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The new Cupra Tindaya concept car will preview the next stage of the brand's design language when it is revealed at the Munich motor show next month.

The show car is named after the volcanic mountain on the Atlantic island of Fuerteventura because "its copper-toned rock echoes the signature of Cupra", said the brand.

To be unveiled on 8 September, it is expected to focus heavily on the future of the brand's interior design.

Cupra said the concept "delivers the maximum expression of driver focus, while offering a unique experience, enhancing the driver’s emotions".

In a preview image released by the brand, it shows a radical new cabin similar to that of the DarkRebel concept unveiled in 2023. It includes a yoke-like wheel, chunky central spine similar to the electric Tavascan's, and what appear to be racing seats.

The brand said the concept will blend “human and machine, where the driving experience and emotions reach their fullest expression”, emphasising a focus on interior design.

Cupra has revealed little else about the concept but did confirm it will also show the next step of its exterior design language.

The concept follows a major range-wide redesign last year in which the entire line-up was refreshed to bring parity between the new electric cars and older combustion models. The revamp mainly focused on the front end and included a prominent nose, a broader grille and triangular LED lights

The show car will be revealed alongside a camouflaged production version of the new Raval – Cupra’s Volkswagen ID 2 twin. The Raval will arrive in 2026 as the brand’s new entry-level model and a rival to the Renault 5. It is expected to be priced at around £25,000.

Chinese tech giant Xiaomi is planning to start selling its new electric cars in Europe within the next two years.

Historically best known as a manufacturer of consumer electronics (primarily its hugely popular smartphones), Xiaomi launched the SU7 saloon as its first EV in 2023 and announced plans to become one of the world's five biggest car makers. 

With its second EV, the YU7 SUV, now also on sale in China, Xiaomi Auto is one of the fastest-growing car brands in its home market, with more than 80,000 cars delivered in the last quarter alone (a near-200% yearly increase), and is laying the groundwork to soon start exporting cars internationally.

In an earnings call this week, company president William Lu told international media that Xiaomi Auto plans to enter the European EV market in 2027, having recently shared a photo of an SU7 on German plates to his Weibo account.

Lu is reported as saying the company is in the research and preparation phase of its European rollout and did not give any specific details on timings or model lines. 

Before sending its cars overseas, however, Xiaomi must contend with severe production bottlenecks at its factory in Beijing. Wait times for the SU7 are currently at 41 weeks, according to Chinese outlet CnEVPost, and orders placed now for the YU7 won't be fulfilled for more than a year. 

Xiaomi reportedly took around 240,000 orders for its Tesla Model Y rival within 18 hours of its unveiling in June – largely attributed to a low starting price equivalent to just £29,000 – leading to a backlog as the firm ramped up production of its two debut models in very short succession. Responding to criticism of the delays on social media, Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun recommended that disappointed customers consider rival products.

"If you need to buy a car quickly, other China-produced new energy vehicles are pretty good,” he said, highlighting the Xpeng G7, Li Auto i8 and even the Tesla Model Y - which he called "a great car".

Amid high demand for its first two cars, Xiaomi's EV business generated revenues of just over £2 billion in the last financial quarter and is expected to achieve monthly or quarterly profitability later this year, Lu said in the earnings call. However, he added that the company is still ultimately operating at a loss following investments of more than £3 billion in the company's launch and scale-up.

Xiaomi's EVs are likely to be pitched more overtly at the premium end of the market in Europe, given their performance focus and high levels of technology. 

The SU7 saloon – benchmarked against the Porsche Taycan and Tesla Model S – comes with up to 664bhp in standard form and has a claimed maximum range of nearly 500 miles. The YU7 touts a similarly lofty output in top-rung guise and is said to be capable of 519 miles per charge - though that is according to China's generous CLTC cycle.

Both cars are available with a choice of rear- or twin-motor powertrains and different battery sizes, though Xiaomi is likely to offer a streamlined international line-up, at least initially. 

It is possible that the company could launch the warp-speed SU7 Ultra super-saloon as a European halo model, having already built some hype around the 1527bhp super-saloon by breaking the EV lap record at the Nürburgring twice with it. 

Xiaomi's third car will be a larger SUV called the YU9. Positioned more upmarket than its range-mates and equipped with a range-extender powertrain, it seems less likely than its more mainstream, pure-EV range-mates to come to Europe.

Two recent facts revealed about Stellantis-backed Chinese electric car maker Leapmotor shouldn’t both be true at the same time but somehow are.

The first is that the company’s T03 electric runabout is now the UK’s cheapest car – £14,495 after a recent £1500 discount applied by Leapmotor to mimic the government grant. 

The second is that Leapmotor posted its first-ever half-year net profit, elevating it into the very exclusive club of Chinese electric-focused start-ups to have turned margin positive. The only other member is Li Auto, a premium maker of mainly large range-extender SUVs.

Any company that can profitably sell cheap electric cars clearly points to the future of the automotive industry, so what’s Leapmotor’s secret?

Leapmotor has so far been one of the quieter Chinese car makers in terms of UK sales, with 790 registrations so far this year to the end of July. That number has been eclipsed by the likes of BYD, MG and Chery’s Omoda/Jaecoo brands, but then Leapmotor deliveries only began in April.

Along with the budget T03, the only other model it sells is the C10 mid-size electric SUV, which now has its own thread on motoring forum PistonHeads after interest was sparked by a generous private lease from as little as £161 a month (which has since ended; now it's £319 a month with £319 down).

More models are coming. The B10 compact electric SUV is poised to go on sale soon and Leapmotor chief financial officer Li Tengfei announced that the company will reveal its new B05 compact electric hatchback – a rival to the MG 4 and Volkswagen ID 3 – at the Munich motor show in September. 

Along with the compact hatchback, the first of two small cars on a new ‘A-series’ platform are due next year.

While most global car makers fear the rise of low-cost electrified cars out of China, Stellantis is cheering the growth of this particular competitor. Leapmotor’s non-Chinese sales are handled by Leapmotor International, a joint venture 51% owned by Stellantis since 2023 following a deal in which the company also bought a 20% stake in Leapmotor for €1.5 billion.

“Leapmotor’s financial performance looks better than most Chinese NEV peers’,” Patrick Hummel, autos analyst at the bank UBS, wrote in a note to investors. “Stellantis made a good choice”.

Leapmotor International plans to go global, but aside from some early registrations in Latin America, the bulk of the company’s 20,370 exports in the first half went to Europe. CFO Li claimed the company booked 4000 sales in July in the region, in process claiming an impressive 1% of the fussy German car market.

The company claims it now has 550 dealerships in Europe – including over 50 in the UK and a target of 70 by the end of the year.

Neither Leapmotor nor Stellantis breaks out the profitability of the International arm. Li claimed the division is profitable but told investors that’s not the priority at this stage. “In the initial years, the most important job is to boost sales and enhance Leapmotor's global branding presence,” he said on the company’s first-half earnings call on 18 August.

The small but historically significant net profit of 30 million RMB (£3m) in the first half of 2025 came from a combination of its Chinese operations as well as a sizeable chunk (equivalent to around £20m-£30m) of carbon credits paid by Stellantis to allow it to hit emissions targets in Europe. Subsidises from the Chinese government also helped out, Li said.

Even though it was pushed over the profit line by non-traditional means, Leapmotor is doing a lot better than other start-ups like Nio, Xpeng and Zeekr, all of which are still languishing in the red. 

Leapmotor started later than its competition, launching its first car in 2019. In the first half of this year, however, Leapmotor sold 221,664 cars in total, up 156%, with another 50,000 added in July. This is well below China’s leader, BYD, at over two million but above Li Auto, which posted sales of 30,731 in July.

Profitability is even more impressive, given the company’s average selling price reached just 106,000 RMB (£11,000) in the first half, according to calculations from global investment bank Jefferies.The low price reflects the punishing competitiveness in the Chinese market but also the company’s value proposition. Leapmotor has a wider range of models on sale in China, including the new B01 saloon version of the upcoming hatchback and a larger C-badged saloon. 

Leapmotor's ability to make a profit from that low base reflects the fact that is vertically integrated, with 60% of the bill of materials cost coming from parts it makes itself, according to the company. Like BYD, Leapmotor produces its own batteries, which it packages into the chassis itself. 

The Hangzhou-based company, born out of electronics company Dahua Technology (known best for its surveillance cameras), has channelled that know-how into creating the Leap 3.5 electronic ‘software-defined’ architecture that it ports from car to car, which, it claims, reduces the development cycle of models on the platform by 25% and the overall investment by 40%.

The big question is whether Leapmotor can remain profitable after it moves some production of B-series vehicles to Europe next year (either the B10 SUV or B05 hatchback or both). The big cost saving will be on the tariffs that Leapmotor currently has to pay on European Union imports, both on EVs and its combustion-engined range-extender models. 

Moving away from China’s low-cost supply chain will increase bills but occupying existing Stellantis plants (reportedly in Spain) won’t cost too much, Li claimed. “Our overseas projects are mostly retrofit… on existing production lines. So the overall investment will be much smaller compared with greenfield projects,” he said.

Leapmotor’s low-cost, high-tech approach encompasses semi-autonomous driving and next year it claims it will be able to compete with the best thanks to improvements in lidar sensors, high-performance computer chips from Qualcomm and an ‘end-to-end’ algorithm figuring out where to place the car. As with all Chinese companies claiming leadership in this space, it’s hard to know who is actually ahead and how much the driver really can just sit back and watch as the car takes over.

This has even less relevance in the UK, where hands-free technology is tightly regulated and a new system of driver assistance is needed. As for the wider tech, one of the first customers to take delivery of the cheap-deal C10 SUVs posted on the PistonHeads forum deal thread that, after a week and 400 miles, he was "pleasantly surprised" by the experience despite the car missing out on Apple CarPlay.

The fact that Leapmotor can sell electric cars of decent quality both cheaply and – now - profitably bodes well for customers, dealers and especially for Stellantis, which gets to study how it’s done and potentially borrow some of the tech for itself.

Of all the many thousands of car makers that have ever existed, it seems probable that only one was created and operated by a woman.

Daphne Arnott’s eponymous company lasted for only a decade or so, but its short existence was an exciting and noteworthy one – and not just because of gender norms.

Arnott was born in 1926 to a father who was a third-generation automotive engineer and she was first exposed to motorsport at a young age, when he took her to Brooklands to watch a customer race using a supercharger of his.

She joined the London-based family business after a magazine publishing venture failed and became friendly with its general manager, wartime aircraft engineer George Thornton.

In 1951, the pair ventured to build a car for Formula 3, a new category for single-seaters powered by 500cc motorbike engines that had arisen from post-war austerity in Britain.

Autocar took notice when the little Arnott 500 “proved very fast” on its debut at Brands Hatch that October. It had independent suspension, partly donated by a Morris Minor, but most notable was Arnott’s focus on safety: it was the first F3 car with an integrated roll hoop and a seatbelt – not common even in Formula 1 for another 20 years.

When our sister title Classic & Sports Car caught up with Arnott in later years, she recalled: “Anyone who drove for the works team was required to use belts. Nobody was ever killed in one of our cars, and Dennis Taylor perhaps owes his life to our belts. He rolled a car at Brands Hatch but stayed in it, and when it landed on all four wheels, he continued. Had he been thrown out, he could have been seriously hurt.”

Arnott had wanted to try racing herself but “at the time there were so many restrictions on women and I wanted to compete on equal terms with the men. Most of those ladies’ races were really for the girlfriends of drivers and mechanics, and I thought they were a bit sissy.”

Naturally, her exploits caught the attention of London’s press. The Evening News wrote in 1952: “Arnott is a real mechanic. She is frequently to be seen in the pits changing a plug or helping in some other way, her white overalls grimy with grease, her blackened hands pushing carelessly through her blonde curls.” When asked if she had a romantic link to driver John Brise, she pointed to her car with a grin and said: “This is my boyfriend, and he takes up all my spare time.”

Enjoy full access to the complete Autocar archive at the magazineshop.com

The paper met her again in 1953, as her team fielded another F3 first: a fibreglass body. It weighed a third as much as an aluminium one, and she emphasised: “We kicked it around the garage and jumped on it and it seemed to make no difference.”

Meanwhile, Arnott had an eye on record-breaking, as DB, Kieft and Cooper set new 500cc bests at Montlhéry in quick order. So her team fabricated a streamlined body for the F3 car – and Brise broke no fewer than nine class records, for a fastest lap (122mph) and endurance.

Next came a road-going sports car: basically the F3 chassis clad in a fibreglass coupé body (praised by Autocar as “striking and beautifully finished”) and powered by various British fours. At least six were sold.

Ever ambitious, Arnott decided to enter a car into the 1955 Le Mans 24 Hours (painted not British racing green but her favourite colour, red). The only available driver was young Peter Taylor, and Arnott later recalled: “As he passed the pits [during practice], he simply had to give his girlfriend a nonchalant wave.

That loss of concentration caused him to clip something, the car swerved across the track and piled into the Dunlop Bridge. He was unhurt, but when I saw him get out of the car unscathed, I wanted to run across and murder him.”

It was a major blow, but Arnott’s team redoubled their efforts for a 1957 return with a bespoke coupé – and this time the innovation was, in our words, “quite the most complex suspension”, the idea being that long rocker arms would afford more grip the faster the car was cornered.

It ran okay in the race – until the fifth hour, when its Climax engine uncharacteristically shed a valve.

And that was pretty much that. Arnott refocused on the family business, taking it over after her father died in 1961. Soon after she sold up and moved to Devon to run a guest house with her husband. 

She took the 1955 Le Mans car with her, though, and it has since been restored to its former glory.