Innholdsfortegnelse for February 14, 2024 i Autocar

TOUCHSCREENS ARE ONE of the most controversial subjects in the car world, but manufacturers are still planning bigger and flashier versions of them, especially for higher-end models. An example being touted by Continental, developed in conjunction with Swarovski Mobility (yes, as in the jewellery shop), is the Crystal Center Display, which will give “unprecedented levels of brightness”, thanks to micro-LED (light-emitting diode) tech. It’s just a concept today, but it gives an idea of just how far display technology can be pushed in the future. The crystal surface itself is three-dimensional, with facets created using special grinding techniques similar to those used to cut glass. The high-tech part is the use of micro-LEDs to generate an image that appears to be floating inside the crystal, so it’s possible to see…

How many ‘clever’ interior features can you fit into one compact crossover? As of this week, courtesy of your regular Czech purveyor of such things and its revised Kamiq, there’s one more. The little cubby between the rear footwells with an elasticated strap, the phone-sized pockets high on the front seatbacks, the various cargo nets and hooks, the 12V socket in the boot, the parking ticket holder, the ice scraper in the filler flap, and the umbrella in the driver’s door are joined by a wireless charger with a difference: it’s air-conditioned, so that your phone doesn’t get cooked. And yes, it still blows cool if you ask for the cabin to be warmed. It seems like such an obvious thing to do, so of course Skoda has done it…

Now in its twilight years and looking like a tribute to a time when Jaguar still harboured dreams of a starkly different kind to those it has now, the XE has received one last model-year update. It’s not a big one: a new set of wheels, a few interior detail tweaks and some further simplification and value-adding equipment additions. But, thanks to many years of cost amortisation, they bring entry-level versions of the XE roughly to price parity with mid-range VW Golfs. A top-of-the-line XE like our test car is the price of an Audi S3 Saloon. Still pretty compelling, then. There are only five XE variants left now: three rear-driven, mildhybrid, four-pot D200 diesels; one rear-driven, four-pot petrol P250; and one four-pot petrol P300. The P300 is alone in…

In 1964, the all-new Rover 2000 became the very first European Car of the Year. Its award was based on criteria still employed by the jury of acclaimed motoring journalists from across the UK and mainland Europe that judges today’s contest. Uniquely, each past victor has been chosen irrespective of its class or category: it has simply been the most complete all-round car. So, marking 60 years of the contest, we’ve brought together 15 of the best COTY winners from across the decades to decide which is the greatest of them all. And, just to keep us honest, points will be awarded by three former COTY judges. Notebooks at the ready, team… THE JUDGES MATT PRIOR Autocar’s editorat-large, Prior was a graduate automotive engineer who turned motoring scribbler in 1997.…

MODEL TESTED LONG RANGE • Price £49,900 • Power 491bhp (est) • Torque 364lb ft (est) • 0-60mph 4.4sec • 30-70mph 3.4sec • Economy 3.7mpkWh • Max DC charging 219kW • 70-0mph 46.2m Say what you like about Elon Musk and his wireless brain chips, but when future historians chart the development of personal transport, the Tesla Model 3 will rank alongside Ford’s Model T and the VW Beetle in its significance. Admittedly, when this entry-level Tesla arrived in 2017, electric cars already weren’t too unusual a sight, with BMW, Nissan and Tesla itself all having footholds in the market. However, seven years later, they are simply everywhere you look. Musk and Tesla can take credit for this not only directly – after all, so many of the EVs we…

“It really does feel very Mercedes” FIRST REPORT WHY WE’RE RUNNING IT To see if a bright future lies ahead for the Smart brand reinvented under Geely Here’s something I bet you never expected in Autocar: a magic trick. I’m going to say a word and then tell you what you saw in your mind’s eye. Ready? Smart. Now, if you say you didn’t see a quirky two-seater, I know you’re lying. The point I’m trying to make isn’t that I should have reinvented myself as The Wondrous Wilberforce but that the public perception of the Smart brand is set in stone. So when it unveiled the bulbous Concept #1 (pronounced ‘hashtag one’, regrettably) at the Munich motor show in 2021, it took us all a bit by surprise. Yes,…

MILEAGE 1383 WHY WE’RE RUNNING IT Is the intriguing use of a rotary engine a masterstroke or flawed genius? Discuss With the miles I cover as a photographer (I’ve done nearly 25,000 of them in the past six months), what I want a car to be above most other things is easy-going. After a day of shooting, I typically face a two-hour motorway slog back home, so I really value being able to kick back, relax and just waft. Thankfully, if there’s one thing the MX-30 range-extender is good at, it’s setting your mind at ease as you float along on cruise control. The ride at speed is soft, with an overall quality that’s just as good as, if not even better than, rivals such as the Lexus UX and…

Austria isn’t a country that many think of as an automotive powerhouse. Yet many well-known car names, from Aston Martin to Volkswagen, have turned to the Austrians for their expertise. Austria has also been home to many of its own car brands and even witnessed the birth of Porsche as a sports car maker. Here are our favourites from over the Alps. Porsche 356 1948 The town of Gmünd holds a special place in Porsche lore, as it’s where the very first cars to bear the name were built. Ferdinand Porsche had moved his operation there in 1943 to escape air raids on Stuttgart, setting up shop in a former sawmill. The very first Porsche was 356.001, a mid-engined roadster. It remained a one-off, as the second car was a…

“With output hiked to 656bhp and 590lb ft, the standard V8 car is as fast as the outgoing V12 Vantage” Aston Martin is going after the Porsche 911 Turbo S with a comprehensively overhauled version of the Vantage, which arrives as part of a wide-reaching revamp of the British firm’s sports car line-up. Touting substantially more power and higher performance than its predecessor, the new Vantage is described by Aston Martin as “the most driver-focused and fastest Vantage in the famous nameplate’s 74-year history”. Arriving first in fixed-head form with a drop-top Volante expected to follow, Aston’s revamped coupé has not been extensively restyled on the surface. However, it has been comprehensively re-engineered inside and underneath, in line with Aston’s strategy to bolster its sports cars’ dynamic and technological credentials.…

JLR CEO Adrian Mardell has called for an “urgent national conversation” about organised vehicle crime and is urging the government to invest further to crack down on gangs, even if that comes instead of tax cuts. Concerns about high theft rates of Range Rover cars have led to reports from owners of a sharp rise in insurance costs. Asked about the issue during a media call for JLR’s third-quarter financial results, Mardell launched a passionate defence of the safety of his firm’s cars, saying that suggestions of high theft rates of Range Rover and Land Rover Defender cars had been exaggerated, due to misreported data. Mardell acknowledged that organised vehicle crime is “a serious issue in this country” that is “landing heavily on all [manufacturers]”, including JLR. He added: “Our…

Bentley’s design director of the past five months, Robin Page, can be reasonably described as a Bentley ‘lifer’, even though he was busy designing Volvos for a decade immediately before he took up his current role. Page worked in Bentley’s Crewe HQ for 17 years of his early career, rising to become head of interior design between 2001 and 2013, the crucial years that produced the seminal Continental GT and launched Bentley into the modern era. Now Page returns at another vital moment, just as the company gears up to launch, in 2025, the first of five EV models that will make up its model range by 2030. To complicate matters, Bentley has recently had several design bosses arrive and depart in short order, so this is as much a…

koda wasn’t the first to put a larger hatchback body on an existing supermini platform to deliver an equally spacious yet better value family car. That’s the idea on which the modern Dacia brand was founded. But the Czechs have been at it since 2013, when they launched the Rapid Spaceback, replaced in 2019 by the Scala. And since the Octavia has become a much bigger and pricier prospect, there has been plenty of room for something slotting in between it and the Fabia to flourish. The Scala has now been given almost precisely the same mid-life facelift as the taller Kamiq, which means there are new headlights and exterior styling touches, new digital instruments, new interior trim materials, a few new bits of equipment and an updated midrange engine…

The DS 3 E-Tense seems like a forgotten child. It was updated at the end of 2022, gaining in range and power, but so many of its fellow Stellantis EVs have since been updated or introduced that 18 months feels like a long time. In terms of the wider competition, it feels even longer. For customers with £40,000 to spend on a high-rise compact EV with a bit of kerbside allure, there’s now the Volvo EX30 and the Smart #1 to look beyond before even considering this one. DS is addressing this situation in two ways: firstly and more importantly by putting anywhere between £2750 and £3250 into the personal finance deals available, effectively making the lower-rung Performance Line model into a sub-£35k proposition; and secondly by improving its interior…

When we first announced the Ford Focus as European Car of the Year in our 18 November 1998 issue, would we have predicted, 25 years on, that it would remain the contest’s most significant winner, in our judging panel’s opinion? Well, we must have had an inkling, because the test that Autocar conceived to welcome Ford’s new wunder-model into the market was as audacious as the Focus was groundbreaking. Then editor Patrick Fuller tasked the road test team, which I’d recently joined, to take one of the first Focus press cars and accrue as many miles as possible in a week. Perhaps as a joke, some bright spark suggested 100 laps of the M25 – or roughly 12,000 miles. But after the guffaws subsided, the idea somehow stuck, and thanks…

MILEAGE 11,058 WHY WE’RE RUNNING IT It took Nissan 11 years to give us a second EV. Was it worth the wait? In last week’s issue, you might have read a review of the latest Porsche Cayenne E-Hybrid Coupé. The real anoraks among you may remember that it was shown in picturesque Northumberland, with the sky’s palette doing a remarkable impression of a golden retriever. That test location was quite far away for this latte-sipping, mediabubble-in-habiting Londoner, so I decided that something powered by petrol would be preferable to my Ariya, as the drive is essentially all the way up the A1, and at motorway speeds the EV is still managing fewer than 150 miles per charge. We hadn’t written about the latest BMW X3 PHEV for the website, so…

BMW’s reborn Mini had small but perfectly formed shoes to fill when it was launched as a three-door hatchback in 2001. Expectations were high, but in Autocar’s view they were met by the ride, handling and build quality – if not the packaging (there’s precious little space for rear passengers and the boot is tiny) or the Tritec engine. Nevertheless, 23 years and two generations later, the R50/R53 Mini is becoming something of a classic, admired for the way it comes closest to evoking the spirit of BMC’s 1959 original, right down to its cyclops-eye speedo, wideapart tail-lights and roof gutter. Aside from the diesel version, all are powered by some form of that 1.6-litre four-cylinder engine. The most prized is the 215bhp John Cooper Works GP of 2006, for…

THERE ISN’T A country on Earth without a significant automotive population, despite the car being a recent invention. Today, there are 1.5 billion globally. A century ago, there were just 0.017 billion – almost 90% of them in the US. As such, the 1924 observations of Edward Reeve, having toured the world as a consultant after a distinguished engineering career at Wolseley, are truly fascinating. “In Syria [then French], Egypt and Palestine [British], the car is making great headway in replacing the multifarious transportation methods. In Jerusalem, although motoring is still in its infancy, many trade opportunities occur. “In Cairo, Africa’s largest city, with nearly one million people, there are many possibilities. The roads are first class and cars are plentiful.” Today, congested Cairo has a population of 22 million.…

Porsche has just revealed an extensively overhauled version of its Taycan EV but already thoughts are turning to what a successor could look like, with the brand committed to retaining the name well into the future. Speaking to Autocar at a prototype drive of the new car (p26), Taycan model line boss Kevin Giek revealed that Porsche is confident there will long be a position in the range for the Taycan, even once the similarly sized Panamera goes electric in the future. “We have a high interest to keep it as a long-lasting car line, like the 911 – like we do with all our car lines,” said Giek. “When we decide to have a new model line, we don’t think about only having it for three or four years.”…

PARIS IS CRACKING down on big cars by trebling the cost of parking for those over a certain weight. Petrol, diesel and hybrid cars weighing more than 1600kg and electric cars weighing more than 2000kg per hour to park in the city will be charged €18 (£15.40) centre and €12 (£10.30) to park elsewhere within the limits of the French capital. Although the move has widely been reported as an attack on SUVs, it also affects many popular saloons and estates. Plug-in hybrids are especially affected: the BMW 330e weighs 1740kg, the Citroën C5 X PHEV 1722kg and the Mercedes-Benz A250e hatch 1680kg. Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo hailed the vote as a “clear choice” by residents (to whom the surcharge won’t apply), despite recording only a 54.6% vote in favour…

JLR HAS FINALLY begun to resolve the parts backlog caused by delays at its new logistics ‘super centre’ – but it has cautioned that it will take time for dealers to be able to repair all of the cars affected. The problems arose when the company reconfigured its UK parts supply network from 18 warehouses to one giant hub run by Unipart Logistics in Leicestershire. In October last year, as many as 10,000 Jaguar and Land Rover cars were off the road awaiting parts due to delays at the facility; and in November, JLR CEO Adrian Mardell acknowledged that there was a backlog of around 5000 critical parts. Mardell revealed that this backlog had been reduced to fewer than 2000 parts by the end of January. However, he said: “Those…

Audi describes this latest S3 Sportback as “more than a mere product upgrade”, which has the distinct whiff of marketing hype – until you run through the list of the changes that the firm has wrought beneath the fetching camouflage wrap of our prototype test car. The formula for a great S3 – blending premium feel, strong performance and everyday usability – is well established, and when we road tested the initial version of this 8Y generation in 2020, we found an accomplished and engaging performer let down by its ride quality and interior feel. We suggested that the S3 felt like the “forgotten hot hatch” of the Volkswagen Group – but clearly Audi’s engineers haven’t forgotten it, judging by the tinkering they have done in the time since then.…

BMW has facelifted its X6 SUVcoupé. We tested the standard six-cylinder petrol model last week – now for the highperformance M Competition. More has changed than you may expect. Of course, the M gets the same general tweaks as the lesser X6s (slimmer headlights, different tail-lights and a redesigned cabin with fewer buttons and bigger screens), but it has also been treated to some significant mechanical upgrades. It still uses a twin-turbocharged 4.4-litre petrol V8, but it’s an entirely new generation of engine, allegedly. We’ve seen it before in different states of tune in the X7 and XM, and the headline change is that it’s now a 48V mild hybrid. The electric motor, which is integrated into the automatic gearbox, contributes up to 12bhp and helps with smoothly firing up…

Kevin Giek is a remarkably chipper chap, considering that he has one of the toughest jobs in the automotive industry. In his 23 years at Weissach, he has worked pretty much everywhere except the canteen, had a hand in the development of some of Porsche’s most influential cars and, most recently, headed a brutal development programme for the new Taycan in which millions of miles have been covered, in all corners of the world and in the most extreme conditions. This latest exploit could be the most important yet – and not just for him, as director of the Taycan model line, but also for his employer. Arriving four years after the launch of the original Taycan and mere weeks after the unveiling of its SUV sibling, the Macan EV,…

If you need convincing that minimising aerodynamic drag is vital in cars, all you need to know is that above about 40mph, a car’s aero load is the main retarding force for its engine to overcome, exceeding stuff like mechanical drag and rolling resistance. Since most cars can do much more than 40mph, another fact comes starkly into play: that aerodynamic drag rises as the square of speed. Double the speed and you need four times the power. Treble the speed and you need nine times the power. A car that needs 40bhp to do 40mph needs around 360bhp to do 120mph. No wonder creators of both road and race machinery spend big money to keep drag as low as they can. Yet even this is elementary stuff. A modern…

MILEAGE 3455 WHY WE’RE RUNNING IT To see if this new Avenger is finally the Jeep to crack Europe One key sign of a car’s toughness credentials is how prepared you are to fill it with rubbish. And in the Avenger’s time with us, both Richard Lane and I have taken it to our local household waste recycling centres (when did dumps get posh?). Richard noted that even the Renault Clio is bigger capacity-wise, yet once the rear seats are down, the Avenger still scores points for offering such a useful shape for chucking in big bags of tree cuttings. The rear seats fold down in a 60/40 split without leaving a lip and a large space emerges for floor-to-ceiling stuffing. I’ve found measurements in this instance are secondary to…

As both an enthusiastic cyclist and driver, I can’t help agreeing with Marek Lasek’s ‘phone moan’ (31 January). Aside from the questionable “lingering cognitive impairment” of using a phone, I can’t see how texting while stationary presents a greater risk than trying to use a car’s touchscreen to alter the heating or audio when you’re actually driving. While I won’t criticise “vigilante cyclists” recording such incidents, I would rather focus on my ride when I’m out. I try to take the view that there are good and bad in every bunch and we have to try to use the roads together – although I’m acutely aware that I’m going to come off worse in any incident. As a cyclist, I regularly encounter other riders showing little consideration either for themselves…