The Long Goodbye: 10,000 Glorious Miles In The Endangered Seat Ibiza

Back in 2017, I flew to Barcelona to cover the launch of the fifth-generation Seat Ibiza. At that time, the Volkswagen Group was on a high; the Ibiza was at the cutting edge for a supermini; the Ford Fiesta was its main concern; and there were only nine electric cars on the market.

Nine years have passed since then and everything in the car industry has changed. Yet here I stand before a factory-fresh Ibiza that is hardly any different from the pre-production example I examined in 2017. Yes, the front end is a bit more substantial and the interior is more modern-looking, but that’s about it.

This unusual situation is the culmination of a funny few years for Seat. In 2017 it was the envy of every mainstream brand, but its last all-new model launch came in 2018, and now the marque is set to be retired completely by the end of the decade as part of a massive restructuring at the VW Group. This, then, could be the last time we report on what it's like to live with a Seat. 

Let's focus on the here and now, though, as this freshly updated Ibiza is still a 'new car', irrespective of its creator's imminent retirement - and there's plenty to talk about.

For this second Ibiza facelift, the updates are limited to merely a refreshed exterior and "new embossed textiles, refined materials, a darker headliner, and subtle, neutral accents on the air vents" – but, hey, it’s something. My long-termer is actually the same car that recently received the attention of our road testers, who awarded it four stars – a higher rating than many all-new cars of late. Muy bien, vamos, etc.

I’ve always had a preference for smaller cars, especially those of the sportier variety, so I’m delighted with this Ibiza. And even more so because I’m particularly averse to tech heaping, especially when it comes at the expense of physical switchgear and full control over the driving.

As you might recall, this car has the punchier, 113bhp version of the mandatory 1.0-litre three-cylinder turbocharged petrol engine, with the optional seven-speed dual-clutch (DSG) automatic gearbox, and is in top-ranking FR Sport trim. It’s the exact spec I would have chosen, except I’d probably have taken the manual gearbox… and then regretted it every morning on the M25.

Actually, I probably wouldn’t have chosen this Onoric Grey paint either, even if duck-egg blue would be a better description for it – because, like Fiat, I agree that Britain is in dire need of livening up, and Seat now offers bright red and yellow finishes on the Ibiza (called Liminal and Hypnotic, oddly).

The highlights of the standard kit on the Ibiza SE (from £21k) are 16in alloy wheels (an inch bigger than before the facelift), LED headlights, an 8.25in touchscreen, an 8in digital cockpit (both as before), a leather-wrapped steering wheel, air conditioning, rear parking sensors, cruise control and the unwelcome collection of ADAS functions. SE Technology trim (£22k) then expands the touchscreen to 9.2in with more features and makes entry and ignition keyless.

FR First Edition (£24k) enlarges the alloys to 17in, gives the exterior a sporty makeover, makes the suspension firmer, swaps the regular seat for heated buckets and adds ambient lighting (including rings around the front air vents), front parking sensors, a reversing camera, selectable driving modes and, on DSG cars, gearshift paddles. FR Sport (£25k) completes the package with 18in alloys, a larger (10in) digital cockpit, a wireless smartphone charger, a front armrest and a height-adjustable boot floor.

Few options are offered, but my Ibiza does feature the combination of an upgraded stereo (an absolute must for me), with six speakers and a subwoofer, and a spacesaver spare wheel (instead of a tyre repair kit). It’s an absolute no-brainer at £550, unlike the opening sunroof, which is lovely to have on a warm day but not £995 lovely.

First impressions are of a particularly enthusiastic supermini with a sensible yet exploitable amount of power and a naturally dynamic chassis and direct steering, yet also one that rides in a relatively composed fashion - not outright comfortable but more than acceptable for what it is. It's like a cut-price Mini Cooper in a way - just the kind of character that makes me so enthusiastic about small cars.

It's weird that there have been high-performance versions of the Leon hatchback and estate and even the Ateca SUV yet never such an Ibiza, because the background is already fully painted - Cupra would just need to add the final flourishes. But sadly the window of opportunity for new petrol hot hatches has long since closed, and Cupra has made its own electric supermini, the Raval.

In a way, then, I'm living in the past by driving an Ibiza - but it's a very enjoyable place to be. Usually I would approach a long-term test as I would a favourite artist's new album, with trepidation and questions to be answered, but this is more like listening to a greatest hits compilation: it's all comfortingly familiar and I know it's all good. Hope I'm not misremembering.

Update 2: Old-school cruise control is a breath of fresh air

I can't remember the last time I used normal cruise control before getting my Ibiza - and what a delight it is. Often with the adaptive kind, it takes me a while to realise I've been slowed down to shadow the dawdler in front, or the car stands on the brakes just as I'm preparing to indicate for an overtake. In the Ibiza, the speed differential to vehicles in the distance is always obvious, and I always make quicker and slicker progress as a result. 

Mileage: 356

Update 3: Changing a habit of a lifetime

Donald Trump’s various bewildering quotes have provided me with much mirth over the years, but it’s rare that I actually learn anything from him. I was properly taken aback by one of his recent tirades, though. “The hated start-stop feature unnecessarily shuts off a car’s engine when you stop at a red light,” he said. “In other words, the engine goes off. That’s great.” (Who ever said the Americans can’t do sarcasm?)

His Environmental Protection Agency concurred that start-stop is “almost universally hated”, which was news to me. In a decade of evaluating every type of new car, I’ve literally never given its doings a second thought, and nor have I ever heard anyone, colleagues included, complain about it. The EPA also called it “stupid”, which is ironic when this invention has been shown to improve fuel economy by 5% or more for no mechanical penalty.

In fairness, I can appreciate that a momentary loss of heated or cooled air is a lot more noticeable in Michigan or Texas than in Britain, and my research into the American public sentiment revealed that this is a side effect of some less sophisticated stop-start systems. Perhaps it’s a generational thing too: I’ve never known any different.

Anyway, how funny that stop-start systems should hit the news just as one bothers me for the first time ever. My new Seat Ibiza often interrupts its own combustion at the exact moment that I’m about to put my foot down again, annoying me and sometimes whoever is behind too.

It doesn’t help that the Volkswagen Group’s 1.0-litre turbo triple is particularly unpleasant on start-up in this application, shuddering and snorting like a horse on a freezing morning. And uniquely the refiring also causes the windscreen wipers to stutter during their arc of motion, as if there’s momentarily insufficient voltage to power both them and the starter motor.

For all these reasons, I’ve taken to deactivating the system when in stop-start traffic. (Mr President would surely approve… if he had any idea what a Seat was.) Thankfully there’s a handy physical button for this beside the gearlever.

But it could be worse: when I ran a Seat Arona (essentially a taller Ibiza) back in 2017, on a few occasions the wipers froze entirely while I was driving through thick spray on the motorway – which was terrifying – and wouldn’t reanimate until I followed the advice of the IT Crowd.

I’m afraid I also need to vent about one of the few areas that Seat tweaked in the Ibiza’s recent facelift: the air vents. Now, I’m a big fan of ambient lighting, and I’ve chosen a moody red for my Ibiza, but the rings of light around the dashboard’s two peripheral vents are reflected upwards into the adjacent windows – right where I’m trying to look through to the wing mirrors. Helpfully, the rings dim when I indicate – but this just suggests that Seat’s engineers realised there was a problem yet pressed ahead anyway, which isn’t really on in my opinion.

Nevertheless, if you offered me a choice between this and another car with exemplary visibility in all directions but even a single touchscreen-based climate control, I’d pick the Ibiza every time. This would be on safety grounds, because every individual aspect of its ventilation (direction, speed, heat, sync, auto, recirculate) and heating (rear window, front seats) has its own physical button or dial – something that, unforgivably, is fast on its way to becoming a unique selling point for Seat.

Mileage: 696

Update 3: Where’s the supermini efficiency?

For obvious reasons, I'm keeping a closer eye on my MPG readout than usual - and wondering why the figure is so low. My commute may be mostly motorway, but I'd still expect 50 rather than 40mpg from a modern supermini. Even switching to Eco mode made little difference. In fairness, the Ibiza isn't yet a mild hybrid, and perhaps the sporty tyres of FR trim are to blame too. Whatever, I should just be thankful that I'm not in a big diesel at present.

Mileage: 1355

Supermini vs SUV: Is my Seat Ibiza better than its Arona sibling?

Update 4: Still a roomy supermini

My unfavourable comparison of the Ibiza with its Arona crossover sibling may have made it sound very impractical. It's not. At launch, Seat emphasised how much roomier it was than the old Ibiza, and at 5ft 8in tall I can still comfortably 'sit behind myself', having several inches to spare above my mop and my feet fully beneath the driver's seat. Bonus marks, too, for the rear speakers, bottle-sized door bins and, best of all, big rear quarterlights

Mileage: 3063

Update 6: Manual or Auto? Which suit the Ibiza best?

Blistering performance has for me never been a prerequisite for driving fun. Of course I want something that can accelerate reasonably quickly, but its performance needn’t be exceptional.

In fact, I’d rather it weren’t, because silly numbers make you much likelier to end up in sticky situations, both physically and legally. And if everything is rushing past in a blur, I’m not savouring as much as I otherwise might the elements of driving that are actually enjoyable: shifting up through the rev range, picking the right gear for a corner, braking at the ideal time, picking the perfect cornering line and hitting the apex.

I might have just written myself out of a future go in a McLaren, but so be it, because I’ve also explained what makes my 113bhp Seat Ibiza so great. Well, except for the obvious discrepancy that it’s an automatic.

This dual-clutch gearbox (DSG) is a good one, even though it’s of the cheaper clutch type, not hesitating very often and being happy to kick down when asked. Furthermore, it will let me manually select which of the seven forward ratios I want to use, either by knocking the large drive selector leftwards and then back and forth or by pulling the small steering-mounted paddles.

However, as usual, I can’t really see the point in taking this half measure, not least because my left leg remains static and the controlling computer won’t allow me to make selection mistakes.

I was therefore delighted to learn that the almost identically specified Ibiza being run by my What Car? colleague Jonty Renk had the standard six-speed manual gearbox instead, and eagerly arranged a temporary exchange.

It’s incredibly rare nowadays that my left leg has to do anything in a car, but I’m not going to praise this manual set-up because of welcome nostalgia; I’ll do so because it’s genuinely good. Unlike in many cheaper cars I can recall from the past decades, the biting point was easy to find straight away; the lever felt solidly anchored into something; and I was soon sliding up and down the tree without a second thought.

This 1.0-litre three-cylinder turbocharged engine develops decent torque at relatively low revs, after which the curve flattens and tails off, so it doesn’t need to be ‘kept on the boil’ and is flexible throughout. Indeed, I often saw the digital instrument display suggest I select sixth when I was happily cruising along in fourth.

The gears are rather long but nevertheless I found there was real joy to be had in shifting down a gear or two to get that committed drive through a corner, and in haring up a 60mph road away from a junction. This may be basically the same car as my own but, as the youngsters say, it just hits differently.

Until I had to drive it to work, that is. My twice-daily rush-hour torture on the M25 was one of the main factors in my decision to choose the DSG, and just a single stint of stop-start traffic under the glowing ‘40’ roundels proved this was wise. Seemingly continual shifts between first and second soon tired my left leg, and the repeated need for my left arm to move between wheel and lever was then irritating rather than stimulating.

Both gearbox types have their benefits and their flaws, then, as expected, but I now feel even more torn between them knowing how good the manual option is. If only there weren’t quite so many people crammed into the south nowadays.

Mileage: 3384

Update 7: Software niggles bite

My varied misadventures in the baffling world of software have continued into yet another car. The Ibiza's touchscreen had for weeks been infrequently bothering me about installing an update, but it kept doing so while I was concentrating on, y'know, driving, so I kept pressing 'later'. Eventually I remembered to ask it to install before setting off, only for the relevant menu to tell me no update was pending. Glitch? Bad prank? Hallucinations?

Mileage 4132 

Update 8: How does the Ibiza fare as a motorway commuter?

Many years ago, a representative of a top Premier League football club told me that an automotive sponsor provided its scouts with cars for their constant touring around the country in search of future talent. These guys’ mileage was insane: I can’t remember the exact figure but I’m fairly sure it surpassed six figures over the course of just a few years.

It would have been an unenviable job in a top-of-the-range saloon, let alone the low-cost small hatchback in question. The thought of endless hours making steering corrections, trying to mitigate backache and pushing the volume wheel ever forth as the tinny stereo lost its eternal battle with the wind and road roar resonating around that tin box made me feel a bit sick.

Yet while my new Seat Ibiza is a car of similar cost and format and my long daily commutes make most people think I’m bonkers, it hasn’t proven as ill-suited as I’d feared.

Certainly that description of the older hatchback’s stability and comfort shortcomings doesn’t apply. The Ibiza sits steady on the motorway, while the imitation buckets of sporty FR trim keep me comfortable enough for a couple of hours (although I’m not sure I’d survive for much longer than that, given they lack lumbar adjustment).

Unwanted noise does get pretty loud inside, but much of that can be attributed to the hideous concrete stretch of the M25 through Surrey, which no car can truly counteract and is almost unbearable in some of them – whether due to the tyre type or some natural resonance I can’t say. Our original Ford Puma ST long-termer was torture there.

While I would obviously rather be commuting in a bigger and meftier car (my previous Volvo XC90 had very little tolerance for decibels), at least my Ibiza has the upgraded stereo, which includes a subwoofer amid a spare wheel under the boot.

While Bowers & Wilkins would laugh at its sound quality, I’m sure it’s worth upgrading to (for £550) if you will be driving your Ibiza on cruddy surfaces regularly, because anything thinner and quieter would surely struggle to cut through it all.

My car’s performance is perfectly sufficient for overtaking – although unfortunately that doesn’t protect me from the usual cretins in their vans and blacked-out premium SUVs who take offence at a little car using lane four and counter by closely examining its rear bumper.

Its economy could certainly be better than its usual 40-45mpg, considering that little turbo petrol engine has only just over a tonne to propel, but it could also be far worse, as stints in that PHEV XC90 and a diesel Toyota Land Cruiser demonstrated to my great cost.

Another major consideration for motorway commuting these days is, of course, ADAS – and I’m delighted to say the Ibiza is fabulous in this regard. First, because it has only four driver assistance systems. Pity poor Alastair Clements with the 20 – twenty! – to contend with in his Omoda E5. Second, because the drowsiness monitor has never once bothered me, although I wonder if that’s because I’m a habitual sunglasses wearer.

And third, because the two ADAS that I do hate are easy to turn off, via just three presses of two buttons on the left-hand spoke of the steering wheel (bringing up a menu on the display between the digital dials).

Those are speed limit warning, because an indicated 43mph ain’t actually 43mph, and lane keeping assistance, because it failed my long-time litmus test: where a B-road near my place contracts from two lanes into one, its white dividing line is succeeded by an asphalt-coloured scar.

Well, if any LKA system ever actually manages to see the distinction and doesn’t try to steer me into the kerb, I’ll be sure to let you know…

Mileage: 4605

Update 9: Why is my car fan working overtime?

I've never run a car that uses its engine cooling fan anything like as fervently as this - at least not audibly so. Even a fast run of merely a few miles up the A23 for petrol will have it whooshing for England on the forecourt. And no, actually, it was always doing this before the recent 35deg C spell. There are no warning lights and nothing looks amiss under the bonnet, so I assume it's fine.

Mileage: 6952

Update 10: Potholes, oil top-ups, and dipstick drama

Well I never: the local council has fully resurfaced our badly messed-up road. I mean, yeah, it is the main route into the city, but still – shock! A week of sleepless nights as my furniture literally vibrated seems worth it now that I can glide over such perfectly smooth asphalt.

Pity they couldn’t also have done our building’s driveway, though, because all the digging has seemingly dislodged two of the marker stones – which I discovered when my Ibiza loudly pushed one into the enormous adjoining pothole. “That’s a puncture,” I grimly told my passenger – followed immediately by the binging of the tyre pressure warning system.

Having parked up, though, I could hear no hissing, and when I anxiously returned to the car the next morning the tyre was still rock-solid when slapped.

Astonished at this rare bit of good luck and delighted to have potentially saved myself £160, I went and topped up the pressures and all has been well since. There are some truly awful statistics and anecdotes about potholes, so I really do wonder how often someone gets away with an incident like this.

In any case, I would have been okay, because unlike most modern cars the Ibiza comes with a spacesaver spare wheel under its boot floor – at least as a £550 option, bundled with a stereo upgrade. Worth it: the fifth tyre may be a Linglong instead of a Continental, but it’s a million times more useful than any puncture repair kit.

That same week, the Ibiza also asked for some more engine oil – a first for me in almost a decade of running long-term test cars. It wanted 0W-20-grade stuff, which I was pleased to find in stock at my local Esso garage, in Castrol Edge form. I bought the smaller bottle, for £27 – and ended up using all of it.

The Ibiza’s manual explains that, depending on use, “oil consumption can be up to 0.5 litres per 1000km” – or about 5600 miles per gallon in old money – and “is likely to be higher for the first 5000km”. Nowadays you wouldn’t expect to have to top up before the first oil-change service (which the touchscreen tells me will be needed in 10,100 miles’ time) but anecdotally such consumption is normal for a VW Group engine.

The little book also said that I ought to use a funnel, which was annoying because I’ve never owned one, but a neighbour – clearly far more practically minded than me – suggested that I could simply cut the end off a plastic water bottle instead. With that done, the job couldn’t have been easier.

Well, actually it could, because why did Seat decide to make the Ibiza’s dipstick black? The whole point of the thing is to visually demonstrate how much dark liquid is left in the sump, so literally any other colour would have been infinitely more helpful.

Mileage: 7306

Update 11: Four adults, no problem

Twenty years ago, four adults cramming into an affordable supermini on a 36deg C British summer's day would have been an absurd notion. Yet there we were, thanks to car bloat, global warming and standard-fit air conditioning. My three friends had comfortable amounts of head and leg room in the Ibiza and they were kept nicely cool by hidden floor vents.

Mileage: 7705

Update 12: Can the Ibiza double as a driver's car?

Many people have since 2017 wondered at, or indeed complained about, the lack of a replacement for the Ibiza Cupra. Audi and Volkswagen didn’t hesitate to heat up their new-generation (ie MQB-platformed) superminis, so why did Seat? Especially considering that all the hard work and investment had already been done for the Spaniards.

The surprising success of Cupra since it was upgraded from Seat sub-brand to full-blown manufacturer with hot versions of the Ateca, then the Leon and Leon Estate, only made the situation seem more of a joke to hot hatch fans. The punchline came late last year, as even stolid Skoda elected to sportify its Fabia.

No official reason has ever been given but, reading between the lines, the preventative factors seem to be the eroded profit margins on small cars and the board’s desire to establish Cupra as a more premium and thus more crossovery brand.

Anyway, it’s surely too late now. The days of the compact petrol hot hatch are virtually over. Excepting the bespoke, the rare and the incredibly pricey Toyota GR Yaris, your ambitions are now limited to a 228bhp Mini John Cooper Works or a 174bhp Fabia 130.

Would you also count the 113bhp Polo R-Line and Ibiza FR, the latter of which I’ve been happily driving this summer? Both warmed-up variants gain sharper exterior styling, slightly larger alloy wheels and bucket-like seats inside, and the Seat scores one over the Volkswagen with ‘sports’ suspension.

This is just the Ibiza’s standard suspension (coil springs, passive dampers, MacPherson struts at the front, a torsion beam at the back) in a slightly firmer and lower-riding tune, not anything fancy, but I’m sure you would be able to notice the difference in its compromise between comfort and agility.

Despite this, taking the twisty way home hasn’t become a habit in my time with the Ibiza, as it had with some cars in the past, but I thought I’d give it a go recently. I already knew that its three-cylinder turbo engine would be up to the job, as it’s no sluggard during my motorway commutes and, as I found out in a swap with a manual Ibiza it produces plenty of torque from low revs.

Having selected the Sport driving mode (via a physical button!) for livelier throttle response and meatier steering, I felt able to exploit even more of the surprisingly strong grip of the sporty Continental tyres, revelling in the Ibiza’s steadfast neutrality as I attacked each apex.

I also had another go at the manual shift function of the dual-clutch automatic gearbox, using both the flappy paddles behind the steering wheel – which turned out to actually be small plastic buttons – and the chunky central gearlever (push it left from D, then back and forth for downshifts and upshifts).

It responded quickly and faithfully to my requests, only defaulting to automatic mode in order to protect itself from over-revving or stalling. However, I still couldn’t derive any pleasure from shifting an auto 'box myself – and I was surprised and concerned by the distinct smell of a burning clutch after one 0-60mph sprint.

I did enjoy myself, but the Ibiza didn’t rock my world. Then again, nor did the 204bhp Polo GTI when that still existed. And it’s certainly more fun than £27,000 might get you elsewhere – and objectively better in myriad other ways too.

Mileage: 9213

Update 13: Who needs a van?

"No way that's going to fit," my friend said, but once again the Ibiza proved that it's genuinely practical, saving her £100 on van hire. As fellow vinyl record fiends will have spotted, 'that' referred to the ubiquitous Ikea Kallax, here in 4x4 configuration. With us sitting as far forward as we comfortably could, this 147cm-long, 77cmwide 'cube storage unit' just about cleared the load lip. Yes, only just - but in a supermini!

Mileage: 9547

Final report: we'll miss this brilliant supermini when its gone

Sometimes you know when it’s the last time; other times the fact surprises you later on. I vividly remember the last day I would see a Vulcan fly; but when was the last time I felt like a kid? Which type of finale is the better depends on what kind of person you are, I suppose. I would always rather know, so I can savour the moment and contemplate why it matters. 

Handing back my Seat Ibiza, I felt confident that it was a final goodbye – not just to the particular car I’d been driving daily for the past six months but to a whole type of car.

For various reasons, the fifth-generation Ibiza has remained on the market long enough to become an anachronism, even after its recent facelift. What do I mean by that? I mean it’s a compact, light, low-riding hatchback; it’s purely combustion-powered; it has an almost entirely analogue interior; and it carries a minimum of ADAS.

The cars of 2017 were in these ways fundamentally different from most emerging these days – which just shows how rapidly and how significantly the automotive landscape has been shifting. Things now are generally larger, heavier, more complicated, more annoying and more electrified, none of which excites me – often the exact opposite. So this test, as I had expected, became something of a victory lap for old-school simplicity.

I feel like I’ve used the caveat “for a supermini” over and over, but I was just continually amazed by how multi-talented the Ibiza was for a car of this genre, which in decades past was commonly restricted to the role of ‘shopping car’.

This Ibiza still excelled in that role, of course, such that it would be more accurate to describe it as ‘house move car’, having helped both me and a friend move this summer, carrying not just boxes but also bulky furniture in its boot.

But my point is that, despite it having only three cylinders and less than a litre of cubic capacity to work with, its turbo petrol engine produced enough power and torque for it to serve as a long-distance motorway commuter. Road noise was my only real bugbear on the M25; ride comfort, seat comfort and the quality of the sound system never crossed my mind. I highly doubt anyone would have said that about an Ibiza 20 years ago.

And on a few occasions friends came along for the ride, enjoying generous head, leg and knee room, while floor vents blew a steady stream of ice-cold air on them as Britain baked outside our comfortable cocoon.

When I say ‘old-school simplicity’, in large part I’m referring to the dash layout. Whereas the designers of modern superminis seemingly started with a touchscreen and then worked around that, here they obviously focused on making key controls easy to both locate and operate.

All of the climate functions, all of the stereo functions and even the driving mode and stop-start selectors were stationary physical buttons, not mobile icons. This ethos even extended to a mechanical handbrake, which prevented that unpleasant rocking back and forth that electronic alternatives usually inflict.

Sometimes I doubted whether the Ibiza really was a great car or whether it just seemed great because better contemporaries had all been replaced by electrified and digitised irritants. But no, I reminded myself: it was great when I first drove one in 2017, a time when the much-missed Ford Fiesta was still in its pomp. Rather, the failures of newcomers were only serving to exaggerate this older car’s successes.

I should also remind myself that this test wasn’t premised as a hazy-eyed eulogy of pure-ICE superminis but rather “a pulse check on the long-neglected Seat brand” – something that’s much harder to perform.

The Ibiza and its Arona crossover sibling (which I also tried in facelifted form and which was similarly recommendable) are in line to gain a mild-hybrid system early next year, but all signs point to them being the last major product announcements from this storied brand. 

To be totally honest, I’ve always found sentimental attachments to car brands a bit weird: if this Ibiza were any other badge, I’d be bidding it no less of an emotional farewell. But these things do matter to a great many enthusiasts, and in this case it seems some national pride is at stake too. Further, if any brand should rightfully be struck off (and there are a few), it’s definitely not this one: Seat has made some proper winners in recent years.

In fact, this Ibiza has been such a winner in my eyes that, if ever my luck runs out and I have to find myself a proper job, it might well be the car I’d buy with my own money and keep until it falls apart.

So perhaps this won’t be my final farewell to old-school automotive simplicity after all.