Innholdsfortegnelse for November 8, 2023 i Autocar

The new Skoda Superb brings substantial technological upgrades inside and out, headlined by the addition of a plug-in hybrid powertrain with 62 miles of electric-only range and a revamped cockpit that majors on user-friendliness. Due on sale in mid-2024, the fourth generation of Skoda’s executive flagship returns as a hatchback and an estate. It also sticks with combustion propulsion, bringing a choice of six powerplants, all with four cylinders, from launch: three petrol engines, two diesels and that petrol-electric PHEV. The petrol line-up opens with a 148bhp mild-hybrid 1.5-litre, while the 201bhp and 262bhp 2.0-litre options (the latter driving both axles) forgo electrical assistance. The front-wheel-drive diesel also produces 148bhp, while the 4x4 version makes 190bhp. The range-topping PHEV pairs the entry-level 1.5-litre petrol with a single electric motor to…

The owner of a Range Rover Evoque has accused JLR of repairing her vehicle using second-hand parts, as the manufacturer struggles to source new, replacement components for thousands of its customers’ cars. As first reported by Car Dealer Magazine, a trade publication, around 10,000 customer cars across the UK are awaiting replacement parts, with around 5000 of them off the road at JLR dealerships as a result. The crisis, which originated at the firm’s new parts facility, Mercia Park, was revealed by Andrew Woolliscroft, UK client director at JLR, during a dealer summit last month. “Mercia is a bottleneck and we have a backlog of orders,” said Woolliscroft, adding that the shortage of parts had “nearly stopped workshops from being able to operate”. He also said that JLR had run…

The rise of low-cost EVs from China has been a “wake-up call” for traditional car makers, Nissan CEO Makoto Uchida has said, prompting his firm to overhaul its development plans with a focus on ensuring that its EVs are affordable. Speaking at the Japan Mobility Show in Tokyo, Uchida said that the electric car market was “moving faster” than Nissan had expected when it set its 2030 plan in 2021, and that EV prices were coming down “massively” quicker than the firm had predicted two years ago. He said: “We thought the process was step by step, but it has accelerated a lot faster. The Chinese have accelerated this in the market and beyond. We’re having discussions on price. We’re looking at affordable pricing for EVs across the world. This…

SATURDAY, SUNDAY Weeks of anticipation have been rewarded: I’ve got my hands on a rear-wheel-drive Polestar 2, a recent addition to the repertoire of a car whose shape I’ve admired since I saw the Volvo concept on which it was based in Gothenburg in 2016. Single-motor 2s have been around for years, but with a front-mounted, less powerful motor. This new rear-wheel-drive edition rides flatter, goes faster, is as economical, resists road noise brilliantly and seems mechanically quieter. Official range is 406 miles (with the 82kWh Long Range battery), but the car’s predictor always starts at 330 miles after a full charge. Drive with a bit of sympathy and it will do 380. Accompanying these delights is a logical, touchscreen infotainment system that even a steam-age individual can fathom and…

Five years after it was launched to head off BMW’s hot-selling X6, Audi’s Q8 SUV-coupé has been refreshed. The changes aren’t seismic, but perhaps nor did they need to be. The Q8 has always done a decent job of combining the Q7’s opulence, quietly strong performance and all-round ease of use with a less pedestrian look and subtly sharper cornering ability. In Europe, Audi now sells roughly one Q8 for every two Q7s, so the decision to launch the model in the first place was also clearly the right one. It all means that, for this facelift, most of the changes are purely cosmetic, with none concerning the chassis. The tweaks are mostly found at the front, where the straightforward slatted main grille has been replaced by one with chunkier…

‘Flagship’ is a term typically assigned to cars of luxury and class, so it’s perhaps incongruous in the context of a Volkswagen, the ‘people’s car’. And yet its large SUV, the Touareg, has been the de facto flagship since the demise of the Phaeton saloon. It’s held that status slightly uneasily, being much more luxurious and expensive than the rest of the VW range but also more level-headed than many of its rivals. Maybe that’s why the third-generation Touareg hasn’t set the UK sales charts on fire. But VW is keeping the faith and has given it an update to help it keep pace with rivals from BMW and Porsche, which have also been thoroughly refreshed recently. There are now light bars front and rear, and new adaptive headlights with…

The Ford press office calls this the ‘farm spec’ Ranger. Alternatively, you might call it the road tester spec, because it is in effect the Caterham 160 of Ford’s pick-up truck range. With its manual gearbox, part-time fourwheel drive, steel wheels, black plastic bumpers and fabric seats, this is as basic as Rangers get. And that’s quite unusual for Ford’s line-up of pick-up trucks, which today are bought as everyday lifestyle vehicles as much as a work tool. As a result, the majority of Rangers you’ll see on the road are in posh Wildtrak trim or above. If you want a single-cab Ranger, you’re also limited to the XL. So are you missing out by saving yourself more than £10,000 and going for a stripped-out Ranger? In truth, you are,…

Japan’s car makers have always seemingly been at the cutting edge of automotive design and technology. Except, that is, with electric cars. Stand at the side of the streets of Tokyo, the world’s largest city, and you would do well to spot an electric car. I didn’t knowingly see one in the best part of a week there, for the recent Japan Mobility Show. But that shouldn’t have come as much of a surprise: from 2016 to 2021, EV sales accounted for between 0.4% and 0.6% of the entire Japanese market, which averaged more than five million vehicle sales a year during that period, according to Jato Dynamics data. EV sales increased to 1.7% in 2022 and 2.3% this year, to the end of September, but growth is minuscule and…

Your 25 October article ‘How to make EVs affordable’ was really barking up the wrong tree. I have a much better idea. First, we need a standard ‘skateboard’ chassis. Stellantis has this down to a fine art already, all of its cars being the same underneath. We will take this idea, except we don’t need the giant, heavy and expensive battery, just the motor. Bodies can be made of thermoformed plastic and will just be slotted onto the skateboard (again, like Stellantis does already). At the front of the chassis, we will have a pin that protrudes below the wheels. Each side will have some copper brushes. This will also provide the steering. Then all roads will be fitted with a simple guide channel down the middle, into which the…

The GL-Class of 2006-2013 is a luxurious, sevenseat SUV that, size-wise, faces few rivals. The Range Rover, Land Rover Discovery and Toyota Land Cruiser Amazon are all shorter (the Range Rover by 127mm), but where the GL really scores is in its much longer wheelbase. At 3075mm, it makes the car a genuine seven-seat SUV, to the extent that its two rearmost chairs are properly comfortable affairs that even grown-ups can enjoy on the long drive down to St Moritz. Accommodating a party of skiers isn’t the only reason to like the GL. Having 4Matic permanent four-wheel drive and lockable front, centre and rear differentials working in conjunction with Mercedes’ 4-ETS electronic traction control, the model offers plenty of sure-footedness in slippery conditions. Should the car go offpiste, it’s reassuring…

THIS SATURDAY IS Remembrance Day, commemorating the enactment of the Armistice 105 years ago, which concluded 51 months of war that had killed 17 million people from the world over – or, as Autocar succinctly put it, “the end of the long nightmare”. When the war began in 1914, we surveyed the initial combat uses of motorised vehicles (revisited in our 27 September issue). When it ended in 1918, we looked back on how this had developed. “Surely no branch of British industry has played so great a part in victory as have the manufacturers of self-propelled vehicles,” we posited. “It is no exaggeration to say that this industry has saved civilisation for the generations to come, for without it we should have gone short of almost every one of…

Areborn Toyota Celica is being debated as part of a new era of electric sports cars from the Japanese manufacturer that will also include the return of the MR2. A more diverse range of new Toyota and Lexus models, encompassing everything from small ‘midengined’ sports cars to vast crossovers, has been made possible by a remarkable new modular electric car architecture that brings with it a level of flexibility never before seen in the industry. The first model to use the new architecture will be a low, sleek Lexus saloon, which is due in 2026 and was previewed by the recent LF-ZC concept car at the Japan Mobility Show in Tokyo. Alongside it at the show were three other concept models, each illustrating just how versatile this as-yet-unnamed architecture is.…

Ferrari has made its Le Mans-winning 499P prototype racer available for purchase as a no-holdsbarred track toy equipped with a 777bhp hybrid V6 and costing £4.6 million. Based on the 499P endurance racer that took victory at La Sarthe this year (Ferrari’s first top-flight endurance outing in 50 years), the “strictly limited” 499P Modificata is reserved for non-competitive use by “gentleman drivers”. Speaking at its debut at Mugello, Italy, the firm’s nonhomologated vehicle leader, Manuela Cecconi, said it has been created “for customers to enjoy the thrill of a racing prototype”, adding that it is “the firm’s most exclusive project”. Each car costs €5.1 million (£4,620,600) before tax – nearly eight times the price of the new SF90 XX. It has been designed for a “very select clientele”. Each…

VOLKSWAGEN WILL UNWRAP its first electric estate in the coming months, ahead of a market launch next year. The new ID 7 Tourer is based on the ID 7 saloon, which is due to begin UK deliveries imminently. It will be an early entrant into the nascent EV estate segment, currently populated by just the MG 5 SW EV, Vauxhall Astra Sports Tourer Electric, Peugeot e-308 SW and, at the upper end, Porsche Taycan Sport Turismo. BMW will also launch an estate version of its new i5 next year, though, and Audi has previewed an electric future for the A6 Avant. Nio has hinted at plans to bring the similarly sized ET5 Tourer here, too. Volkswagen’s take on the formula – effectively an EV alternative to the new Passat –…

MERCEDES-BENZ IS preparing an extensive platform and drivetrain upgrade for its EQE and EQS electric models, with the aim of slashing charging times while boosting range and performance. Due for UK sales in 2025, the upgraded EQE and EQS – in both saloon and SUV forms – are set to adopt a new platform that’s known internally as EVA2M. The new structure, a development of today’s EVA2, forgoes the 400V drivetrain electrical architecture of the current cars for a more advanced 800V system that permits higher battery charging power and therefore quicker charging times. For reference, the current cars max out at 200kW. The updated EVs are also set to receive new electric motors produced in-house, in place of the Valeo motors used today. The so-called eATS2.0 units are said…

MAZDA’S UK BOSS has said the government pushing back its ban on new ICE car sales to 2035 was a “relief” for car buyers and that the decision was “entirely pragmatic”. Jeremy Thomson told Autocar he was confident that the five-year postponement wouldn’t change the pace at which electric cars were bought and that the added time would instead be used as an extended transitional period and allow even more people to make the switch. Thomson added: “This change [to EVs] will come at a certain pace, but it has to be measured. A seven-year timeframe to end the internal combustion engine was always going to be a challenge. [The pushback] is probably a relief for consumers.” When asked what the next steps for Mazda were in the shift to…

On the same day Max Verstappen made yet more history by breaking his own record for grand prix wins in a single season – 16, thanks to victory in Mexico – Kalle Rovanperä marked his own latest landmark achievement. At 23, the Finn is now the youngest double World Rally Champion and the sixth to score two consecutively. Rovanperä and co-driver Jonne Halttunen had built a strong lead on the Central European Rally that crossed borders in the Czech Republic, Austria and Germany, when on the second day Toyota team-mate Elfyn Evans crashed out at low speed. The Welshman had been the only driver in with an albeit distant shout of beating Rovanperä to the WRC crown, and with his threat extinguished the Finnish crew could back off. That allowed…

The facelifted Audi SQ8 starts at nearly £100,000, which, to state the obvious, is a hell of a lot. Then again, you get a good amount of capability for the money: an oak-or carbonfibre-inlaid cabin of supreme quality, generous space for the family, the mostly but not entirely tamed monster that is Ingolstadt’s twin-turbocharged 4.0-litre V8 (tuned to 500bhp and 568lb ft) and a raft of technology designed to make a 2.2-tonne SUV handle a bit like a hot saloon – most notably rear-wheel steering and, if you go for Vorpsrung trim, active anti-roll bars and an electronically controlled Sport differential that controls the rear axle’s torque split by way of two multi-plate clutches. The SQ8 also variously gets a quartet of exhaust tips, massage seats, 23in wheels and, depending…

The Nio ET7 is a 5.1m-long luxury saloon that showcases the full kaleidoscope of this very modern Chinese car maker’s capabilities. It also uses the company’s battery-swap tech so, in theory, you can get your depleted battery replaced by a fully charged one in about five minutes. The car has an aerodynamics-led shape that’s becoming essential for any efficiency-seeking EV, but there’s a distinctive Nio squint to the front styling and an appealing Audiness to the rear. The raised lump of lidar housing above the windscreen is perhaps most distinctive to Nio. This is part of the suite of driver aids that – if or when legislation allows – will give the car close to fully autonomous driving capabilities. There’s no mistaking that the ET7 is the brand’s fat-cat model…

Italy’s supercar industry has intense tribal rivalries, but the different factions have always shared close links. The most obvious is proximity: almost all sit within Motor Valley, the small part of the Emilia-Romagna region that is home to Ferrari, Lamborghini and Pagani, and where both the Maserati MC20 and Dallara Stradale are built. There is also a broader collective pride that one corner of Italy could have become the epicentre for the most exciting part of the car business. Nobody exemplifies this more than Maurizio Reggiani. The 64-year-old engineer will be retiring as Lamborghini’s head of motorsport at the end of this year. Before holding that role, he was the supercar maker’s engineering boss, latterly chief technical officer, for 15 years. When he first started working for Lamborghini in 1995,…

So, 1994: the most traumatic and controversial Formula 1 season? Arguably only 1982 comes close. The death of Ayrton Senna, swingeing pre-and mid-season regulation changes, accusations of cheating, black flags and disqualifications, pit-lane infernos and at the end of it all a dirty ‘professional foul’ that would decide the world championship. Yes, I knew when I embarked on writing a book about Benetton in F1 that 1994 would be the big chapter. The British-based team owned by an Italian fashion house famous for its colourful sweaters and controversial advertising campaigns had for years been a plucky contender, a ‘rebel outsider’ that had always fallen short of taking on and beating Williams and McLaren. Until 1994, when in the wake of a ban on sophisticated technology including active suspension and so-called…

Silent but deadly Reflective of the ‘creative’ stories surrounding the possible cause of the recent Luton airport car park fire, Dave Thomas’s worries regarding the safety of EV systems (25 October) are very real ones for me as a firefighter. The rapid expansion in the number of EVs combined with an apparent lack of robust guidance from manufacturers to the professions that are likely to deal with them is a real concern. It seems that knowledge about the risks of, and solutions to, issues with EVs are being acquired from accidental experience, rather than proper planning and guidance. It’s fair to say that a great number of my profession share real concerns about the dangers associated with the increasing numbers of EVs appearing on our roads and parked at our…

An owner’s view HERMAN KAHN “I bought my 2011 350 CDI seven years ago. It had 80,000 miles on the clock, and I’ve put another 70,000 on it. The GL is a premium car with lots of features. A lot can go wrong and the bills can be high. However, I save money on repairs and maintenance by buying genuine parts from my Mercedes dealer and having them fitted by an independent garage. Recently, I’ve had reason to replace a suspension air compressor and a bellow pneumatic spring, but the car is 12 years old and has a high mileage, so I accept this. I intend to keep the GL for a few years yet. Nothing else suits my purposes – it’s the complete all-rounder.” Buyer beware… ENGINE On the…

A road test in any other magazine might well be a short, subjective summary of a new car produced under almost any circumstances, but the Autocar road test is different. Specific, rigorous and detailed, it’s the closest examination we can give of any new model. It appears over at least eight pages and is close to 50 man-hours in the making every week. Most of what the road test process entails is designed to be strictly repeatable and fair. We benchmark standing-start and in-gear acceleration at a purpose-built test facility every week. We carry out both subjective and objective handling tests on both road and track, on the latter up to and beyond the limit of grip, so as to fully assess stability, drivability and limit handling appeal. And while…

Toyota intends to offer a manual transmission as an option on its next-generation electric cars to ensure that they are not a “commodity” and remain as fun and involving to drive as its most engaging internal combustion-engined models. The system, which has been in development for three years, will be a factory option for buyers of EVs based on a new modular architecture being developed for launch in 2026. It is almost entirely soft-wareoperated, with hardware tweaks limited to a clutch pedal and gearshift borrowed from the petrol-engined GR86, plus a rev counter and some new switchgear to select the mode. Paddle shifts are possible, too. Engineers said the system had been created as part of a move to make electric cars “fun to drive” and in response to Toyota…

TESLA GAVE FORD a “huge gift” in demonstrating how to cut costs on electric car development and production, Ford CEO Jim Farley has said. Ford’s Model E electric division lost $1.3 billion (£1.07bn) in the three months to the end of September as it negotiated a “challenging market” for the Ford Mustang Mach-E SUV as well as investing in new EV products, the company said. The firm is aiming to overturn Model E losses with its second generation of electric vehicles, which it intends to launch from 2025, starting with a new electric pick-up and a seven-seat SUV. “A great product is not enough in the EV business any more. We have to be totally competitive on cost,” Farley told analysts on the company’s third-quarter earnings call. “Tesla actually gave…

BEFORE ALMOST EVERY car became available with air conditioning in the UK, sunroofs were the popular, must-have accessory. Apart from helping with ventilation, people like the feeling of open space they give as a kind of halfway house to a convertible, and they’ve remained popular. Traditional mechanical sunroofs have plenty of drawbacks, though, some of which are becoming unacceptable in today’s sustainability-driven world. One is weight. On a powered sunroof, the materials, guide rails, electric motor and shutter system can add 6kg-8kg at the highest point of the car, where, as well as being a CO2 burden when manufacturers are trying to lose every gram, it’s not great for handling. Squeezing in the roof panel and gear also takes up about 30mm of head room. An alternative is a fixed…

AUTOMOTIVE manufacturers have the best engineers in the world, capable of coming up with ingenious ways of making our cars faster, more efficient and safer using the latest technology. But sometimes their solutions are much more basic. For example, a surprising number of cars have factory-fitted concrete in the chassis. Certain pick-up trucks were too frontheavy when unladen. This caused not only a very bouncy ride but also, more seriously, the rear wheels to lift when braking hard. In extreme conditions, you could tip these trucks onto their nose, especially if the cab’s occupants were sturdily built. The answer was to fill the rear chassis rails with ballast to balance the weight and keep the back end down in a hard stop. Concrete was the cheapest and easiest material. It…

wonder if anyone outside of the world of printer sales is sad that we’re In its annual ‘How We Shop, Live and Look’ report in October, the department store John Lewis said that its sales of home printers had fallen by 26% during the past year. It even conceded that the printer is “resented… a destroyer of homework, voracious devourer of ink” – and it usually tries to be nice enough about things it sells that you will buy one. Is there a more hated domestic device? The printer industry has a horrible reputation for adopting the worst bits of the tech world, trying to control our behaviour by forcing the purchase of specific expensive ink cartridges, even if the colour you need hasn’t run out, automatically updating software to…

The new Volvo EX30 is terrific to drive. It’s a compact electric crossover with strong performance and is at its most entertaining in its mid-range rear-wheel-drive form, more so even than the incredibly rapid four-wheel-drive flagship variant, which can accelerate from 0-62mph in just 3.6sec. Few other electric cars, let alone small crossovers, have the levels of agility, grip, adjustability and engagement that the EX30 offers. And yet I cannot in any honesty recommend you buy this car. I’m tempted to put it more strongly: do not buy a Volvo EX30. It is frustrating to use to well beyond the point of annoyance. I’ll come to why, but let’s begin with the hardware. The EX30 rides on Volvo parent group Geely’s electric SEA platform (like the Smart #1), which offers…

When the Stinger was launched, we called it Kia’s 3 Series. While Bavarian juggernaut levels of sales success didn’t materialise, the Stinger was at least in the conversation and a huge show of confidence and ambition. When the EV9 was revealed, we called it Kia’s Discovery – and now people are already trading in their Land Rovers (and Audi Q7s and even Porsche Cayennes) to get into this new large electric SUV even without having driven one. UK EV9 deliveries start in January when the range-topping, fully loaded £75,995 GT-Line S model lands. The entry-level £64,995 Air and a mid-range GT-Line (tested here) will follow. Steve Cropley drove an early EV9 on Korean roads, but at last we’ve now sampled the car we’ll get in Europe. The EV9 is the…

We like the electric Mazda MX-30 for its eccentricity, but its pithy range and lacklustre pace make it a compromised thing you could only really choose if you had another car. As a riposte to such criticism, Mazda now offers this, the MX-30 R-EV, which uses an 830cc rotary engine to provide power to a 17.8kWh battery. The battery powers an electric motor that in turn drives the front wheels for a (claimed) range of around 400 miles. The pure-EV version remains on sale alongside the R-EV. But will you actually want to go 276 miles further? Or, in other words, how well does this new-age technology work in practice? The MX-30 is a Hawaiian shirt in a world of suits and something that’s distinguishable by what it does have…

The Pendine Museum of Speed – pristine, architecturally exciting and newly opened this year – could normally be expected to dominate any site it occupied. But at the museum’s beautifully situated home on the south-west coast of Wales, the sheer grandeur of the natural surroundings takes precedence, where an impossibly vast expanse of flat, sandy Carmarthenshire beach spreads out in front of Pendine, a small coastal town of around 500 souls. This great natural apron runs for seven miles along Carmarthen Bay, and when the tide recedes, it reaches more than half a mile out to sea. It is truly one of the wonders of the world. But when Sir Malcolm Campbell, first of Britain’s great ‘speed kings’ to use the place, arrived in 1924, he didn’t dwell on the…

MODEL TESTED PREMIUM Price £38,950 Power 268bhp Torque 253lb ft 0-60mph 5.6sec 30-70mph 4.6sec Economy 3.7mpkWh Max DC charging speed 154kW 70-0mph 46.0m Look at the long histories of Porsche and Opel and you’ll find that they still produce much the same kind of cars as they did around their foundation – sporty luxury cars for the former and dependable middleclass transport for the latter. Others have experienced serious mission creep, even in a relatively short time. You won’t find it in the literature for the Smart #1, but the name Smart was originally conceived as a slightly contrived acronym for Swatch, Mercedes, Art. The project originated not with a major car manufacturer but with Swatch, a Swiss maker of affordable watches, which wanted to make a city car that…

“Genesis’s German-based team designed and made the estate specifically for Europe” FIRST REPORT WHY WE’RE RUNNING IT To see if this old-school compact executive estate has new-world charms On our fleet, I’ve gone from running a Citroën C5 X to an Alpina D3 S Touring to a Genesis G70 Shooting Brake. So if you want to know what a niche posh wagon is like, it would appear I’m your man. Still, nicer than yet another SUV, no? It is to me, anyway. Genesis sells some of those too, of course, and with or without electrification, but this G70 Shooting Brake is a compact executive estate of much more traditional style. Back when sales reps ruled the motorways and ‘i’ on the back of a car stood for ‘important’, many more…

FIRST DRIVE Volkswagen ID 7 The Tesla Model 3 rival with a range of more than 400 miles impressed us in prototype form. Now we try the finished version DRIVEN Ferrari SF90 XX Reworked 1016bhp hybrid is Maranello’s most extreme roadlegal model yet INSIGHT Numberplate auction We hunt out bargains at the DVLA’s last-ever in-person auction of private registrations EVERY WEEK ROAD TEST Alpine A110 R Track-honed version of lightweight two-seater meets our road testers USED GUIDE Toyota Auris A used Toyota should be reliable – but that’s not the only reason to buy one SUBSCRIBE autocar.co.uk/subscribe or see p32…

Things develop fast in the motor industry, but this process has been going on since the late 19th century. Cars have gone from being horse-frightening playthings of the wealthy to everyday transport for millions, and the entire motoring infrastructure has evolved to keep up: road signs, speed limits, motorways and the rest. Here, then, is how some of them developed. Motorways The gradual evolution of the motorway makes it hard to pin down the earliest true example. The first limited-access highway was the Long Island Parkway (above), opened in 1908 and only partially surviving today, while the first dual highway (with opposing-direction vehicles separated from each other) was the A8 autostrada between Milan and Varese, opened in 1924. Despite Nazi attempts to pretend otherwise, the A555 between Cologne and Bonn…