AI:ME concept: inspired by A2 and Matt Prior (maybe)
A modern take on the A2, Audi’s AI:ME urban mobility solution was previewed by this tester
Trumpet-blow of the week: I’ve been bleating on for longer than is strictly healthy about how the Audi A2 was a car ahead of its time.
So when the editor wanted to run a feature a few months ago about cars that should be reborn, a new A2 was the obvious choice for me. Any new A2 would have to be on the VW Group’s new MEB all-electric platform, I reckoned at the time, but there’d be a lot to like about a small, spacious, posh Audi.
We had some industry experts assess our wares. “We think selling it would be the problem,” they said. To say I was ‘crushed’ hardly does my feelings justice. But what’s this from the Shanghai motor show? It’s only the flipping AI:ME concept: a compact, spacious, posh Audi based on the MEB all-electric platform – so perhaps other industry experts don’t think it’s such a bad idea after all.
Our correspondent asked about visual and engineering similarities to the A2. “If there are parts of our heritage like this, it’s not bad, because it makes it recognisable,” he was told, but he was assured that really the AI:ME’s similarity of ethos to the A2 was “a coincidence”.
I say you heard it here first. And if my premonitions keep going well, you’re going to love it when somebody gets around to making a new Matra-Simca Rancho.
Time spent = money saved
Spring, surely, is the biggest season of the year for browsing classified car adverts. And if you are doing so online, it’s worth knowing about a service that has been around for a while, but is, I think, less known than it should be.
As well as checking a car’s tax status, you can now also check its MOT history since 2005 – and not just whether it passed or failed, but the reasons for failing, or what the advisories were when it passed.
Which, I think, can give you some kind of indication of how the owner has treated a car. Early Porsche Boxsters strike me as quite tempting, but I’d worry about one that keeps turning up to an MOT on bald tyres.
The check shows the respective mileage, too. One Range Rover I looked at went from 210,000 miles one year to 85,000 the next. So arm yourself with questions, raise alarm bells or reassure yourself – and waste less time and money either way.
Just head to check-mot.service. gov.uk and sling in a reg number.
Ferrari sale makes a splash
Four years ago, a man called Richard Colton bequeathed the proceeds of his two Ferraris – a 1960 250 GT SWB and a 1967 275 GTB/4 – to the RNLI. At auction, the two cars were sold for £8.5 million, making them the most valuable items ever left to the life-saving charity.
I mention it now because a new Shannon class lifeboat, the £2.2m boat that was the subject of Autocar’s Christmas road test, will be named the Richard and Caroline Colton this weekend, at its lifeboat station in Hastings.
Of all the Christmas road tests I’ve been involved with, the Shannon lifeboat is one of the most extraordinary in terms of its performance and capability. That the £400,000-plus a day it takes to run the RNLI is all found charitably is even more remarkable.
Read more
Opinion: Is the car world finally ready for the Audi A2?
Christmas road test: RNLI Shannon Lifeboat review
Reinvent the wheels: designing new versions of old cars
Source: Autocar
