6:40 am, December 31, 2022
So, year-end then. Time for a mince pie and the inevitable mantlepiece moment where I pompously give you my view of the past 12 months.
January 2022 seems an entirely different universe now. Twelfth Night (the festival, not the Shakespeare play) had barely happened before Constellation dotted the ‘i’s and crossed the ‘t’s on its acquisition of Marshall Motor Group.
Cazoo started its year off with finalising a £67m deal to buy out Italian online car retailer Brumbrum, while rival Carzam appointed a new chief technology officer.
Boris Johnson gave his support for a new gigafactory for electric vehicle batteries, while the public were anxiously waiting for the much-anticipated Sue Gray report.
And to cap it all off, official data confirmed that Ford had lost its best-seller crown to Vauxhall in 2021 for the first time in 50 years.
Some 11 months later and it couldn’t be much more different.
As I write, Cazoo’s tenacity and open wallet that it showed in January has become a rapid withdrawal from sponsorship deals and a mass clearance of (mainland) European operations – Brumbrum was just one of the many embarrassing casualties.
Its share price as of December 19 was down 98.8 per cent on its flotation value in August 2021.
Meanwhile, the shutters came down on rival Carzam in June, with the business owing its creditors £18.9m, prompting many car dealers to question the success of the so-called ‘online disruptors’.
Britishvolt, the much-vaunted project to build EV batteries on a mass scale, is finishing 2022 by looking for new investment after narrowly avoiding administration in November – now being seen as a serious blow to the UK’s hopes of leading the electric car revolution.
And let’s not talk about Boris Johnson, or the fact that we’re now on our third incumbent at Number 10 in a year, or that Sue Gray report.
This has all happened over the course of this year, don’t forget. It’s utterly extraordinary.
And this is before you remember other headlines such as Hedin walking away from buying Pendragon, the worrying increase in dealers being held to ransom by cybercriminals and Jaguar Land Rover’s CEO leaving the British firm.
It’s Ford’s loss of market dominance and the car that secured the Blue Oval’s position as the nation’s favourite that I’m struggling to get my head around, though.
When the numbers were totted up, the Vauxhall Corsa came out as 2021’s best-selling car and in so doing became the first non-Ford to take the top spot since 1971, when Brits bought more Austin/Morris 1100/1300s than anything else. A staggering 50-year run by Ford came to an end.
Ford would argue that 2021 – and indeed 2022 – were hardly normal years in the world of new cars, and it still managed to secure eighth place in the best-sellers chart.
But it wasn’t with the Fiesta as it has done since, well, seemingly forever but with its more off-roady brother, the Puma.
Come October of this year and seemingly out of nowhere Ford announced that the Fiesta was to disappear by mid-2023.
Time had been called on the cornerstone of Ford’s ‘people car’ status – a car that had for 45 years served the nation as a supermini, a first car, a driving school car, a family car, a shopping car and a performance car.
By the time of us putting this issue to bed, Ford had added some more details about the decision to axe its icon, saying the production space in its Cologne factory was needed for its forthcoming new VW ID.4/Skoda Enyaq-based electric SUV. A tough but necessary decision, apparently.
I’ve prattled on in a previous column about Ford being in danger of losing its founding principles of providing mass, efficient transport, so I won’t waste your time any further on the matter.
With that, that’s my mantlepiece moment. See you in the new year – heaven knows where we’ll be this time in 2023!
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