A warm and sultry night in old London town was the location for the formal brand launch for Lepas in the UK. Regular readers will already have seen my review of the Chinese manufacturer’s first car, the L8, Lepas-L8-Launch-Review However, this was a chance to meet the full team and find out what the future plans are.

Rewind a couple of years, and most UK car buyers had never heard of the Chinese car giant Chery. They certainly do now with the company storming the UK sales charts with its Omoda and Jaecoo brands. Just last month, the Jaecoo 7 and 5 models were in fourth and seventh positions, respectively, in the chart of UK registration figures.

Isuzu first showed us its D-Max EV at the Commercial Vehicle Show earlier this year. It made the headlines, being the first fully electric pickup in the UK to provide over 1-tonne payload, 3.5-tonne towing capacity and permanent four-wheel drive.

Mitsubishi stopped selling its range of vehicles in the UK in 2021, but now the Japanese company is back with two new vehicles. At the recent launch event, I got to sample both the L200 pickup and the Outlander PHEV. The latter is a story for another day. This is the seventh generation of the L200 and it has been on sale in other markets for quite some time.

I attended the launch of Kia’s PV5 van just before Christmas, and I was able to try it in both commercial and passenger guises. I came away impressed, not just by the way it drove, but also by the affordable pricing for a fully electric van. Keen to try one for an extended period, I have just enjoyed a week behind the wheel of a top-spec passenger PV5 Plus and can now report further.

Eager to get behind the wheel of Mazda’s all-new CX-5, a quick trip to Scotland gave me the opportunity to put the car through a thorough test on challenging and mostly traffic-free roads.

Proud Yorkshiremen and women have often called our county ‘God’s Own Country’ Inspired by this description a small group of local business leaders including the Chair of the Yorkshire Historic Churches Trust Ed Anderson, the former Chair Tom Ramsden and two prominent Yorkshire businessmen Jonathan Turner and Jonathan Sands OBE have come together to showcase our County with a Classic Car Rally w…