A Sunday Car for Every Day of the Week

Britain registered 2,020,520 new cars in 2025, and 13,618 of them were sports cars. That is one car in 148. Ten years earlier, in a larger market of 2,633,503, the same SMMT segment took 49,118 registrations, or one in 54. The best-selling sports car in the country last year was the Porsche 911, on 3,223 units. Third, behind the Porsche Taycan, was the Mazda MX-5, on 1,500 cars. A single model of Kia SUV, the Sportage, outsold the entire specialist sports segment three and a half times over.

This is not an argument about performance. Fast cars are still made and still sold here, and some of them are extraordinary. The argument concerns the other end of the market: the cheap, light, modest-looking car that made an ordinary Tuesday worth driving, sold in volume to people who would never have described themselves as enthusiasts. That car has not been improved upon. It has been withdrawn. The pleasure it provided is still available in Britain, but it has moved address. It now lives on the used forecourt and in the order books of a handful of specialists, and it costs a good deal more to reach than it used to.

What Britain Buys Now

The clearest account of the shift is the industry’s own. SMMT’s Motor Industry Facts 2026, published in February, sets 2015 against 2025 segment by segment. Dual purpose, the trade’s term for SUVs and crossovers, went from 355,118 registrations to 772,404, a rise of 117.5%. Superminis fell 42.7%, from 926,241 to 530,579. Lower medium cars, the Golf and Astra class, fell 35.2%. The mini segment, which is to say the smallest cars sold in Britain, fell 63.4% to 25,717. Specialist sports fell 72.3%. On SMMT’s own volumes and market totals, SUVs and crossovers took 38.2% of the 2025 market against 13.5% in 2015.

Dual purpose 772,404

Supermini 530,579

Lower medium 463,504

Upper medium 110,148

Multi purpose 74,865

Mini 25,717

Specialist sports 13,618

Executive (25,367) and luxury saloon (4,318) omitted.

Source: SMMT Motor Industry Facts 2026

Size has followed the mix. Analysis of Dataforce registration data by Transport and Environment, published through its Clean Cities campaign in February 2025, put the SUV share of new UK car sales at 62.41% in 2024, up from 47.16% in 2020. That campaign counts models SMMT files elsewhere, which is why its share runs higher than the dual purpose figure; both are measuring the same direction of travel. Clean Cities also points out that the minimum width for a standard urban parking bay in Britain is 1.8 metres, and that some 4.6 million cars sold here since 2021 are larger than a typical space. Autocar, reviewing its own road test records in 2024, found the mean kerb weight of the new cars it tested had risen from 1,553 kg in 2016 to 1,947 kg in 2023.

Why this happened is easier to observe than to prove, but two facts sit side by side in the same SMMT publication. Average new car CO2 in Britain fell 10.1% in 2025, to 91.8 g/km, which is a real achievement and not a small one. And the first-year tax on a fast petrol engine is now heavy enough to appear as a line item in a brochure: Toyota GB’s GR Yaris price list, effective 2 March 2026, itemises £3,300 of vehicle excise duty on a 197 g/km hatchback before delivery and number plates. A manufacturer working to a fleet-average emissions figure has little reason to keep a small, cheap, thirsty enthusiast’s car in production, and every reason to sell a heavier one with a plug on the side.

Discontinued, Not Replaced

The withdrawals are a matter of record. Ford confirmed in October 2022, as Motoring Research reported at the time, that Fiesta production would finish in July 2023, closing a run that began in 1976. The Focus followed on 14 November 2025, when the last car left the Saarlouis plant, according to FleetPoint, ending nearly three decades of production and car assembly at the site. Hyundai stopped supplying the combustion i20 N and i30 N to Europe in 2024, a position Carscoops confirmed again in May of this year, with hybrid successors promised rather than delivered. In each case the replacement, where there is one at all, sits higher off the road.

The consequence shows in the segment tables. SMMT’s five best-selling superminis of 2025 were the Ford Puma, the Vauxhall Corsa, the Nissan Juke, the Mini Cooper and the Peugeot 2008. Three of those five are crossovers. The Puma was also Britain’s best-selling car outright, on 55,488 registrations, which means the country’s most popular new car sits in a segment named after a body style it does not have. The Fiesta does not appear at all.

Segment	2015	2025	Change
Dual purpose	355,118	772,404	Up 117.5%
Supermini	926,241	530,579	Down 42.7%
Lower medium	715,604	463,504	Down 35.2%
Upper medium	249,347	110,148	Down 55.8%
Mini	70,263	25,717	Down 63.4%
Specialist sports	49,118	13,618	Down 72.3%

Source: SMMT Motor Industry Facts 2026

The Cost Of Still Caring

What survives is good, and dear. Caterham lists the Seven 170 at £29,490, for 440 kg, 84 bhp and, on the company’s own figures, more than 170 bhp per tonne. Mazda’s MX-5 starts at £28,605. The Toyota GR Yaris, the most complete small performance car currently on sale here, is £46,045 on the road. Alpine’s petrol A110, which evo priced at £55,160 in March and described as the last of its kind before an electric successor, weighs 1,103 kg. Four cars, four different answers to the same question, and not one of them within reach of a first-time buyer.

Car	UK price from	Detail
Mazda MX-5 1.5 Prime-Line	£28,605	132 hp, six-speed manual
Caterham Seven 170	£29,490	440 kg, 84 bhp
Toyota GR Yaris	£46,045	276 bhp, £3,300 first-year VED
Alpine A110	£55,160	1,103 kg, petrol run ending

Source: Caterham Cars, Carwow, Toyota GB and evo, 2026

Set against what people earn, those are not modest sums. ONS figures for April 2025 put median gross annual pay for a full-time employee in the UK at £39,039. A GR Yaris therefore costs rather more than a year of the median full-time wage before tax, and the cheapest new MX-5 costs roughly nine months of it. Neither is exotic machinery. Both are small petrol cars with manual gearboxes, of the sort that once occupied the middle of a dealer’s price list rather than the top of it.

The barrier at the other end of a driving life is cover. Confused.com’s price index, built from more than six million quotes and published quarterly, put the average comprehensive premium for a driver aged 17 to 20 at £1,813 in May 2026. That is down 11% on the £2,045 of a year earlier, which is genuine relief after a punishing few years, and it is still two and a half times the £719 average across all ages. A cheap first car and a cheap first year of insurance used to arrive together. Britain has been losing both at once.

Where The Pleasure Went

It went used. SMMT counted 7,807,872 used car transactions in 2025, up 2.2% and a third consecutive year of growth, with superminis taking 32.1% of them. Auto Trader’s Retail Price Index for April 2026 put the average used retail price at £17,397, flat year on year, but the fastest-appreciating stock was the oldest: cars aged ten to fifteen years were up 8.4% over twelve months. Petrol cars averaged £14,988 against £23,555 for electric. The second-hand market has quietly worked out what the new one stopped selling.

The national fleet tells the same story from the other side. The Department for Transport reported in April 2026 that the average age of a licensed car in the UK reached ten years at the end of 2025, 14% higher than at the end of 2020, across 34.5 million cars. SMMT’s Motorparc breakdown has 31.7% of cars on British roads at more than twelve years old, and superminis as the largest slice of the fleet by a wide margin: 11.9 million against 6.2 million dual purpose. A 2023 Sustrans report, citing RAC Foundation figures, identified the most commonly licensed car in the country as the Ford Fiesta, at 1.29 million in 2021. Britain still owns small cars. It has simply stopped buying them new.

I believe we will look back with disbelief at how we allowed larger and larger vehicles to take hold. SUVs require more land to park them on, more materials to produce them with, more road space to drive them along and more fuel to travel the equivalent distance by smaller vehicles.

There is a defence, and it deserves stating plainly. A heavier car protects its occupants better in a collision with a lighter one, which is physics rather than marketing. Electrified drivetrains are heavy because batteries are heavy, and they are cleaner in use, as that 10.1% fall in average new car CO2 demonstrates. The trade will add, correctly, that it builds what sells, and that a supermini earns a manufacturer very little per car while a crossover on the same platform earns rather more. None of that is in dispute here. What is in dispute is the suggestion that nothing has been lost along the way.

Because what is left of the ordinary trade in driving pleasure is now small and self-selecting. Three Porsches, the 911, the Taycan and the 718, accounted for 47.3% of Britain’s entire specialist sports segment in 2025. Caterham sells a car largely to people who already know they want one. Alpine’s petrol A110 is finishing. Hyundai’s N division has gone shopping for hybrids. A Porsche is not an answer to the question of what a twenty-five-year-old on the median wage ought to buy, and at present there is no answer to that question in a British showroom.

The judgement is this. A market that sells 772,404 crossovers and 13,618 sports cars has not discovered that Britain dislikes driving. It has discovered that tax, regulation and margin all point the same way, and that a tall car is easier to sell at a profit than a light one. The cars themselves are perfectly competent, and in most measurable respects better than what they replaced. The loss is subtler and harder to argue in a boardroom: pleasure has become a purchase decision rather than a by-product, something bought deliberately at £29,490 or hunted down at twelve years old on a wet forecourt in February. For most of the past fifty years a Briton on an ordinary wage could stumble into an entertaining car by accident. That is over, and nobody was asked.