Innholdsfortegnelse for 13/07/2016 i Autocar

SINCE JLR LAUNCHED its Special Vehicle Operations division two years ago, confusion has reigned about the meaning of the ‘SV’ initials surrounding its activities. This week boss John Edwards explained the naming convention. SVO is the name of the operation that covers four main activities: the launch of ‘halo’ models such as the Range Rover Sport SVR, the personalisation of cars to customers’ requirements, the JLR Classic business (including offering ‘reborn’ cars like the Lightweight E-Type) and the manufacture and sale of branded goods. SVA has become SVAutobiography and is the tag given to luxurious versions of existing models. SVR is the tag carried by extra-performance models such as the Jaguar F-Type SVR, while SVX will be applied to a planned range of all-terrain vehicles. “We have none [SVXs] at…

AN OPEN-TOP VERSION of the LaFerrari hypercar is set to make its public debut at the Paris motor show in October, ahead of customer deliveries next year. Design changes for the convertible variant include a pair of rear buttresses and a roll-over hoop. Expected to be called LaFerrari Aperta, the model has a removable carbonfibre hard-top or a soft-top — partly to avoid the extra weight of a full convertible roof and partly due to the tight packaging of the mid-mounted V12 and hybrid system. This differs from the 488 Spider and California T, which have folding hard-tops. LaFerrari’s carbonfibre chassis has received extensive modifications to maintain torsional strength and the car’s aerodynamics have been tweaked to ensure its drag coefficient is the same as that of the coupé. The…

RENOWNED ITALIAN race car chassis manufacturer Dallara, which works in top-flight motorsport including Formula 1 and IndyCar, is preparing its own road car, due before the end of this year. The new model is set to be a back-to-basics rival to cars such as the Alfa Romeo 4C and KTM X-Bow — both of which Dallara helped to develop. Company founder Giampaola Dallara said: “It will not be a normal car; it will be a car without a door.” Dallara also said there were “a lot of lessons from KTM and a lot of lessons from our old racing activity”. With a maximum annual production run of 120 units, the new car is set to use a 2.3-litre four-cylinder engine, capable of developing up to 400bhp, and a manual transmission,…

Let’s assume you take it as read that this is still the best sports car in the world. The best subsupercar sports car, at least. You’ll know the 718 Cayman is the best sports car in the world because you remember the 718 Boxster reviews from a few months ago. Bad 718 Boxster points: the new engine has two cylinders fewer and one turbocharger more than it used to, so it now sounds like a Subaru. Good points: everything else. The Cayman has been through the same mill as its sister model, only it has emerged, for the first time, the cheaper of the two. Which makes a lot of sense, given that it doesn’t have the cost and complexity of a folding roof. Generally, though, changes to the Boxster…

I did many foolish and regrettable things in the previous-generation Mercedes-Benz C63 AMG. I remember many of them distinctly. The flicked thumbs-up of a crazy-brave biker as he went prostrate on the fuel tank on a barren stretch of south coast bypass. The bemused, thumbs-down look of a bus driver when I briefly went all ham-fisted at a roundabout and finished up staring at the kerb in a vanishing pall of shame-smoke. It was that kind of car: 6.2 litres of hooliganism, wrapped in a chartered accountant’s notion of sporty dress. Mostly, though, I remember ferrying an old mate repeatedly up a tiny, one-way section of our home town’s high street where the artery becomes so clogged by shops and pubs that it resonates like a wooden tunnel with the…

MOTORSPORT WINNER Claire Williams Williams F1 Deputy team principal Only 8% of jobs in the Williams F1 team are held by women – but to Claire Williams, that figure is still something to be proud of. “Five years ago, it was 0%,” she says, “so we’re getting there.” The Williams team is trying to change that by going to schools to actively inspire girls and challenge their prejudices about F1 and engineering in general. “Not a lot of girls choose to take STEM [science, technology, engineering and mathematics] subjects, for whatever reason. It seems deeply entrenched in our gender psyche,” Williams says. MARKETING WINNER Lisa Brankin Ford of Britain Marketing director The variety of work in Brankin’s role should give any graduate reason to look at the automotive industry. One…

Melanie Falconer (Our Cars, 29 June) comments on repairs to her Mazda CX-3, saying: “Modern cars seem to be designed to allow parts to be replaced as speedily as possible.” This is not my impression. For example, I’ve had difficulty even replacing headlight bulbs on many cars. This used to be an easy job most could do themselves, but now many require some disassembly under the bonnet or wheel arch. I had a Chrysler that needed the inlet manifold removing to replace the spark plugs! I once witnessed a customer come into a garage with a new Volkswagen Beetle that needed a battery. They tested it, confirmed it needed replacing and found a replacement but weren’t unable to fit it because the wing had to be removed. I think maintenance…

Shortly before editorial assistant Doug Revolta borrowed the Discovery Sport for a holiday in Cornwall that included a visit to historic Pendennis Castle (above), the instrument display had begun to issue the occasional gentle warning that the diesel exhaust fluid (DEF) level was getting low. DEF, better known as AdBlue, is a mixture of urea and distilled water used in modern diesel-engined cars to help clean up exhaust emissions, and you can’t afford to ignore the increasingly strident warnings for too long or the car will refuse to start. I knew a top-up was looming but forgot to mention it to Doug before he set off for Cornwall, so it was hardly a surprise when he sent me a worried-sounding text asking what he should do about the car’s renewed…

Mileage 9486 The past few weeks have included numerous journeys to various locations across the south of England, punctuated by a spot of bay parking. Being forced to park at various busy train stations north and south of London and within tight multi-storeys at both Gatwick and Heathrow airports, you appreciate the relatively petite size of the Vitara. At 4.1 metres long and 1.7m wide, it certainly has the edge on its closest rivals. Even though the Ford Ecosport is slightly shorter, both it and the Vauxhall Mokka are almost 300mm wider. This lack of girth is a real benefit, because the Vitara will happily negotiate tight corners in car parks and fit into bays with space to spare. As a result, occupants can get in and out without worring…

READER’S CAR: PORSCHE CAYMAN S Malcolm Wilson enjoyed three years with a Mercedes-Benz E 320 CDI, but he felt the need for something with more driver appeal for its replacement. “I test drove a Porsche Cayman S and bought it in July 2015 at a net £24,000, including trading in my old E-Class. It is a launch edition of the gen-2 model, specced by the factory. It is a PDK with Sports Chrono Plus and has many toys. So far, the Cayman has been on driving holidays around the Black Mountains and Brecon Beacons.” SEND YOUR BANGERNOMICS TALES TO JAMES Twitter: @Bangernomics Email : james@bangernomics.com WHAT CAUGHT MY EYE THIS WEEK: MOT HISTORY CHECK A free app that you can check find the on MOT the iTunes test history…

Track cars 1 Elemental RP1 From £75,000 A tweaked Ford Ecoboost engine makes it fast, but it’s the beautiful handling that leaves a lasting impression. 2 BAC Mono From £79,000 A sublime attempt to recreate the single-seater driving experience for the road. Utterly incomparable. 3 Radical RXC500 From £143,000 Radical’s revision of its road car delivers the power previously missing. A Nürburgring record holder in waiting. 4 KTM X-Bow From £143,000 Austrian motorcycle maker’s take on a track day special. It’s hard not to fall for the wonderful driving manners. 5 Vuhl 05 From £60,000 Mexican track day car has a pragmatic and forgiving chassis. Turbo engine isn’t the most characterful.…

AS EVERYONE KNOWS, the Lotus Elise is one of those natural, right-first-time cars that, although 20 years old in its basics, still informs sports car design and manufacture around the world. Rival manufacturers continue to ape the Elise’s ultra-rigid, box-section ‘tub’ chassis, bonded and riveted from extruded aluminium components. And when they do, they call it modern and progressive, even though Lotus has been using the process for decades. Successive owners of Lotus Cars have always concluded that for success, the marque needs a simple sports car to sell in decent numbers (like it had during the good days of the original Elan) but it has had some significant struggles getting there. At the beginning of the 1980s, when Toyota owned the company, it worked on a compact coupé based…

ALPINE IS STRONGLY tipped to launch an SUV as its second model, with a rival to the Jaguar F-Pace and Porsche Macan thought to be most likely. Alpine boss Michael van der Sande described it as “inevitable” that Alpine would launch models beyond its core sports car range. “To build a brand, you need a product line-up that maintains demand,” he said. “Alpine was always about launching a brand, not just a sports car.” As well as admitting that he had “six or seven” different proposals for new models to mull over, van der Sande added: “The sports car is our core, and when that is established it opens up possibilities to do anything. The only prerequisite is that any car we launch will always have the target of being…

THE MAZDA MX-5 should continue to get even lighter in future generations, with downsized three-cylinder engines likely to power them. The current, fourth-generation MX-5 was smaller and lighter than the car it replaced. While MX-5 programme manager Nobuhiro Yamamoto has said the MX-5 is unlikely to get smaller in the future (a fifth-gen car won’t arrive before 2021), it should get lighter due to the increased affordability of lightweight materials such as carbonfibre. “The size is right,” said Yamamoto. “But in the future lightweight materials will be very important and will be used in this car. Now carbonfibre is very expensive, but we have in development affordable carbonfibre, so the MX-5 will be lighter in the future.” On the subject of downsized engines, Yamamoto said as the car got lighter,…

Stefano Domenicali joined Lamborghini as chief executive officer in February, in the midst of the company’s most successful six months to date. The Sant’Agata sports car company sold a record 2013 Huracáns and Aventadors in the first six months of this year, and in June set a new monthly standard of 416 cars sold. Now four months into his new job, Domenicali sat down to discuss his vision for the company with Autocar. How is your new job progressing? “I’m very excited about this challenge because Lamborghini is in transition. We are consolidating the brand and stabilising our sales volumes for the Aventador and Huracán. Then, of course, we are preparing for the Urus SUV, which will be a game changer for us. It is a new market with new…

AS WELL AS looking at ways to combat hacking, the WMG simulator tests how car and driver react to both regular and unexpected events. “We can put pedestrians, dogs and cyclists into the simulation and then make them behave in different ways and study responses,” says principal engineer Gunwant Dhadyalla. Today, I’m the guinea pig. I’m driving around a virtual Coventry in a trundling queue of traffic and trying to stick to the speed limit. It’s fair to say the simulator lacks the adrenalin spike that I’d expect from a top-flight video game. The graphics lack the slickness of a Gran Turismo or Forza franchise, but they are spread across a 360deg screen that surrounds the Range Rover Evoque I’m nominally piloting through this rendered environment. I’m feeling motion sick…

The Kodiaq breaks new ground for Skoda: a seven-seat SUV. Skoda has never had one before, so this, the production version of the Vision S concept unveiled at this year’s Geneva motor show, will be its first. The final design won’t be unveiled until the end of August, but we’ve driven some prototypes and beneath their camouflage lies a car with the same proportions, prominent front grille and distinctive, high-set front foglights as the Vision S. Skoda will offer a plug-in hybrid powertrain similar to that of the Vision S concept, although it won’t be available until 2019. Instead, buyers will initially be able to choose from petrol and diesel engines taken from the Superb. Both front and four-wheel-drive variants will be offered. The cars we drove were all fitted…

‘Our big problem is that we are sold out until 2021. It has to remain extremely limited’ Somewhere in Britain, there’s a very happy and very proud car nut. This person, who wishes to remain anonymous, is the owner of the Ferrari 458 MM Speciale, a model built to his or her own vision by Maranello’s One-Off programme. Based around the 458 Speciale’s underpinnings, this one-of-a-kind car, recently seen at the Goodwood Festival of Speed, has gone down a storm since it was first unveiled. Even Maranello is impressed with its own handiwork. “We think this is one of the best one-offs so far,” says Enrico Galliera, Ferrari’s commercial director. “The client came with a clear idea of what they wanted. That was one of the keys to the success…

Mileage 7158 I find there’s no better way of testing a car’s practical capabilities than chucking a double bass in the back and driving in to central London. Moonlighting as a musician, I was presented with such an opportunity, along with the keys to our Tivoli. The car’s custodian, Jimi Beckwith, has already praised the boot capacity but hasn’t tested the full seats-down load bay yet. Enter the awkwardly shaped, 1.2-metre-long block of wood. The rear seats are felled with a simple tug of a lever by the headrests, leaving a relatively flat bay that accommodated the instrument with no trouble at all. There’s not a big drop from the lip to the boot floor, either, so loading and unloading was easy. The double bass neck poked through between the…

1 Nissan Pathfinder (2005-2014) A somewhat schizophrenic vehicle, the Pathfinder is part SUV, part workhorse. This mammoth car can seat seven, and when you fold the seats down, it can store more than 2000 litres in its rear. Additionally, it can forge a route over tough terrain, but the trade-off for the rugged ability is fewer creature comforts than some rivals possess. The interior is uninspiring to look at, although it has been built to stand the test of time. Prices for this burly Japanese 4x4 start at £3695. Things to look out for on any used Pathfinder include rusting around the windows and locking mechanisms and the fracturing of the automatic gearbox heat exchanger. 2 Mercedes-Benz R-Class (2006-2013) This is a Marmite car in terms of looks and something…

Family hatchbacks 1 Volkswagen Golf From £17,600 Expensive it may be, but there’s enough class here to make the price look reassuringly precise. A cut above. 2 Ford Focus From £14,000 Has a blend of ride and handling that rivals can’t match. One of the UK’s most popular cars for all the right reasons. 3 Seat Leon From £16,200 As always, a Golf in cheaper Spanish drag. Margins are cleverly engineered to show, but this is the best Leon yet. 4 Mazda 3 From £17,000 As ever, it seems, the Mazda aces driveability and efficiency but fails to totally convince in an all-star class. 5 Peugeot 308 From £15,000 Classy all-round appeal of the latest 308 is all new. A bit tight on space but a serious contender nonetheless.…

MPVs 1 Volkswagen Sharan From £25,500 Full-sized seven-seater offers outstanding versatility and space with tidy handling and VW-brand desirability. 2 BMW 2 Series Grand Tourer From £24,200 Brings a proper premium brand badge to the MPV table but appeals for more reasons than that. 3 Ford S-Max From £23,300 Better looking and better to drive than most, but not quite the class leader its predecessor was. Cabin a bit plain. 4 Volkswagen Touran From £22,200 The medium-sized people-carrier done conservatively. Refined and wieldy, with excellent infotainment options. 5 Seat Alhambra From £24,900 A cheaper, plainer and less desirable sister for the Sharan. Spacious, versatile and decent to drive…

A target weight of 900kg is believed to have been set Anew Lotus Elise will go on sale in 2020, Lotus boss Jean-Marc Gales has indicated. Work on the redesigned two-seat roadster is believed to have already begun, coinciding with news that Lotus is on course to make a profit for the first time in 20 years in 2017. Although Gales said only that the car will be “ready in 2020”, he also gave clues as to the design philosophy and engineering make-up of the car. Chief among these is that the car will stay true to its lightweight roots, using the same extruded aluminium chassis technology pioneered on the original Elise S1, which went on sale in 1996, and which underpins all of Lotus’s cars today. Autocar understands the…

Early sales interest in the new Alpine sports car has given company bosses the confidence to investigate creating a family of spin-off editions, including higher-performance and convertible versions of the car. In the build-up to the launch of the sports car, which will be revealed this winter ahead of sales beginning early next year, Alpine has revealed two concepts: the rally-inspired Alpine Celebration and the more production-orientated Alpine Vision. The latter, which is said to be 80% representative of a production model, highlights Alpine’s plans to create a point of difference from rivals such as Porsche and Lotus by focusing on compact dimensions and agility over outright power without sacrificing interior comfort. “If you look back through our history, the place we can be most legitimate is by building rear-drive,…

Jaguar Land Rover’s Special Vehicle Operations (SVO) division is on course to launch one new product every year between now and the end of the decade, according to managing director John Edwards. Edwards said SVO wants to boost its annual production volume by between 40 and 50% from the current annual total of 3500 units. The division already has three models in production — the Range Rover Sport SVR, Range Rover SVAutobiography and Jaguar F-Type SVR — and is planning a fourth, which is due before the end of the year and understood to be a Land Rover model. It also builds a range of specialist armoured vehicles. Last week SVO opened a £20 million, 20,000-square-metre technical centre and vehicle-building facility near Coventry. It also announced its intention to add…

Maserati may consider producing another low-volume model, according to boss Harald Wester. Speaking to Autocar, Wester confirmed that the company “could do a limited edition, but not yet”. Maserati’s most recent limited edition was the 2004 MC12, a rebodied version of the Ferrari Enzo that sold out despite being priced far higher than the firm’s regular models. It was also developed as a racing car. Maserati’s Modena plant currently makes the carbonfibre-bodied 4C for Alfa Romeo. Prior to that, it built the limited-edition Alfa 8C Competizione, which was heavily reliant on Maserati hardware. Wester pointed out that Maserati has only 1100 staff, making it agile and flexible enough to take on such a project. Following the Levante’s introduction, Maserati has minor updates for the Ghibli and Quattroporte planned for later…

THE UK’S NEW car market has recorded its strongest ever half-year performance, growing by 3.2% compared with the same period last year. There have been 1,420,636 registrations so far in 2016, although demand in June eased by 0.8%, according to the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT). It says the fall is a sign of the market stabilising after last year’s record sales. The Ford Fiesta remains the UK’s best-selling new car, with 68,833 sales. The Vauxhall Corsa and Ford Focus complete the top three, selling 42,356 and 38,715 units respectively. Alternatively fuelled vehicles now account for 3.2% of the entire new car market, recording a 21.3% sales increase compared with the first six months of last year, while diesel and petrol sales grew by 2.3% and 3% respectively.…

Scientists at the University of Warwick are set to spearhead research into combating car hacking thanks to a new, £2.1 million driving simulator specifically designed to test connected and autonomous vehicles. The simulator, which uses a Faraday cage to prevent external wireless signals from entering, can be used to find — and try to exploit — security weaknesses in a safe way. “We’re going to do research that is ‘attacker in the loop’,” said Professor Carsten Maple, director for cyber security research at the university’s Warwick Manufacturing Group (WMG). “We’ll set up as real-world an environment as we can with signals that will purport to be infrastructure, and then see what happens when a car tries to connect to them. We can set up a software-defined radio system very easily…

They said we could make our way to a quiet little test track and drive the concept as fast as we liked The RS16’s rear is mobile under braking and on turn-in in that delightful Renault Sport way Remember it’s a concept car, built to celebrate Renault Sport’s 40th anniversary, and that Renault Sport management are as yet unsure whether they’re going to build a limited production run. Of course, they’re still mulling it over – thinking money, while taking good care of the concept car. Just a concept. That’s why this RS16, a bit more than a Renault Clio RS with a Mégane RS 275 engine, has had all the important engineering work done, so it could make its debut not on a motor show stand but…

The Hyundai Ioniq is something of a trailblazer: it’s the first car to be offered in three electrified states. There’s an all-electric model capable of 174 miles on a charge, a petrol-electric parallel hybrid that we’re driving here and a plug-in hybrid that’s due next year. It’s all part of Hyundai’s intention to have as many as 28 ‘eco-friendly’ models on sale by 2020 – and this hybrid certainly fits that bill. It features a modified 104bhp version of Hyundai’s 1.6-litre Kappa petrol engine, which, thanks in part to its Atkinson cycle, now has 40% thermal efficiency. That’s around 15% better than the traditional Otto cycle. Stored beneath the rear seats is a 1.56kWh battery, which feeds an electric motor that takes maximum combined power to 139bhp and torque to…

Autocar has launched the Great British Women in the Car Industry initiative to inspire more women to consider a career in the industry we love. The current imbalance between the numbers of men and women in the industry is dramatic. It is our hope that by shining a spotlight on those who have reached the top, more women will consider the rewarding, exciting careers that are open to them. On the following pages you’ll read about the woman who, our judges believe, holds the most inspirational position in the car industry and every finalist in the 10 categories we’ve chosen to highlight. You can read more about all of the Top 100 Great British Women at autocar.co.uk/greatbritishwomen. ‘ Our job was to decide what a Citroën really was. I was…

FIESTA ST200 IS TOO PLAIN I love all fast Fords. When I heard that Ford was making a 40th anniversary run-out special of the Fiesta ST, I thought it might be a junior RS type of car. I’m glad the engine has more power and they’ve adjusted the suspension and other bits to cope. But what puzzles and disappoints me is that the body and wheels are exactly the same as a normal ST’s, just with new colours. It would have been nice to give it a slightly more purposeful bodykit and even different wheels to mark it out as a run-out special of the Fiesta. As it is at the moment, I just don’t think it looks special enough. Richard Webb-Hale Cheltenham, Gloucestershire REPEAT RETREAT So highway authorities are…

As it always does on special occasions, the Bentley seemed perfect for this year’s Goodwood Festival of Speed — except for one thing. It was bucketing down, and those already at the event kept sending us back lurid tales of floods and mud, wall to wall. Call me old-fashioned, but the notion of tackling such conditions in your low-slung, £80,000 high-performance GT doesn’t sit very well. We veterans of the British summer have learned to fear one thing above all: being parked in wet fields we’ll probably have extreme trouble leaving at the end of the day. But one important detail made the Bentley’s case different: it has four-wheel drive. I arrived at gate-opening time to find our appointed entrance, Gate 4, firmly shut. There was a detour sign to…

I was rather taken with a 2009 Avensis Tourer 1.8 T2. It’s the later shape, too Has anyone got SUV fatigue yet? I am pretty sure it will be regarded as a diagnosable medical condition very soon. The thing is that most new cars hitting showrooms seem to be configured that way, because that’s what buyers want. Except that if you’re after a family-friendly hack to get you through the ‘difficult children and their stuff’ years, you need an estate. Yes, being fashionable is for fools — fools with too much money in their pockets when they could simply go for value instead. Value brings choice, and choice is a good thing. A Ford Mondeo estate is a very good thing and absolutely ginormous. I think £6000 is not an…

       Autocar’s star ratings explained Inherently dangerous/unsafe. Tragically, irredeemably flawed. Appalling. Massively significant failings. Very poor. Fails to meet any accepted class boundaries. Poor. Within acceptable class boundaries in a few areas. Still not recommendable. Off the pace. Below average in nearly all areas. Acceptable. About average in key areas, but disappoints. Competent. Above average in some areas, average in others. Outstanding in none. Good. Competitive in key areas. Very good. Very competitive in key areas, competitive in secondary respects. Excellent. Near class leading in key areas, and in some ways outstanding. Brilliant, unsurpassed. All but flawless. Any car that has had a full Autocar road test is highlighted in yellow.…