Today's cars aren't boring, there's just way too many of them
Failure to identify a mystery car in his mirrors has driven Richard Porter to a frightening admission
A few weeks ago I was driving home when an unfamiliar car appeared behind me. It was medium-sized and an SUV, which already makes it deeply generic, like Kardashians or men who work in the City of London. But actually, head-on in my mirrors, this thing was distinctive because it had a grille like a Jeep. Mentally I spooled through my knowledge of the current Jeep range and came up blank. This car looked like a Jeep, but it wasn’t an actual Jeep. For one thing, it didn’t have its maker’s name written above that slotty grille. This was puzzling, but before I could get a closer look, the mystery car had gone.
When I got home I decided to do some research. This strange, unfamiliar car with its rip-off grille was surely from one of those Chinese car makers you’ve never heard of but which suddenly has a massive showroom on the bypass and in seven years will be cited as the reason we no longer have Nissans and why Stellantis is now all European car companies except Morgan. So I combed the website of every Chinese company currently flogging cars in Britain and found lots of cars that look like those generic SUVs in renderings of new buildings on hoardings, or Tesla-shaped bars of soap that have been run under a hot tap for too long, but nothing with a faux Jeep grille. I was stumped.
Still, there was nothing I could do until two weeks ago when once again I saw my white whale. It really was white, by the way. Once again it was behind me, but this time as it turned off I got a look at its side profile and, well, that told me nothing. But later, while trawling the internet for clues again, I realised it might not be a Chinese car after all and this led me, eventually, to the answer: the car I saw was a KGM Torres. No, me neither. But I kept reading. KGM is what used to be Ssangyong, South Korea’s third most successful car maker, and the Torres is its latest SUV, described by Auto Express as ‘spacious’. Strangely, evo hasn’t yet road-tested this car. Maybe saving it for eCoty.
Solving the KGM Torres mystery at least allowed me to sleep again, but it also reminded me of something troubling that I’ve suspected for a while, which is that I don’t really know cars any more. When I was a kid, and indeed long after I wasn’t, I felt like I knew every new car on sale, here and elsewhere. I could even spot trim variations and options and I’d silently bridle at people casually saying things like, ‘Ooh, doesn’t that look like an Audi’ because what Audi would have alloys like that for Christ’s sake, Steve. But here we are in 2026 and the consonant-hoggers who used to be called Ssangyong have managed to launch a brand-new car entirely without me noticing.
And it’s not just the Nadine Dorres or whatever it’s called. I’ve no idea what half of those new Jaecoos and BYDs are, not in the reflexive way I used to have with, say, the entire Ford range. Come to think of it, I’m not entirely sure I know the entire Ford range any more. I’m certainly not confident I could list every current Volkswagen, not since they decided to start selling seven different small SUVs, all with memorably unmemorable names like T-Cross and T-Roc and T-Bag.
Worse still, given the magazine you’re reading, I really have to think hard about current Ferraris because it’s not like simpler times when their regular model range went 355, 512, 456 and that was it. In fact, at the time of writing, Ferrari lists more individual models in its range than Fiat. And that, I think, explains some of why I’ve lost track of cars. It’s not that they’ve got less interesting, because God knows there were some right dullards 10 or 20 years ago. It’s that there are just too many of them.
Merc used to sell three saloons, an estate and a sports car; now it has over 20 models in its range. Audi was similarly minimalist, whereas now I honestly couldn’t tell you how many very similar-looking SUVs it makes nor, since it seems to change its badging system on a monthly basis, what any of them are called.
It’s not entirely the fault of the car makers, of course. It’s also down to me getting old and having greater responsibilities, chiefly trying to remember on which day my children have PE and by which app the school has told me this, both things that change more often than Audi’s badging policy. Something’s got to give in my ailing brain, and it’s keeping a detailed knowledge of all the cars in all the showrooms across the land. So, with regret, I’ve realised that I don’t need to know this stuff. But you can ask me any time about the KGM Torres.
