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The fall and rise of the budget car

Twenty years ago, the classic bargain brands like Lada seemed to be going the same way as the Soviet empire that spawned them. Woefully dated and badly made, only a weirdo would have bought a new Lada rather than a second-hand model from Ford, Vauxhall or VW. However, one of the big trends in the car industry today is the re-emergence of bargain cars.

Driven: Volkswagen Passat CC GT

Elegant and refined. Forty years ago these two words would not have been used to describe the Beetles bought in droves by the counterculture in the US; a symbol of the hippy movement and the definitive people's car, designed at a time when Germany sought to put people in motion. With the Passat CC, however, Volkswagen is indeed making a sharp move away from the ‘volks wagen', and these two words rolled off the tongues of those who saw the car in all three countries we drove through on our winter holiday.

Top Gear East Coast USA Road Trip tonight

Jeremy de-stresses in the SLS in NYC It’s a bit of a Top Gear day today with not just this morning’s news that Top Gear drafted in Tiff Needell to play at being the Stig, but the first in the new series of Top Gear kicks off tonight on BBC2 at 8.00 pm (9.00pm in Europe). And actually, this morning’s Tiff Needell story ties in with tonight’s Top Gear as it’s got Slumdog Millionaire director Danny Boyle as the Star in a Reasonably Priced Car. But that’s not the main piece tonight; that honour goes to the boy’s trip up the East Coast USA.