Innholdsfortegnelse for July 2019 i CAR UK

‘Elon Musk took an intelligent path’ ‘Tesla has been around 11 years, and now they sell more Model S saloons than the flagships from BMW, Audi and Mercedes [in Europe]. It’s a small number but in the segment it’s impressive. For the foreseeable future electro-mobility is more expensive, and that’s why Elon Musk took an intelligent path – these costs are more acceptable to customers in higher segments. But we need a transition [during which] our margins will be smaller and our prices higher.’ ‘Electro-mobility faces many issues’ ‘With electric cars it is not necessarily a case of the earlier the better. We are here now with the EQC (p42) and we’ll have 10 electric vehicles by 2022. Of course, if you use EVs in China now you’ll actually increase…

Autonomous car tech specialists Mobileye and the Ordnance Survey – formed 1791 – have joined forces for an ambitious mapping project. The two plan to map the UK’s road network in much finer detail than ever, to support autonomous cars’ cameras and sensors. The data-collection scheme logs the exact location of manhole covers, cones, lampposts, network boxes, roadworks and – crucially – road markings. The tech will be hugely useful for autonomous-car development, providing more information and allowing the vehicles to respond more naturally to their surroundings. Trials are being carried out through this summer in London, Manchester and the North East. The terabytes of data collected are sent to OS, which then interlinks it with the mapping information in its vast data banks. Mobileye and OS intend to share…

Foot flat down, negotiating sweeping bend after sweeping bend, I’m lost in aural euphoria after just 10 minutes of AMR exposure. This is the last mission for an engine that’s become synonymous with Aston Martin: a naturally-aspirated V12 that sings like Pavarotti and punches like Ali. We live in an age of stringent emissions regs, turbocharging and electrification, and every new car from Gaydon from now on will succumb to at least one of these trends. Which makes this, the Rapide AMR, the spicy run-out special for both the V12 and the marque’s four-door anachronism. As the revs climb, the AMR’s V12 is free of turbo lag, naturally, and devoid of unsightly lumps of boosty torque. Instead its power delivery is rich in predictable, heaving thrust. Peak power isn’t accessed…

Riding in an all-electric Porsche Taycan with chief engineer Stefan Weckbach is like a Marvel fantasy adventure augmented by virtual reality headset and F1 simulator. We leave Porsche’s Weissach test centre, strike out onto the road, and the very first g-force attack feels like a cocaine bomb that hits the brain before the nose. This pre-production Taycan Turbo prototype features a beefy 96kWh lithium-ion battery weighing 650kg. It juices a 215bhp/221lb ft motor on the front axle, and a 402bhp/406lb ft powerplant at the rear. All told it’s a vast 649lb ft of peak torque, or 738lb ft in the 10-second overboost window. In launch-control mode, it’s as though your eyeballs are being squeezed to the back of your skull. Porsche claims just over three seconds from take-off to 62mph,…

Silence is the new luxury. Ask any new parent. Or ask any traditional luxury car maker forced to watch with frustration as Palo Alto upstart Tesla has made inroads into their market share (big ones, in the case of the Model S and European luxury saloon sales), and huge inroads into their cultural space. Since the Model S was introduced seven years ago, Tesla has been the goto luxury EV brand. But seven years ago Range Rover-driving CAR reader Pritpal ‘Prit’ Matharu wasn’t ready to make the switch to electric power. Now he is, and the market has opened up. Manufacturers including Jaguar and Audi finally have Tesla rivals in their showrooms, and others, including Porsche and BMW aren’t far behind. We’ve three e-SUVs along for Prit to consider: Audi’s…

Over nine months and almost 17,000 miles, I’ve been won over by the Mazda 6 Tourer. I didn’t expect to be – and in a weird way I almost didn’t want to, given that the same spectacular change of heart happened with my previous long-term test car, the initially ordinary but soon deeply likeable Peugeot 5008. Maybe I’m just soft. The thing is, others on the team have tried it and liked it, too. Ben Barry, who’s running a very handsome Audi A6 Avant, one of the default options in this class, was impressed. He’d ultimately still choose the Audi, but was surprised how good the Mazda was. Likewise editor Ben Miller was happy, rating the looks, cockpit and low-tech but pleasingly no-nonsense infotainment, when we swapped one weekend. (I…

Dacia Duster Comfort TCe Month 1 The story so far It’s a bargain – that much is obvious. But it is it a good car? + Such good value its rivals tend to be very secondhand; Apple CarPlay - Hardly pretty; takes 11.1sec to get to 62mph Logbook Price £14,400 (£15,045 as tested) Performance 1333cc turbo four-cyl, 128bhp, 11.1sec 0-62mph, 118mph Efficiency 39.2-41.5mpg (official), 37.6mpg (tested), 136g/km CO2 Energy cost 16p per mile Miles this month 1406 Total miles 1406 The Oxford English Dictionary describes juxtaposition as ‘the fact of two things being seen or placed close together with contrasting effect’, but I think a picture of my new Dacia Duster long-term test car and Ben Miller’s BMW 8-M850i side by side would do just fine. That’s the scene in…

Mercedes-Benz X350d 4Matic Month 2 The story so far SUV contender or Nissan Navara with an identity crisis? + Rugged and sumptuous - I’ve lived in smaller houses Logbook Price £47,405 (£56,484 as tested) Performance 2987cc diesel V6, 253bhp, 7.9sec 0-62mph, 127mph Efficiency 31.3mpg (official), 24.8mpg (tested), 237g/km CO2 Energy cost 24.2p per mile Miles this month 781 Total miles 1070 An unintended consequence of owning a truck is that I now appear to be lumbered with endless mundane jobs that previously I never had to countenance, or could easily find an excuse for avoiding. For example, do you know how many bags of horse manure you can fit in the back of an X-Class? Lots, is the answer. It would have been none, if I had a 488 Pista.…

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Change is in the air at Maranello – how else do you explain an all-wheel-drive Ferrari flagship with a V8 engine in place of the V12 that ruled through the F50, the Enzo and the LaFerrari? The SF90 Stradale might be four cylinders short of a dozen but electric power more than makes up the deficit. Yes, the SF90 – a bombastic new halo car for Ferrari’s rejuvenated range and a nod to the Scuderia’s 90-year anniversary – is also Maranello’s first-ever series production plug-in hybrid, not to mention its first-ever all-wheel-drive supercar. ‘One of Enzo Ferrari’s great lessons was not only to know how to read the times, but to anticipate them,’ says Ferrari CEO Louis Camilleri. ‘But the speed at which change is happening doesn’t frighten us; we…

FUTURE-FACING STYLE We’ve already seen a hint of how the EQS will look, in the shape of the F 015 concept (above and right) from 2015. Mercedes designers are understandably cagey about their future EV flagship’s form this early in its gestation. But our sources suggest the EQS will be a quite different partner to the classically dynamic-looking S-Class limo (not peas in a pod like the GLC and EQC). HEAD OF THE FAMILY As part of Mercedes’ plan to unveil 130 electrified cars by 2030, the EQS flagship will be the biggest and most expensive of 10 full-electric models set to debut before the end of 2022, joining the EQC tested in this issue. It’ll sit alongside an EQA hatch, EQB SUV, EQE saloon and full-size EQG 4x4 in…

Vauxhall has lifted the lid on its new Corsa. But instead of revealing the whole line-up of 2020’s replacement for the company’s current best-seller, it’s the electric version that gets first exposure. Want a combustion-engined one? We’ll see it soon, and it will go on sale this winter, before the electric Corsa arrives at Vauxhall dealers next spring. It’ll look just like this Corsa-e, except with a tailpipe and without the electric badging. The Corsa-e relies heavily on technology from Peugeot-Citroën owners PSA, which bought Vauxhall/Opel from GM in 2017. Under the slick, Mark Adams-designed skin is a 50kWh battery and a 134bhp electric motor, good for 0-62mph in 8.1 seconds. Vauxhall claims a 211-mile range, which can be improved in the Eco drive mode. Plug it in to a…

Audi is rolling out its punchy new 3.0-litre V6 diesel faster than you can say ‘particulate filter’ – and boldly replacing previous high-performance petrol models in the process. The engine block is based on the 50 TDI but heavily revised, with an uprated crankshaft, pistons, conrods and oil-temperature management, plus an electrically powered compressor (EPC), more on which later. The engine now puts out up to 344bhp and 516lb ft. That’s a chunky 58bhp and 59lb ft increase over a 50 TDI, but falls 100bhp short of the old V8 in the S6 and S7. Torque, however, is up 111lb ft on the old V8, for a huge midrange kick. The SQ5 also makes the switch back to TDI power after its two-year dabble with a 3.0-litre petrol V6, and…

On a car as high-tech as the hydrogen-fuelled, self-driving Hyundai Nexo, it’s easy to overlook its Blindspot View Monitor. It sounds like the blindspot monitors already fitted to many cars, but is in fact significantly more advanced. In fact, it may prove to be the real standout feature of the Nexo. And when it finds its way on to cars that run on fuel available from more than seven filling stations in the UK, it could be a significant life-saver. For now, BVM is available on just the Nexo, which has it as standard, along with remote parking, forward collision-avoidance assistance and much more, including a two-screen dash that’s so big and clear it will make Mercedes sit up and take notice. Regular blindspot monitoring uses sensors or cameras to…

It’s rated to go cross-country right up to its 106mph maximum velocity Here’s a vehicle that makes no logical sense whatsoever. Based – let’s be blunt – on a piece of farm machinery, this £48,785 Ranger Raptor costs £10k more than the next most expensive Ranger, yet comes with the exact same 210bhp engine and 10-speed automatic gearbox. It’s too heavy to qualify for cut-price light commercial vehicle tax (the main reason you see so many blinged-up trucks on UK roads), and its massively modified chassis and suspension excel at going fast in off-road desert conditions. Something that’s obviously going to be really handy when you’re tackling the mid-summer drizzle on the A303, headed towards the West Country with your surfboards and jet skis strapped to the back. Therefore, having…

For some very committed souls a V10 M5 is an everyday M car. For the rest of us, Munich’s new X2 M35i aims to do the same job with considerably more palatable running costs. The X2 M35i is a high-riding crossover with a transverse turbo four, all-wheel drive and an auto ’box. About as far from a trad BMW sporty saloon as it’s possible to get, then, though BMWs been delivering hit SUVs from unlikely packages for 20 years. Audi and Mercedes already have hot compact crossovers, of course, in the form of the SQ2 and GLA 45. The X2 M35i, priced from £43,435, promises a similarly unlikely balance of everyday usability with performance-division pronk. The 35i is powered by a four-cylinder turbo you’re likely to see in many future…

The 991 is dead – long live the 991. Before the era of the biggest-selling generation of 911 truly ends, Porsche will build a limited run of Speedsters, 1948 of them, hand-crafted in Zuffenhausen. Shown last year as a concept, it’s carried the core elements through to production, with only a few details changing, and no softening of the focus. This is a mouth-watering combination of GT3 engine and 911 R front wings and bonnet, with styling that echoes Porsche’s first Speedster of 1954 and a lack of flab that shames some of the other Speedsters that have appeared at odd intervals in between. The naturally-aspirated 4.0-litre engine drives the rear wheels through a six-speed manual gearbox, the hood (replacing the concept’s tonneau) is manually operated, and the steering wheel…

MERCEDES-AMG A35 A very brawny, very brainy Benz There’s no doubting the AMG’s grip, nor the fact that the Honda can’t keep up Like the back of my hand. If I’ve been down this road once I’ve been down it a thousand times, albeit on a motorcycle; flowing between the verges, climbing forward over the front wheel to keep it down over the lumps, flies popping on my visor like fat rain in a summer storm. Hard work, then? Of the very best kind, the bike always accelerating, braking or turning, the delicate but critical issue of just how much you can ask of its two tyres all-consuming. The same road in the new Mercedes-AMG A35 is a piece of cake, the AMG’s ludicrous traction, power and poise making a…

Bentley design director Stefan Sielaff likes to look back before moving forward. So when he and his team began conceiving Bentley’s new high-performance luxury saloon, the next-generation Flying Spur, they studied the car that started the bloodline. ‘We always look to our heritage before designing new cars,’ says the affable Bavarian, at 57 just five years younger than that first Flying Spur. ‘It would be a big mistake to blow this away and ignore 100 years of history. Customers expect vehicles that are true to Bentley’s heritage. Those old cars also have a lot to teach us.’ It’s easy to see similarities between the 2020 Flying Spur – sales begin early next year – and the S1 Flying Spur, unveiled in 1957 (this example was built in 1958). On both…

Do you care about production car lap records? Because I do. Oh yes – I care a lot. How much the manufacturers care probably depends on whether or not they hold a record. When Alfa Romeo set a new SUV production lap record at the Nürburgring in 2017 with its hot Stelvio Quadrifoglio, it probably thought the Green Hell was the most important yardstick any car could be measured by. When Mercedes beat Alfa’s time a year later (with the ludicrous AMG GLC 63), I imagine Alfa decided the Nürburgring was irrelevant. Still, the itch to break records spread from Alfa’s HQ in Italy over to Alfa Romeo UK, which recently decided to set its own lap records at some British circuits. One of those would be Silverstone: the car…

THE ENEMY SPY Daniel Somerton drives one of the Fiesta ST’s mortal enemies, a Renault Sport Clio, and is also an engineer at Renault’s F1 team. What does he make of the Clio’s adversary? THE PROSPECTIVE BUYER Chris Murat has been reading CAR for years 13, rides a Ducati at weekends and runs a Skoda Octavia vRS in the week – but wonders if the ST might be enough fun to justify downsizing. THE CONVERT The more time deputy features editor James Taylor spends with the Fiesta ST, the more he’s convinced it’s an all-time hot-hatch great. Will the readers agree? THE JDM ENTHUSIAST Mechanical engineer, part-time writer and full-time car enthusiast Luke Roberts has a taste for naturally-aspirated Japanese performance cars from the ’90s – but he’s intrigued by…

Shredded Wheat steering: gets the job done but with zero flair Skoda Kodiaq Edition Month 7 The story so far Skoda’s biggest SUV, here in 2.0-litre diesel form, spends most of its life commuting up and down the A1M, with weekend parole spent ferrying the kids around town + Decent build quality; easy access to Spotify - Ride firm in the rear seats Logbook Price £37,629 (£39,235 as tested) Performance 1998cc diesel four-cyl, 187bhp, 8.8sec 0-62mph, 129mph Efficiency 49.6mpg (official), 36.7mpg (tested), 151g/km CO2 Energy cost 16p per mile Miles this month 2821 Total miles 15,242 As the Kodiaq barrels across the North Yorkshire Moors, it dawns on me that Skoda’s 4x4 shares traits with the stereotypical resident of God’s own county: blunt, obdurate, thrifty. The Kodiaq is signing off…

By stretching the A-Class’s platform to the absolute limits, Mercedes has finally created the baby G-Class that’s been rumoured for years. Its new, chunky GLB is the exact opposite of the ungainly, not-that-practical and long-in-the-tooth GLA tall hatch. It might even take the shine off the new (and actually quite good) B-Class by offering the option of two more seats, that hip SUV shape and a wheelbase some 100mm longer. Some of the outrageous details from the concept – namely the integrated overhead foglights and 17-inch off-road tyres –have been whisked away. But the boxy dimensions are a stark differentiator from the rest of Merc’s sleek and rounded small car range. The lofty glasshouse makes for plenty of headroom and, at 560 litres, the five-seat version has a larger boot…

Illustration Chris Rathbone Obsessed with cars from childhood, almost everything Tetsuya Tada’s ever done has served as preparation for his biggest achievement: convincing one of the world’s biggest car makers that it should build sports cars again. The GT86 owes its existence to him, as does the long-awaited new Supra and Toyota’s ongoing presence at the top of modern endurance racing. Perhaps perversely, Tada’s ascendency began with the humble Raum, a five-seat mini-MPV. In the mid-’90s, Tada got the call to work with legendary Toyota engineer Ichiro Suzuki. Like Luke Skywalker, the young Tada expected to get straight into the sexy stuff. And like Yoda, Suzuki realised his new and impetuous apprentice needed tempering. The Raum taught Tada a couple of key lessons: that the numbers must always add up,…

So the summer holiday’s booked and you’ve saved literally dozens of pounds by making the family shoe-horn themselves into a Ryanair seat for that four-hour flight to Fuerteventura. You’d thus be entirely justified in buying yourself a pricey traveller’s watch to keep track of the time back home: ignore the fact that the Canaries are in the same time zone. We featured the Platonic form of travel watches – the Rolex GMT – in our round-up from the Basel watch show in the last issue. Here are three more takes on a popular theme. 01 I Bamford GMT £1100 George Bamford started the Bamford Watch Department to customise Rolexes, Zeniths and the like, making the merely expensive both unique and unaffordable. His own-brand range has the same flair but lower…

Performance hybrids and turbocharging are sending power outputs soaring, giving cars with a single driven axle an increasingly hard time. Fortunately, electric power opens the door to easy, space-efficient all-wheel drive. Theo Gassman: ‘Conventional all-wheel drive still constitutes 90 per cent of the market, and we are still expecting a growth in the popularity of these mechanical systems for a decade at least. But while so-called e-axles – four-wheel-drive cars in which the engine drives one axle and an electric motor the other – won’t predominate until 2030, they are set to become increasingly popular.’ Volker Marx: ‘As we see from many existing battery-electric cars, electric motors on each axle are a relatively easy way to provide very efficient all-wheel drive. By the same token, an e-axle in an all-wheel-drive…

Difficulty starting conversations? Need an ice-breaker? Try driving a Toyota Supra. Everybody wants to stop and talk to you about it. ‘So much better than it looks in the pictures!’ the gent walking his dog down Bala high street proclaims, telling us he’s been considering one as a replacement for his TVR. ‘Does it still have the 2JZ engine?’ the knowledgeable-beyond-his-years lad in Ffestiniog wants to know. And most others are simply curious to know what on earth it is. ‘I haven’t seen many Toyotas like this ,’ the middle-aged biker in Betws-y-Coed murmurs. Which sums up this new sports car’s purpose, and its challenge: to stir interest in Toyota as a brand, while also being considered the right stuff by the cult of fans still in thrall to the…

Familiar faces I read the latest (May) issue of CAR for the first time since the late ’80s. My earliest recollection of Gavin Green was as I drove by him on the Thruxton circuit during a Renault 5 Turbo race event. Gavin was in a hurry and went off into the weeds, his car on its side for the rest of the race. I finished last, but did at least finish! Tortoise and hare? A few years later, my phone rings. ‘Charles March here, I understand from the BARC that you are a dealer in motor racing memorabilia.’ ‘Yes, that’s true. How can I help?’ ‘Well, I’m planning a hillclimb event here at Goodwood House in the summer and I would like to have some dealers here to sell to…

Think Audi Q8, BMW X6, Mercedes GLE Coupe. Then think Porsche Cayenne, until now more Stuttgart’s answer to the Q7, X5 and GLE than a genuinely sporty SUV with a capital S. It took Weissach R&D one full Cayenne life-cycle to conclude that Porsche also had to create the kind of machine that’s proved such a licence to print money elsewhere. When Matthias Müller was still in charge, two SUV coupes were in the making: a smaller one based on the facelifted Macan and a bigger, Cayenne-based creation. The Macan-based remix may yet resurface in 2024, as a version of the upcoming Audi Q6 e-Tron built on the electric PPE architecture. But you can order your Cayenne Coupe now. In the metal the low-roof Cayenne is in-your-face: wider, ground-hugging, arguably…

On weekdays, Mike Flewitt wears a suit and tie and sits behind a desk in McLaren’s very white temple of technology in Surrey. But today he’d rather talk about racing his Lotus Elan, his historic Formula 2 car (a McLaren, unsurprisingly), about his 570S GT4 sports racer, and how he’s looking forward to driving at the Arizona Motorsports Park in the new McLaren 600LT Spider. Running a car company is Mike Flewitt’s job and his life. But racing is his love. As it is for his wife Mia, who joins us in Arizona. Mia is reigning champion of the FIA Pure McLaren GT Series, the one-make championship for McLaren owners, driving the Flewitt family’s 570S GT4. She won 2018’s inaugural series, winning five of the 12 rounds, including victories at…

Given that this is not the season within which F Giles flails the local hedgerows into some semblance of submission while showering the roads with a resultant thorny detritus which he steadfastly refuses to clear up, it comes as something of a surprise to discover that the CR-V has decided to celebrate the springing of, um, spring with a slow puncture. Happily, we spotted this before enough air had bled and fled to effectively ground the rim. Nonetheless, the dermis of modern tyre sidewalls is so pathetically flimsy that risking even a partially deflated drive any further than you could fling a wellington boot is likely to unleash carefully orchestrated tooth-sucking at the local tyred and exhausted centre, followed by the inevitable ‘It’s buggered, mate’. Fortunately, changing a wheel is…

Hyundai Santa Fe Premium SE Month 3 The story so far Plenty of miles added to the odo, but none requiring a press of the diff-lock button yet + Quiet motorway cruiser, reasonable economy - Poor turning circle, sharp door bottoms Logbook Price: £43,985 Performance: 2199cc turbodiesel four-cyl, 197bhp, 9.4sec 0-62mph, 127mph Efficiency 38.7mpg (official), 35.8mpg (tested), 164g/km CO2 Energy cost 16.5p per mile Miles this month 2298 Total miles 8647 Fifteen years separate the two cars in the picture above, my long-term Santa Fe, and my new, old, Honda CR-V. Well, 15 years as far as the Honda is concerned. For Hyundai – and for the SUV genus – it might as well be 50. When the first-generation Santa Fe was battling second-gen CR-Vs like mine in the early…

Cupra Ateca 2.0 TSI Month 1 The story so far The Ateca kickstarts Seat’s standalone Cupra brand, but can this warmed-over family SUV really establish an all-new performance arm? + Refined, punchy straight-line performance; family versatility - Design; lacks character and flair; 27.1mpg; uncompromising ride quality Logbook Price £35,915 (£35,915 as tested) Performance 1984cc turbo four-cylinder, 296bhp, 5.2sec 0-62mph, 153mph Efficiency 34mpg (official) 27.1mpg (tested), 168g/km CO2 Energy cost 20.5p per mile Miles this month 1184 Total miles 1328 I like Seats a great deal. When my children were toddlers I purchased an Alhambra. With its seven full-sized seats, sliding rear doors and generously appointed cabin it was – and, I’ll argue, still is – the finest family car money can buy. Our current family car is an Altea XL.…

Chris Teagles ‘I use my R8 every day and adore it –the design has aged really well, it’s lovely to drive, and sounds great too’ SENSIBLE SUPERCAR I’d loved Audi R8s for years when I saw this 2008 model at a dealership in Birmingham. I actually had a Lamborghini Gallardo on my wish list too – both cars share a lot under the skin – and the dealership coincidentally had one of each up for sale. They steered me towards the R8, though, saying people get jealous of Lamborghinis and it might get keyed. The idea of lower running costs, a nationwide dealer network and being a little less flash all appealed and ultimately meant the R8 won me over. PERFECT DAILY DRIVER I think the Audi probably was the…