How do you choose between a Renault 5 and a Ferrari 12Cilindri? | Thank Frankel it’s Friday

The problem, in a nutshell, is that car manufacturers are being forced to make cars people don’t want to buy. And yes, that is a vast, sprawling generalisation, but in the broadest brush terms so too is it true. EV sales are sluggish and those that are being sold are overwhelmingly going onto company car fleets at vast discounts or into Motability schemes also for a lot less than list price. 

This is, in turn, torpedoing their residual values making it even less likely that private individuals will choose to part with their own hard-earned cash to buy a new one. Why, for instance – and I’m deliberately choosing a really decent EV which I like – spend over £50k on a brand new long range dual motor Polestar 2, when you can buy a 2023 model with less than 15,000 miles on the clock for little more than half that amount?

Even so, new EVs keep on coming. I sit on the Car Of The Year jury and of the seven cars shortlisted for the 2025 award, four were pure EVs (Renault 5, Alfa Romeo Junior, Kia EV3 and Hyundai Inster), one that comes with both petrol and pure EV versions (Citroen C3) and only two powered either entirely or primarily by petrol (Dacia Duster, Cupra Terramar).

And yet perhaps it will not be the greatest surprise to discover that the list of cars I’ve enjoyed driving most in 2024 are predominately (but not entirely) EV-free. These are just a few of them.

Right at the top end, I loved the new Ferrari 12Cilindri which instead of being an even faster, madder and less usable replacement for the 812 Superfast, turned out to be softer, quieter, subtler and a real return to the Grand Touring roots of the Ferrari 12-cylinder Berlinetta. At last the true successor to the fabled 365 GTB/4 ‘Daytona’ is here.

Only a little further down the scale, you’d think the marriage of the engine from the GT3 RS track day car with a six speed manual gearbox would be enough of a USP for the Porsche 911 S/T, but actually it is the way the car is damped, allowing it to flow along the most difficult roads, that is the standout memory for me. The best Porsche of the last decade, and by a distance.

Aston Martin continued the product onslaught started by the fine DB12 last year with the no less excellent Vantage, which turned out to be a properly brutal V8 hotrod in the finest traditions of the 1980s ‘Oscar India’ Vantage; but when I found myself chopping between it and the McLaren Artura, now with a spider roof, new exhausts and uprated power, I was reminded all over again just how under-rated is the hybrid from Woking. Forced to choose, I’d have it over even the brilliant Aston.

I didn’t love the Ioniq 5N, but I was amazed by what Hyundai has done with this all-electric phenomenon. The agility of such a heavy car is something to behold, but actually it’s the button that fires up a virtual twin-cam four and turns the steering column paddles into gearshifters that captivated me most. It’s so good I guarantee if you drove someone who didn’t know what it was, it would never occur to him or her that it was not powered by petrol. It even has a rev-limiter for goodness sake. Though none has yet, others will follow this lead.

I doubt anyone will try and create a rival to the Toyota GR Yaris because it must be hideously expensive to make relative to the price and numbers sold, but with even more power and agility for this year, it is one of the most usable fun cars of its or any other era, a proper little masterpiece that deserves to be considered to be one of the great real-world driver’s cars of the day.

And finally the briefly aforementioned Renault 5. I’ve driven so many disappointing EVs of all descriptions some have lumped me in the EV-sceptic Luddites for whom petrol power is the only way. Not true: I’ve just been waiting for the right one to come along and this is it. Great to look at, quiet, comfortable, surprisingly fun to drive and realistically priced, I can see it gaining traction among the young like the Fiat 500 did in 2007 and Mini Cooper at the turn of the century. I expect that, like them, it will also have a transformative effect on its brand. And it will deserve to.

Should I pick a car of the year from this lot? How to compare a Ferrari 12Cilindri with a Renault 5? It’s preposterous. But if I had to, it would be the Porsche. Just.