivers economic progress without trashing our climate commitments or steamrolling the communities in the flight path.”
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