Found it

I think?

Well, after several weeks of diligent hunting I’ve finally found a new steed. I collect it on Thursday, so you’ll just have to gnaw your knuckles in delicious suspense for another week - assuming the thing makes it home!

While you’re waiting, allow me to bring unexpected cheer from Trumpland, where the car business is suddenly booming. GM has raised its profit forecast for the year. Twice. Ford has done the same. And Stellantis - that Franco-Italian-American Frankenstein’s monster that owns Fiat, Chrysler, Peugeot, Vauxhall and half your local scrapyard - has seen its operating profit triple.

Before we crack open the Asti Spumante, however, there’s a twist. Almost every last penny of that recovery came from North America. Peel back the numbers and Europe - the continent that actually invented the car - is still haemorrhaging money. It’s rather like discovering your prize-winning vineyard is being bankrolled by the branch office in Ohio.

So what’s America’s secret? Almost too simple to print: they’ve started building cars people can actually afford and want. Trump’s administration took a flamethrower to the emissions rulebook, and Detroit - freed from the sacred duty of losing money on EVs - sprinted gratefully back to profitable, but politically incorrect pick-ups and SUVs. Add a few Trumpian tariffs to keep the imports at bay, sprinkle in some re-shored jobs, and hey presto: an auto industry that once again remembers it exists to make money.

GM, having quietly incinerated the better part of eleven billion dollars on its EV adventure (surely the most expensive method yet devised for discovering that the customer wasn’t interested), has finally stopped digging. Ford went one better and set fire to its own battery joint venture - a fitting metaphor, given how few of the things actually hold a useful charge.

Meanwhile Europe is doing the exact opposite - and doing it with the quiet pride of a man reversing his Rolls-Royce into a canal because the sat-nav told him to. Brussels has decreed punitive emissions rules and mandatory quotas of electric cars nobody wants. The EU has cheerfully recreated the economics of the East German Trabant. Ordinarily it takes a Politburo to inflict this grade of misery.

The result? European profits are in terminal decline, while half-witted eco-zealots are driving the car industry straight into the arms of China - a spectacular own goal given China runs on coal, ignores the emissions sermon, and is presumably still laughing too hard to load the container ships. And who are these visionaries steering us onto the rocks? Well, 99% of them have ponced off the taxpayer their whole life. The closest most have come to industry (or a real job) is a photo-op in a borrowed hard hat.

Meanwhile at Volkswagen & Co. the plot reaches a properly Wodehousean farce. Under German law, roughly half the boardroom is made up of “worker representatives.” So while VW’s bosses gamely explain how they intend to arrest the decline, they must first win the blessing of a supervisory board where half the seats belong to the very people whose factories are on the chopping block. It’s the corporate equivalent of trying to steer a lorry with both hands on the handbrake.

And so the great divergence rolls on. America builds what makes money. China builds what’s cheap and eats everyone’s lunch. And Europe - the birthplace of Benz, Daimler and the internal combustion engine - legislates its industry into a ditch, then solemnly holds an inquiry into the ditch. Me? I’m delighted to be the new owner of something from another era. I think?