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
Number of cloned number plates on UK roads at record high, data shows | Transport
The number of reported “cloned” vehicles involved in offences on UK roads has reached a record high, official data shows.
More than 11,400 drivers contacted the DVLA last year after being issued with fines for offences they said they did not recognise or accept responsibility for – most of which are believed to be down to cloning, where a number plate is copied fraudulently on similar vehicles to avoid enforcement cameras.
The number of complaints about misattribution was 9% higher than in 2024 and almost double the figure recorded in 2018, according to the RAC motoring organisation, which analysed data obtained under freedom of information requests.
The rising figures underscore concerns about the number of illegal number plates in use, allowing criminals to evade detection and dangerous drivers to avoid being caught.
Although drivers should provide number plate suppliers with the V5C vehicle logbook and proof of identity, an investigation last year uncovered more than 130 official suppliers in the UK willing to sell cloned versions, which allow drivers to dodge police and congestion charges.
Cloning vehicles has left many innocent car owners having to struggle to prove they were not responsible when enforcement camera images apparently caught their vehicle committing offences.
A parallel concern is the use of “ghost” plates which are designed to be unreadable by the UK’s 18,000 automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) cameras, which enforce safety measures such as speed limits or lane closures on smart motorways.
The RAC said the UK needed to overhaul an outdated and poorly regulated number plate system. Its head of policy, Simon Williams, said: “If number plate suppliers were carrying out all the checks they’re supposed to, it would be much harder for dodgy drivers to buy cloned plates in the first place. It’s only when a fine arrives at a vehicle keeper’s home address that they realise someone else is driving around using their vehicle’s number plate illegally.”
He said that more also needed to be done to catch drivers with ghost plates, “whether that’s more police officers being equipped with handheld devices that can detect if plates are unreadable, updating ANPR cameras and introducing higher security standards for number plates and for those who produce them”.
The government last month said there would be a new nationwide crackdown on illegal number plates, with funding from the Department for Transport for a new roads policing team. A new National Roads Policing Coordination Centre would share intelligence as well as trialling new technology such as specialised goggles to detect number plates that have been designed to be unreadable by cameras.
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Drivers using an incorrectly displayed number plate can be fined up to £1,000.
A Department for Transport spokesperson said: “We’re cracking down on illegal number plates with significant investment in a new roads policing team and innovative tech to stamp out the scourge of cloned numberplates.
“Illegal number plates help facilitate crime, and we are supporting the police to work with the DVLA to make it easier to report these crimes and support victims through a new digital tool.”
Traffic & Transport
‘A big responsibility’: Clifton Suspension Bridge master hails £7.6m renovation | Bristol
The job does not give the holder age-old perks such as the right to drive sheep across the great structure, but the title “bridge master” does have a certain ring to it.
“I don’t tend to say I’m the bridge master when I’m at a party,” said Tristan Ralph, the current holder of the title. “But people do seem to know and bring it up. It’s a job less ordinary, isn’t it? It’s a Victorian sounding title and people are really, really interested.”
There is, however, nothing ceremonial about the title. Ralph is in charge of maintaining and running the Clifton Suspension Bridge, a UK feat of engineering, without any public money.
“It does feel a big responsibility,” said Ralph. “When the chairman of the trustees rang to say we’d like you to do it, you suddenly feel the pressure. It’s so famous and people in Bristol, quite rightly, are proud and almost possessive of it. Bristolians think: ‘It’s our bridge.’”
The bridge master – and the not-for-profit charity the Clifton Suspension Bridge Trust – have the task of maintaining the bridge “in perpetuity”. “I’m a temporary custodian,” Ralph said. “When I’m finished, I have to make sure it is handed on in just [as] good a condition or better than I inherited it.”
Ralph, a bridge engineer by profession, was speaking to mark the conclusion of a large refurbishment project that has taken two and a half years and involved hand-painting more than 4,000 original iron chain links and installing an energy-efficient lighting system. It has cost about £7.5m. “It’s been a big job,” he said. “But it’s come pretty much bang on budget, which is rare these days.”
That is important because, to many visitors’ surprise, the bridge does not receive public funding. “The upkeep of the bridge, the running of it, the salary costs and everything are all paid only by our toll money,” said Ralph. “People think that we might get something from local or central government. But, no, it’s just the toll money.”
Motorised vehicles – including motorcycles – pay £1 to cross the bridge. There is no charge for pedestrians, cyclists or horse riders. As well as being a beautiful structure, it is also a vital part of Bristol and North Somerset’s transport system.
Ralph said: “It draws the tourists in. We get visitors from hundreds of countries every year but primarily, it’s still a vital piece of local infrastructure. If the bridge wasn’t here, the difference it would make to Bristol traffic would be incredible. We average over 8,000 vehicles a day still. Maintaining it as a transport link is utterly vital.”
The end of the refurbishment does not mean Ralph can rest on his laurels and spend more time hobnobbing with members of the Bridge Owners Forum.
“In a few years, we’ll need to paint the underside of the bridge. The under-bridge gantry unit itself will be replaced over the coming years. So there’s always something. We need to keep on top of things. It’s like your house or your car. If you just ignore it, don’t do things for a couple of years, they start breaking down.”
As in most walks of life, the climate emergency is a challenge Ralph and the trust are having to face. “We were monitoring the bridge daily in the summer with the very hot weather. And maybe if the bridge was being designed today, there would be a little bit more robustness around wind.”
The prevailing south-west wind is not usually a problem and the bridge rarely has to close but if it blows directly through the Avon Gorge it can be more difficult. “We need to keep an eye at both the magnitude of any wind events but also their frequency,” Ralph said.
The engineer admires the bridge’s designers, including Isambard Kingdom Brunel. “It’s remarkably advanced for its time.”
And there is no sign that its days are numbered, largely because the Victorians did not skimp. Ralph said: “There are three layers of chains. The original Brunel design only had two, but because it went from a timber design to a cast-iron deck, they upped it to three.
“There’s a little bit of comfort in there. Today there might be pressure to say, well, can you keep it to two, but in Victorian times they did like to add a little bit of meat on the bones.
“It doesn’t have a finite life. There’s no end date in our plans. We all just keep it going in the highest standards as we can. It’s in really good condition as long as we keep doing what we need to do, keep our attention on it and don’t let things drift. Forever is a long time but there’s no reason why we have any need to worry at the moment.”
Uber has begun a trial of autonomous vehicles on the streets of Manchester as it looks to bring robotaxis to cities around the UK.
The first self-driving cars are operating, using the technology of its partner firms Pony and Verne, with whom Uber recently launched Europe’s first autonomous taxi service in the Croatian capital, Zagreb.
Uber said it was “excited to take this first step toward making this technology accessible to people across the UK”.
In social media posts, Verne said it had “started our autonomous vehicle testing in Manchester”, while Pony said there were “plans to bring robotaxis to the city” and that testing was under way.
The tests involve the company mapping the streets of the city in north-west England with a safety driver behind the wheel and no passengers.
Limited passenger services started last month in London, but with a safety driver in the front seat of cars supplied by Wayve under Transport for London’s licensing rules for private hire vehicles.
The next steps are unclear. Opposition from Uber drivers, their unions and the capital’s politicians to the rollout of robotaxis is mounting. The GMB and ADCU unions have both said thousands of drivers jobs will be lost and have called for help for those affected.
A critical report from London assembly’s transport committee this week called for the government to devolve authority over autonomous taxi services.
It said there was “considerable uncertainty about many of the claimed benefits of autonomous passenger vehicles”, and fears over the impact on public transport and congestion, as well as safeguarding and accessibility for disabled passengers.
There has been no official application to launch passenger services in Manchester so far, and the vehicles are operating under government licence via the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency (DVSA) and the Department for Transport.
A spokesperson for Transport for Greater Manchester said it wanted the city’s taxis to be the safest in the country.
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“New technologies play an increasingly important role in the growth of our city region,” they said. “But they need to be introduced responsibly, safely and with real thought about what it means for our residents.
“Although no applications have been made to operate driverless taxis in the Greater Manchester, we’re aware of potential interest from companies to do so.
“Safety will always be our top priority, and we will need strong assurances that no vehicles will operate on our roads that pose any risk to residents.”
Uber said it expected to offering robotaxi trips in as many as 15 cities worldwide by the end of 2026, mainly in the US and the Middle East.
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