America’s electric car market is not very hot right now, with experts estimating that sales in this year’s first quarter dropped by 28%. It wasn’t great last year, either, with a 2% decrease, thanks in no small part to the cancellation of the $7,500 federal tax credit.

Meanwhile, Europe is seeing a huge uptick in electric car sales. Last year, numbers went up by nearly 30%, and the first months of 2026 gave no sign of slowing down. I can’t help but wonder: Could some of the best EVs in Europe make a difference if they were sold stateside?

Canada is preparing to open the floodgates to Chinese-made EVs, which are bound to stir some controversy. But you won’t see any of those in the U.S. Still, European companies have plenty of EVs that I think could do pretty well in America—as long as they are priced right. (I think we can all agree that nobody wants another Volvo EX30 story.)

Photo by: Cupra

Cupra Born

• Price in Europe: from €40,450 ($46,700)
• Range: from 428 km (266 miles) WLTP

Cupra, one of the many brands under the Volkswagen Group’s umbrella, seemed prepared to land in the United States, but that plan has been put on the back burner for now, seeing how the car market there isn’t exactly stable.

If the brand were to come stateside, the Born four-door electric hatchback would take on rivals such as the Nissan Leaf and Chevrolet Bolt EV. Cupra’s compact offering is based on the same underpinnings as the Volkswagen ID.3, which was once hailed as the electric alternative to the iconic Golf.

The difference between the ID.3 and Born is that the latter is much more fun to drive, thanks to a revised chassis setup and its rear-wheel drive powertrain. You might have to explain to your friends what car you’re driving more than once, but if you don’t want a boring commuter car, this would be great.

The base trim gets 204 horsepower, while the sporty spec goes up to 326 hp.

Photo by: Fiat

Fiat Grande Panda

• Price in Europe: from €24,990 ($28,900)
• Range: from 320 km (199  miles) WLTP

Fiat’s U.S. portfolio only includes the electric 500e, which is quite the fashionable urban runabout. But it’s expensive and cramped inside. The new Grande Panda EV would right both of these wrongs, with a bigger—albeit more stripped down—cabin and a lower price tag.

Mind you, this is still a small car, but at least it has four doors. Plus, it’s one of the most unpretentious EVs out there, with a no-nonsense attitude. It even has a built-in Level 2 charging cable tucked in the nose. Plus it has chunky styling that gives it a better presence than city cars that failed to take off in the U.S. 

Photo by: Andrei Nedelea

Renault 5

• Price in Europe: from €28,000 ($32,350)
• Range: from 312 km (194  miles) WLTP

Remember the Le Car? Probably not, but I’m here to help. It was Renault’s attempt at selling the original Renault 5 in the United States. Suffice to say, it didn’t go well, but the good news is that there’s a brand-new Renault 5 in Europe.

It’s only available as an electric car, and it’s a fantastic one at that. It looks great, it drives nicely, and it doesn’t break the bank. Plus, you can get a baguette holder as an official accessory. Again, small hatchbacks haven’t exactly been popular in the U.S. historically. But come on, look at this thing. 

Volkswagen ID.7

• Price in Europe: from €54,505 ($62,900)
• Range: from 599 km (372 miles) WLTP

The Volkswagen ID.7 is the only car on this list that had a real chance of being sold stateside before the German automaker changed its mind and pulled the plug, citing “the ongoing challenging EV climate.”

Positioned as the all-electric alternative to the Passat sedan, the ID.7 is a very smooth road-tripping machine, as our former editor-in-chief found out after driving the battery-powered sedan on Germany’s Autobahn. And now that the Tesla Model S is out of the picture, the ID.7 would make for a great alternative. There’s also a wagon version, which I have personally shortlisted for my next car purchase.

The exterior of the broad 16.5-foot sedan is covered in a camouflaging flurry of opposing black and white diagonal slashes that resemble one of Jasper Johns’ radical “crosshatch” paintings from the mid-1970s. The cossetting interior, its narrow rampart-like band of windows mainly covered by this wallpaper, is dark and unfinished, and blanketed in a matted black felt that, notably, reminds me of a magician’s backdrop, meant to absorb light and disguise sleights of hand. 

But despite the lack of badging and iconography, the font on the narrow, rectangular LCD screen behind the thick-rimmed steering wheel is a giveaway. The delicately curvaceous—and internet-derided—sans-serif type, with its ransom note mix of lower- and upper-case letters, is immediately recognizable as belonging to the rebranded Jaguar. 

The Type 00 concept showcased the design direction for the forthcoming production vehicle. But based on the camouflaged silhouette, we expect some changes to the final car. 

Photo by: Jaguar

I’m at the leaping-cat brand’s headquarters—built beside its development testing track, on the site of a former British Air Force nuclear bomber training runway—in England’s Midlands. I’ll be among the first Americans to drive, on dry ground, a prototype of the venerable British automaker’s forthcoming six-figure, 1,000+ horsepower, super-sedan, code-named the X900. The entire future of the venerable brand is riding on its massive 23” wheels.

It is evident, from the moment that I tip into the throttle, that the teams of engineers and designers here have been aware of and attentive to this heavy burden.

The big car moves off the line and gathers speed with an intentional, but not abrupt, alacrity. It is plenty quick, and will likely put anything in the brand’s history to shame in a 0-60 race. But it is not trying to snap my neck, like a Tesla or a Lucid; that is not how it will prove itself. Rather, it gets underway with grace and composure, always holding, but not withholding, an alluring sense of more. It does not feel wickedly domineering like an S-Class, or brutally concretized like a 7-Series. It is a boss bitch, strutting in heels, confident that it owns the runway.

Jaguar initially made its name creating sportily bewitching coupes and convertibles, from the earliest SS cars in the 1930s through the XKs, and E-types of the 50s and 60s. But its brand equities are, in my opinion, best defined by its luxurious sedans, which, at their peak—in the first (1968-87) and fourth (2010-19) generations of the XJ nameplate—offered intense refinement, delightfully torquey thrust, and a perfect balance of engagement and isolation. 

“The four-door GT is the purest vision of Jaguar,” Rawdon Glover, the brand’s managing director, tells me, concurring. “This new car needs to take Jaguar to its previous hunting grounds, its natural habitat.”  

Photo by: Jaguar

If this means holding a sweepingly endless left-hand corner at 90 mph or bombing down the track’s mile-long back straight at 145 mph in whooshing rapture, then Glover’s team has already achieved high marks in the repatriation department. Power comes on progressively, with a constant sense of tappable reserves, even at triple-digit speeds, and builds with an intriguingly analog linearity, more like an aviation-grade torque-rich V12 than a trio of electric motors (two rear, one front.) The brake pedal is firm but never hard, and the big, vented discs scrub speed predictably without any of the android intervention inherent in many regenerative systems. (Additional regen is apparently available for those who want it, though we didn’t get to sample the various settings.) The feel from the thick steering wheel is tactile, but never jumpy; its feedback filtered through a thin layer of goose down.  

But it is the ride that I find most surprising. We repeatedly traverse a course on the back stretch of the proving grounds, meant to mimic the world’s worst sections of broken pavement, and the big cat resolutely absorbs the impacts. Whether they’re cosplaying at concrete that has been washboarded like a gravel path in Joshua Tree two weeks after a freak summer storm, or puzzled to resemble Manhattan’s West Side Highway after a winter of icy expansion, the Jaguar remains unbothered. The adaptive air springs provide the huge donuts with a suspicious amount of travel, granting a sense of connection undergirded by isolation. It doesn’t make the landscape disappear. It’s more like I could feel what each wheel was doing, even when the four-wheel-steering system was working, but I kind of didn’t care. The car is present, but unperturbed. 

Photo by: Jaguar

The sensation is less wafty than a Rolls and not as thunderously damping as a Bentley. It weirdly reminds me of some of my favorite recent Aston Martins, remarkably planted, but pliant, like the DBS (or even, gasp, the DBX). Perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising, since the vehicle dynamics engineer for all of these is the fabled Matt Becker, who was mentored by his father, Lotus project engineer Roger Becker. He designed the body motions of the new car to scientifically mimic the vibrational amplitude and pitch of top-tier Jags of the past, like the dominating XJ-C V12 coupe of the mid 1970. The final result, he warns, is still being dialed in.

The car is remarkably, and intentionally, low, the product of an extremely long wheelbase and some impact-engineering wizardry that allows the thin and flat structural battery pack in the floor to extend beyond the firewall instead of piling up under the passenger compartment. The driver is positioned right at the center of gravity, amidst a perfect 50/50 front-rear weight balance.

As a result, I sit deep in the car, not upon it as in other electric sedans. That sinking feeling is enhanced by the very tall beltline—which seemingly rises above my shoulder—and narrow greenhouse, like the roof had been stepped on by a diplodocus as it craned its neck up for some prehistoric foliage. In hot-rodding terms, it’s chopped. This sensation places me in mind of that time I borrowed a 1990 XJ-S V12 coupe to cruise around LA. It’s another car one sits deep within, legs stretched out into a long footwell, like the vehicle is a cocoon.

Forward visibility is relatively assured. But because there are no other cars, or pedestrians, or scooters, or e-assist delivery vehicles careening around me as there would ordinarily be in New York City, I’m not able to get a sense of what this near-clerestory glass would feel like in traffic. My sense is, a little crypt-like and disconcerting. Adding to this sensation is the fact that, following an unfortunate trend introduced on vehicles from the Aston Martin Valkyrie to the Polestar 4, the new Jag lacks a rear windshield.  

There’s no glass on the fast-back rear end. Like the Polestar 4, the Jaguar relies solely on cameras for rear-view monitoring.

Photo by: Jaguar

This deletion is predicated, in no small part, on the X900’s very acute fastback rear; a typical windshield-mounted rearview mirror would show little besides the plunging headliner. Instead, supplanting this long-lived convention, Jag has affixed rear-facing cameras and a small rectangular display centered at the base of the dash.

I can cast aspersions on this fad, because that’s what I do, and because I know that current camera-based rear-view mirrors make me feel like I’ve just rode a Tilt-A-Whirl after washing down clam chowder with a tumbler of white Russians. Sadly, or more likely happily, the Jag’s system isn’t working, so I have yet to experience it in person.

Neither, despite repeated requests, will my handlers allow me to get into the X900’s twin rear bucket seats, so I can’t tell you what kind of contortions ingress or egress requires under that dipped roofline, or what it’s like to sit back there. This is unfortunate, as it seems possible that this generation of big Jag sedan could, like some of its predecessors, lend itself to chauffeuring VIPs, and VIPs don’t enjoy thumping their noggins on the door-top surround. Perhaps that’s why VIPs these days ride in Escalades.  

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Source: InsideEVs

I also didn’t get to experience much of the infotainment system or user interface. But I can tell you that one smallish screen stretches from the driver-side window to about two-fifths of the way across the dash. The portion to the left of the wheel seems to control driver functions like adjusting the steering wheel and mirrors, the drive and regen modes, and the lights. The small portion to the right of the wheel seems like it might house entertainment and navigation features. The center of the dash between the seats was covered, so I couldn’t tell if there was another screen under the felt. But there’s definitely a small phablet-sized screen that protrudes from the top of the tunnel, like an Uber driver’s Galaxy, that handles HVAC controls.

Brand head Glover tells me that Jag doesn’t want to overwhelm passengers with the dazzle of screens on every surface. This seems commendable. Yet the interior also stunningly lacks hard switches. Again, some areas were covered in the stygian fabric, but the only actual buttons I could discern were on the steering wheel. When I bring up this lack to head JaguarLandRover designer Andy Wheel, he demurs, recognizing the movement back to analog functionality required by forthcoming European and Chinese safety regulations. 

Jaguar Brand Boss Rawdon Glover explains the company’s approach to buttons and user interfaces.

Photo by: Jaguar

“We know there’s obviously legislation coming in certain markets where we know we’re going to have to bring some of that in, and that’s obviously something to fret over for another day,” he says. “But we’ve just wanted to keep it super clean, super intuitive.” Something else to check in on next time, I guess.

Still, these potential liabilities give me a bit of pause. The X900 drives very much like a 21st-century electric Jaguar sedan, with the brand’s signature combination of acceleration, ride, and handling. Under all that op-art shelf paper, it seems like it will have an alluring Jaguar-like shape: specific, unique, elegant, and hopefully not too slavishly mimicking the blank unresolved quality of the front and rear treatment shown on its recent Type 00 concept.  

What I personally worry about for the brand is the fact that, as good as the car might be, Jaguar has created a vehicle for a future that, in many ways, may no longer arrive. The marque is no longer chasing volume, no longer competing with the full-range lineups of German luxury giants, instead hoping to move a much smaller number of EVs at an alleged “white space” price point that starts around where the S-Class leaves off, in the lofty $130,000+ realm. It is betting the future on a low-volume flagship electric sedan. But Jag tried and scrapped a long-planned range-topping EV once before, back in 2021, given its inability to conform to the needs of the coming market. In two days with the Jag team, talking solely about the electric flagship and the brand’s heritage, no one mentioned that car once. It was like a curse that could not be spoken aloud for fear of invocation, and the silence was a bit deafening.   

Jaguar is highlighting its grand tradition of grand touring cars. But has the world moved on from big sedans and coupes?

Photo by: Jaguar

Jaguar has always been best when it has been an innovator, leading instead of following. But I can’t help but wonder if the market for six-figure battery-powered sedans is broad enough here, or anywhere, to make this gamble pay off. Lucid, at times the best-selling luxury electric sedan in America, sold only around 4,000 of its high-end Airs here last year. Porsche’s beloved and dynamic Taycan sells in roughly equal numbers, and BMW sold only around 3,000 i7s and Mercedes half that many EQS sedans. And 2025 will likely go down a watershed year for the category in America.

The Germans have very large and profitable lineups of other high-volume vehicles to support these ventures, something Jaguar currently lacks. With expensive, unproven technology, a relaunch that seems intended to shrug off the past (and 90% of its previous customer base) and its long-term reputation for glitchy unreliability, can Jaguar really sustain itself on Ferrari volumes? Glover won’t give me a sales number at which the brand turns a profit, though he assures me there is an attainable one. I hope it’s not like the Panglossian 100,000 annual sales Lotus was predicting to me a few years back. (In the first half of 2025, Lotus sold fewer than 3,000 cars globally.)

The capricious madness of our country’s current leadership—intently quashing our transition to EVs, and then starting senseless wars that disrupt the global flow of oil—makes any hope for market predictability impossible. That predictability is something automakers tend to rely on when investing billions of dollars in products with long cycles of development and amortization.  

Photo by: Jaguar

I know from experience witnessing our responses to the OPEC oil embargo and safety/emissions law of the early 1970s, the economic meltdown of the late 2000s, and the supply chain interruptions during the recent pandemic, that global geopolitical, regulatory, and economic circumstances can have a huge impact on consumers’ automotive choices. In the aftermath of Trump’s latest arbitrary aggressions, we’re already seeing marked increases in searches for electric vehicles. If this lunacy in the Middle East continues unabated, purchase behavior may shift wildly.

The future is an evanescent dream. But we have to imagine the destiny we want to inhabit. I thoroughly enjoyed my time in the Jag prototype, and long for another go with a more finished version. I also believe that an automotive landscape devoid of Jaguars would be far less rich and interesting. Hopefully, with its new super-sedan, Jag has envisioned just the car that tens of thousands of wealthy global iconoclasts will want to buy in 2027. This cat is on its ninth life. Here’s praying it lands on its paws as confidently as this prototype seems to. 

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Source: Jaguar

Brett Berk is a freelance automotive writer based in New York. He has driven and reviewed thousands of cars for Car and Driver and Road & Track, where he is a contributing editor. He has also written for Architectural Digest, Billboard, ELLE Decor, Esquire, GQ, Travel + Leisure and Vanity Fair.

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The Mercedes-Benz CLR is remembered for all the wrong reasons. It infamously took flight, not once but three times at the 1999 24 Hours of Le Mans, flipping end over end and soaring right over crash barriers like something produced by a broken video game physics engine. YouTuber Mike Fernie recently visited one of the surviving cars—now part of the Loh Collection in Germany—and explains its full story in a detailed video.

The CLR was the result of an evolutionary process that began with the CLK GTR and CLK LM. Those cars were built to the GT1 ruleset that defined the top class of endurance racers in the latter half of the 1990s, and mostly produced race cars masquerading as street cars. The CLR was built to LMGTP rules, which represented a tilt back toward dedicated prototype race cars and let Mercedes dispense with the road-car pretension.

Mercedes kept the CLK LM’s V8, but increased displacement from 5.0 liters to 5.7 and wrapped it in more snug bodywork. The familiar four round headlights and grille from the then-new C215 CL-Class coupe are mounted ridiculously low on the front end, and the bodywork droops down below the wheel arches. That bodywork, with long front and rear overhangs to accommodate big diffusers and run with very little rake, would turn out to be the CLR’s undoing.

The V8 was loosely based on the M119 road-car engine, which, in turbocharged form, had powered the Sauber-Mercedes C9 to victory at Le Mans a decade earlier. It made about 600 horsepower in the CLR, enough to turn this car into an airplane.

While Mercedes claimed to have conducted over 20,000 miles of testing, the three cars it brought to Le Mans had trouble on the Circuit de la Sarthe’s high-speed straights. Future F1 driver Mark Webber took off during qualifying, then again during a pre-race warmup. In his autobiography Aussie Grit, Webber says team management didn’t take his crashes seriously (they weren’t caught on film), hence why he was sent back out, and why Mercedes didn’t withdraw.

The two undamaged cars took the start, although Mercedes made some tweaks (with input from Adrian Newey) and advised its drivers not to follow other cars too closely at high speeds. That wasn’t enough to prevent Peter Dumbreck’s crash during the race itself—one of the most replayed moments in motorsports.

I Found The Flying Car Mercedes Has Hidden Since 1999

That moment was caused by a lack of balance in downforce between the front and rear ends. The low-rake setup took downforce off the front end but the fixed rear wing didn’t bring a corresponding reduction at the back. That caused the front end to pitch up on the bumpy Circuit de la Sarthe, allowing more air to get underneath and push the front end higher, while the rear wing kept pushing down on the back of the car. The wake from a car in front made things worse.

Just as no battle plan survives contact with the enemy, the cleverest ideas of engineers don’t always work in the real world. Aston Martin and Honda are getting a painful reminder of that in F1 right now, although at least the nerve-jangling AMR26 hasn’t taken flight.

There’s a common piece of wisdom among value-oriented car shoppers: Don’t buy new, buy a three-year-old car off a lease. That’s still a good idea, but according to new data from Edmunds, you may not have to wait that long. Even 2025 model year cars are getting cheap, especially if you’re looking at EVs. 

In new new blog post, Edmunds Director of Insights Ivan Drury notes that 2025-model used cars sold in the fourth quarter of last year went for $6,370 less than their average new car transaction price. That’s already substantial savings, but the numbers are even better for EV and PHEV shoppers. 

Models like the Dodge Charger Daytona and Jeep Wrangler 4XE have truly staggering discounts after less than a year on the road. The average used 2025 Charger Daytona went for $19,711 less than a new model in the same quarter, the study shows. (I have a guess as to why values are plummeting.) That means you’d pay 67% more for essentially the same car, with just a few miles on it. For the Wrangler, the discount is even steeper. Used shoppers saved $19,873 on average. 

Dodge Charger Daytonas have super-steep discounts on the used market. But based on our contributor’s nightmarish experience with his Charger, we’re not sure if it’s a good buy even with a steep discount.

Photo by: InsideEVs

By the top-line number, though, the biggest loser was the Genesis GV70 Electrified. Barely used examples offer a stunning $24,012 discount over new ones. There are more mass-market deals, too, including the last of the Toyota bZ4Xs, the Chevy Equinox EV, and the Honda Prologue.

I’m not going to crib the whole list, because you should take a look at Edmunds’ work there. But I will say that it’s a trend I’ve certainly seen for myself. As automakers have piled on incentives and special finance deals, used models have had to compete with fire sale new prices. Factor in that many of the 2025 model year cars were sold with $7,500 tax credits—which evaporated at the end of the third quarter—and you can see why the discounts are so big. 

The Equinox EV won our inaugural Breakthrough Award for its extremely affordable price. But they’re even cheaper on the used market, and I’d recommend comparing new vs. used options before pulling the trigger.

Photo by: Motor1.com

There is, of course, a catch. One underrated cost in car-buying is the interest rate on the loan, and it’s here where new cars usually significantly outperform their used counterparts. Automakers often offer discounted financing through their captive loan companies, helping to save you from rates that are higher than they were for most of the last decade.

According to Experian Data collected by U.S. News and World Report, the average super-prime customer—I.E. someone with a credit score above 781—is paying 4.88% right now. For equivalent used buyers, the figure is 7.43%.  

Assuming you put $10,000 down on a five-year loan for $40,000 car, that difference alone could account for $2,139 dollars. That’s definitely not enough to account for the level of savings here, but it’s a common reason buyers shop new rather than gently used.

But in today’s world, the EV deals are clearly on the used market. The tax credit is gone, driving up new EV prices, while buyer misgivings about battery reliability and charging keep values depressed on the used market. I don’t expect that to last long, though. Modern EV batteries just aren’t worth worrying about, and once you find a working charging solution, an used EV will be the best car you’ve ever bought.

Contact the author: Mack.Hogan@insideevs.com