Independent Reviews of New and Used Cars

Škoda’s Enyaq electric family hatch gets a useful mid-term update. Jonathan Crouch takes a look.

Toyota’s improved Yaris Cross small SUV will continue to be a hugely significant for this Japanese maker. Jonathan Crouch drives it.

How will modern era used market buyers cope with a version of this Škoda that’s quite a lot more expensive and sophisticated? It’ll be interesting to see. There’s certainly lots to like here from a car that feels engineered to a depth that many rivals can’t match. Even the trendy digitalised cabin manages to deliver quite a mature blend of form and function. The electrified engine options are welcome. And the media features and autonomous driving tech are cutting-edge, as is the safety tech with up to 26 assistance systems available. The Czech maker knows the kinds of people it’s aiming at here and by 2020, no longer wanted to serve them as a ‘value brand’. That market was left to the Chinese. Instead, this manufacturer wanted a higher quality image developed alongside higher quality products - cars like this one. The company was looking forward to an era where the purchase of something like an Octavia would be viewed not as a cheaper choice but instead as rather a clever one. Here, we were minded to think that this time might already have arrived.

Mercedes rationalises its mid-sized coupe offering into this car, the CLE Coupe. Jonathan Crouch drives it.

The Tayron is a sharper-looking kind of Volkswagen seven-seat family SUV. Jonathan Crouch checks it out.