THERE ARE A bewildering number of new cars on sale in Ireland right now. Gone are the days when each brand has two or three in their line up. There is an exhaustive list of variants. Even SUVs now have coupé versions (although nobody is buying them and some are now going out of production – looking at you Volkswagen ID.5).

Mention you work for DoneDeal Cars (it often says it on my t-shirt) and you get asked a lot of questions about cars. At the pub. At parties. At parent-teacher meetings (yes, this has happened).

Luckily I don’t know much about anything else, and perhaps the comments section will say about anything at all, so I don’t mind playing the guessing game.

However for you, here, I have picked the 5 new cars that most impressed me in 2025. This is by no means an exhaustive list, and it isn’t in any particular category, but I might mention one or two you hadn’t thought of.

The Dacia Bigster

If you had told me three or four years ago that one of my favourite cars would be a Dacia, I would have laughed in your face. Up until recently they made worthy, but fairly bargain-basement runabouts that you bought if you really wanted a new car, and were happy to drive a car with about as much charisma as toe fungus. But roll on 2025 and the Dacia range is, by and large, brilliant.

Sure some of the plastics are a little patchy in places, but they now look good and have good specification and decent engines. Case in point, the Bigster, which is, as you might have guessed – big. It is their largest........

© TheJournal