Max McDee
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30 years in the auto industry. I separate the reality from the EV marketing hype. Wrench in one hand, pen in the other. No BS reviews & unfiltered stories.
Articles by Max McDee
Cheap hatchbacks and Chinese partnerships are propping up the Stellantis EV strategy
The EV transition was meant to be smooth sailing, but nothing really went according to plan - any plan. When you actually live with an electric car every day, you quickly learn to ignore the five-year master plans announced at investor days. What matters is whether the heater works, whether the suspension can handle broken roads without rattling your teeth, and whether the monthly payment makes sense.
BYD is teasing its new Yangwang flagship destined for UAE
We tend to romanticize flagship beastly sedans as effortless cruisers built for crossing continents, but in real life, their size dictates where you can take them and how much energy you spend keeping them in perfect condition. Those cars come with price tags that could buy a house or two, and that is the exact territory BYD is stepping into with its newest high-end saloon, the Yangwang Altior.
Dodge brings its electric and twin-turbo Chargers to Europe
Trying to get a wide American performance car through a multi-story parking garage in Europe is an exercise in patience and hand-eye coordination - your head swings from side mirror to side mirror like your life depends on it. Buying a proper Detroit muscle in Europe used to mean dealing with gray-market importers, confusing paperwork, and cars that were out of scale with local roads.
Volkswagen takes the slow road to hands-off driving in China
Most of the "autonomous" cars that we drive today are Level 2: helpful right up until the moment things get messy, at which point the machine panics and dumps the responsibility back into your lap. That gap between real autonomy and glorified cruise control is what carmakers are desperately trying to bridge, and Volkswagen has decided that the road to solving this problem runs through China.
XPeng sends Mona L05 to customers abroad ahead of Chinese launch
It is very rare for a Chinese manufacturer to build a car for export from day one. Usually, we get a vehicle designed around Chinese traffic scenarios and smartphone ecosystems, with a European radio tuner bolted on eighteen months later as an afterthought. But watching XPeng load the new Mona L05 onto cargo ships before the car has even officially gone on sale in China feels like a serious shift in strategy.
Interior of the new BYD Seal 07 reveals a grownup design
Here’s a simple fact about cars, electric or not - whenever you spend six or seven hours behind the wheel, you quickly forget about performance numbers and start caring about cabin layout. If you cannot put your phone on a charger without knocking a coffee cup, or if shifting into reverse means fighting with a fiddly dial while maneuvering into a tight parking bay, all the power and clever software count for nothing.
Australia and New Zealand join long list of Cybertruck-less countries
A good utility vehicle is supposed to earn its keep not through showroom drama, but through how well it works with the roads, lanes, parking bays, and the everyday tasks of the real world. When a vehicle needs an entire country to reshape its streets and change regulations just to accommodate its presence - reality usually wins.
The floating 1,197-HP Yangwang U8 now patrols the streets of Dubai
Once you've been driving for a few years, you start to recognize unmarked police cars from quite far away. In the UK, traffic officers usually spend their shifts in a Skoda Octavia vRS, waiting for someone to get a bit too optimistic in the outside lane. In Germany, the autobahn patrols rely on practical BMWs, Volkswagens, and a growing fleet of Stellantis products.
QuantumScape hires Muehlbauer to build its first 100 MWh solid-state battery production line
If you own an EV, then you most likely share my skepticism toward battery breakthroughs. Every few months, a press release promises a miracle technology - charge in five minutes, last a million miles, and weigh next to nothing. When a company says they have a new manufacturing roadmap, I don't get too excited - I look past the marketing, wondering what they are going to actually need to build it.
Best heritage revivals from Paris Motor Show 2026
I learned something last week that I actually had no idea about - Paris has been hosting car shows since 1898, when a handful of first horseless carriages gathered in the Tuileries gardens and tried to convince very skeptical Parisians that the horse was a relic. 128 years later, the Paris Expo Porte de Versailles was once again Europe's biggest automotive stage, and I spent the opening days walking its halls with a notebook, sore feet and a growing sense of déjà vu.
Europe loosens its 2035 combustion ban - legacy automakers buy more time
Have you bought a new car in Europe over the last five years? You have probably gone through a showroom experience that felt much like a lecture. Salespeople trying to steer us away from petrol engines and toward battery power, warning that the old ways had an expiry date... For ordinary drivers who do not have a driveway to plug in at night, or who regularly haul heavy loads for hundreds of miles, that deadline felt divorced from the reality of daily life.
The second-gen BYD Seagull grows up, but keeps its price under $10,000
There's an obvious pattern whenever a carmaker releases a second generation of its cheap-n-cheerful city car. The original model hits the streets as a scrappy, compromised runabout with thin door cards, four seats, and just enough power to keep up with urban traffic. Then a rival builds something slightly bigger for the same money, buyers walk across the street, and the engineers have to go back to the drawing board. That is the exact story behind the second-generation BYD Seagull.
XPeng begins European deliveries of the L03 in Paris ahead of November UK arrival
When a CEO flies halfway across the world just to hand a single set of car keys to a retail buyer, it rarely has anything to do with customer service. Most of the time, it is a carefully staged photograph designed to convince nervous local dealers and skeptical European leasing companies that the brand is not going to pack up and vanish in three years.
The latest Xiaomi HyperOS 1.18 teaches the SU7 and YU7 to relax in traffic
The irony of owning an electric car with enough power to outrun most supercars isn't funny at all - we spend four days out of five stuck behind delivery vans in total gridlock. We love to obsess over Nürburgring lap times, wild zero-to-sixty sprints, and chassis balance on a mountain pass, but most of our miles are spent staring at brake lights. That's why Xiaomi Auto's latest HyperOS 1.18 caught my attention.
Affalterbach reveals the 1,169 hp Mercedes-AMG GT SUV
The legacy of Affalterbach was written in V8 rumble, supercharged whine, and clouds of vaporized rear Michelins. It used to be simple - if you wanted a fast Mercedes SUV, AMG's recipe was unsubtle: take a practical family car, shoehorn a hand-built twin-turbo V8 beneath the bonnet, stiffen the suspension until your fillings rattled, and let the exhaust wake the dead.
Paris Motor Show’s eight debuts that matter
The Paris Motor Show used to have a knack for launching cars that end up defining a decade. The original Smart City Coupé rolled onto the stand here back in 1998, the Audi A2 arrived a year later as an aluminum-bodied masterpiece of efficiency - both went on to become cult objects long after the accountants had killed them off.
New XPeng Mona L05 joins China’s family crossover wars
Not all that long ago, automotive startups treated internal combustion like a plague. If you so much as suggested dropping a petrol generator into a skateboard chassis, the EV evangelists would look at you as if you had lost your marbles. But the car market has a brutal way of punishing dogmatic thinking, and this ideological purity has been kicked to the curb in favor of cold pragmatism.
Tesla’s cold-gas-powered Roadster has landed
Nine years is an eternity in the auto world - long enough for a clean-sheet platform to be conceived, engineered, facelifted, and sent to the great scrapheap in the sky. When Elon Musk drove a cherry-red targa out from the back of the electric Semi in late 2017, the brief seemed simple enough: build a gorgeous car that would deliver a proper, petrolhead-grade black eye to internal combustion.
Alpine A310 Vision revives Dieppe’s icon with limited production on the cards
When the original Alpine A310 was revealed back in 1971 in Dieppe, it was quite a bit of a shock, really. The motorsport scene adored the A110 Berlinette - but the A310 was a sharp, angular wedge that looked like a knife pointed at the heart of the Porsche 911. It was eccentric, and very French, especially once it grew flared arches and got the growling PRV V6 in 1976.
XPeng G9L drives from Austria to Paris for its European debut
The excitement has barely settled at the Paris Expo, and I am already circling XPeng’s latest addition to its growing lineup. Minutes ago, the G9L took its first public bow on European soil, with the pre-production prototype sitting under the spotlights, arriving covered in road grit after a 823 miles shakedown trek - a flat-out sprint from Magna Steyr’s historic assembly facility in Graz, Austria, right into the heart of France.
The 2026 Lancia Gamma is here to save the brand
Fifty years ago, Pininfarina designed a rakish fastback sedan called the Lancia Gamma, dropped a flat-four boxer engine in, and created one of the most brilliant heartbreaks in Italian motoring history. It had the poise of a movie star, and the temperament of a wet firecracker - mainly because running the power steering pump off the left camshaft belt meant turning full lock could grenade the entire valvetrain.
Xpeng's Yoyo robotaxi service goes live
Guangzhou at dusk is a definition of anarchy - electric mopeds fly in all directions, and beat-up delivery vans cut across three lanes without warning. If you ever wanted an autonomous vehicle test ground, the heart of southern China is the best place for it. This is where Xpeng has chosen to kick off an invite-only pilot for its commercial autonomous driving venture under the playful moniker of Yoyo (or Xiaopeng Youyou 小鹏悠游).
Renault sharpens up the 4 E-Tech
Way back in 1961, Pierre Dreyfus handed his Renault engineers quite an interesting brief for the original 4L: build a "blue jeans car." He meant an honest, functional tool meant for everyone from shopkeepers to farmers. The original was never designed to be precious. It wasn't built to flatter egos. Fast-forward to the upcoming 2026 Paris Motor Show, and Renault is revisiting its roots, though in a very much updated form.
The new Hyundai IONIQ 3 goes on sale in UK, production kicks off in Turkiye
The electric vehicle transition used to feel like an exclusive club with entry needing a second mortgage. Real enthusiasts, who appreciate the joy of a sorted chassis and modest dimensions, were largely left out in the cold. But this year has been different, with more and more truly affordable EVs finally arriving in the showrooms. Hyundai is one of the brands that decided it was about time to give people what they've been asking for all along - an aerodynamic, pixel-infused hatchback.
British luxury gets electric era overhaul with the new Jaguar Type 01
Many, many years ago, Sir William Lyons famously declared that a Jaguar should be "a copy of nothing," an ethos that gave birth to the legendary 1961 Geneva unveiling of the E-Type. It was a car so jaw-dropping that Enzo Ferrari called it the most beautiful car ever made. But for the better part of this century, Coventry lost that magical plot.
Renault rejects the SUV fetish with the electric E-Space MPV reboot
Back in 1984, Renault and the skunkworks at Matra rewrote the family road trip by gifting Europe the original Espace. With its lightweight composite panels glued to a galvanized skeleton and a nose lifted straight from a high-speed TGV train, it started the entire continental religion of space-efficient motoring. The Espace was the ultimate rolling living room.
Alfa Romeo refreshes Junior crossover
Alfa Romeo has never been the one to enter a room without causing a scene, and the christening of its first electric crossover was no exception. When Italy's industry minister threw a full-blown patriotic tantrum over the proposed "Milano" badge - complaining that assembling an Italian-named car in Poland was a commercial treason - Alfa simply raided its archives and slapped the historic "Junior" badge onto the tailgate instead.
UK caught between Brussels and Beijing with 45% EV tariffs on the table
Britain has arrived at a multi-billion-pound fork in the road: which way will this island nation genuinely be better off? Do we keep enjoying the growing choice of ultra-affordable Chinese electric cars, or do we fall in step with Brussels and put up steep trade barricades to protect our deeply integrated domestic manufacturing base?
Inside Britain’s record-breaking EV surge
The British automotive market is a different animal entirely. Every year, on September 1st, bleary-eyed buyers hover around shiny new registration plates. But as the September 2026 registration dust settled across the UK, the automotive landscape went through a tectonic change. In thirty days, British motorists registered 99,199 pure battery-electric vehicles.
Tesla defies analytics with Q3 delivery numbers but still misses the mark
With crude oil prices marching upward, courtesy of the geopolitical situation across the Middle East, drivers who spent the last two years swearing they would never touch a charging cable are wincing at the fuel pump and reconsidering their options. Tesla's third-quarter delivery numbers for 2026 are a perfect example here.
The new electric Jeep Compass 4xe found its soul in the Arctic
Fifty miles south of the Arctic Circle is the frozen expanse of Arjeplog (Sweden) - and it's not your usual testing ground. It is an unforgiving outdoor laboratory where half-baked chassis tuning and lazy electronic calibrations go to die. Watching a family-friendly compact crossover slide sideways across the ice ring track usually smacks of cheap marketing theater. But watching the all-new, fully electric Jeep Compass 4xe get covered in snow feels very different.
The new Range Rover Sport swaps V8 thunder for high-voltage muscle
The Range Rover Sport has been the bad boy of the luxury SUV world for good two decades. A rebellious, leather-lined battering ram equally good at doing burnouts outside Harrods as it was at scrambling up a muddy Scottish hillside. For three generations, and more than one million sales, its defining party piece was the supercharged V8 soundtrack that announced your arrival three postcodes in advance. It was loud, antisocial, and intoxicating.
Xiaomi SkyNomad series boosts sales on the way to half a million cars
Only three short years ago, a consumer electronics titan best known for mobile phones, fitness bands and robot vacuums built its first electric car. When the SU7 arrived, it terrified Stuttgart’s finest. It was followed by the YU7 crossover, proving that Xiaomi was deadly serious about electric pace. But car companies cannot survive on hot-lapping dream machines alone.
Lexus finally reveals prices of the 2027 TZ three-row electric SUV
Toyota Motor Corporation treated the EV gold rush with ice-cold skepticism - we all saw it, and we all had a few things to say about it. Its rivals burned billions delivering half-baked electric cars, but Toyota focused on its multi-powertrain approach - leaning into hybrids, perfecting battery supply chains, and telling the world to calm down. In hindsight, I think Toyota might have understood the market a bit better than anyone else.
Xiaomi look-alike Luxeed RX goes on sale
Things do change awfully quick in China. It wasn't that long ago when domestic brands shamelessly copied the shapes of Land Rovers, pinched the quad headlamps of Mercedes sedans, and put Porsche Macan rear ends onto budget crossovers. They did it because everyone then agreed that Western engineering and design were the gold standard. How times have changed… Today, China's domestic electric vehicle market is the most advanced and saturated on the planet.
Lynk & Co built a cut-price EV to save its skin - 15,000 orders confirm they got it right
China, China, China… Nobody pauses to offer condolences in its cutthroat battery-electric dogfight - you really cannot call it another name. A simple stumble invites the competition to feed on your carcass. Lynk & Co felt that chill right down its spine this summer when its sales went into the red - deliveries down 37.44% year-on-year in August, total volume down by 14.84% across the first eight months of the year.
Nissan is sending an old Leaf into Cambridge chaos
What's the ultimate trial by fire for an autonomous vehicle? It's definitely not the perfectly laid out boulevards of Phoenix, Arizona. Apart from the busy streets of Beijing, the next best place apparently is Cambridge. Anyone who has ever tried driving through this historic English university town knows the horror: medieval carriageways narrower than an open umbrella, delivery vans parked on blind bends, and thousands of distracted students on rusty bicycles swarming like angry bees.
Tesla’s European FSD push stalls
The reality of driving in Europe is something that no line of Silicon Valley software code has quite managed - not yet. Squeezing down old and narrow cobblestone alleys, dodging delivery vans, and avoiding cyclists that tend to pop out of nowhere is a high-stakes gamble that we all take part in every day. Out here, the roads do not play to the same rules as the sun-drenched grid of a California boulevard.
Blue paint, white stripes: Renault 8 Gordini returns as a RWD electric ghost
Long before the hot hatch became Europe's idea of fun, French rally enthusiasts worshipped a little shoebox called "la Gorde." In 1964, Renault put a crossflow head onto a rear-mounted engine, dialed in a tail-heavy, pendulum-like handling balance, slapped two white racing stripes over Bleu de France paint, and gave everyday motorists a masterclass in opposite-lock physics.
Tesla Semi finally leaves the sidelines and goes into production
Seeing an eight-ton Class 8 commercial tractor haul itself off the line like an angry hot hatch is something you need to experience - otherwise you won’t believe it is possible. For nearly seven years, we have treated the Tesla Semi like a ghost story - a sleek silhouette seen hauling crisps or sitting in the background of earnings calls. Forever stranded in a development program.
The US-spec ID. Buzz is sent back to the end of the line
Would you believe that the whole saga of ID. Buzz started 25 years ago? I remember looking at the Volkswagen Microbus back in 2001, watching executives promise that Woodstock's favorite party bus was about to make a comeback. The Microbus then morphed into the ID. Buzz in 2017 as EV fever started to take hold. It took more than two decades, leadership shuffles, and a powertrain revolution before the actual ID. Buzz touched down on American soil in late 2024.
EV sales are surging and Eastern ambitions are changing European market
There is almost a visceral sensation when you see average petrol prices at $2.45 a liter and diesel kissing $2.61 a liter - the highest Europe has seen in decades. For our American readers - that's $9.59 per gallon of diesel, which is about $3.30 more than East Coast residents pay now.
The new Bentley Torcal bridges ultra-luxury with Stuttgart hardware
This is it. The moment has finally arrived when Bentley, known for wood shavings, hand-stitched hides, and the deep-chested burble of a giant V8, has to face the music. That moment even has its own name - the Torcal. It is the fourth model line in Bentley's portfolio and its very first production electric vehicle. Bentley fans have spent most of the last decade dreading the day Crewe would swap eight-cylinder rumble for silent battery power, but the reality is actually way, way more unapologetic.
The reborn Nissan PIXO could be the urban EV we actually need
Who remembers the original Nissan Pixo? Back in 2009, it arrived as a rebadged Suzuki Alto assembled in Delhi: a cheap, bare-bones box powered by a buzzy 1.0-liter three-cylinder engine. It was transport in its purest, least romantic sense - an appliance designed to get budget-conscious commuters from point A to point B without emptying their wallets.
Four minutes to charge an EV? Geely says its 2.2 MW is the answer
This week has been a proper whirlwind of battery announcements - and the message has never been clearer: you can forget the half-hour charging sessions. We used to tell ourselves that 30 minutes was a reasonable trade-off for zero emissions. It was the price of admission. But in China, it seems nobody got that memo.
Nissan updates the N7 with tech and lower prices to fight back in China
I'm still trying to wrap my head around the fact that Nissan managed to build an executive-length, rear-wheel-drive electric saloon with active road-reading dampers, decent computing brains, and roof-mounted LiDAR - and then sell it for the price of a second-hand hatchback. I had to triple-check my sources, because the cheapest electric Nissan in Europe right now is the bare-bones $30,453 Micra.
BYD's smallest urban runabout is about to grow bigger
The original hot hatchback philosophy never had anything to do with raw horsepower - but everything to do with chucking a light, squared-off box through tight city roundabouts. When the BYD Seagull first arrived in early 2023, it captured that exact pocket-sized cheeky essence. It showed up on the scene as a compact, sub-four-meter city car built with a focus on affordable, everyday electric commuting.
Sunwoda's 15C Megawatt tech means full battery in less than 10 minutes
Stopping to charge an electric car used to mean a bit of a lifestyle adjustment. You would pull into an empty service station, fight with a cable thick as an anaconda, pray the card reader works, and then pace around for forty-five minutes with the battery slowly seeping in electrons. If you enjoy the open road, the romance of a crisp morning sprint used to come with an asterisk: the fun-busting midway compulsory stop.
The rear-drive Geely EX5 breaks the cover
The Chinese EV market is relentless, chaotic, and can be very tricky to keep track of. A brand debuts on a Monday with world-changing promises, drops two compact crossovers on Wednesday, and rolls out an entirely new sub-brand by Friday morning. But there are exceptions to this rule, and sometimes a manufacturer realizes that approach gets you nowhere really, and decides to transform an ordinary runabout into a decent piece of hardware.
BYD’s Fang Cheng Bao Formula S and S GT go on sale in China
For the past couple of years, Fang Cheng Bao was the brand you associated with squared-off, boulder-crawling plug-in beasts - a sub-brand built specifically to pull wealthy outdoor hobbyists away from their Land Cruisers and Defenders. Yet here we are, watching that off-road-centric outfit park a pair of sleek EVs right in the Xiaomi SU7 and Tesla Model 3's front yard.
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