Innholdsfortegnelse for May 10, 2023 i Autocar

New Toyota boss Koji Sato has hinted that high-performance Gazoo Racing (GR) cars will continue to be launched under his leadership – and he has even suggested that the momentum of development could accelerate. Sato became president and CEO of Toyota Motor Corporation in January, taking over from Akio Toyoda, grandson of the company’s founder, who moved to become chairman. Toyoda founded GR and was a staunch supporter of the firm’s world endurance and rallying campaigns as he sought to underpin its technical expertise and express a fundamental deep-rooted love of cars. Toyoda is a keen driver and competitor and his job title at the firm is playfully ‘master driver’. Speaking in his first UK interview since taking the job, Sato said: “The Gazoo brand will be acknowledged for the…

ALPINE WILL TAKE on the famous Pikes Peak hillclimb for the first time with this hardcore, aero-optimised A110, which has been “designed to break records”. The most extreme iteration of the A110 yet, the 950kg Pikes Peak edition has been designed to cope with the demands presented by the 12.4-mile Colorado hillclimb, also known as the Race to the Clouds. The car has been developed by Alpine in collaboration with French racing team Signatech and sports a pronounced front splitter, double rear wing and shark fin for added downforce. Aero-optimised wheels, side skirts and a rear diffuser feature as well. There’s also a cooling duct on the roof to feed air into the engine. Power comes from the same 1.8-litre turbocharged petrol four-pot as the standard car, but uprated by…

LAMBORGHINI WILL “GUIDE the change, not simply follow it” in making supercars acceptable in the eco-conscious age. Speaking to Autocar at Silverstone, for the reveal of the V12 plug-in hybrid Revuelto to UK-based owners, Lamborghini CEO Stephan Winkelmann said it is not only about the technical lowering of exhaust emissions but also how the cars are perceived. He said super-sports cars in their current form would meet a “tipping point in terms of social acceptance” but that battery-electric powertrains would one day offer the necessary attributes to work in full-blooded Lamborghinis, winning over rev-happy existing owners. Lamborghini has already started work on an all-electric 2+2 due to go on sale in 2028 and the Urus will become fully electric for its second generation. For the new car, Winkelmann knows his…

My Autocar podcast co-host Steve Cropley said the other week that he sees little delineation between those of us who like cars and those of us who like motorbikes. As usual, I agree with him, but last week I was in the company of some ‘proper’ bike journalists – who tend to be a hardier group than car hacks, given their daily exposure to temperatures and perils – so thought I would ask some of them. It seems that they also perceive the joys and threats of our hobbies broadly similarly to us. We love the journey, the interaction with great engineering and the handling and performance, while the same kinds of people want rid of us and can’t be bothered to fix potholes. One rider opined that the bike…

0n an improvised test route through the Cotswolds, time and again up crops the sort of corner that illustrates how surprisingly evolved Aston Martin’s new DBS 770 Ultimate is from the regular DBS. Said corner lurks on snaking, quick, fairly narrow B-roads and is taken in second or third gear. It’s smooth on the inside but corrugated on the hedge-lined outside – especially on the exit, where you also find dust, mud or, just for fun, standing water. We have all taken this corner a million times, and it’s one the regular DBS would get through without much difficulty but also, it must be said, without much panache. On the way in, you would lack the confidence needed to fully run the car’s endless nose up against the edge of…

Maserati’s answer to the Porsche Macan has arrived in the UK. We’re testing the Modena, which at £67,810 and 325bhp is the centre point of a three-strong Grecale range that begins with the GT (296bhp, £61,570) and ends with the Trofeo (525bhp, £99,700). Like the GT, it has a 2.0-litre fourcylinder turbo petrol engine driving both axles through an eight-speed automatic gearbox, but as well as the extra poke, there’s a mechanical limited-slip differential. Air springs are optional and fitted to our car. The Grecale sits on Alfa Romeo’s Giorgio platform, as do the Alfas Stelvio and Giulia, but with an extra 83mm of wheelbase over the Stelvio. Given how good that SUV and that saloon are to drive, particularly in their fast forms, this was a strong basis for…

Stationary traffic isn’t typically an environment to leave you gawping in wonder at your surroundings. But when that traffic is downtown Manhattan and you’re driving a Lucid Air, you only need to look up to do a bit of sightseeing, because the Air’s striking windscreen runs all the way back into the roof to give you a panoramic view of the city and the sky above from a unique perspective. The Air itself comes with a unique perspective of its own. Its maker Lucid is determined to do things differently as it creates truly premium if not luxurious electric cars way above Tesla in their positioning and with an eye as much on Bentley as Mercedes-Benz or Audi. The Air saloon is Lucid’s first model. We have experienced it briefly…

There are more than 1.2 million plug-in vehicles registered in the UK, according to a recent study. We’re all aware of the worries about charging them, but another aspect of the proliferation of EVs that’s rarely discussed is how the maintenance industry will evolve to cope. Even manufacturers’ official service departments have proven short of staff who are trained to work with high-voltage electric powertrains, and the huge network of independent garages is similarly struggling to find the training and staff to deal with the more difficult issues that can arise on an EV. A few years ago, this subject was being discussed by some people in an industrial unit near Wantage, Oxfordshire. Not just any people, though. Mission Motorsport was founded in 2012 by Major James Cameron and several…

Over the years, I’ve either bought Audis or BMWs, and I love both brands. However, having recently bought a BMW iX, I can only agree with all the superlatives heaped on it in Mark Tisshaw’s sign-off piece in the Our Cars section of 26 April. BMW has left clear blue water between itself and Audi in this sector. The iX feels like driving the future, being so quiet and unbelievably comfortable – just what I imagine driving a Rolls-Royce would be like. I also tried an Audi Q8 E-tron, and it was left hopelessly in the shade on all counts. Even the new facelift hasn’t addressed fully the main issue: the poor range versus the BMW. Personally I even like the look of the iX in the flesh, although I…

An owner’s view DAVID LENEY “I love my i8, especially its handling and refinement. I’ve owned it for five years and it’s never given me any major trouble. The electric range is realistically only 18 miles and visibility can be a problem. Servicing isn’t too expensive, but electrics seem to be a thing, with warning lights occasionally popping on and off. I thought about the Roadster but it cost more and you lose the rear seats, and my children used to love doing the school run in the car.” Buyer beware… ENGINE The engine is based on the 1.5-litre unit in the Mini Cooper. So it’s reliable and the six-speed automatic gearbox is robust. There have been issues with the fuel pressure sensor, which is prone to failure. One or…

The new 718 Spyder GT4 RS is a screaming, drop-top swansong for Porsche’s mid-engined sports car family ahead of its transition to a pure-EV drivetrain in 2025. The final iteration of the 718 – as we know it – is the most powerful derivative of the Boxster since production began in 1995. It takes 493bhp and 332lb ft from the same GT3-based atmo 4.0-litre flat six that powers its hard-top sibling, the five-star 718 Cayman GT4 RS. Redlining at an ear-splitting 9000rpm and sending its reserves through a “lightning-speed” seven-speed PDK gearbox, it propels the roadster from 0-62mph in just 3.4sec and on to 191mph. Porsche says the open roof “makes the highly evocative sound of the engine an even more compelling experience”, particularly given the fitment of a lightweight…

THE REVISED PEUGEOT 2008 will arrive later this year with subtle styling changes and a modified powertrain line-up that includes a significant upgrade to its electric variant. With UK order books set to open in the summer, the latest 2008 has a wider, more aggressive-looking front end that features the new Peugeot badge. But the biggest changes come underneath, with the 2008 receiving a powertrain overhaul. The electric e-2008 model gains a new, more powerful electric motor and a larger, 54kWh battery – the same used in the revised Peugeot e-208. Power rises by 18% over the previous e-2008 to 153bhp. The range also increases significantly, from 214 miles to 252 miles, which puts the e-2008 in direct competition with the Kia Niro EV and the Hyundai Kona Electric. The…

LEVC, the Geely-owned firm behind London’s electric black cab, will launch a range of electric vans and MPVs as it drives forward with a major global expansion. A new platform, called SOA, will form the basis of a line-up of high-tech F-segment models, positioned above the likes of the Citroën ë-Spacetourer and Volkswagen Multivan. LEVC boasts of the SOA’s flexibility, saying it can accommodate vehicles sized between 4.86m and 5.95m long, with wheelbases spanning 3.0m to 3.8m. At the top end, that’s larger than a standard Mercedes-Benz Sprinter van. It provides sufficient space for four rows of seats, with the fourth row cleverly packaged to fold away into a compartment under the boot floor, keeping the load space flat. As with LEVC’s current TX black cab, accessibility is key, so…

THE VIEW THAT an EV is no better than a glorified milk float with all the technical appeal of a washing machine is being put in its place. As manufacturers begin to fine-tune EV motors and drivetrains to get improved range and performance, it becomes clear that the difference between electric and ICE may not be as great as many assume. Volkswagen has just announced its new drivetrain for the MEB vehicle architecture with a systematic series of design tweaks aimed at getting more for less. Or to put it another way, finding more torque, more efficiency and better range while fitting into the same space. Intended for the next generation of the ID family, the new, rear-wheel-drive APP550 drivetrain generates 281bhp and 406lb ft of torque at the final…

MONDAY I’m so impressed by the way the Ineos Grenadier seems to be clearing every obstacle, as it were, despite the many negative views by those who reckon they know how hard it is to build an allnew car range and establish it in the market. So far, it has survived the will-it-look-good-enough and the will-it-drive-okay phases and now seems to be pleasing early owners on many vital counts. One of my friends has just acquired one, and he’s so taken with the great bits (quality, controls, interior layout and surprising refinement), and the one foible (old-school steering) seems to be fading from the problem list as he gets used to it. We have no idea yet of production rates or profitability, but I think the time is fast approaching…

Electrification is upending many traditions in the car industry, as this updated Volvo C40 Recharge demonstrates. It represents what once might have been termed a mid-life facelift, yet the styling is entirely unchanged. Don’t be fooled, though: the face is one of the few things that Volvo hasn’t lifted. So comprehensive is the overhaul (or life-cycle update, as Volvo puts it) of the C40’s drivetrain that this Single version has had its motor switched from the front to the back axle, making it and the closely related XC40 Recharge the first rear-driven Volvos since the 940 saloon went out of production 25 years ago. It’s a reflection of the relentless progress of EV technology and the ever-increasing competition in the class. Based on a multi-powertrain architecture, the C40 and XC40…

How the hell do you deny something as exquisitely barbaric as Lamborghini’s V10? Unless you suffer from acute musical anhedonia, it’s not possible. The sound this naturally aspirated 5.2-litre motor makes is too rich, resonant, gut-wringing. After a while in its company and numerous forays to 8500rpm under your belt (sometimes you ambush the redline, flaring up to it; but sometimes you linger for the final stretch, revelling in the aural chaos), you start to wonder how many get-out-of-jail-free cards it has handed out over the years. Not every Huracán, or the Gallardo before it, has been a dynamic delight. In the old days, the cars were flat-footed, and even the current Huracán Evo AWD feels synthetic in direction changes. Yet each and every one of them has had that…

MODEL TESTED E-SKYACTIV D 3.3 RWD EXCLUSIVE-LINE • Price £43,010 • Power 197bhp • Torque 332Ib ft • 0-60mph 7.6sec • 30-70mph in fourth 7.4sec • Fuel economy 46.2mpg • CO2 emissions 129g/km • 70-0mph 47.5m They’re falling like flies now. Vauxhall Astra and Ford Focus diesel – dead. Every Renault diesel car – dead. Volvo XC40 diesel – dead. Even BMW has killed off much of its diesel range, including former mainstays like the 330d and 530d, citing falling demand. A bizarre time, then, to develop and launch a car built on an all-new platform designed for longitudinal inline four-and six-cylinder engines, including an equally brand-new 3.3-litre diesel unit. It seems that the Mazda CX-60 diesel comes about 20 years too late, but Mazda says it demonstrates a “commitment to…

“I loved finding a new way to drive and seeing controls and features that were totally unfamiliar” FIRST REPORT WHY WE’RE RUNNING IT What lessons can be learned from this most old-school of current offerings? “You’ve never driven off road?! Not even once?!” an incredulous Piers Ward exclaimed over the airwaves from his home in rural Lincolnshire. “No, because there are roads where I want to go,” came my cheeky reply from a Sussex suburb. Our associate editor was calling to deliver the news that my wee Yaris Cross was going to be swapped for a gigantic Land Cruiser – two Toyotas seemingly from different universes. Land Cruisers being as rare as Ward’s favoured flat caps around here and the possibility of meeting a mamba appealing to me about as…

DRIVEN Jeep Grand Cherokee We’re driving the latest version of Jeep’s flagship to see if it has the right hardware to return to its glory days FEATURE Made for Mumbai How do you engineer a car for the world’s toughest commute? Skoda shows us how INTERVIEW Koji Sato Toyota’s new boss talks to us about the future of the world’s biggest car maker EVERY WEEK ROAD TEST Ford F-150 Lightning We evaluate this vital electric version of the world’s best-selling ‘car’ USED GUIDE Jensen Interceptor How to buy one of the coolest British cars of the 1960s SUBSCRIBE autocar.co.uk/subscribe or see p20…

British Leyland: a source of jokes for Fawlty Towers, Private Eye and anyone searching for a symbol of Failing Britain in the 1970s. Yet BL was also, briefly, the second-biggest car company outside the US. But while chronic funding problems, disastrous industrial relations and dubious quality control undermined it, that didn’t stop some interesting machines emerging, several of them legends, before the BL name died in 1986. Austin 1300 GT 1969 ‘The One GT That Just Had To Be’: so read the adverts for the vinyl-roofed, fake-alloy-wheeled, twin-carburetted Austin 1300, which appeared seven years after the original and top-selling big Mini that was the Morris 1100. This was more than the lifespan of the average car today but still five years before the 1100/1300 went out of production, to be…

Alpine will begin its push into the mainstream market next year with an electric hot hatch based on the new Renault 5. Newly previewed as the A290 Beta concept, it promises to be a more usable accompaniment to the widely acclaimed A110 sports car without compromising the brand’s sporting character. Although the A290 Beta features an FIA-approved racing chassis and two motors mounted on the front axle, the production car will use the 5’s CMF-BEV platform. Renault has already touted the dynamic potential of the architecture, which mounts the battery pack in the floor of the car, lowering its centre of mass and thereby improving its handling. It also features multi-link independent suspension at the rear. Alpine has further fettled the platform to ensure that it is playful at low…

Chinese premium EV brand Nio has launched a third generation of its innovative Power Swap Stations, which can now replace the power pack in one of its models in under five minutes – and they are bound for the UK. The first examples of the reworked stations have gone live in China and the firm has begun producing them for the European market at a new production plant in Hungary. Nio now has more than 1300 Power Swap Stations in service in its home nation and has completed more than 20 million swaps. In Europe, Nio has launched in Norway, the Netherlands and Germany, and it has 13 stations live across those markets, with more than 12,000 swaps completed. The firm claims that more than 56% of ‘charging’ for Nio…

FORD BOSS JIM Farley has confirmed that the company will make a seven-seat electric SUV as it tries to differentiate itself in an EV market that is reaching “overcapacity”. Ford posted losses of $700 million (£558m) for its Model E electric division in the first quarter of this year amid slowing sales for its Mustang Mach-E. The company broke out EV profitability for the first in March last year as it restructures to better tackle the transition to electric. The losses are greater than the $400m (£318m) recorded for the same period last year. “We could see the overcapacity in the two-row electric utility segment years ago,” said Farley, referring to the five-seat electric SUV market, which is dominated by the Tesla Model Y. Ford predicts there will be 45…

Aroad safety organisation backed by the police has criticised current eye test requirements for drivers and called for mandatory eye testing once they turn 70 and every three years thereafter. Rob Heard, a former traffic police officer and founder of the Older Drivers Forum, a not-for-profit organisation run by Hampshire Constabulary Road Safety Team, says the current requirements for elderly drivers are inadequate. “We’re one of the worst countries in Europe,” he said. “There are only two times in a driver’s career when their eyesight must be tested: the driving test and when a police officer tells them to read a licence plate at 20 metres. Compared with other countries where regular eye assessments are mandatory, our rules are out of date.” Heard’s comments follow news that a senior coroner…

VOLVO WILL REVEAL a compact electric car, now confirmed to take the name EX30, on 7 June, with a focus on introducing the brand to “new groups of customers”, including younger people. This will be driven by a “reasonably low-cost” monthly subscription model to make it more affordable to Generation Z drivers. The new electric crossover will arrive in November as a rival to the Jeep Avenger and sit below the XC40 Recharge and C40 Recharge (driven, p26) in Volvo’s growing lineup, which is now headed by the EX90 electric SUV. The Swedish company said: “[The EX30 is] a car that will be crucial to our strategic ambitions in shaping the future of mobility and becoming a fully electric car maker by 2030.”…

A week earlier, he had been jousting in the cut and thrust of the British Touring Car Championship season opener. Now here he was back at Donington Park, turning back the clock to race a tin-top from a distant past – and looked absolutely in his element. At least this time there was no pressure. “There’s always pressure,” Colin Turkington gently countered, with that familiar easy smile. The fourtime BTCC champion is a class act and yet again showed why, in one of the standout performances at the annual Donington Historic Festival. Turkington was guesting in Mark Smith’s lovely E30-generation BMW M3, the 1980s three-box saloon that still defines the best of the lauded M division. This example was a Bigazzi car raced in the DTM in period by the…

From a cursory glance of the spec sheet, like Volvo’s C40 Recharge opposite you might think at first that the XC40 Recharge Twin is unchanged, retaining as it does an electric motor on each axle and an eye-popping combined output of 402bhp. Yet how the two new motors are used substantially alters how the powertrain works, with the goal of boosting efficiency and, as a consequence, range. Before, Volvo’s Twin powertrain had an identical 201bhp permanent magnet motor on each axle, both being constantly in use when power was sent to them. Now it features a larger, 254bhp permanent magnet motor on the rear axle and a smaller, 148bhp asynchronous motor on the front axle, with the latter working only when needed. This means the car (that being the XC40…

The Mini Electric hatch is many things, but a long-distance cruiser isn’t one of them, with its range being just 144 miles. And yet by building an Electric Convertible with the same 28.9kWh battery, this time yielding 124 miles, the British brand has pulled off the seemingly impossible and made the hatch look like an endurance beast. I’m being flippant, of course, but it does illustrate the compromise that is a fundamental aspect of this rare-breed EV. Rare because there aren’t any rivals (even the Abarth 500e Cabrio is a landaulet, not an actual drop-top) and only 999 will be made, 150 of them for the UK. At £52,500, even that feels like an optimistic target. A BMW i4 electric saloon could be yours for less, or indeed a 2.0-litre…

Dear all, Stepping out onto a street in China is always an assault on the senses: an ever-shifting cornucopia of unfamiliar sights, sounds and smells. Even in a city as relatively international as Shanghai, a 10-minute walk invariably leaves you feeling exhilarated, unclean and slightly unsettled. So after a three-year break from visiting – a period in which China largely isolated itself from the wider world through its ‘zero Covid’ policy – you might expect our first experience of a Shanghai street to be particularly intense. And yet, on arrival in the city for this year’s Shanghai motor show, the first thing you notice is how surprisingly quiet it is. Granted, China is still loud: the country retains an ability to develop machines that produce annoying bongs, beeps and jingles that…

Fobbed off Back in March, my car conked out on Finchley Road into London at the start of rush hour. An obscure message about holding the key fob against some undefined area briefly appeared and then was repeated a minute later, just before the car stopped and its electrics all ceased to work, thus turning off the engine and shutting down most systems. In the five hours I was stuck, unable even to get the car into neutral, I successfully brought the main road into London to a standstill, causing a jam from Finchley Road Tube to Brent Cross. What caused the breakdown? Simple: the fob’s battery ran out. Now, even my shaver has a display of remaining power, so why can’t a car’s fob? There could at least be…

The BMW i8 arrived like a bolt from the blue in 2014 and left us, open-mouthed and still reeling from the shock, in 2021, unable to work out if this butterfly-doored, low-slung and extravagantly constructed plug-in hybrid sports car was the Great Leap Forward or a slightly underwhelming 911 rival, with its six-figure price tag and the engine from a Mini Cooper. Where it unquestionably succeeded, though, is with its Blade Runner-aping design. The i8 remained recognisably a BMW, but it didn’t look a lot like any other cooking BMW. It looked (and still looks) terrific, and time and depreciation being what they are, you can now put one on your driveway for not much more than £30,000 – and you’re very unlikely to see its price go lower. So…

Bugatti “appeals warmly to the sportsman” “THE MOTORING WORLD owes a great deal to [Ettore] Bugatti, not only because he was one of the first men to make the small sports car a serious rival in competitions but also because he appears to be constitutionally endowed with originality and unable exactly to follow any other designer’s lead.” Emerging successfully from the ruins of war with a new version of his seminal Type 13, Bugatti designed the Type 29 to 1922’s new grand prix rules, and for it his first eight-cylinder engine and innovations like front brakes and shock-absorbing seats. It having performed well on track, he did a road version, the Type 30 – which prompted our plaudits in 1925. “Acceleration, if the [four] gears are used intelligently, is really…