The Grand Tour Guide to the World

The USA has two solid claims to being the greatest car-making nation in history, the first being that mass production of cars was perfected here. The second is that, from the Model T to the Mustang, it’s made so much memorable stuff. Detroit’s best days might be behind it, but the old town rose from the dead after the financial crash and isn’t done for yet, even if a lot of the assembly of stuff in the USA now happens under foreign ownership in un-car-y places like Tennessee and Alabama. Even so, the fact remains that America still builds and buys a lot of cars. And some of them are even quite good.

GREAT BRITAIN

Current annual production: 1.8 million

Epicentre: Birmingham

Most famous cars: Mini, Jaguar E-Type, Range Rover, Morris Minor, Jaguar XJ6, and so on.

Best current model: Range Rover

Great Britain was once the world’s second-largest car-making nation after the USA and once boasted the world’s largest factory, the Austin plant at Longbridge in Birmingham. Britain came up with ground-breaking new models like the Mini, which showed that front-wheel-drive was the way to make a small car, and the Range Rover, which showed that 4x4s weren’t just for farmers. But that was all a long time ago. What does Britain have now? Well, it’s got over 30 factories, from the vast mass production of Nissan in Sunderland to the gentler pace of tiny companies like Ariel in Somerset, and they’re making more cars now than they have in two decades, from the Mini and Honda Civic to the Morgan Three-wheeler and McLaren 720S. When it comes to designing, developing and building cars, Britain is still officially ‘quite busy’. And ‘quite good’. Any more would lack British understatement.