News

The Abu Dhabi Autonomous Racing League (A2RL) has held the first multi-car driverless race ever staged in Europe, running five fully autonomous single-seaters at Imola on 5 September. UAE team Kinetiz won after the two fastest cars collided, while two-time champions TUM were eliminated on the formation lap. It was messy, and that is exactly the point.

Robert Shwartzman will drive Peugeot's revised 9X8 in the World Endurance Championship from 2027, closing a season in which the 2025 Indianapolis 500 polesitter had no race programme at all after Prema pulled out of IndyCar. He already has a Hypercar win, taken at Austin in 2024 with AF Corse's Ferrari. The 9X8 has 29 starts, four podiums and no wins.

Volkswagen has taken over 30,000 European orders for the ID. Polo and buyers configuring one now are quoted at least ten months. Skoda's Epiq is past 35,000 with some deliveries slipping to mid-2027. The bottleneck is not demand: it is Martorell and Pamplona.

Only one Ferrari Enzo left Maranello in Matte Nero Opaco, ordered new by a member of Brunei's royal family and delivered to their London address. It now sits in Ontario on New Zealand papers showing 5,763 km from new, and RM Sotheby's is selling it through its sealed platform on 30 September, where the result will never be published.

Horse Powertrain has revealed the B20, a 130 kg 2.0-litre turbo sealed to the IPX8 standard and rated to keep running under 1.1 metres of water. It makes 190 to 252 hp and reaches 48.4 percent thermal efficiency. Its only application so far, the Geely Galaxy Cruiser 700, is homologated to wade 800 mm, because wading depth is set by the vehicle rather than the engine.

BMW has finished driving-dynamics testing on the combustion-engined 3 Series at Miramas and confirmed the car at the top of the range. The M350 xDrive is the only six-cylinder in the line-up, with 443 hp and 0 to 100 km/h in 4.1 seconds, and it is the first 3 Series with a drift mode. Production starts in the second half of 2026. The drift mode does not.

BMW began collecting event-based video from consenting iX3 owners in Germany on 1 April 2026, and from mid-September the programme covers the European Union with one change: faces and number plates are no longer blurred inside the car. Up to 120 seconds of raw footage per incident now travels to BMW's servers, where the obscuring happens only once a developer opens the file by hand.

Honda gave Ayrton Senna a red NSX for his stays in Portugal in 1991, and chassis T000233 now heads to RM Sotheby's London sale on 31 October with a £500,000 to £800,000 estimate. The floor is the same figure the car was publicly advertised at in April 2024. Senna's role in creating the NSX is real, but considerably smaller than the legend around it.

Dacia has replaced the Spring with a Slovenian-built car on Renault's AmpR Small platform, 3.85 metres long and 18 cm wider than before, with a 27.5 kWh LFP battery good for 250 km. The Expression opens below €18,000 and the Journey stays under €20,000. The synchronous motor is still a Shanghai e-Drive unit, and the Chinese-built old Spring stays on sale underneath it.