Articles by Paul Pottinger

You are, of course, welcome. What is it you say? Kia ora? On the other hand New Zealand’s much vaunted practice of mass importing used cars - so-called grey imports - is a custom best kept east of the Tasman.In view of the response to last week’s column, this is an issue worth clarifying. When New Zealanders had the most wretched fleet of vehicles outside the third world, getting about in Anglias and Zephyrs, grey imports were a means of making motoring affordable.New Zealand’s automotive conditions are not ours. Here, where according to Roy Morgan the average worker earns 26.3 per cent more than the equivalent Kiwi, new car ownership has never been more affordable.Our government imposes tariffs and luxury vehicle tax, yet cars - even prestige cars - sell at a record rate. In the most popular segment, you can get a Hyundai i30, Mazda3 or Ford Focus for less than $21,000 with full factory warranty, capped-price servicing and legal recourse in the event of failure.You have some surety of retained value. Most incoming cars are tyred and tuned for local conditions. What would you get with a grey import of uncertain history flogged by a dealer who is not accountable to the brand whose wares fill his forecourt? Next to none of the above.Many missives I’ve received boast of New Zealand’s six-monthly certificate of road worthiness. None grasp its necessity. D’you reckon it might have something to do with the NZ vehicle fleet being the oldest of any Westernised country? Here there are more than 60 brands to keep competition acute and standards of quality and equipment high.Market pressure does not exist on this scale or concentration elsewhere. New Zealand needed used imports for the very reasons Australia does not. Yet the Productivity Commission blithely advocates a practice that will diminish the quality of cars on the road, erode security of ownership and destroy Australian-owned businesses.At issue is not importers of specialist vehicles who do niche numbers for enthusiasts. It’s countless grey Corollas. Even the basic specification of factory-imported. Despite 54,000 New Zealanders leaving for Australia in 2012 alone, economists tell us the joint’s experiencing an upturn. Great.A country whose fairest city is destroyed by natural disaster deserves all good fortune. I don’t occupy an economist’s lofty perch. If I did, I wouldn’t be blind to a post grey import Australia in which tens of thousands of substandard cars blight the streets - nor to unemployment figures swelled by tens of thousands “liberated” from jobs in car retail.New Zealand, by all means send us your best and brightest. And Russell Crowe if you must. But hold your counsel on this issue. As anyone using their grey matter can see, the scenario for used imports is all black for Australia.

The first R-Line upgrade on a Golf and price cuts on the Jetta are Volkswagen’s model-year 2014 range revision highlights. Showroom-wide changes include a welcome upgrade to the Beetle but price increases of up to $2000 on some models.The R-Line Package - $2200 on the popular Golf Highline and $2000 on the niche Beetle - adds a raft of racy badges, trim, go-fast kit plus sports suspension, 18-inch alloys, faster steering and paddle-shifters.Such items should bring the Golf even closer dynamically to the GTI but the latter is now $500 more. Most Golfs cop a price rise - $250 on the Car of the Year Comfortline and $300 on the Highline. An extra $400 is now asked for the Cabriolet and $300 for the Beetle. Steeper stickers adorn the Polo - $250 on the Comfortline, $350 on the GTI. The three-door version of the hot hatch has been dropped.Tiguan buyers are looking at $400 extra on the Pacific or $500 for the top-line 155 TSI. A Passat adds $500 for the 130 TDI and Alltrack and $750 for the V6. Touareg buyers have to find $800 extra for the V6 diesel and $2000 for the V8.Only the slow-selling Jetta gets price relief - $1500 off the 118TSI and $3250 from the Comfortline. It also loses the 103 TDI Comfortline and quick 147TSI Highline. Elsewhere the Beetle, to date one of the few locally sold VWs with basic rear suspension, now features the multi-link independent setup of the superseded Mark VI Golf. There’s new paint too - “candy white”, if you like.Next month the new Golf R and GTI Performance version arrive. 

There’s a new master in the seven-seater class, adept at carting children and chattels. Can 250,000 buyers a year be wrong?

Volkswagen Golf 90TSI Comfortline and Skoda Octavia Ambition Plus go head-to-head in this comparative review. 

Peugeot 208 GTi and Ford Fiesta ST go head-to-head in this comparative review. 

Black is white. The sun circumnavigates earth. An Abbott Government minister pays his own way. The CLA 45 AMG is such to make you wonder if certainty has not, in fact, ended.

On driving this highly stylised, hugely appealing "four door coupe" in France earlier this year, we concluded that it mattered not an iota how we felt about it, you were going to buy the CLA anyway.

The show stealer of Frankfurt 2013 is also its biggest decoy. Jaguar's gibber inducing C-X17 SUV concept is essentially window dressing for a far more dramatic announcement by Jaguar's global brand manager Adrian Hallmark.“We will have a rival for the BMW 3 Series, Audi A4 and Mercedes-Benz C-Class sedans in 2015,” he tells Carsguide. “It will be built in the UK at a new factory on new lightweight architecture. It's a world first aluminium monocoque.“Jaguar would like to change the vocabulary of prestige motoring from the ‘German Three’ to the European Four. We don't want to pick on anybody or nick their lunch. We want to attract people by the intelligence of our offer."Hallmark says the new sedan will run purpose built engines that will, in their various forms,  use less than four litres of fuel per 100km or reach 300km/h. Asked if coupes, cabrio and wagons would follow - in keeping with the Germans - Hallmark simply says the news sedan is the “start”.How will this model, the first ever purely Jaguar compact sedan, be known? “Well, possibly X-something, but not with the word 'Type',” he laughs referring to the ill-regarded rebodied Mondeo from the brand's Ford-owned years.Hallmark says the compact sedan could be expected to sell by itself a volume greater than the annual total of Jaguar's combined ranges. So what's with the C-X17 then? Hallmark refuses to confirm its production, although the new lightweight architecture would clearly fit this car, if not bigger, heavier Jaguars.“We,” he says, as in Jaguar/LandRover combined, “already have six SUVs. We haven't built this for fun. The reason for throwing this out there is that it adds colour, literally, to the saloon architecture story. And we want to test the idea of Jaguar SUV on people. We want to test the design, test the reaction to a shift in direction. We'd love to build it, but I won't confirm it.” 

It's a well-known if shakily founded maxim that diabolical results come in threes.

Look hard at this car. It's Volkswagen's next hatchback. Well, maybe look under the skin. It's the substance of the XL1 rather than the outlandish form that we'll see in VW's small, affordable passenger cars before the calendar flips to decade three.While the limited run XL1 is on sale in Europe for some $160,000 to collectors and the uber green, its essence will run tomorrow's Ups, Polos, Golfs and more besides. The trick is to look past the hip level height, carbon fibre body, gull wing doors and to see the plug-in electric battery on which it can run for 50km alone and the two-cylinder diesel engine which stretches the range for a further 500.This combo makes for emission free city travel and open road travel at some 0.9 litres per 100km, though it can motor at 160km/h. Hence the company label "1.0-litre car" - of which the XL1 is the showroom precursor - refers not to capacity but range.Having clambered through the Bladerunner doors, you could be in almost any contemporary VW, albeit the brand's only two seater. The switchgear and most of the dials are from the Golf, the wheel is pure GTI, the gear stick operates a seven speed DSG auto, the removable Garmin multi-media screen is found in the Up.There's no mirrors and no need for them - two rear facing cameras, one mounted in each door eliminate blind spots. That should be disorientating and so it is for about 30 seconds at which point it replaces intuition.That's also  so of the drive. The XL1 glides as silently as any electric vehicle though a good deal more efficiently than any on the road with almost on-existent wind resistance. Amid the plethora of innovation there's at least one delightful old world note. The steering is purely mechanical, entirely devoid of assistance, just like a Lotus or my 1971 Kingswood.Merging onto to the autobahn, the diesel engine is engaged via finger tip on the Garmin. It chugs crudely but almost immediately into life, ensuring that you needn't remain on the inside lane for long. When our brief test  is over, I'm exhilarated in a way that only some fast and fabulous cars have made me.Parked nearby the XL1 at Bensburg Castle near Cologne this week, where VW runs a pre Frankfurt Show event, is a Bugatti Veyron - the outrageous 16-cylinder quad turbo supercar. Haven't driven one of those. Probably won't.But it's proximity makes you realise the XL1 is every bit as much a supercar in its own sense. And while it is the single most expensive VW in the brand's near 80-year history, its heart and lungs will be part of your and my driving reality.