The plan, hinted at by policymakers but confirmed by a Government report last month, is to legalize the use of unmanned delivery vehicles on pavements in Britain. Citing a need to provide “clarity” on this matter to commercial operators — a majority of which are in the takeaway business — the Government says its intention is to create a “clear, lawful route to the UK market for pavement delivery robots”, which have been operating in grey areas and tiny numbers for a couple of years.

To most ordinary road users, that “clarity” already exists. The 1835 Highways Act, among other established legislation, stops just short of actually stating “it is forbidden to drive your pizza delivery machine down the pavement”. That the Government plans to dilute these rules, as early as 2027, risks subverting a millennia-long consensus that pedestrian spaces are for the exclusive use of walking people.

Yet pilot schemes are underway around the world, notably in North America, where disability advocates, active travel campaigners and community organizations are incensed by the arrival of camera-controlled vehicles in historically pedestrian spaces. Videos abound of these robots hassling walkers, blocking wheelchair users, damaging street furniture and generally being pestilent. Meanwhile, the companies in charge of the robots insist that such incidents are rare, or don’t matter, or are otherwise acceptable collateral damage in the righteous pursuit of progress.

In Chicago, where residents are so aggrieved by this new sidewalk traffic that local legislators have actually moved to stymie the trial’s expansion, delivery drones are prone to smashing the glass walls of bus shelters. A level crossing in Miami is one of several railways where robots have been obliterated by locomotives in pointless collisions, with one video showing a spectacularly fiery result. Across North America, “Sidewalk Autonomous Delivery Robots” star in a fast-growing filmography of wince-inducing videos captured by bystanders.

Suggested Reading

How robots make us human

By Mary Harrington

There is, of course, no central tally of people harmed by these machines, but several have been injured or sent to hospital. The victims include a cyclist in New Jersey who broke his collarbone after being taken out by an Avride robot, and a pedestrian in Arizona who was knocked over and then injured again by the robot, she alleges, when she was on the ground.

In purely physical terms, the robots are formidable. A laden weight of over 50kg and a top speed of 10mph make larger examples quite frightening. Smaller, slower units have also been trialed, many limited to 4mph when they detect pedestrians, but even the more diminutive models have been filmed bothering people’s ankles, diving beneath the wheels of passing cars, and generally getting in the way. Humans are expected to dodge these machines when they plot uncompromising routes through crowds, sidestep them when they halt, or yank pets out of the way if the vehicles’ on-board AI hasn’t learned to detect a Yorkshire terrier. And when a robot pulls up at a pedestrian-controlled crossing, or otherwise gets stuck, its operator hopes that you will step in to assist.

To date, the pavement delivery drone experiment is going as badly as you’d expect, with predictable resistance from its unwilling, unconsenting human participants. But the scheme operators have turned to one of the oldest tricks in the consumer robotics playbook to mitigate public anger: cuteness. Almost all pavement delivery vehicles have smiley faces, exaggeratedly large anime-style eyes for headlamps, and affectedly unthreatening styling that resembles a child’s toy. Many have electronic voices capable of synthetic obsequiousness, humanoid nicknames emblazoned on their flanks, or large dot matrix screens on their fronts that can “emote” with basic expressions. Once the robot, called something like Cuthbert, has crashed into you, it can change its digital face to a sad one before whirring off with its cargo of bubble tea.

This reflects the unlovably cutesy approach to accountability shared by most of the big operators of delivery drones. Following one of the Chicago bus shelter crashes, the startup Serve Robotics ran a local advertisement campaign that featured an anthropomorphic delivery robot displaying the self-deprecating message “Nasir is sorry” and “I took ‘breaking into the market’ too literally”. Corporate statements immediately following crashes are stiffly unrepentant and almost always downplay the severity of whatever went wrong. When the aforementioned woman in Arizona spoke with the robot operator Starship, having been injured by one of its machines, the representative offered her takeaway discount codes along with the firm’s insurance details. The twee design language of the robots themselves might be effective in manipulating hearts and minds, but this type of oopsie-daisy non-apology lands badly when the damage is physical, painful or frightening.

The purpose of this experiment has yet to be adequately explained. Human beings have successfully carried pizza and curry to one another for generations, at a cost that evidently can be absorbed by consumers, without the need to legislate away pedestrian protection. The government has said that the proposed legalization of food delivery vehicles in traffic-free space will “facilitate low carbon, last mile delivery services in ‘delivery deserts’”, a newly-invented non-issue, and somehow “drive productivity gains in our NHS, by connecting medical goods around hospitals, maximizing the benefits of aviation drones and boosting productivity so staff can focus their time where delivery robots are not suitable”. None of this really follows. Deliveries within hospitals do not require sweeping changes to the constitution of our public realm, and there is no obvious connection between curry-bots and the more serious field of medical drones. While the official rationale includes magic words like “NHS” and “low-carbon”, it reads like a startup’s solution looking for a nice-sounding problem. Beyond vague hand-waving at “innovation” and “growth”, none of the evidence submitted to Parliament by regulators or industry (which is, of course, lobbying for deregulation) have adequately justified the assumption that pavement robots should happen here.

More from this author

How Ferrari lost its sex appeal

By Ed Wiseman

The key beneficiaries and proponents are foreign companies, which stand to win financially and are consequently leading the demands for “clarity”. Regulators are outnumbered and outgunned; the DfT has no staff dedicated to pavement robots within its tiny Micromobility team, which specializes in scooters and e-bikes. The companies encircling the regulators are large, slick affairs with established lobbying practices and great heaps of VC cash. If all goes to plan for them, they and others will receive explicit permission to run their vehicles along walkways, with licensing and supervision responsibility falling to local authorities — ill-funded and often haphazard organizations that are even less likely to push back on Big Tech’s excesses than Whitehall is.

We can study soaring injury rates from dockless e-bike and e-scooter initiatives to understand how effective borough councils are at supervising “innovation”. The accountability vacuum carved out by those micromobility operators shows us that, even with an identifiable human rider, who is tracked via GPS and who has paid for their session using their bank card, personal liability for injuries cannot reliably be established. Delivery robot operators enjoy a similar shroud of invincibility; nobody will ever be personally prosecuted for damage done with their autonomous machines. Instead, disincentives against harming passers-by fall within the murky corporate apparatus of civil liability and “provisions”.

What happens when the penalty for maiming or killing is merely financial? It’s a well-worn talking point in the decades-long conversation about driverless cars, but the government proposes far feebler regulation of these sidewalk vehicles. It’s likely that we’ll sooner contend with machine autonomy on our walkways than our highways. Delivery companies have expressed their preference for their robots to be treated like a person rather than a machine; the then-boss of Amazon’s Scout drone program said in 2019 “we want to be viewed as a pedestrian and treated as a pedestrian”. In Korea the technologists are getting their wish, with pedestrian status, including priority at crossings, granted to sidewalk bots of up to half a ton.

The bleakness of being legally obligated to kowtow to someone’s kebab is eclipsed only by the more broadly depressing reflection this shows us of our societal proclivities and what we describe as “growth”. With walking too difficult to monetize, the pedestrian has been deprioritized in the pecking order of public space to make room for something profitable — a galling demotion in the era of sustainability and low-traffic neighborhoods. And in the absence of strong advocates or principled regulation, the institution of the sidewalk can be stripped of its assets by foreign companies. Those foreign companies will spoil these capitulated tracts of realm in the most annoying possible way — with a column of infantile machines, carrying infantile food, loosing their payloads of “picky bits” into Britain’s inert, dribbling maw.

This is not a good idea. Unlike more promising entries on Britain’s innovation to-do list, this proposal irritates everybody while benefiting very few. And unlike similarly arrogant and exploitative transport proposals of decades past, this one seems likely to happen, with legislation to reformulate the tenet of the sidewalk due to reach Parliament this or next year. Distributing tepid takeaways does not justify the granting of pedestrian-like status to vehicles, no matter how much “clarity” it would offer tech firms, and the prospect of allowing such a transparently extractive coup against the public will be an historic test of Britain’s regulatory gag reflex. Regrettably for the pedestrian, still bruised by a century of vehicle-centric urban planning, a new and more exploitative machine age may have dawned.

Never before has a new sports car prompted such an international response — even the fallout from Jaguar’s disastrous rebrand in 2025 was largely domestic. People all over the world hated the Luce’s appearance, which was uncharitably compared with that of a much cheaper Japanese EV, and the ill-advised launch event, which for some reason involved the Pope. Interestingly, the public questioned who and what the Luce was for.

Interesting, because a majority of participants in this online pile-on can be assumed to be outside Ferrari’s target audience; with an expected price of around £500,000, the Luce is even more expensive than the manufacturer’s core V12 models, which the haters also can’t afford. But all of these people still feel as though they have some relationship with Ferrari and its products, and the disappointment and widespread confusion that met the Luce immediately upon its launch was still bad news for a brand supported almost entirely by this consensus on desirability, which in turn is based largely on good looks. The Luce will be commercially successful, but its reviled appearance has broken a link in that chain. 

It’s an upending of an industrial phenomenon that predates living memory. Italy’s century-long advantage in car design is systemic rather than purely stylistic; fueled by the historic trading wealth of its northern cities, the country’s bicycle and weapons factories spawned over a hundred known car-building workshops (and probably hundreds more fleeting startups that were never recorded) at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, when the internal combustion engine gained mainstream traction. These small outfits were artisan producers, manned by skilled craftsmen drawing on knowledge from established local industries, which would build a rolling chassis, including drivetrain and engine, before taking it to a nearby carrozzerie, or coachbuilder, for bodywork to be added. 

Some of these bodywork specialists emerged from the nascent car industry, but many more were long-established suppliers of traditional broughams and state coaches to the European aristocracy, including the noble houses of pre-unification Italy. Both horse-drawn carriages and early motor cars were effectively the preserve of landed families and extremely successful businessmen, all of whom invested — both directly and through high-value commissions — in what could be described as the burgeoning supercar industry. This process created a geographical concentration of small industrial suppliers, specialized labor pooling, and finance, as well as an ecosystem that rewarded forward-thinking design. 

That might sound like a whole lot of the automotive cliché that is “heritage and pedigree”, which it sort of is. But over that 100-odd years, Italian car designers were becoming the best in the world at doing a specific thing — communicating the theatre of internal combustion in products optimized for desirability. Taut bodywork shrink-wrapped over hard points of a car’s physiology, with bulbous affordances for carburetors and sharp vents clawed into steel; an elongated and exaggerated nose to illustrate a longitudinally-mounted V12, or a pair of muscular haunches sculpted around a twin-turbocharged V8 at the rear. Italian car designers understood what people wanted, and want it they did.

The concurrent evolution of Futurism (inspired to some extent by Marinetti’s 1908 car crash) thrust the values and attributes of this violent new industry into the cultural mainstream, in Italy and around Europe. Artists imagined a world built in the image of this grand new technology, forged in the furnaces of industrialized northern Italy, a snub to antiquity and a direct rejection of the region’s horse-drawn Renaissance past. The seminal “modern” car and the first to enter MoMA’s collection, the Cisitalia 202 GT, was designed by Carrozzerie Pinin Farina (later Pininfarina) and became the blueprint for postwar “grand tourers”, conveying its capabilities and purpose with its long, low bonnet, set-back cabin and integrated coachwork hewn from a single sheet of aluminum. 

By then, Mussolini’s deliberate investments in car manufacturing, car infrastructure and car racing — enshrined in extensive car propaganda — formed a substantial part of Italy’s self-image. One of the era’s engineering and motorsport heroes, a young Enzo Ferrari, had risen to mainstream fame running Alfa Romeo’s racing team, which was named Scuderia (stable) Ferrari, and which borrowed a distinctive prancing horse motif from the plane of noted WW1 fighter ace Francesco Baracca, who had in turn cannibalized his family coat-of-arms. The intersection of mechanized warfare, motorsport, and the rapid popularization of driving propagated Italy’s obsession with the automobile and the meteoric ascent of its car industry. 

Forty years later, the F40 — a coked-up, wedge-shaped, 200mph hypercar with gaping air intake ducts and an exhaust that would occasionally spit flames during downshifts — became another fossil-fueled masterpiece, communicating to bystanders that it was built to noisily break the law. Designed by Pininfarina, it appealed to a new, brash species of capitalist, but used identical raw materials; internal combustion is an inherently violent and complex process, and, a lifetime after the emergence of Futurism, Italian car design could still make its furious business legible to the passer-by. 

The Emilia-Romagna region went on to birth Ferrari, Lamborghini, Pagani, Ducati and Maserati, and following Italy’s post-war miracolo economico, the original artisan coachbuilders evolved into full-service design consultancies. Global manufacturers would outsource the aesthetics of new models to these organizations. Even humdrum household cars, like the original Volkswagen Golf and Ford Fiesta, were designed in Northern Italy by descendants of the region’s metalworking tradition. It’s hard to know what a 20th-century carrozzerie would make of 21st-century EV architecture, if an example could be rolled back in time, down a cobbled Turin street and through the doors of an oily workshop. It’s not clear what any of the industry’s great designers would choose to draw the casual observer’s attention to, in the absence of any clear mechanical drama or tense, contorted metalwork. The motor or motors of an electric car can go pretty much anywhere, and in the case of the Luce are somewhere unremarkable, behind the wheels and out of mind. The large battery is a graceless plinth on which to plonk a car-shaped effigy, and while the powertrain does need cooling, to an extent, this does not take place in a fun way; an electric car won’t gulp gallons of oxygen through aluminum nostrils like a petrol one does, nor exhale scorching air from its gills. The sports car, its societal meaning, and our expectations and understanding of its form, were for a hundred years defined by the needs of internal combustion. Without that rationale, Ferrari was bound to lose its edge.

That isn’t to say that an electric vehicle gives its designers a creative blank canvas. Regulations (primarily pertaining to safety but to a lesser extent efficiency) meet with practical considerations and manufacturing limitations to inform a car’s shape more coercively today than ever before. Mandated minimum radii (that is, pedestrian-protecting limitations on pointiness) make cars’ bodywork seem less chiseled than those of the past, hoods must be a certain height, and pedestrian impact must be mitigated. Flourishes like pop-up headlights and angular front edges have been banned, and the tiny cabins that gave older Italian GT cars their delicate proportions are now impossible to mass-produce legally due to the carefully regulated geometry that defines a new car’s interior. Lights have to be in certain places, pillars must be a particular thickness to conceal rigid roll protection structures, all compromising a car’s appearance. Globally, road fatalities are falling, a phenomenon due partly to these individually minuscule, iterative improvements to industrial design, but the result is homogeneity and aesthetic compromise. It is, quite literally, why we can’t have nice things.

Ferrari revisited the coachbuilding tradition by commissioning a Californian agency to create its Luce, a first for the company; all other production Ferraris have been designed in-house or by one of the Italian design firms. Founded by Sir Jony Ive (known for his work on the iPhone) and joined by Marc Newson (who has tried his hand at everything from shotguns, to airline seats, to public conveniences), San Francisco-based LoveFrom represents the 21st-century tech design tradition that emerged indirectly from Silicon Valley. Ferrari chose to outsource both the inside and outside of the Luce to them, with the brief to design a practical five-seater: clearly a mobility tool rather than the exotica that Ferrari has a century of confidence in creating. It’s a decision that consciously subverted the relationship between Ferrari, internal combustion, and Italian design, instead applying the Ferrari badge and some of its cachet to an electronic device, designed elsewhere, for an as-yet undefined generation of customers. 

It is easy, when asked what beauty is, to point at something unappealing and say, “not that”. To an extent, that’s what’s happening with the Luce — it’s difficult to articulate what it is about the photographs that disappoints people, and hard for the layman to comprehend why an iPhone-inspired Ferrari feels so aesthetically jarring. There isn’t much for anyone to read, just a smooth, sealed box containing electronics, that neatly conveys its purpose as a comfortable and reasonably fast vehicle for several people and their luggage, like a Nissan or Ford might. Journalists physically present at the Luce’s Rome launch event (all, on some level, conscious of the need to be invited back) insist that the Luce is better in real life, which is probably true. But like a trance DJ releasing a breathy acoustic album, Ferrari and LoveFrom’s technical performance play second fiddle to the expectations of the crowd. 

It would almost certainly be an easier sell if the Luce did something interesting. Its specifications are relatively impressive, with 1,035bhp produced by several motors, a 0-62mph time of 2.5 seconds, and a top speed of 193mph — all moderately unusual for a five-seater. But Chinese manufacturers have built tons of cars with four-figure horsepower, and a sub-three-second sprint time is no longer that cool. EVs deploy torque immediately, with none of the dithering or thermodynamic flamboyance inherent to internal combustion, but that means that any mainstream manufacturer using an electric powertrain now has access to similar technology. The cars you can buy second-hand from ring-road dealerships are almost as quick as the Luce, which robs Ferrari of its mechanical swagger, and in turn changes the foundations of its design language. Carrozzeria LoveFrom didn’t have enough raw material to work with when presented with the Luce, given that a Chinese-made SUV can achieve the same kinetic feats. Unlike historic performance cars, separated from the mundane by superlative stats, the Luce doesn’t really have anything to say.

More from this author

How China conquered the car industry

By Ed Wiseman

As cars become appliances with largely indistinguishable raisons d’être, historic brands seem to be searching their archives for a time when they were truly successful; often, this turns out to be the second half of the 20th century, where cars were aspirational household acquisitions and domestic car manufacturing was a source of national industrial pride. But aesthetics alone won’t sell a car, as Honda found out with its daftly-named “e”, which was a cute, chunky EV based loosely on the (‘iconic’) Mk1 Civic, but which cost too much and which had too small a battery. Consumers aren’t swayed by heritage any more, and in the electric era, manufacturing giants with identities rooted in internal combustion are scrabbling to retain their relevance. 

It is therefore difficult to say what Ferrari could have done differently. Regulations prevent it from returning in any meaningful way to its design tradition without resorting to naffness or pastiche, and the absence of a petrol engine neuters its ability to communicate the mechanical drama that defined its notoriety for decades. So it’s left with the Luce, a Ferrari-themed mobility solution, designed overseas, seemingly reviled by the sorts of people who will never own one, but probably popular enough with the super-rich, who might. The first 88 Luce allocations made available in China were purchased immediately. In the short term, Ferrari NV will be fine, and will sell every Luce that it builds, but the absence of raw head-turning allure brings a new directionlessness to the wider Ferrari mythos and historically hegemonic European industrial tradition that affects all of us, whether we’re driving these storied machines or merely gawping at them as we walk through wealthy neighborhoods. If the latest half-million-quid Ferrari isn’t cool, even to hoi polloi, then the age of the sports car — and by extension, a consensus of desirability that lasted a century — is waning, just as horses faded from our streets a century ago.

It was a vast and lavish operation. While roadies were building manufacturers’ elaborate show stands in the 26-acre Palexpo center on the run-up to the event, their PR counterparts were turning the region’s resorts into a multi-week, multi-Alp industry bacchanal. Immediately after the grand opening night, the sector would decamp in its entirety to money-no-object afterparties at chalets, hotels, and rented pleasure craft in the Petit Lac.

Like the rest of Europe’s car industry, it was fun while it lasted. And also like the rest of Europe’s car industry, it “lasted” about a century before the wheels came off. As Covid-19 tore through Europe, the show’s organizers canceled the 2020 edition at the last possible minute. It was a panicked decision that infuriated exhibitors, many of which had spent seven-figure non-refundable sums preparing enormous displays for which the show had become known.

The show disappeared for a few years, returning meekly and to a tepid reception in 2024, but by then European carmaking had begun to change the way it imagined itself. China, Covid-19, Dieselgate, EVs and Net Zero all cast a shadow over the Geneva Motor Show and the fossil-fueled success it represented. Footfall had plummeted from over 600,000 punters pre-pandemic to about a quarter of that at the show’s half-hearted final Swiss installment, which was largely snubbed by even large car brands that couldn’t justify the cost of appearing, and which had been rattled by several years of supply chain issues. An attempt to rebuild the event’s prestige in Doha fell predictably flat and, as the wider industry reckoned with its new, challenging headwinds, the organizational committee moved to dissolve itself, marking the end of one of Europe’s most influential industry showcases. It was simultaneously a regrettable circumstantial fumble and a helpless industrial self-own.

If Geneva’s death reflected a symbolic fracture in Europe’s century-long automotive home run, the rise to prominence of the Brussels Motor Show — a more straightforward, pragmatic and frankly dowdier occasion — reveals its current crisis of self-esteem. Held a little earlier in the year, the Brussels event has pretty much inherited Geneva’s position as Europe’s de facto auto show of note, now hosting the European Car of the Year awards and a smattering of product unveilings, but without any of the glamour. Journalists and dignitaries visiting this year’s rainy press preview day were greeted by buckets, some filling with alarming speed, placed beneath the numerous leaks in the elderly Brussels Expo roof.

Suggested reading

The UK is falling into China's trap

By Luke de Pulford

The rot can, by my reckoning, be traced back to Q3 2011. When I first started writing about vehicles in 2009, the Chinese automotive industry was justifiably disregarded in Europe. Nobody drove an electric car. Only 55 EVs had been sold in Britain that year, compared with around 600 across the rest of the EU. Europe’s entire EV fleet could, at the time, have parked several times over in the car parks of Belgium’s leading exhibition center. But within about 20 months, Nissan had launched the Leaf (arguably the first mainstream EV) and the Chinese state-owned giant SAIC had begun selling the sub-par MG6 sedan, laundered for the British market with the historic MG badge. Both cars were bad in their own ways, but their arrival was the beginning of the end of Europe’s car manufacturing primacy. Fifteen years on, a British family is about as likely to choose a Chinese car as it is a Japanese one, and the country now buys those 55 electric vehicles by about 10am on a given Saturday morning. Some 9.7% of cars sold in Britain, for example, are from Chinese companies, and many more — especially electric models — were built in China on behalf of foreign ones.

My crumpled fold-out floor plan of the Brussels Motor Show charts this phenomenal pace of change. Mitsubishi’s stand is flanked by Chinese newcomers Jaecoo, Omoda and Zeekr, the latter a Geely sub-brand now headquartered in Volvo’s hometown Gothenburg. Opposite them is Xpeng, then Nio, then BYD — a company that only began exporting EVs five years ago, and which is now the world’s largest builder of them. Chinese car manufacturers are unambiguously okay now, having overcome some or most of the consumer skepticism they were met with when they first arrived, and are exploiting their considerable head start in EV manufacturing (which equates to around half a decade, or roughly one model cycle, particularly in battery and powertrain tech) and low production costs, which are estimated to be around a third cheaper than those of the European manufacturers.

This asymmetry is evident even on ostensibly “European” stands. The Spring, a cheap electric runabout sold by Romanian Renault subsidiary Dacia and occupying quite a prominent place on the brand’s display, is built in Hubei province. Smart (originally developed in the Nineties by Mercedes-Benz to sell microcars, which it built in its then-futuristic Smartville factory in Hambach) is now a German-Chinese joint venture that manufactures electric SUVs in Xi’an. Even the electric Mini Cooper, a direct descendent of, arguably, British carmaking’s greatest cultural export, is now built in Zhangjiagang.

Regulators, half an hour away on the Brussels metro, and politicians, 20 minutes away by diplomatic S-Class, have consistently encouraged and rewarded these incursions. They have cajoled consumers towards EVs that only Chinese companies can sustainably sell at anything approaching affordable prices. And the Chinese government, which has created near-chaotic levels of oversupply in its neo-dirigiste car and battery industries, and which has identified global leadership in this critical sector as a strategic ambition, owns companies that are increasingly able to participate directly at the consumer level rather than merely embedding themselves into global supply chains.

To put it politely, this challenges conventional narratives of European automotive supremacy. Longstanding manufacturers from industrial powerhouses like Germany and France — frequently downplayed as “legacy brands” with varyingly scornful undertones — were the best in the world at building petrol and diesel cars. Audi’s Vorsprung durch Technik slogan reflected a national ideology during the internal combustion era, while Renault’s pre-war l’Automobile de France became a macroeconomic truth as its automotive engineering grew integral to its industrial output. Carmakers were relevant to cultural identity as well as GDP, and as tangible representations of homegrown technological prowess, passenger vehicles are perhaps more obvious to a major nation’s population than, say, its arms or chemical products. And to smaller European countries, which entered the car sector late, the mass production of quality consumer vehicles grew to represent an economic ascendancy beyond agriculture, raw materials and whichever less aspirational heavy industry they had been involved with previously. When Škoda Auto was privatised and integrated into Volkswagen in 1991, the confidence signal (and flow of Deutsche Marks) changed the way post-communist Czech manufacturing was perceived both internationally and at home, and the country’s automotive sector is now its industrial flagship and major source of national pride.

Tucked away behind the beefy six-figure EVs at the Brussels show are a smattering of perfectly good, conventional, small-displacement petrol cars, with manual gearboxes and realistic prices. Still in production for the next few years at least, these are living artifacts of an era in which Europeans built their own stuff. China was among the worst at manufacturing this kind of car, never coming close to emulating Europe’s internal combustion engineering, which was of such undisputedly high quality that it deterred new entrants. In the Net Zero era, that polarity has begun to reverse. It’s little surprise that Europe’s routed giants are retreating into nostalgia.

Above the Alpine stand, a vast screen displays, on an endless loop, the brand’s short film entitled 70 Years of Lightness, which imaginatively intersperses live action clips of the French company’s historic models racing on a mountain with stylized Ligne Claire animated sections, redolent of Hergé’s (locally) legendary Tintin cartoons. Mercedes-Benz’s sprawling display includes a replica of the Patent Motor-Wagen, probably the world’s first car, which it claims as its spiritual origin. Lotus has seemingly painted its Evija hypercar in John Player Special livery in a wistful nod to its own self-nominated motorsport heyday. But the retrospection has seeped even into the physical designs of Europe’s current and next-generation models, which increasingly lean on yesteryear’s fondest memories.

On the Renault stand, for example, rehashes of the R5 Turbo (a mid-Eighties “hot hatch” motorsport pinup) and Renault 4 (the first modern hatchback, mechanically speaking, with 8 million sold worldwide over three decades) sit beside the new Twingo, which revives both the nameplate and the cutesy bug-eyed design of the 1992 original. Behind the new but retro-styled Panda on the Fiat stand is the new Trio, which directly apes postwar trikes like the Piaggio Ape that were a cornerstone of Italian transport for half a century. There’s nothing fundamentally new about car manufacturers referring back to their greatest design hits — an ever-present reminder of this is the 2007 Fiat 500, which did for 21st-century Fiat what the original Cinquecento (on which its design is based) did in the nascent post-war economy of Fifties Italy. But short of a pan-European miracolo economico, these reheated people’s cars risk coming across as an expensive pastiche.

Almost all of Europe’s largest mainstream car companies owe their existence in the market — and status as flag-carriers for their home country’s economy — to an affordable mass-market “people’s car” that they sold at some point in the 20th century. Famous examples include the Citroën 2CV, a simple peasant-spec machine originally slated for a 1939 launch, but ultimately released into the wreckage of rural France a decade later; Fiat’s aforementioned 500, designed to fit inside the twisting streets of Italy’s borghi, both symbolized and facilitated the mass mechanization of postwar Italy; and Volkswagen’s Type 1 Beetle, a design so good that it remained in production until 2003, remains the bestselling single product in the industry’s history. Even later models like the Renault Twingo (totemic of Europe’s now-lost belief in compact, inexpensive cars) and Renault Espace (which spawned the “Eurovan” genus of aggressively practical people-carriers that dominated motorways for 20 years) responded neatly to the needs of Europe’s economy and citizens at the time.

It is likely that any modern-day equivalents will be Chinese-developed or Chinese-built using Chinese components or at least Chinese raw materials. Europe’s remaining car industry, underpinned anyway by Chinese supply chains, has been forced to relinquish its century-old relevance to ordinary Europeans — a hard-won privilege deftly undermined over just 15 years. Today, the capacity to deliver affordable cars that Europeans either want or are forced by regulations to need belongs exclusively to foreign manufacturers, predominantly Chinese.

Suggested reading

How Europe crashed its car industry

By Helen Thompson

Volvo belongs to Geely, as does the manufacturer of London’s black cab. German-owned Mini builds its British-flavored EVs in Jiangsu province. Stellantis, headquartered in Hoofddorp, owns formerly patriotic brands like Alfa Romeo, Fiat, Peugeot and Maserati, as well as selling Chinese-made Leapmotor runabouts that substantially undercut most alternatives. The historic giants that once dominated the Geneva Motor Show through superior engineering and cultural cachet have, in the years since the event imploded, either been consumed by Chinese corporate might altogether, or forced to consolidate. The smaller, damper Brussels Motor Show is where the wounded survivors have rallied.

Europe will find it difficult to un-strip the assets of its former industrial keystone. With zero-emission mandates funneling consumers and commercial buyers towards what is effectively an imported technology, it is near-impossible to imagine a solution that meaningfully rectifies the auto sector’s current course. Tariffs have proven ineffective at stymying the influx of Chinese cars, which now enjoy a 12.8% market share. Manufacturers are happy to swallow the additional costs, and Chinese suppliers are beginning to open plants in third countries anyway.

At the last-ever Geneva Motor Show, former Renault boss Luca de Meo called for what would amount to an Airbus-style consortium of pan-European cooperation on affordable electric cars, a further dilution of carmakers’ national identities and still a slightly unconvincing response to China’s heavily subsidized and comprehensively integrated supply chain. There are doubts as to whether Europe could come close to emulating this raw materials advantage, even in favorable regulatory conditions or if a coherent decision was made on reducing reliance on EV imports. In all but the most optimistic of scenarios (which involve the rapid exploitation of local mineral deposits and the development of advanced industry to process them) Europe’s car sector, and by extension the mobility of its population, will be in Chinese hands.