Top Gear's Anti-Awards: these are the biggest failures of 2025

In August, Volkswagen (the ‘people’s car’ – hah!) proudly announced it would start selling ID. 3s with 228bhp motors… but you would only be allowed to enjoy 201 of those horses fresh from the factory. Unlocking extra zip would cost £16.50 a month, which also upped torque from 265Nm to 310Nm.

A company statement noted ‘paying more for higher power is nothing new’ but the meanness of artificially neutered horsepower and adding yet another paywall to our subscription-infested lives is easily VW’s dumbest money-saving idea since those touch-sensitive temperature sliders. And Dieselgate.

With the cabin quality reputations of Volkswagen, Mercedes, Audi, Ferrari and more deeply in the toilet, it seemed the industry was correcting course and bringing back buttons. Cue Merc’s Hyperscreen-obsessed design boss telling us in September: “That [Audi Concept C] interior looks like it was designed in 1995. There is too little tech. I have always claimed that I am a big fan of hyper-analogue things, but you cannot ignore a screen. When you have a small screen, you automatically send the message ‘congratulations, you are sitting in a small car’.”

Gorden also insists in-car voice assistants are “now working perfectly". How wrong can one man be?

The Honda Civic Type R, Top Gear’s 2022 Car of the Year and 2023 Performance Car of the Year, is very possibly the greatest hot hatch of all time. Sharper than any GTI, more rounded than any Fast Ford, and no longer an absolute war wound to look at. Naturally then, Honda has abruptly removed it from sale halfway into its life cycle (in Europe) because its 189g/km CO2 output is too damaging to the all-important ‘fleet average’ lawmakers eye beadily, poised to dish out eye-watering fines.

We live in a world where a 2.8-tonne BMW XM is officially ‘greener’ than a 2.0-litre Civic. Madness.

Of cars, you understand. Not people. After decades of being told ‘we’ll all be driving Chinese cars soon’, 2025 was the year it actually happened. Market share for Chinese newcomers topped five per cent midway through the year, with registrations of BYDs, Jaecoos, Leapmotors and so on up 120 per cent on 2024.

Now, we’re not against good value, well-equipped cars shaking up the marketplace. But these newbies seem to have no story to tell. Where’s the design flare, the passion, the innovation or the USP? Ordinary mass market cars can be icons (Mini, Beetle, 500, Fiesta) but not if they’re as generic as your dishwasher.

It’s been a relatively quiet year for the alarming well-coiffured supreme commander of all world motorsport, after he spent 2024 embroiled in (unproven) claims of allegedly interfering with F1 race steward decisions and suggesting the world’s fastest drivers should be fined if they swore. It’s possible MBS piped down to concentrate on his FIA presidential re-election bid, which wasn't a close-run thing after all other candidates were forced to withdraw.

The rules state you can’t run for the FIA’s top job unless you nominate six prospective vice-presidents, and for the South American region there’s only one rep: noted MBS ally Bernie Ecclestone’s wife, Fabiana. What are the chances?

In other ‘no one man should have all that power’ news, Elon Musk – not usually prone to a guarded quip – made the understatement of 2025 when he admitted on 23 July that Tesla was in for a ‘rough few quarters’ following its worst three months for sales in a decade, and ex-bestie Donald Trump’s cancellation of EV purchase grants.

After an all-time share price high on 17 December 2024, Tesla’s value plummeted in the first half of 2025 due to disappointment at the revised Model Y’s specs, tanking Cybertruck values, a 51 per cent fall in Tesla’s cash-cow CO2 credits-selling business, and Musk’s, um, erratic political persona.

Porsche is no stranger to an about-face. Water-cooled flat-sixes, diesel SUVs, (briefly) no manual GT3. And that’s fine. The world would be a better place if changing your mind in the face of new information wasn’t demonised. But the scale of the Porsche EV climbdown is unprecedented. The perma-delayed e-Boxster and Cayman twins will get engines ‘in the top models’. The Macan Electric is having an engine shoehorned into its frunk. And the monster SUV sitting above the Cayenne in the range will now be ICE and hybrid only.

This engineering nightmare has cost the Porsche CEO his job and wiped over £2bn from 2025’s financial forecast. Yowch.

Another big-name brand burned by the EV downturn has been Ford. Now, the Blue Oval surely holds the world record for killing off the highest number of household name cars: Cortina, Granada, Sierra, Escort, Mondeo, Ka… but the demise of the Fiesta and imminent loss of the Focus feels like the biggest main character massacre since The Red Wedding.

Ford insisted the Explorer and Capri EVs would pick up the slack… but in September it cut 1,000 jobs at the Cologne factory and rumours are rife the Fiesta may make an electrified comeback sooner rather than later. Baby and bathwater anyone?

Now, beauty is in the eye of the beholder and all that. But the commenters verdict on TopGear.com and in the TG YouTube chat under all 2025’s new Ferraris has been scathing. The Ferrari Amalfi has a touch of the manatee about it. The 849 Testarossa’s 1970s Le Mans vibes bless it with some seriously awkward angles. We’re still not sure the F80 is beautiful (well, Jethro is). Even the one-off SC40 didn’t really stick the landing as a faithful F40 tribute.

Ferrari design boss Flavio Manzoni is bullish, saying Ferrari can never be retro and should avoid cars with a ‘face’, but is his current range the most challenging Ferrari line-up… ever? We reckon so.

After the titanic 2021 Formula One title fight, the 2022 rules reset was meant to banish the excuses of ‘dirty air’ and allow F1 cars to follow closer, race harder and overtake more often. Instead we got a year of explaining ‘porpoising’, the single most one-sided canter to a title in history, and the most bloated, heaviest F1 cars of all time. And the drivers still complain there’s plenty of circuits (besides Monaco) where overtaking is next to impossible.

2026’s new regs could be even more controversial – surely it’s time to junk turbos and active aero, and at least try 20,000rpm V10s running on 100 per cent sustainable e-fuel?