Innholdsfortegnelse for February 17, 2021 i Autocar

The radical E-R9 concept is Lotus’s vision of what endurance racing cars could look like in 2030. Styled by Evija hypercar designer Russell Carr, it features an aircraft-inspired cockpit in a sweeping deltawing body and would be “partly driven like a car and partly flown like a fighter jet”. The E-R9 (E-R for ‘endurance racer’ and 9 in tribute to the British brand’s first Le Mans racer) is the work of the Lotus Engineering consultancy arm and showcases features and tech that could appear on future competition cars. It’s a virtual design study for now, but chief aerodynamicist Richard Hill said the concept “incorporates technologies which we fully expect to develop and be practical”. The E-R9’s aerodynamic efficiency is optimised by the use of ‘morphing’ body panels that expand on…

Wrightbus, the Northern Irish bus manufacturer owned by JCB heir Jo Bamford, has announced the creation of more than 40 new jobs as it ramps up production of the world’s first hydrogen fuel cell double-deckers. It has made the move in response to the government’s pledge to help fund 4000 new British-built zero-emissions buses over the next five years. This news follows the recent announcement by Alexander Dennis (ADL), the UK’s biggest bus builder, that it will take over the design and assembly of chassis for its electric buses at its base in Larbert, Scotland. This was previously the responsibility of BYD, its Chinese partner company. The announcements are a shot in the arm for an industry that’s reeling from a bruising 12 months during which bus passenger numbers plunged…

I can remember reading an observation made by one amazed early reviewer of the McLaren F1. He’d discovered that when sixth gear was selected at almost 200mph and the V12’s throttle bodies were subsequently prised back open, the car surged forth. There’s no shortage of confounding facts about the greatest supercar ever made, but I never got my head around that one. How was the Mac capable of generating so much thrust just at the point the body of air ahead of it would be solidifying into a wall? I also found it difficult to imagine the synaptic hit and adrenaline rush the driver must have enjoyed. But then Autocar secured some time in what’s known as the CTR Anniversary – the car currently being hand-assembled by Ruf in Pfaffenhausen…

“Basically, it’s Kia’s Fiesta,” is the way to explain the anonymous shape of the Rio, which remains largely unfamiliar to the public despite having been sold in the UK since 2005 and twice since reinvented. This is the updated version of the Rio that arrived in 2017. The range opens at £14k, but we’re at the other end, where the new 1.0-litre three-pot engine gains a turbo and Kia’s first mild-hybrid system. At £21k in range-topping GT-Line S trim, the Ford comparison is surprisingly valid. You might still grimace at the prospect of a 1.0-litre, but while the power output remains at 118bhp, this unit is 16% torquier than its forebear, giving an unexpectedly strong 148lb ft. Meanwhile, the 48V system is impressively discreet, recuperating energy without drawing attention to…

At less than 1450kg, this Octavia vRS is not a particularly heavy car, and the engine’s torque duly made short work of the severe gradients that often have similarly powerful cars labouring away on Millbrook’s Hill Route. However, at maximum attack, the drone of the engine quickly becomes tiring and for this reason alone there’s little satisfaction to be had from wringing the car’s neck. When given the opportunity to show what it can do, free from speed limits and other road users, the chassis is similarly unambitious. It does demonstrate hints of adjustability on turn-in, but thereafter remains fairly inert and, as on the road, scrappy and prone to understeer if you don’t get the application of power right on the way out of bends. Again, warmer Tarmac and…

The ‘under new management’ signs – or ‘changement de direction’, if you prefer – have been up across the French car industry lately. Following the spectacular downfall of Carlos Ghosn, former Seat boss Luca de Meo took the helm at the Renault Group. Meanwhile, Carlos Tavares has taken control of Stellantis, the new, Dutch-registered firm created by the French PSA Group’s merger with the Italian-American Fiat Chrysler Automobiles. Both men have strong track records, but they face formidable challenges in ensuring that some of the world’s most storied car brands can thrive in a new era of motoring. STELLANTIS The recent merger of the PSA Group and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles has created the world’s fourth-largest car maker, with its 8.1 million global sales in 2019 behind only Toyota, the Volkswagen…

COMPARISON Alpine A110 vs Nissan GT-R vs Toyota GR Yaris These three cars are a world away from what their makers usually create. We find out why they’re so special FEATURE Renault Clio V6 Before the trio above came the likes of the Clio V6. Andrew Frankel celebrates it FEATURE Life with an Ignis New cars don’t get much more oddball than this little Suzuki. Is that a good thing? EVERY WEEK ROAD TEST Hyundai i20 Mild-hybrid tech and a sharp new suit mark out the third-gen supermini USED BUYING GUIDE DeLorean DMC_12 This movie star car can be yours if you look hard and are careful enough SUBSCRIBE autocar.co.uk/subscribe or see p64…

MILEAGE 3311 WHY WE’RE RUNNING IT To see if the E has the everyday usability to match its desirability We’re very much still in the education phase of electric cars among the public. Many Autocar readers will know their appeal and drawbacks, likewise the early adopters and evangelists – although less of the drawbacks there… That education must include an explanation of what a headline range figure really means. In the Honda E’s case, 125 miles is very much a bestcase scenario, and one valid only for the warmest months of the year. Or warmest days, in the UK’s case. In the summer heatwave when the E was first delivered, a range approaching 125 miles was indeed possible when I drove carefully and turned the regenerative braking to its maximum,…

Friend of this page Richard replaced his Westfield and Marlin Berlinetta with that fabulous TR40 and now there is more: a 1998 Chevrolet Camaro. “It’s a 3.8 six-cylinder with a fantastic bodykit. Most people mistake it for a Corvette due to the pointy front. “I had a 3.6 Jaguar XJS for a short while before I bought the Camaro. Similar size, similar engines, same year. Surprisingly, the Camaro has the better ride. Performance seems identical. I love the XJS, but the Camaro definitely has something special about it.”…

Any Bentley Continental GT has to be a shoo-in for future classic status, except that with so many to choose from, only the rarest and best are likely to command prices worthy of the marque. That’s why we’ve shunned your ‘standard’ Conti for something more special: the W12 Supersports of 2009-11. It’s 13% more powerful than the standard car (621bhp compared with 552bhp, making it, at the time, the fastest Bentley in the company’s history) and, thanks to the absence of rear seats, lighter too. Our find is a 2009-reg example with 44,000 miles.…

An expert’s view BEN COLEMAN, SMART TECNIC “I took over Smart Tecnic, where I’d worked for nine years, last September. We’re a specialist Smart dealer in Birmingham and customers come to us from far and wide. The cars may be intended for urban use but we work on many with very high mileages. There’s a Mk2 Fortwo in the workshop with 159,000 miles, although the highest-mileage car we service is a Mk1 model with 288,000. Mk2 Fortwos have their problems but, assuming servicing is kept up to date, are robust and reliable. My choice would be a 1.0 83bhp Passion with the flappy paddles. Besides us, there are other good specialists around the country and a good social media community who love their Smarts, so you’re never far from help.”…

McLaren has unveiled its first ‘clean sheet’ supercar since the game-changing 12C a decade ago, replacing almost every facet of its V8-engined Sports and Super Series models with an all-new design that provides early clues about how it will deal with the age of electrification. The car, called the Artura and available to order now from £185,500, is a plugin hybrid with a governed 205mph top speed and 3.0sec 0-60mph acceleration. In addition to the explosive performance, it can cruise for up to 19 miles on battery power alone and its combined fuel economy exceeds 50mpg. At the kerb, the Artura weighs just 27kg more than a 720S even though its 671bhp powertrain consists of a newly designed twin-turbo V6 engine, a 92bhp electric motor and a 7.4kWh battery, all…

When the UK government revealed in November that it would bring forward its ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars to 2030, a starting gun was fired to signal to the car and electric vehicle charging industries that the race is on. Both must deliver suitable infrastructure to support a mass adoption of EVs in the next decade. One major problem the current public charging network faces is an absence of chargers away from congested areas of the country. According to data supplied by Zap-Map, 40% of the public charging network is located in London and the south-east, compared with just 3.7% in Wales. A Welsh government spokesman acknowledged the disparity, telling Autocar: “There are specific challenges in remote and rural areas, where there’s a particular need…

TESTER’S NOTE In a show of how confident Xpeng is, it didn’t give us some brand-new media car for the test but the daily runaround of an employee. It didn’t disappoint. MA There was no shortage a few years ago of Chinese start-ups with grand dreams of making EVs. A trio has since come to symbolise the industry, thanks to their success not just in sales but also on the US stock market: Li, Nio and Xpeng. Nio is best known to Europeans, but Xpeng is hot on its heels, already selling its G3 crossover in Norway. The Guangzhou-based firm’s second model, the P7 saloon, has been on sale in China since June last year, and this month it gained NGP, an autonomous driving system to rival Tesla’s Autopilot. Compared…

MODEL TESTED 2.0 TDI vRS Price £32,260 Power 197bhp Torque 295lb ft 0-60mph 7.2sec 30-70mph in fourth 7.3sec Fuel economy 42.2mpg CO2 emissions 130g/km 70-0mph 52.2m Diesel power is not, and never has been, the first thing that comes to mind when hot hatchbacks are the subject of discussion. Not that anyone has told Skoda. The marque has long ploughed this particular furrow, and has to some extent made the niche its own with a line of fast, frugal and clandestine products that stretches all the way back to the boxy Fabia vRS supermini of 2003. Yes, the entire vRS sub-brand sprang into life via the black plump. Which is perhaps why, when so many car makers are ditching diesel and heading for the hybrid hills in order to reduce…

VERDICT The purchase of any diesel performance car comes with an admission that practical matters matter. Owners of such cars tend to be relatively circumspect. For this reason, it would be unfair to criticise the latest Octavia vRS TDI for having an engine more effective than engaging, when that engine will happily deliver fuel economy no petrol-powered hot hatch could ever dream of matching. And it would be remiss to dismiss it on the basis that it doesn’t deliver the level of dynamic reward some of us might want when our favourite B-roads unfurl ahead of us. The car is clearly intended to work best when driven at seven tenths, rather than nine, and that is exactly what it does. A more sophisticated driveline would improve the recipe, but the…

Seven-time Formula 1 world champion Sir Lewis Hamilton will continue with the leading Mercedes-AMG team after the two parties agreed a new deal. A “significant” part of the deal is the setting up of a charitable foundation to promote diversity and inclusion in motorsport. The extension is for 2021 only, notably meaning the contracts of Hamilton, team-mate Valtteri Bottas and Mercedes-backed Williams youngster George Russell will all expire at the same time. F1 mulls Saturday sprint race trial F1 is still considering adding Saturday sprint races to the schedule, and new series boss Stefano Domenicali said talks are ongoing with teams about trialling the idea at events this season. F1 executives have been considering moves to spice up the racing, although Domenicali said that plans for reverse grids are now…

Andrew Jordan’s rise to the top of the British Touring Car Championship had been impressively relentless. It all really came together back in 2013, when he secured the title driving a Honda Civic run by the family Team Eurotech. From there his pace, experience and popularity with sponsors led to a seat with the WSR-run BMW squad as team-mate to Colin Turkington. By the start of the 2019 season, Jordan, by then a little older and wiser, was perfectly placed to challenge for the BTCC crown again – and were it not for a disaster at Donington, he could easily have taken his second title. Instead, a hefty shunt in the opening race, when he was tipped sideways at the Old Hairpin and then collected, wrecked his day. While his…

QUESTION My friend is after a nearly new Toyota Land Cruiser V8 Amazon, but we’re struggling to find one. Should we give up? Michael Moran, via email ANSWER There are a few J200-generation Amazons in the classifieds, sold new in the UK before the model was pulled from the market in 2015, but if you simply must have something newer, an imported example is your best bet. We found a top-of-the-line 2018 Japanese car on sale at a specialist importer in Yorkshire, but the blank price tag suggests it’ll command top dollar. Rarity is on your side, though, so you needn’t worry overly about short-term depreciation and, happily, Japan drives on the same side as us, so you won’t have to get used to left-hand drive. FP QUESTION Can a…

When new in 2013, this example of the hottest of hot hatches (at least until the Audi RS3 landed in 2015) cost around £42,000, but today, seven years and 95,000 miles later, it could be on our driveway for £15,990. It is being advertised by a private seller and has a trade value of around £11,650, so there’s surely a bit of haggling to be done. Doubtless the seller will point to the car’s full Mercedes-Benz service history. That deserves a big tick, but we’d go through the invoices, checking all majors and minors have been done, the air con has been regassed and the brake fluid and coolant have been changed. The seller is bound to indicate, too, the car’s AMG sports exhaust, two-owner history and, from the pictures,…

Porsche’s celebrated track-bred GT3 line has moved into a new generation with the long-awaited unveiling of the 992-series 911 GT3. The new model, on sale now priced from £123,100, is described by the firm as “a highly athletic road car fit for high-performance driving on track balanced with the demands of everyday use”. As with previous GT3 models, Porsche Motorsport has been heavily involved in the new car’s development, this time in a bid to transfer “pure racing technology into a production model more consistently than ever before”. The 4.0-litre engine is capable of revving to a dizzying 9000rpm To that end, the new GT3 features the traditionally high-revving naturally aspirated flat six in 4.0-litre form, with more power than ever. It also gets key aerodynamic and technological upgrades, the…

IF YOU’RE A tyre designer these days, you could be stuck between a rock and a hard place. Why? Because of EVs – more specifically, high-performance EVs. Tyres are a melting pot of compromise, trading off between grip, ride quality, wet handling, dry handling and rolling resistance. Over the past decade, the significance of rolling resistance has been steadily increasing in line with the need to find that last percentage point of efficiency to reduce CO2 emissions. Suspension and tyres are closely matched during the development of a car and certain tyres are recommended for used on a particular model for that reason. An example is the Pirelli P Zero Elect, developed in conjunction with car manufacturers as a dedicated EV tyre. One of the trickiest fitments was the Porsche…

In the past, Volkswagen’s hot diesel Golf often outsold its hot petrol Golf two to one. The GTD has been common on roads since its arrival in 2009, mainly because it has been cheaper to buy and run than the GTI but hardly any slower in the real world. Few cars capitalised so effectively on our addiction to easy-access torque in the turbodiesel era. In 2021, it’s unlikely the GTD will outshine the GTI quite so brazenly, if at all. However, this has little to do with the ability of the Mk8 product and everything to do with the PR crisis engulfing diesel, because on paper the GTD is better than ever. Power has risen 16bhp to 197bhp, torque is up 15lb ft to 295lb ft and, while the new…

Were you to flick through the sales brochure for the Porsche 901 – as the 911 was known in the early 1960s, before Peugeot asserted its naming rights – you’d marvel at the simplicity. Porsche provides quaint details such as the handbrake drum diameter (180mm) and the ‘location of engine in vehicle’, which, just to be clear, is ‘at rear, behind rear axle’. But more broadly, while there are columns of figures to absorb, there’s not much variation. None, in fact, except for a small note at the very bottom of the specification, where we’re told additional gear sets for the five-speed gearbox exist. The 911 is otherwise a set mechanical menu. You don’t need me to tell you that this level of rationalisation is utterly alien to the 911…

“It’s all about the Charlottes,” says Joel Teague, CEO of Co Charger, a new company that claims to have the answer to that rather large elephant in the EV room: how to charge your car at home when you don’t have a charger, never mind a driveway. According to Co Charger, at least 40% of UK residents live in properties where installing a private charger isn’t an option, such as flats or terraced houses. For them, EV ownership is impossible unless they can charge at work (to where fewer people travel these days) or they have a public charger nearby (that works). Co Charger addresses this problem by enabling the 200,000 or so people with a parking space and a charger at home to share them with their neighbours who…

Liaisons, some dangerous, some inspired and many unexpected, have long created drama in the automotive industry. Half a century ago, no pundit could have imagined modest, middle-class Peugeot being a lead player in an industrial combine including the mighty (it was then) Fiat, America’s third-biggest car maker (it was then) Chrysler and Opel and Vauxhall, twinned then cast off by General Motors. Almost as wild would have been the idea of Fiat swallowing Chrysler, Jeep and a pick-up brand called Ram. Yet that’s exactly how things turned out, with Stellantis formed from the merger of the PSA Group (which grew out of Peugeot) and FCA (Fiat and Chrysler merged). So how did its various brands get here, and what are some of their most memorable creations? FIAT PUNTO Fiat invented…

One-make series are now a major contingent among the entry-level options for national and club racing, and a new kid on the block, the City Car Cup, is set to really take off in 2021. The premise is pretty simple and pays homage to the very successful Citroën C1 Cup. But the City Car Cup takes the idea a stage further: rather than just adding a roll-cage to the 1.0-litre box and getting on track, it makes them look, sound and handle more like proper racing saloons. The idea is the latest from the fertile mind of Greg Graham, who holds a category development role with the British Racing and Sports Car Club (BRSCC). “We wanted it to be a proper little race car,” he said. The original iterations (2005-2014)…

Another week, another Lorry update. Battery installed. Not too difficult. I used the opportunity to insert a couple of bits of wood to stop it sliding around in the tray. I didn’t have the wrong-sized battery: all previous batteries have failed to fill the area. I used the Lorry over the next couple of days and it is fine, although going through a flood always makes it prone to stalling after the dip. Meanwhile, two big decisions: I have decided to take the spare wheel off the bonnet, because I really struggle to lift it, and the interior needs a roof lining, because in the current weather it’s like a rainforest.…

With the imminent arrival of the refreshed E-Pace, now is a good time to revisit the smallest SUV in the Jaguar range, because while everyone’s distracted by revised infotainment and new plug-in hybrid technology, the canny used car buyer can look into what they could save on the outgoing version featured here. Under the stubby bonnet of the E-Pace is either a 2.0-litre petrol or a 2.0-litre diesel engine, both available in varying states of tune. The petrol line-up encompasses 198bhp, 245bhp and 295bhp versions and the diesel units can be had in 148bhp, 178bhp and 236bhp forms. All E-Paces come with dual-zone climate control, cruise control, front and rear parking sensors and LED headlights, but S trim adds leather seats (electrically adjustable in the front) and a more sophisticated…

Amazing to think the Scirocco Mk1, launched in 1976, beat the Golf GTI to showrooms by a few months. Our pick, though, is a much later example that was registered in 1986, by which time the Golf GTI Mk2 was on the scene. According to the auction blurb, this Mk2 Scirocco was in need of only a light refurb, and had three owners in the book and 92,000 miles on the clock when it went under the hammer. It made £2600 on Car & Classic, an online auction that’s impressive for the way every lot is exhaustively photographed and described. Bidding opened at a derisory £100 but, fortunately for the seller, someone knew its real value.…

Remember when the first Smart Fortwo came out? You’d often see the little things whizzing along in the outside lane of the motorway, their drivers proving that their tiny two-door hatch could mix it with bigger and faster machinery. When its successor arrived in 2007, it shrugged off that particular chip and settled down. It might have had something to do with the fact that it was now a little bigger and wider but also that other, more conventional rivals had come on the scene that were better to drive. Still, those rivals didn’t have the Smart’s trademark Tridion safety cell with plastic body panels, its unusual two-seat layout and its rear-mounted engine. Then there was the brand’s association with Mercedes-Benz, plus a sporty Brabus version. The Mk2 Fortwo of…