News

Skoda Quietly Had Its Biggest Year in Six Years

While the global auto industry is still trying to figure out what comes after the post-pandemic whiplash, Skoda has gone ahead and delivered something refreshingly old-school: real, measurable growth. In 2025, the Czech automaker built 1,065,000 vehicles worldwide, a 15-percent jump over the previous year and its strongest production result since 2019. That’s not a rebound—it’s a comeback.

At the center of it all is Skoda’s historic home in Mladá Boleslav, which pumped out 605,600 vehicles while also assembling 329,000 battery systems for everything from Skoda’s own EVs to other Volkswagen Group products. It’s an operation that now straddles two automotive worlds at once, still building combustion-engine cars while simultaneously supplying the electrified future.

Skoda likes to point out—correctly—that Mladá Boleslav is the only Volkswagen Group factory that builds ICE vehicles and full EVs on the same production line. That’s not just a trivia fact; it’s a quiet flex. It means Skoda can pivot production faster than most brands as market demand swings between gasoline, hybrid, and electric powertrains.

And swing it has.

On the electric side, Skoda’s new Elroq compact electric crossover has taken off with 112,500 units built by January 2025, while the larger and already familiar Enyaq added another 77,000 vehicles. These numbers don’t make Skoda a Tesla-level EV powerhouse, but they firmly establish it as a serious European electric player—not a reluctant follower.

Meanwhile, Skoda hasn’t forgotten how to make old-fashioned mechanical hardware. Across its factories, the company produced more than 1.03 million transmissions and over 500,000 engines in 2025, underscoring that the ICE business is still very much alive inside the brand.

If Mladá Boleslav is the brain, Kvasiny is the muscle. The plant’s output jumped from 248,000 to 301,500 vehicles, a healthy 20-plus-percent increase that signals strong demand for Skoda’s higher-margin models, many of which are built there.

The growth story doesn’t stop in Europe. In India, production doubled to 73,800 vehicles, driven largely by the new Kylaq crossover, a model designed specifically for that rapidly growing market. This isn’t just export-and-hope strategy—Skoda is tailoring its products to local tastes, and it’s paying off.

Then there’s Vietnam, where Skoda has opened a new assembly plant with the Thanh Cong Group. So far, it’s modest—2,500 Slavia and Kushaq models built from Indian-supplied kits—but it’s a classic first step toward deeper localization in Southeast Asia, a region every global automaker is eyeing.

Skoda’s management isn’t hiding its satisfaction.
“For the first time in six years, we exceeded the limit of one million Skoda cars produced,” said Andreas Dick, the board member responsible for production and logistics. And for once, corporate pride actually lines up with the numbers.

What makes Skoda’s 2025 performance impressive isn’t just that it built more cars—it’s what kinds of cars it built. Gasoline, hybrid, and electric vehicles all rolling down the same lines. European volume, Indian growth, and Southeast Asian expansion. Old-school engines next to battery packs.

In an industry obsessed with choosing sides, Skoda is winning by refusing to. And right now, that flexibility looks like a very smart bet.

Source: Škoda

NEW CARS

Next-Gen Citroën C4 Promises Radical Design and a Rebellion Against Boring Hatchbacks

Citroën has never been very good at blending in, and it doesn’t plan to start now. As the current C4 edges into retirement—six years old and counting, making it the oldest car in the brand’s lineup—Citroën is preparing a replacement that, in the words of its own design chief, “has to look very different.” Translation: the next C4 is about to get strange in a very French way.

That’s refreshing news in a C-segment world dominated by safe, conservative hatchbacks that look like they were designed by a committee armed with spreadsheets. Citroën, on the other hand, is aiming for something more radical. Design boss Pierre Leclercq says the fourth-generation C4 will be “highly bespoke,” deliberately separating itself from everything else in the brand’s lineup—which, outside of the tiny Ami, has quietly turned into a sea of crossovers.

In other words, the next C4 won’t just be a shrunk C5 or a stretched C3. It won’t adopt the chunky, box-on-wheels vibe of Citroën’s newer crossovers either. It will stay a hatchback—and a defiant one at that.

Cheap Bones, Expensive Attitude

Under the skin, the next C4 could take a very different path from its Stellantis cousins. The current model rides on the CMP platform, shared with cars like the Peugeot 208 and Opel Corsa. But Citroën is reportedly considering switching to the more cost-focused “Smart Car” architecture that underpins the new C3 and C3 Aircross.

That might sound like a downgrade, but Citroën sees it as an opportunity: lower production costs mean a lower sticker price, which frees the brand to spend its capital on what it really cares about—style and character.

That’s classic Citroën. Historically, this is the company that gave us hydropneumatic suspensions, single-spoke steering wheels, and dashboard layouts that looked like sci-fi props. Even now, Leclercq insists experimentation should be central to the brand’s role within Stellantis.

“Citroën has always been a bit experimental, and should be the experimental brand of the group,” he said—and he means it.

Bold Enough to Be Polarizing

Citroën CEO Xavier Chardon is just as blunt. The brand, he says, doesn’t want to be “generic” like Volkswagen or Toyota. It wants to take risks—even if that means not everyone will love the result.

“I’m not afraid if people hate our design,” he said. “But I don’t want anybody to think our design is mainstream.”

That’s a gutsy thing to say in a market where customer clinics and focus groups often sand off every sharp edge. But it’s also exactly the kind of attitude that could make the C4 interesting again. The outgoing model tried to straddle the line between hatchback and crossover, which left it a bit confused. The new one, by contrast, sounds like it will pick a lane—and then swerve creatively within it.

A Hatchback with a Point of View

What we shouldn’t expect is a cookie-cutter shape. Leclercq has already ruled out a boxy, two-volume crossover profile. The next C4 will remain a hatchback, but one driven by “new concepts” rather than a simple replacement brief.

That suggests we might get something genuinely different in a segment that desperately needs it. While rivals fight over who has the sharpest LED headlights or the most aggressive fake vents, Citroën is trying to answer a more interesting question: what if a compact hatchback didn’t have to look like everyone else’s idea of a compact hatchback?

If Citroën pulls this off—combining low prices with bold design—it could give the C-segment something it hasn’t had in years: personality. And honestly, in a world of painfully sensible cars, a little weird might be exactly what we’re missing.

Source: Autocar

Tuning

Koenigsegg Jesko by Mansory

If you thought Koenigsegg’s Jesko Attack was already pushing the outer limits of what a road-legal hypercar should be, Mansory would like a word. The German tuner—best known for its unapologetically extravagant takes on ultra-luxury machinery—has decided that even a 1,600-horsepower Swedish missile deserves more carbon fiber, more aero, and more attitude.

The Jesko, after all, is no ordinary hypercar. With production capped at just 125 units split between the track-focused Attack and the slippery, high-speed Absolut, it’s already rarer than most seven-figure exotics. But one owner apparently looked at their Attack and thought, Nice… but not insane enough. Enter Mansory with a full-carbon aerodynamic package that transforms Koenigsegg’s engineering masterpiece into something that looks like it escaped straight from a GT racing paddock.

Seventeen Ways to Say “More Downforce”

Mansory’s overhaul is comprehensive—almost obsessive. The tuner replaces or adds no fewer than 17 separate carbon-fiber aero components, all designed to increase downforce, airflow management, and visual drama.

Up front, the Jesko gets a reworked hood with carbon vents, flanked by new side flaps and a pair of race-inspired front wings that give the nose a far more aggressive stance. Two new “boomerang” elements and vertical aero blades add both turbulence control and the kind of visual chaos Mansory customers tend to love.

Around the back, the madness continues. Mansory fits new endplates and aero add-ons to the already gigantic rear wing, along with rear side flaps and an entirely new center diffuser section to better extract air from beneath the car. A full-carbon “racing” brake light—essentially a Formula 1-style rain light—adds a motorsport touch, while carbon “rear eyebrows” finish off the visual theatrics.

And because even the Jesko’s cooling system can always use more help, Mansory adds a roof-mounted air scoop to push extra airflow into Koenigsegg’s monstrous 5.1-liter twin-turbo V8, which already produces up to 1,600 horsepower on E85 fuel.

Peak Excess Meets Peak Engineering

The result is a Jesko that looks even more like a land-based fighter jet than the already outrageous original. Where Koenigsegg’s design philosophy leans toward purposeful minimalism, Mansory’s version turns every aerodynamic surface into a visual statement. It’s louder, sharper, and undeniably more aggressive—exactly what you’d expect when one hypercar perfectionist meets another.

Does the Jesko actually need this much extra aero? Probably not. But in the rarefied world of multimillion-dollar hypercars, “need” has never been the point. What Mansory offers here is individuality—an already ultra-exclusive machine made even more unrepeatable.

And if you’re the type of owner who felt the standard Jesko Attack wasn’t quite outrageous enough, congratulations: Mansory just built your dream car.

Source: Mansory

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