Innholdsfortegnelse for September 04, 2019 i Autocar

WHILE THE QUALITY of big-range electric cars to rival Tesla has caught up with and in some cases gone past the Silicon Valley disruptor, the original EV maker remains untouchable still in one area: the Tesla Supercharger network of high-speed roadside chargers. As our group test of Tesla rivals reveals (p66), the state of the public charging network on major trunk roads for non-Tesla owners remains embarrassingly behind the quality of the cars that can now use them. Tesla owners retain a greater variety of sites to choose from that are better maintained and quicker and easier to use. One of the biggest electric-car question marks remains just how they’re all going to be charged on long journeys, and from our test, a compelling case for the defence simply cannot…

NISSAN HAS ANNOUNCED a latest round of changes and upgrades to its GT-R model for 2020. Now starting from £83,995, the supercar’s 562bhp 3.8-litre V6 gets two new turbos to improve efficiency and low-rev response. A revised exhaust manifold makes access to servicing the turbos easier, while the gearbox has been revised for faster shifts. Further updates include tweaks to the electronic suspension system for a smoother ride, while the steering is claimed to be more linear. A new brake booster unit should mean less pedal input and enhanced response. New 20in alloy wheels, optional grey leather and titanium exhaust tips also feature, and the iconic Bayside Blue returns from the previous R34 model. Five trims are available, with a £99,995 Track Edition topping the standard range, and a £175,000…

UNDER THE SKIN JESSE CROSSE IT MAY NOT sound like it, but it’s probably one of the smartest innovations aimed at making cars more sustainable that has emerged in the past few years: 48V technology. It’s relatively cheap and fits into existing vehicle architectures but it’s only just coming of age. As well as providing a hybrid drive, it can handle loads of tasks that need doing around the car but previously used energy created by burning fuel. While 48 might look like a figure plucked out of the air after a brainstorming session in the bar, there are good reasons for it. The first is that it’s classified as low voltage and safe. Anything above 60V in a car is deemed a high-voltage system – and a high-voltage system…

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You’ll know by now what happens when a manufacturer tacks a suffix like ‘Sportback’ on to the tailgate of one of its SUVs. There’s a shift that occurs, one that moves the focus ever so slightly away from functionality (which is surely what an SUV is all about, even a compact one) and towards a more abstract concept: the aesthetic. So you get some sporty new design traits that are intended to make the car look even more athletic than it really is. Witness the Q3 Sportback, with its lower shoulder line and slightly swollen arches for a more muscular, assertive look. There’s also an octagonal grille so large that it’d probably work as a regulation UFC arena. And finally, there’s the trademark roofline that slopes away towards the top…

MODEL TESTED STANDARD RANGE PLUS Price £37,340 (including £3500 government grant) • Power 252bhp • Torque 277lb ft • 0-60mph 5.8sec • 30-70mph in fourth na • Fuel economy 3.13mpkWh • CO2 emissions 0g/km • 70-0mph 45.5m When Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning established Tesla Motors in 2003, with Elon Musk joining as chairman shortly after, the subject of this week’s road test was their ultimate goal. Namely, a low-cost, high-volume electric car with the kind of appeal that could wean us all off internal combustion for good. Perhaps it seemed like a distant vision at the time, but 15 years isn’t such a long time for such lofty ambitions to be realised, even in the automotive industry, and here we have the Tesla Model 3. Musk would go on to…

An email arrived: ‘Could you nip down to Dorset and check out some bloke who says he’s an old rock and roller who’s fitting an electric powertrain into an old car?’ Electric cars are here to stay and I’m happy to review them, but retrofitting classics with electric powertrains seems pointless. Yes, you could drive an electric E-Type in central London, but why would you want to drive in London anyway? But down in Poole, things are looking up. For starters, Phil Wainman really is rock and roll. He was a session drummer in the 1960s and then went on to write and produce for glam rock bands such as Sweet, Mud and the Bay City Rollers. “A DELORE AN COULD ONLY BE IMPROVED BY CHUCK ING OUT ITS OR…

David Keene set up the RDM Group with his brother, Graham, 26 years ago, and can still recall the shock of his parents when he announced, aged 29, that he was giving up a high-flying career as an electronics engineering manager at Rover to do so. Today, the thriving company – coincidentally based on the site of the Humber car factory – has expanded in a scarcely believable number of ways. The carbonfibre facility, for instance, ticks over off the back of a deal to manufacture replica American footballs to sit atop trophies exported to the US, but it also makes parts for the upcoming Aston Valkyrie. The trim department can upholster cars to order but also makes leather bonnet corner edges for Morgan. A wiring facility sends out 500,000…

TUESDAY, 8.43AM MILTON KEYNES COACHWAY Britain’s latest and most powerful electric car charging station, installed by Ionity in a corner of Milton Keynes’ park and ride bus station, consists of four charging bays. And right now, it just so happens that we’ve got four EVs with batteries to brim ahead of an Autocar group test with a twist. What luck. Pretty soon, the brand-new Mercedes-Benz EQC that I’ve brought along – the newest boy in the electric luxury car class – is joined by fairly recent arrival the Audi E-tron, electric SUV old boy the Tesla Model X and current class favourite the Jaguar I-Pace. With the hum of flowing current and cooling fans that duly ensues, it’s as if we’re in some giant, open-air computer server cupboard. Plugged in…

“The organisers give you a short driving course, but then you’re on your own” Over beers in an Auckland bar it must have sounded like a novel way to celebrate his big five-oh: take one motorised rickshaw and a couple of mates and drive 750 miles through the Himalayas. However, one night last June, at well over 16,000 feet and with temperatures below freezing, John Stokes had time to reflect on what was quickly morphing from a bit of a laugh to a quite literal mid-life crisis. “Things were looking bleak and we were worried we weren’t going to survive,” he says. “The higher we climbed, the slower the rickshaw went in the thinning air, until it was doing 10mph at most. “We’d totally miss-timed the day’s drive. We were…

FRANKFURT MOTOR SHOW SPECIAL New Land Rover Defender Every fact and figure on Land Rover’s reborn 4x4 icon, as it’s seen in the metal for the first time REVEALED Porsche Taycan Electric GT unveiled – and every other Frankfurt show star FEATURE Another hill to climb We follow VW’s record-breaking ID R up a Chinese mountain EVERY WEEK ROAD TEST Ford Focus ST Ford’s hottest hatchback faces its toughest test yet USED BUYING GUIDE Vauxhall Tigra How to extend summer with a £1500 drop-top LONG-TERM TEST Kia e-Niro What has life been like with a ground-breaking electric Kia? SUBSCRIBE autocar.co.uk/subscribe or see p22…

MILEAGE 3100 WHY WE’RE RUNNING IT To see if the poster child of reborn MG is as easy to live with as the established names in the class I’m feeling quite settled in our ‘new’ MG now and finding lots to like about what I guess many would consider represents being downgraded into a version with less performance and a manual gearbox. How little ‘many’ know. Giving up our old 1.0-litre turbocharged ZS has meant getting rid of its hyperactive automatic ’box, which I was glad to do. It also means getting used to a new normally aspirated 1.5-litre engine, though, one with noticeably less accessible torque than the old 1.0-litre turbo had, as well as a manual gearbox that isn’t the most inspiring to use and obliges you to…

Honda Civic 1.6 SE auto Good to hear from Nick Williams, who enjoys these pages and, in particular, the cheap and practical used cars we feature: “Sending you a couple of pics. One is of my wife’s 2004 Honda Civic 1.6 SE auto. We’ve had it since 2007. Every year, it sails through the MOT. “It has covered only 56,000 miles but is worth very little. Never lets us down, brilliantly reliable and 40mpg around town. Great torque-converter automatic gearbox and cheap to run, too. Civics of this vintage are brilliant.” Next time: Nick’s ride.…

Peugeot RCZ R Price £12,000 Looks, performance, technical interest and rarity: this most powerful version of the RCZ has at least four of the ingredients for future classic success. Will it ascend the same heights as the 205 GTi? It’s not as great as that car so probably not and prices still have a way to fall – £12k buys a 2014-reg with 65,000 miles and full Peugeot history – but maybe, just one day, a mint, low-mileage R may reward an investor’s faith. As this was written, there were only 288 on the road plus seven SORNed. Are those seven people thinking what we’re thinking?…

An expert’s view VINCENT HAYDON, VINCENT HAYDON CARS “As a former Lotus dealer I well remember the Elan. There was a huge push on the Esprit with sales incentives and all sorts, but any objection to the Elan being front-wheel drive was easily countered by giving a customer the keys to the demonstrator. They’d come back with a huge smile and we had another sale in the bag. It helped, too, that it had an Isuzu engine, because people knew it wouldn’t go wrong. Today, they’re a bargain. From £7500 to £10,000 will get you a tidy one with a solid history – and it must be solid because they do like their oil changes.” Buyer beware… ▪ ENGINE The Isuzu engine is bulletproof if regularly serviced. Evidence of fresh…

Nissan has revealed the second-generation Juke, claiming that the trendsetting compact crossover has “grown up”, with improved performance and practicality. The new model was unveiled at events in five European cities and is available to order now in the UK, priced from £17,395. The original Juke was launched in 2010 and Nissan has sold nearly one million examples since then, but having effectively founded the compact crossover class, it has come face to face with increased competition from a glut of new arrivals. Nissan sold 67,763 Jukes in Europe last year, compared with more than 100,000 a year between 2011 and 2013, according to figures compiled by Jato Analytics. By comparison, Renault sold 121,970 examples of the Captur in 2018. The Juke has received a thorough makeover for its second…

The Honda E will offer two power outputs, 134bhp and 152bhp, both of which produce 232lb ft of torque and deliver 0-62mph in around 8sec. The highly anticipated electric city car, first unveiled as the Urban EV concept two years ago, has finally been revealed in production form, along with more specification details, ahead of its debut at the Frankfurt motor show. There are only two visual changes between the prototype seen at the Geneva motor show in March and the final production car: the grille badge is not illuminated as this feature is illegal in Europe and the side skirt no longer says ‘Honda Design’. The Japanese car maker is heavily investing in electrified models, having been initially slow to adapt. The CR-V hybrid launched last year, but this…

Lamborghini has pulled the covers off the most powerful and fastest-accelerating car it’s ever produced – and it’s also the firm’s first hybrid. Making its public debut at the Frankfurt motor show, the limited-run Siån previews Lamborghini’s plans to take its brand of V12-powered flamboyance into the near future with models such as the next-generation Aventador. The Aventador SVJ’s naturally aspirated 6.5-litre 12-cylinder unit has been uprated from 759 to 774bhp with the addition of titanium intake valves, and is mated to a 48V electric motor producing 34bhp, for a combined total output of 808bhp. In what Lamborghini claims is a first for low-voltage hybrid powertrains, the electric motor is integrated into the gearbox and connected to the wheels for low-speed reversing and parking manoeuvres. The charismatic sound of the…

Mercedes-Benz’s AMG performance division has added to its ever-growing compact car line-up with the new GLB 35 4Matic. Revealed ahead of its impending Frankfurt motor show debut, the new SUV is the fourth model to receive the 35 treatment, after the A35 hatchback and saloon and CLA 35 coupé. It will go on sale in the UK in early 2020. Available in five and seven-seat guise, the GLB 35 is powered by the same 302bhp turbocharged 2.0-litre four-cylinder M270 engine as its stablemates, making 295lb ft between 3000rpm and 4000rpm. It is 80bhp more powerful than the non-AMG range-topper, the GLB 250. Mercedes-AMG quotes a 0-62mph time of 5.2sec and a governed 155mph top speed, alongside fuel economy of 37.7mpg and CO2 emissions of 171g/km. No kerb weight figure has…

Volkswagen will unveil a new brand identity alongside the pivotal ID 3 electric car at the Frankfurt motor show next week, as it attempts to draw a line under the fallout from the dieselgate scandal. The revelations in October 2015 about how the firm had cheated diesel emissions tests sparked a clear-out of its leadership group, and sparked a heavy investment in electric technology. The first result of that will be the ID 3, the first car based on the VW Group’s electric-only MEB platform. Termed ‘New Volkswagen’, the design revamp goes far beyond a new logo. Chief operating officer Ralf Brandstätter calls it a “pivotal moment”, as significant as a new-car launch. The roots of ‘New Volkswagen’ began following a board meeting after Herbert Diess took over the firm’s…

Former Jaguar design boss Ian Callum and his new Callum design group are planning to build a batch of comprehensively rethought and re-engineered Aston Martin Vanquish V12s as their new business’s first bespoke car project. Delivery of finished cars is due to start late this year and the full batch of 25 should be completed and delivered at the end of 2020. Each car is expected to cost around £400,000. The Astons will be returned to bare metal and rebuilt from scratch in Callum’s new Warwick-based workshops. They will incorporate dozens of subtle and not so subtle changes, some of which Ian Callum has wanted to make since his original Vanquish design hit production in 2001. “There are things on the car I’ve always wanted to fix,” he said. “Now…

You might be surprised to learn that Formula 1 racer Lance Stroll is mulling the purchase of a Vauxhall Astra. That’s a showroom stock Astra, not a BTCC racer, nor even a VXR. If he buys one, it will join the collection of cars he has raced in his career to date, which are housed in his Canada home country. Why the desire for an Astra? Because this is the car that race tutor Rob Wilson uses to tutor IndyCar, DTM, Nascar, World Rally Championship and World Endurance Championship drivers at the Bruntingthorpe airfield in Leicestershire. Stroll is one of many top flight drivers to have used Wilson’s services and considers the Vauxhall a part of his driving history. Wilson says he also likes “the Astra’s handling balance”. If Stroll…

What’s in a name? Rather a lot when it comes to the new F8 Tributo, which, Ferrari claims, is a tribute to its long tradition of mid-engined, V8-powered sports cars. Nice, but why now? Curiously, no Ferrari suits could say, yet there was a sense of awkwardness in the air when it was suggested that this car might also represent the last hurrah for the pure V8 before the onset of hybridisation. Even if it were the case, that’s likely a little way off yet so there’s plenty of time to enjoy what we’ve got while we still can. Which in the F8 is essentially a heavily facelifted version of the 488 GTB (it shares that car’s structure, roof and doors), featuring pretty much all-new aerodynamically enhanced bodywork, an increase…

In the beginning – which is to say in September last year – Delta Motorsport’s highly flexible new S2 autonomous and electric car chassis, one of the star exhibits of this year’s LCV Show, was only going to appear as a notional prototype, born in a computer and destined to stay there forever. Under the original plans, this all-aluminium, skateboard-style EV chassis design – which now sits proudly in three dimensions at the centre of a specially designed stand – wasn’t even due to show its screen-based face until this time next year. Then everything changed. In a remarkable last-minute turnaround, Delta’s two founders – engineering director Nick Carpenter and operations director Simon Dowson – decided their S2 project would be more timely and have a far bigger impact if…

Bristol-based Zero EV was set up in March last year by young engineers Chris Hazell and Alex Dawood and specialises in supplying EV powertrains, hardware and software to those carrying out conversions. “We started because we were asked to build three electric stunt cars for a hotel in Macau. No one else wanted the job so we took it on. We’ve also built the first electric car for the world drifting championships.” They’ll sell you a complete Tesla small drive unit kit for £7995. More importantly, they’ll provide helpful advice on how to incorporate it into a project.…

A STEP CLOSER TO ARIEL’S SUPER-EV Ariel’s 1000bhp electric Hipercar, the super-performance four-wheel-drive concept unveiled at the 2017 LCV Show, is continuing to run flat out, with first signs of “something to see” likely to emerge early next year. Simon Saunders, boss and founder of Ariel, says styling is close to complete, along the lines already seen in sketches around 18 months ago. Details have been changed by CFD aerodynamic testing and practicalities such as the need to provide doors that open and shut. The car, which has an electric motor to drive each wheel and whose batteries are replenished by a revolutionary gas turbine range extender, has reached a Gen2 state, and some components, such as the powertrain, being dyno tested right now, are even further advanced. Disguised mules…

 Thank BMW. Or Tesla (the man, not the car company). Or even YouTube. Between them, they helped to kick-start a car maker like no other: Rimac. For one thing, it’s based in Croatia, a country better known for spotty dogs, medieval HBO blockbusters and some of the world’s best beaches. For another, it doesn’t produce many cars and its CEO was born after the launch of the Ferrari F40 and was once best known for flogging a green E30-generation BMW 3 Series around race tracks. But Rimac is helping to shape the future of fast cars, specifically those powered by electricity. That was a point rammed home during a recent visit to the unassuming factory on the outskirts of Croatia’s capital, Zagreb. By the time Ms Google had directed me…

Triple British Touring Car champion Matt Neal has spent most of his career racing machines built and run by his family’s Team Dynamics operation – but there’s one he’s glad he’s unable to drive: Mean Mower V2. A Honda mower fitted with a 190bhp superbike engine, it can top 150mph and is recognised by Guinness World Records as the world’s fastest grass cutter. It was built for a 5ft-tall driver, so 6ft 6in Neal doesn’t fit – much to his relief. Still, Neal is hugely proud of the fact that it exists, showcasing the firm’s engineering prowess and its ability to work with a manufacturer. It’s just one example of how Team Dynamics – founded by Neal’s father, Steve, in 1993 – is applying expertise built from decades of BTCC…

FINAL REPORT MILEAGE 7911 WHY WE RAN IT To discover whether £65,000 is too much for a BMW 4 Series without an M badge on its bootlid “That has to be the perfect long-termer.” If I’d made a euro every time somebody told me something to that effect during the past few months, I still wouldn’t be able to afford one of the Amazakoue-wood, 1968-spec reissued gearknobs from Alpina’s online shop. But I’d be extremely close. It costs 138 euros, not least because the wood for each knob is sourced from West Africa, dried out for weeks, then laboriously finished and painted before Alpina’s carburettor-crankshaft crest is fixed in place. As a metaphor for the detailed approach the tiny German manufacturer makes when building fast cars, it takes some beating.…

QUESTION I can’t decide whether to finance my new car on a PCP or HP. Can you explain the advantages and disadvantages of both? Jack Finnis, Bude ANSWER Regardless of pros and cons, your attitude to ownership will probably be the clincher. If you believe a car is like a mobile phone, to be disposed of when a better one comes along, a PCP is for you since it’s structured to make that possible. If you’re wedded to the idea of ownership free of nannyish mileage restrictions, HP is the way forward, although you won’t own the car until you’ve made all the repayments. A PCP looks cheaper but you’re always making repayments. With an HP deal, once the car is paid off, you aren’t. JE QUESTION On the odd…

TORQUE SHOW HOST VW Phaeton 5.0 V10 TDI 4Motion LWB £4999 A Phaeton kicks off our ‘worth buying’ round-up of Wolfsburg’s weird and wonderful. It’s a first-generation model (2002-10) and a rare example of the V10 diesel, since most remaining cars are 3.0 TDI V6s. The Phaeton was the response of the now late Volkswagen Group boss Ferdinand Piech to Mercedes-Benz parking its new A-Class on his Golf’s neatly trimmed lawn. It had to be good if it was going to take the fight to the mighty S-Class and, to that end, was constructed in a brand-new dedicated factory. Our find is a 2004/04-registered example with 136,000 miles and full service history. First, we’d want to check that ‘full’ means every service on the button because the Phaeton is a complex…

THE NEXT-GENERATION Hyundai i10 is set to become the most advanced car in its class when it arrives in the UK early next year, with a comprehensive set of technology and safety upgrades part of its redesign. The third-generation compact city car is set for a public debut at the Frankfurt motor show next week, and has been given an exterior overhaul designed to appeal to younger customers. Extended rear wheel arches have added 20mm to the width and the roofline has been lowered by 20mm over the outgoing model. Hyundai has extended the wheelbase by 40mm, but smaller front and rear overhangs mean overall length has only increased by 5mm. Rear passengers benefit from extra leg room, while 252 litres of boot space is among the best in the…

BUGATTI HAS SMASHED the record for the fastest road-legal car, with an unrestricted version of the Chiron recording 304.7 mph at Volkswagen’s Ehra-Lessian test track. British sportscar veteran Andy Wallace was driving – the man who previously set production car records in both the McLaren F1 and Jaguar XJ220. The Chiron had been optimised for high speed, losing the standard car’s 261mph limiter and being given the 1578bhp version of the quad-turbo W16 engine from the new Centodieci. The record was achieved using specially selected Michelin tyres, each of which had been x-rayed before being fitted to the car. Faster speeds were recorded throughout a week at the German test track, Wallace ultimately breaking the 300mph barrier. But the support team didn’t actually realise it had happened. “They were watching…

PORSCHE HAS EXTENDED its updated Macan range with a new Turbo model, also heading to the Frankfurt show. It’s priced at £68,530, almost £20,000 more than the Macan S that sits immediately below it. The old Turbo’s 3.6-litre V6 has been replaced by a 2.9-litre unit also used in the Cayenne and Panamera. It makes 434bhp and 405lb ft, enough to drop the 0-62mph time by 0.3sec to 4.3sec. The top speed is 167mph. Significant kit upgrades include tungsten-coated brakes.…

Cupra’s first step into the sphere of pure-electric power is a dramatic-looking EV concept called the Tavascan, unveiled ahead of its public debut at next week’s Frankfurt motor show. Named after a ski resort near the French border in Catalonia, the Tavascan is said to marry “the presence of an SUV with the sleekness of a sports coupé” and showcases the evolution of Cupra design as it moves further away from its parent company, Seat. The front end of the Tavascan is designed to balance the desire for “muscularity and dynamism”, the company claims, with an exterior shape honed for range-boosting aerodynamic efficiency. The front end is also intended to create a “totally different focal point” from those of conventional combustion-engined cars, with an illuminated Cupra logo mounted low, below…

The third and least fossil-fuel-dependent of Hyundai’s Ioniq hatchback line-up has been updated for 2019 with new looks, new technology and a new powertrain to help it compete in a rapidly growing electric car market. Its battery has been boosted to 38kWh, up from the outgoing model’s 28kWh, and the electric motor driving the front wheels has been exchanged for a more efficient version. The combination has helped extend the range more than 35% over the old car’s to a WLTP-tested average of 182 miles. Meanwhile, an uprated 7.2kW charging port can recharge the battery to 80% in 57 minutes on a 50kW charger. Despite the weight gain brought on by the larger battery, the uprated powertrain helps bring the Ioniq’s 0-62mph sprint time down several tenths, adding to the…

VERDICT Tesla’s phenomenal rise has already delivered big success for the Model 3. The positioning of the car alone has seen to that. In the UK, it’s the Tesla you can buy for £400 a month. But there is much more to the Model 3 than a Tesla badge at an affordable price. Even in the current cheapest, lowliest form, the car combines truly realistic and practical usability with competitive saloon-car practicality, really striking performance and handling dynamism that doesn’t lack anything for the want of ambition. That the car doesn’t quite seem ready for global domination may be because it’s notably short on refinement, a touch of easy drivability and thoroughly ironed-out completeness next to the world’s best compact executive saloons; and it’ll only be when electric powertrain technology…

Simon Dowson and Nick Carpenter, the principals of Delta Motorsport, met as young engineers at Reynard, the race car manufacturer, in the mid-1990s and have been mostly working together ever since. They set up Delta in 2005 in a family-owned barn with Carpenter as technical director and Dowson as delivery specialist and supply chain manager, moving to Silverstone soon after. They rapidly won a high reputation from working on a wide variety of motorsport-related projects (designing, testing, building and shipping 15 single-seater race cars in five months for GP Masters was an early one). They later played a big part in the planning and design of Jaguar’s stillborn but highly praised C-X75 hybrid supercar. More recently, Delta has gravitated towards electrification and range-extender projects, seeing these as the future. Their…

Opportunities like this one don’t come around very often. Here, Autocar has the chance to build its own lithium ion electric car battery cell from scratch, to see the inner workings of a device that usually stays closed because its contents are flammable and to hear an expert ‘how it works’ explanation from the UK’s foremost professor of EV batteries. There are only a couple of places in the UK where batteries are built from raw materials and one of them is the prototype manufacturing plant at Warwick Manufacturing Group (WMG), a department of the illustrious University of Warwick. Our mentor for the day is Professor David Greenwood, a brilliant communicator of the intricate flows of electrons and lithium ions inside these anonymous-looking grey packages. So free your mind of…

Unit 11, Humber Avenue, Coventry. Doesn’t sound extraordinary, does it? But wander in and you’ll discover the home of what is, by some measure, the UK’s most advanced autonomous vehicle manufacturer – so advanced, in fact, that it is already in the business of selling its four-seat electric self-driving pods to happy customers around the world at about £150,000 each. This is not some outpost of Jaguar Land Rover or Nissan, however, but rather one part of the less well-known RDM Group, the parent company of Aurrigo, its autonomous vehicle arm, which is perhaps best known for its ongoing test projects in Milton Keynes, where it has been running its pods safely and effectively in public environments for some time now. Listen carefully and you’ll soon get an idea of…

When Hyundai showed its Elevate concept for an electric walking car at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) earlier this year, it was seen as an exciting step into the future. This extraordinary machine might one day be suitable, its inventors reckoned, for transport in natural disaster zones where wheeled machines could never go, using its four spidery legs to step over obstacles like boulders, yet rolling more conventionally on smoother surfaces with the aid of the four small wheels that are effectively its feet. It’s safe to say that nobody on the Korean experimental engineering team would have been aware of a steam-powered British walking machine called Pedrail, proposed in 1899, that set out to provide the same sort of rough-terrain ability. This laudable but long-dead concept was unearthed by…

Hands-free ban is madness What madness has happened to car ergonomics? MPs calling to ban even hands-free phone use is farcical (News, 21 August). Every new car sold today bar maybe a few has Bluetooth or an Apple CarPlay system enabling phone mirroring, which would be rendered useless. What’s more, almost all new cars have touchscreens, with even simple functions like adjusting radio volume or climate controls buried inside them. The whole conflict of safety and touchscreen use is madness. Furthermore, there are so many police cut backs that the poor under-staffed police do not have time to solve real crimes, never mind be around to monitor phone use in cars, which cannot be seen from outside if it’s hands-free, incidentally. For a hands-free ban to work, all manufacturers will…

MILEAGE 3848 WHY WE’RE RUNNING IT To see whether Audi has raised the bar for electric vehicles with its advanced Jaguar I-Pace rival The E-tron’s range hasn’t been much of a concern for me so far because 220-odd miles is actually plenty for my needs, although it could always be better. More of an issue is the time it takes to recharge the 95kWh battery pack, especially at home. Given that hooking it up to my 3kW wallbox for 12 hours adds only about 50% to the battery capacity and just over 100 miles of range, I wasn’t sure how well the car would cope with doing back-to-back long trips. Could I get it recharged quickly enough to give me a decent range for the next day’s journey? To find…

BMW 320 The Baby Shark is back. It has been away for a couple of months and I am not quite sure what has been done to it. That’s because I haven’t paid for it. My garage are like that: “Make sure that it starts and runs properly and then come back.” Well, after I collected it, I used it for a run in what turned out to be a monsoon. It starts first time every time now and runs like a top. They didn’t change the carb, just the fuel pump and a proper tune. Lots more details and a breakdown of expenses to come.…

Even before it was launched in 2008, few doubted the Fiat 500 would be a hit. The Volkswagen Beetle and, more successfully, the Mini had proved the market for retro was on fire. And so sales of the little Fiat roared ahead and, just like the Mini, it spawned spin-offs in the shape of the convertible, warm and hot Abarth versions, the 500L, 500L MPW seven-seater and 500X crossover. But it’s the standard 500 hatch we’re interested in here – specifically, the facelifted version launched in 2015. Fiat claimed it made 1900 changes, including to the bumpers but also to the suspension and brakes, and to the engines in terms of efficiency improvements. Our tester wasn’t entirely convinced but was pleased to note that the 500’s cheeky charm remained intact.…

MAZDA MX-5 We’ve become so used to hearing about the scarcity of good used Mk1 MX-5s at sensible money that it’s a shock when you do see them. Ones like this 1998-registered example with 101,000 miles on the clock that went for £1200. It’s a pukka UK car – not that there’s anything wrong with the Japanese-spec Eunos grey import – with main dealer service history to 2004 and then a sheaf of workshop invoices. It was recently Waxoyled so the successful bidder must have assured themselves it wasn’t hiding corrosion.…

It’s the Cinderella of British sports cars, the one polishing the taps, ironing the smalls and emptying the dishwasher while its sister, the Elise, enjoys the limelight. It is, of course, the Elan two-seat roadster. Not the legendary first-gen car from the 1960s, but the so-called M100 series launched in 1989, coincidentally the same year the Mazda MX-5 Mk1 came out. It was unfortunate timing. While the Mazda ironically borrowed much from the original Elan, in particular its longitudinal front-engined, rear-drive layout, the new M100 had its engine across the front wheels and was front-wheel drive. Purists were naturally upset, but a test drive usually won them over. The new car, which at least followed Lotus principles in having a lightweight composite body attached to a rigid steel backbone chassis,…