NEW CARS

The Volkswagen ID.3 Is Getting a Do-Over—and This Time VW Means It

Volkswagen is preparing to give the ID.3 something it’s arguably needed since day one: a proper rethink. The Golf-sized electric hatchback is due for a substantial refresh later this year, bringing with it a redesigned exterior, a reworked interior, and meaningful upgrades to tech and hardware. We first caught wind of the changes last year, but fresh late-stage spy photos now offer a clearer look at how serious VW is about fixing its early EV missteps.

When it lands, the updated ID.3 will be thrust back into the thick of the C-segment EV fight, squaring up against rivals like the Cupra Born, Skoda Elroq, Renault Megane E-Tech, Kia EV3, and the upcoming Hyundai Ioniq 3. Pricing hasn’t been confirmed, but expect it to hover around today’s entry point—roughly £30,860—keeping the ID.3 squarely in the mainstream electric conversation.

A Sharper Face for VW’s Electric Hatch

Volkswagen isn’t throwing away the ID.3’s basic proportions, but it is giving the car a much-needed facial adjustment. The most noticeable changes are concentrated at the front and rear, where revised lighting, reshaped bumpers, and new wheel designs aim to make the ID.3 look less like a design experiment and more like a proper Volkswagen.

The headlights now appear to sit lower and stretch visually toward the VW badge via a larger central graphic. There’s a strong chance this panel will be illuminated, and it may also conceal the brand’s latest matrix-beam LED tech. Below that, the front bumper gets more sculpting, larger outer vents to help airflow, and a small central opening—subtle on paper, but far more assertive than the barely perceptible 2024 update.

The goal is clear: pull the ID.3 back toward the brand’s new design language, previewed by the ID.2all concept. Expect cleaner lines, more confidence, and a more traditional two-box hatchback shape in place of the current car’s near-monovolume silhouette.

Inside, Buttons Are Back (Yes, Really)

If the exterior tweaks are evolutionary, the cabin changes promise to be closer to revolutionary—at least by VW standards. The ID.3’s minimalist, touch-heavy interior was widely criticized for sacrificing usability in the name of futurism, and Volkswagen seems ready to admit that experiment didn’t quite land.

The updated car will introduce a redesigned dashboard and interfaces, including the return of physical buttons, much like those previewed in the ID.2all. Expect higher-quality materials as well, with more texture and soft-touch surfaces intended to elevate the ID.3 beyond its current, slightly austere feel.

VW’s development boss Kai Grünitz has been blunt about the direction change:

“We will bring a re-skin for the ID.3, with a completely new design language going back to where we originally came from, and return to what Volkswagen is known for.”

Better Batteries, Better Value

The improvements don’t stop at the surface. Volkswagen is also targeting meaningful gains under the skin, particularly when it comes to battery performance and cost efficiency.

According to Grünitz, the company has made progress on battery costs, performance, and driver-assistance features—changes that should benefit both VW’s bottom line and the customer experience. In current form, the ID.3 is offered with battery packs ranging from 52 kWh to 79 kWh, the latter delivering a claimed 369 miles of range in GTX trim. Expect that figure to improve slightly as new battery tech filters in.

Crucially, the ID.3 will retain the core strengths of the MEB platform, including rear-wheel drive and a multi-link rear suspension. Front-drive layouts and simpler hardware will remain reserved for smaller, entry-level EVs.

GTI, GTX, and the Question of Electric Fun

One of the bigger unanswered questions surrounds performance variants. Volkswagen has softened its stance on what qualifies for a GTI badge in the electric era, suggesting it’s open to the idea—as long as the car feels right.

“Bringing performance to battery-electric vehicles is easy,” Grünitz said. “But creating fun-driving vehicles is much more difficult.”

That philosophy hints at more than just raw power figures. VW is reportedly exploring ideas such as simulated gear changes—similar to what Hyundai has done with the Ioniq 5 N—to inject character and driver engagement into future GTX and GTI models.

“We have a lot of ideas about what to do with this,” Grünitz added. “You will see this, both for GTI and GTX.”

The ID.3, Rewritten

Taken together, the changes suggest Volkswagen is treating the ID.3 refresh as more than a mid-cycle facelift. This is a course correction—one that acknowledges where the brand overreached and attempts to bring its electric hatchback back in line with the values that made cars like the Golf enduring benchmarks.

If VW delivers on its promises, the updated ID.3 could finally feel less like a concept car that escaped into production—and more like the electric Volkswagen it should have been from the start.

Source: AutoExpress

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How the Bugatti Veyron Redefined What a Road Car Could Be

Two decades later, the Bugatti Veyron still feels less like a car and more like a punctuation mark—an emphatic, titanium-reinforced period at the end of an era when engineers were still supposed to color inside the lines. Before electrification rewrote the rules and before hypercar became a marketing category, the Veyron arrived and casually doubled the world’s expectations. Not nudged. Doubled.

For Loris Bicocchi, the man tasked with finding the edge of that madness—and then leaning on it—the Veyron didn’t just reset benchmarks. It erased them.

Bicocchi wasn’t new to Bugatti when the Veyron program began. In the early 1990s, he had already helped shake down the EB110 GT and the even more feral EB110 SS, cars that proved Bugatti’s four-wheel-drive obsession could coexist with genuine supercar violence. Those machines were fast enough to recalibrate your sense of speed. The Veyron, however, demanded a factory reset.

When Bugatti called in 2001, Bicocchi knew only the rumors. Everyone did. A thousand horsepower. Four hundred kilometers per hour. Sixteen cylinders. Sixteen. Even today, the spec sheet reads like a typo. Back then, it sounded like science fiction whispered through paddocks and test tracks.

His first drive came at Michelin’s Ladoux test facility in Clermont-Ferrand, in a red-and-black prototype that carried more expectations than body panels. Bicocchi didn’t wait for the official schedule. He climbed in on Sunday, before the engineers arrived, just to feel the thing. By Monday morning, he was vibrating with impressions.

And disbelief.

At the time, the Veyron produced roughly twice the power of anything else you could theoretically register and insure. That wasn’t a performance gap; it was a canyon. Bicocchi, a driver whose résumé included the fastest cars of their respective generations, had nothing to compare it to. There was no mental filing cabinet labeled “what this feels like.” Full throttle wasn’t even an option at first. The experience bordered on the surreal.

That sense of the unknown defined the entire program. Once you crest 300 km/h, Bicocchi explains, the physics you’ve relied on your entire career quietly pack up and leave. Aerodynamics stop being a supporting character and take over the story. Stability becomes a negotiation. Every millimeter, every contour, every algorithm matters. At 400 km/h, you’re no longer driving so much as managing consequences.

And yet, the Veyron’s mission was never just speed. That was the easy headline. The real challenge—the one that kept engineers awake—was Bugatti’s insistence that this 1001-hp projectile behave like a car. Not a race car. A car. Something that a wealthy amateur could drive, confidently, without a racing license or a death wish.

That requirement fundamentally changed the testing brief. Bicocchi wasn’t just asked to find the limit; he was asked to civilize it. Throttle response, brake feel, stability at speeds where airplanes start having opinions—all of it had to be intuitive. Forgiving, even. The Veyron needed to be a hypercar that didn’t punish curiosity.

That responsibility weighed heavily. Bicocchi describes the program as a 360-degree strike force: engineers, tire suppliers, aerodynamicists, and drivers learning in real time because no one, anywhere, had done this before. There was no rulebook for a 400-km/h road car. They were writing it at speed.

Between test sessions scattered across the globe, Bicocchi immersed himself in Bugatti’s past. Not as nostalgia, but as grounding. Ettore Bugatti’s original vision wasn’t just about performance—it was about elegance, confidence, and mechanical honesty. The Veyron wasn’t a deviation from that philosophy; it was its most extreme expression.

One moment crystallizes the entire project. At Volkswagen’s Ehra-Lessien test track, Bicocchi was instructed to accelerate flat-out past 400 km/h and then stand on the brakes. It’s the kind of request that makes your internal monologue go quiet. Stress and exhilaration collide at that speed. When it worked—when the car remained stable, controllable, obedient—the relief was collective. That’s when the project stopped feeling like a job and started feeling like history.

Twenty-plus years later, the emotion hasn’t dulled. The Veyron still lands with the same force it did in the early 2000s because it isn’t anchored to a trend. Its design doesn’t scream a specific decade. Its achievement doesn’t rely on nostalgia. It simply exists, complete and unapologetic.

That’s the Veyron’s real legacy. Not just that it went faster than anything else, but that it did so without excuses. It didn’t require compromise from its driver. It didn’t ask you to be brave. It asked you to trust it—and then proved worthy of that trust at speeds no road car had ever seen.

As Bugatti continues to redefine the outer limits of the hypercar, the Veyron remains the reference point. The moment when impossible became production-ready. The car that forced the industry to admit that the ceiling was higher than anyone had dared to imagine.

Some cars age. Some become classics. The Veyron stands apart, timeless not because time has been kind to it, but because it never belonged to any era in the first place.

Source: Bugatti

NEW CARS

Bentley Batur Convertible #4

Bentley’s Mulliner division has never been shy about excess, but Batur Convertible #4 takes bespoke indulgence to a level that even Crewe’s most seasoned craftspeople must pause to admire. This is not merely another ultra-limited Bentley with a paint-to-sample exterior and a few special badges. It’s a deeply personal expression of what coachbuilding looks like when time, money, and taste are allowed to roam freely—and when the client knows exactly what she wants.

That client is Sonia Breslow, a collector whose garage already reads like a greatest-hits album of Bentley history: a Blower Continuation Series, a Speed Six Continuation Series, and the Bacalar that effectively rebooted Bentley’s modern coachbuilt era. Batur Convertible #4 doesn’t just join that lineup; it converses with it, carrying forward a visual and material language that’s uniquely hers.

From the outside, this Batur leans into elegance rather than shock value. The tri-tone exterior uses Breslow’s own commissioned colors, anchored by a hairline 6-mm gloss-silver stripe that accentuates the Batur’s defining feature—its seemingly endless hood. The upper body wears “Breslow Blue,” a shade so personal it extends beyond paint. Mulliner color-matched the convertible roof canvas to it, creating the first bespoke-colored roof of its kind. Drop the top, and the same hue reappears on the Airbridge beneath, turning a functional aero element into a design flourish.

Subtlety continues elsewhere. A Midnight Breslow Blue pinstripe traces the hood, wheel accents and mirror caps quietly echo the primary palette, and polished titanium exhaust finishers add a muted sparkle at the rear. Bright silver grilles keep things classic, reminding you this is still a Bentley—even if it’s one filtered through an intensely personal lens.

The real theater begins when you open the door. Bentley’s animated welcome lamps are already a party trick, but here they cross into signature art. Using more than 415,000 microscopic mirrors, the system projects Sonia Breslow’s handwritten name onto the ground. It’s not flashy in a Vegas way; it’s intimate, like a signed first edition waiting on your doorstep.

Inside, the cabin trades cool blues for warmth. Autumnal tans and caramel tones dominate, offset by restrained light-blue accents that pull the exterior Breslow Blue into the interior without overwhelming it. Contrast stitching runs across the tonneau, seats, headrests, and instrument panel, tying the space together with quiet consistency. Look down, and you’ll spot the outline of Mount Batur—namesake of the car—woven subtly into the deep-pile floor mats, a detail most owners would never notice but Mulliner insists on perfecting anyway.

The dashboard blends old and new in a way only Bentley seems able to pull off. Inspired by early Bentleys, a bright aluminum engine-spin finish spans the fascia, shimmering softly rather than shouting for attention. The Bentley Rotating Display—equal parts gimmick and genius—features bespoke-colored gauge faces and a satin-blue clock face that matches the overall theme. It’s the kind of detail that feels indulgent until you realize how cohesively it’s been executed.

Then there’s the metalwork. Batur Convertible #4 marks Bentley’s first use of three-dimensionally printed platinum. The top-dead-center marker on the steering wheel and each organ stop are crafted from the precious metal, adding literal weight to the term “bespoke.” It’s innovation hiding in plain sight, more jeweler’s atelier than automotive factory.

For all its handcrafted artistry, this Batur doesn’t forget to perform. Under that endless hood sits the most powerful version of Bentley’s iconic W12: a hand-assembled, twin-turbocharged 6.0-liter engine delivering 740 horsepower. In an era where downsizing and electrification loom large, the Batur Convertible feels like a last, defiant love letter to excess internal combustion. It’s not about lap times or Nürburgring bragging rights; it’s about effortless, continent-crushing grand touring, roof down, horizon ahead.

Breslow herself sums it up best. This isn’t a speculative asset or a concours queen waiting for its next auction appearance. It’s a forever car, designed down to the last stitch and pinstripe to reflect its owner’s passion for detail and individuality. In that sense, Batur Convertible #4 isn’t just a Bentley—it’s a collaboration, a rolling manifesto of what modern coachbuilding can be when the client is as committed as the craftsmen.

As it joins its Mulliner siblings, this Batur stands as a reminder that true luxury isn’t about shouting the loudest. Sometimes, it’s about a handwritten name in light, a roof dyed just right, and a W12 beating beneath a hood that seems to stretch on forever.

Source: Bentley

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