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No posting today (bar this one) as I'm on holiday with the family. Normal service resumes next week. Thanks. Richard

A thing of beauty...

Writing this in the reception area of Bentley HQ in Crewe, where I’ve been driving the new V8 versions of the Continental GT and GTC. There are worse ways of spending the first sunny Monday of the summer! Never failed to be impressed by the head-turning ability of the GT, even on the roads in this part of the world where it’s a relatively common sight. However, a genuine rarity in the Bentley world is the car pictured above, the centrepiece of the firm’s heritage display for the summer. It’s a one-of-a-kind 4.25-litre Bentley Embiricos Coupe from 1938 and is about as rare as Bentleys come. The firm has been trying for years to get hold of it, as it’s in private ownership in America but has been in Europe to compete in some historic race events. Andre Embiricos was a wealthy Greek racing driver who commissioned new aerodynamic bodywork for his standard car. The result was a huge success and the car finished sixth at Le Mans in 1949. My Bentley guide didn’t know its value – it’s virtually priceless – but admitted the firm’s annual contents insurance policy had shot up by more than £9,000 just to have it standing on this piece of carpet until September.

Pandora's Box? Perhaps...

I’ve written about driverless car technology in this blog before and I make no apologies for doing so again. I think it’s a fascinating topic. So do many other people and I interviewed one of them yesterday for an article in Vision Zero International, an automotive safety magazine which I contribute to. Bryan Reimer is a respected researcher at America’s MIT university, and believes getting the technology to work – that is having a car which can make its own decisions based on data from sensors – is the easy bit. He says the hard part is working out how humans are going to interact with the system and know when and when not to trust it. “There are enormous benefits but the consequences have yet to be understood,” he told me. Reimer also has concerns over motorists losing their driving skills, echoing exactly what has happened in the aviation industry. Pilots rely on autopilot too much and become ‘de-skilled’ – Reimer’s word, not mine. Then there’s the issue of what happens when a pedestrian gets knocked over and killed, which he says is inevitable. “To have autonomous vehicles we have to rewrite the liability books. Who is responsible – is it the driver? He’s going to say the car was supposed to stop. The car company? The supplier who produced the system?” Part of me thinks we’ve opened Pandora’s Box with autonomous cars.

Driven: Volvo V40

What does it take to make car dealers happy? Giving them a model that they’ve been crying out for since 1997 is probably a good start, and according to Volvo UK’s MD Nick Connor, his retailers are pretty chuffed with the arrival of the V40. They should be; it’s a solid and stylish car that won’t rewrite the premium hatchback segment, but will give them their first five-door C-segment hatchback since the 440 was axed 15 years ago. I doubt it’s going to steal too many sales away from the dominant German rivals – the BMW 1-Series, Mercedes A-Class and Audi A3 – but it will certainly help Volvo’s annual sales. Connor said he reckons they’ll shift about 2,500 before the end of the year, and do 12,500 during 2013. Here’s the interesting bit for me: when Volvo sold the 440 it was an 80,000-a-year brand in Britain, but now it doesn’t even do half that. While the German trio has gone from strength to strength with new model variants every six months and no niche left unfilled, Volvo hasn’t even tried to keep up and is now pretty niche in itself.

Okay, it's not about cars today. But...

...why does Norwich have an airport? Why am I sat here in the Costa Coffee franchise – which doesn’t even accept my loyalty card – with less than a dozen other people in the entire departures area? Hang on… just got to pick a bit of tumbleweed out of my cappuccino froth. At Check-in, all but two of the 12 desks are unmanned and the lady at one of those is filing her nails. Why do I have a pay a £10 ‘airport development tax’ before I can get to my plane? Yes, that’s right, no payment, no departure. Why is long-term parking £25 a day? That’s more expensive that any airport I’ve been in for years. Clearly this place has to take so much money off punters just to survive as a business, because it's got so few paying customers. Check out the picture of Security. No headline-grabbing queues to get into the country here. Yes, that's right. Because this is 'Norwich International Airport'. All the Olympic athletes should come here if they don't want to wait at Heathrow's Immigration. Close Norwich Airport. I promise, no one will notice.

The best Clio yet

Spent a day in Paris recently with Renault, at a photoshoot of the all-new MkIV Clio. It’s the pictures you can see on the cover of this week’s Auto Express magazine and there’s three pages of words inside written by me. Buying a Clio isn’t something I have ever considered but I have to say this new version is the most appealing yet by some distance. On my cameraphone shot, above, you can just about see the car has a red instrument binnacle, and this is one of the personalisation options that Renault is going to be offering on the supermini. It looks really smart inside, matching the dashboard detail with the same colour inserts on the front and back seats. Renault, which unfortunately chose the recession to try to market some very uninteresting looking new cars, needs this to be a hit. I just hope it drives as good as it looks.

Driven: Fiat 500L

There’s plenty to like about the Fiat 500L because it’s practical, decent enough to driver and very spacious. Not much of a review I know, but I want to focus on my nagging problem. It’s not so much the car itself, but the ‘500-ification’ of the Fiat range. The 500L is a essentially a replacement for the Multipla, axed in 2010, and a seven-seater version, the 500XL, is also on the way. Fiat has shown a crossover variant too, likely called the 500X, which is a shoe-in to take over from the slow-selling Sedici. The 500 has unquestionably been, and continues to be, a hit for Fiat. In the UK, in the first five months of this year,13,700 were sold. That’s up from 10,400 in the same period last year. But it represents 66 per cent of all Fiat UK’s sales, and with the arrival of the L, X and XL that figure is likely to rise further. The problem is if you don’t like the 500’s styling – and many people don’t – there’s precious little in the Fiat range for you. It feels like all the eggs are going in one 500-badged basket and in the UK, where there’s little mainstream affection for the Fifties original. And I’m not convinced that’s a good idea for the long term.

Driven: Mercedes A-Class

Wednesday and Thursday of last week were spent driving the all-new Mercedes A-Class, and what a fine car it has matured into. Gone is the high roofline and upright body style that made it an MPV, replaced by a much lower and sleeker machine that’s now a rival to the BMW 1-Series and forthcoming Audi A3. The new A is a massive 400mm longer and up to 160mm lower to the ground than its predecessor. Dynamically, the car is excellent with well-weighted steering that’s sharp and accurate on the turn-in. The ride is sublime with either the comfort or sport suspension settings, or at least it was on the ridiculously smooth roads of Slovenia. Not quite sure how the firmer of the two will cope with British back roads. Also impressive were the engines: all the petrol and diesel units I tried were quiet and refined, and stop/start is standard on all. On the downside, I thought some of the plastic in the cabin, particularly around the gear selecter between the seats, wasn’t as premium as customers might expect. All in all, a highly desirable new car.