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Opinion, long reads, and the interesting side of Irish motoring.
Your car was grand in September. It'll still be grand in November. That's what most Irish drivers think, right up until they're standing in the rain on the N7 waiting for a rescue truck. AA Ireland's breakdown data...
In 1990, if you drove from Dublin to Galway, you went through every town, village, and traffic light between here and the Atlantic. It took forever. That's not nostalgia. That was just Ireland. What followed over the...
A 17-year-old from the northwest of Ireland gets nominated for the country's top young driver award, and most people outside motorsport circles haven't heard of either. That's the problem. And also, quietly, the point....
You fill up at the Topaz outside Howth, point the nose west, and settle in for the long haul to Clifden. Same as your father did. Same as his father probably did, give or take the Topaz. That ritual is about to get...
Your renewal notice arrives. The price has gone up again. You mutter something unrepeatable, leave it on the counter, and then pay it anyway because switching feels complicated. That is exactly what your insurer is...
You've saved €28,000, you've passed your test, and now every salesman in a fifty-kilometre radius wants a piece of you. Petrol, hybrid, electric. Each one makes sense on paper. Each one makes less sense the moment you...
Nicole Drought is packing her helmet bag for Jerez this weekend, and a European GT championship title is on the line. Not bad for someone who learned to read a road on the same tarmac the rest of us queue on for the...
You renewed it online last October, paid without blinking, and moved on. But did you actually know what you were paying for, or why? Motor tax in Ireland runs on two completely different systems depending on when your...
Your tyre budget matters less than which budget tyre you pick. That distinction could keep you on the road instead of in the ditch on a wet November night outside Portlaoise. Tyre Safety Month arrives every October with...
You're on the M6, heading west, rain doing its usual thing. You want to switch albums. With your old setup, that's your phone, your mount, a tap, a swipe, another tap. With Audi's native Spotify integration, it's a...
You open the renewal email. You squint. You read it again. The number hasn't changed. It's still that number. Welcome to car insurance in Ireland, where the quote feels personal even when it isn't. The honest answer to...
You hand over the keys, grab a terrible coffee from the waiting area, and forty minutes later someone appears with a clipboard and a face that says this is going to hurt. The bill is €340. For a service. On a 2017...
The Citroën 2CV is back. Sort of. And if you felt something in your chest when you saw the photos from Paris, you're not alone. Citroën unveiled their electric 2CV concept at the Paris Motor Show and the reaction was...
The humble hatchback built this country's car culture. And right now, Irish drivers are walking away from it in droves. Sales data tells the story plainly. Compact SUVs and crossovers have been the fastest-growing...
Your neighbour just sold the Nissan Leaf. Bought a plug-in hybrid instead. You thought they'd gone backwards. They haven't. The idea that full electrification is the only sensible destination has taken a knock lately,...
You opened the renewal letter. You read the number. You read it again. Then you rang your partner into the room to confirm you weren't having some kind of episode. Welcome to Irish car insurance in 2025. What's Actually...
Your renewal letter arrives. You open it. You say something that would make your granny wince. Same car. Same address. Same spotless record. Somehow the number is bigger again. You are not imagining it. Ireland...
Your pump receipt is doing something it hasn't done in a while. Making you wince again. Petrol nudging €1.80 a litre. Diesel not far behind. A commuter driving a 2017 Volkswagen Golf from Drogheda to Dublin five days a...
Your 2009 Volkswagen Passat with 187,000km on the clock is grand, until it isn't. And right now, mechanics across Ireland are getting very busy explaining exactly how "isn't" tends to happen. The past eighteen...
You pull up on your street after a long day. Your EV is on 12%. The nearest public charger is a 15-minute walk away, and the last time you used it, someone had parked a diesel Mondeo in front of it. Sound familiar?...
You turn the key, the screen lights up, and before you've checked your mirrors there's a BMW logo, a software update notification, and a tile that looks suspiciously like a sponsored result. You're not at a bus stop....
A €100 million battery plant going up in Morocco doesn't sound like your problem. Until you're standing in a forecourt in Sandyford being told a base-spec electric hatchback costs €38,000, and suddenly the global supply...
Petrol dropped below €1.70 a litre at a handful of forecourts this summer. Not everywhere, not for long, but enough for your man at the school gate to say "sure maybe I'll stick with petrol for another while."...
You've got three kids, a dog, and a mother-in-law who insists on coming to Wexford. The seven-seater question isn't philosophical anymore. It's Thursday. For years, the Irish family buying a three-row SUV had to make...
You filled up on Tuesday morning. By Thursday, the same forecourt had dropped 4 cent a litre. Forty litres in the tank. You just handed them €1.60 for nothing. Multiply that across a year and you've basically bought...
You ordered the Model Y. Then Tesla moved the goalposts. The entry-level Model Y has been repositioned across European markets at a sharper price point, and Tesla did what every manufacturer does when they need to shift...
Two new electric hatchbacks are about to fight for the same Irish family budget, the same driveway, and the same school run. One is Korean. One is Czech. Both want your money. October 2026 is shaping up to be a...
The most hushed car ever built just got quieter. Rolls-Royce's Spectre, the marque's first fully electric vehicle, is already on Irish roads. And if your reaction is "grand, good for them," you're missing what...
Bosch is testing fully supervised autonomous driving on public roads in Beijing right now. Not in a lab. Not on a closed circuit. On actual streets, in actual traffic, with actual pedestrians making bad decisions. And...
You circle the same block for the third time, the meter is full, the loading bay has a van in it that hasn't moved since 2019, and somewhere behind you a taxi is getting impatient. Welcome to parking in Dublin....
Pull up to a narrow country road, squeeze in to let an oncoming car pass, and watch the other driver's hand lift off the wheel. Two fingers. Maybe a full palm. You didn't learn that in any driving lesson. It was just...
The pump flicks past €2 and your stomach does that thing. You know the thing. You've been doing it for over a year now, and it hasn't got any less grim. Petrol and diesel prices in Ireland have been sitting stubbornly...
Open your renewal letter. Take a breath. Swear quietly. This is a yearly ritual for Irish drivers, and it's getting worse again. For a while there, things were improving. Premiums fell between 2018 and 2022, partly...
Nobody loves driving at night. New drivers dread it. Experienced drivers tolerate it. And anyone who says they actually prefer it is either lying or hasn't done the M7 at midnight in November rain. The reality is...
Nobody looks forward to the driving test. It sits in your calendar like a dentist appointment with consequences. You will be nervous. That is normal. Everyone is nervous. The person testing you expects you to be...
Dublin to Galway. Two and a half hours on a good day. Three if there's a caravan doing fifty on the M6. And somewhere around Moate, the back seat erupts. "Are we there yet?" "She's touching my side."...
You're landing in Shannon. You've hired a car online. You've packed the sun cream (optimist). One small detail you might want to sort before you collect the keys: which side of the road do the Irish drive on? The left....
A road sign has one job. Tell you something useful. The distance to the next town. The speed limit. Which direction the road bends. Simple stuff. Ireland's road signs try their best. They really do. But somewhere...
In Ireland, we drive on the left. We know this. It's normal to us. It is also, statistically speaking, the minority position. About 65% of the world's countries drive on the right. We're in the smaller camp, along with...
Here's a thing nobody tells you about the driving test. The skills aren't the hard part. By the time your test date arrives, you've probably done dozens of lessons. You can manage a roundabout. You can parallel park...
Most driving in Ireland is a chore. The M50 at half five. The school run in the rain. A forty-minute crawl through roadworks for the privilege of reaching a Supermac's. But then there's the other kind. The kind where...
Here is a number that should make you feel something: 640. That was the death toll on Irish roads in 1972. Six hundred and forty people. In a country of three million. By the time the European Transport Safety Council...