Innholdsfortegnelse for December 2024 i CAR UK

It’s amazing how quickly it starts to seem natural to be swooping around Italy in a menacing-looking Lamborghini, enjoying the fine handling and the appreciative gaze of onlookers, while the car in question is making no noise. The Urus has gone hybrid in a very accomplished manner, its e-motor superbly integrated with the twin-turbo V8, and there’s enough electric-only range to allow a lot of our journey to be done in silence. The Urus launched in 2018 to a chorus of despair about supercar makers sullying their heritage with muddy SUVs. Six years on it’ll still raise hackles but you can’t argue with the business logic: the company’s total sales have nearly trebled to well over 10,000 a year, with a leap in revenues, while profits soared to €723 million…

Faster, grippier but still with all the niceties you’d hope to find on a car costing this much, the GT 63 Pro is a harder version of Affalterbach’s most practical supercar yet. It’s made to tackle trackdays, but won’t need towing there. Time to focus. I’m at Ascari, and it’s only just stopped raining, which is making me wonder about the wisdom of the Pirelli Cup 2R tyres. As we finish the out lap, I dial the powertrain to Race mode and I stretch the 4.0-litre, twin-turbocharged V8’s legs for the first time, using all 604bhp and 627lb ft. That’s an extra 27bhp and 37lb ft over the standard 63. As the pit wall zips past to my right, the 10.9sec 0-124mph sprint time suddenly feels very real and very…

In real-world spot-the-gap-and-go situations the acceleration feels far stronger this time The BMW M5 has undergone a seismic change. Or maybe that should be sizemic, because its kerbweight is now a colossal 2435kg, or 540kg up on the outgoing M5. That figure raised eyebrows so high I briefly remembered what it was like to have hair on my temples, but BMW M boss Frank van Meel recently hit back at critics who have rubbished the M5 based purely on spec numbers, and not driving impressions. The extra weight is largely down to the decision to make the latest version a plug-in hybrid. We’ve come to Germany to find out how the £111,405 M5 saloon has been affected by electrification and its by-products. Not that driving impressions can give the whole…

Mireval is Goodyear’s largest proving ground in Europe, handling tyre testing for just about every vehicle on the planet. Remi Granier, head of the facility, is the man to explain the science behind the black circles. Dedicated ‘electric car tyres’ don’t mean a great deal… … or not to Goodyear, at least. You’ll have probably seen bespoke ‘EV’ tyres labelled by some brands but Goodyear says the rolling resistance of all its tyres is low enough to suit an EV, and it’s already developed more wear-resistant tyres to cope with the increased weight. ‘All our tyres are designed for EVs, and they all have a low rolling resistance,’ says Granier. Sunny side up ‘Guys, it’s raining, let’s get out testing the tyres in the wet’. Not a chance. Goodyear prefers…

‘The 4 and 5 are reactivating old memories – they make electric cars more emotionally relevant’GILLES VIDAL, RENAULT DESIGN CHIEF 01 Because Renault needs another design icon Renault design rarely fails to surprise – often delighting, occasionally dismaying – but it rarely looks backwards. This is the progressive car company that pioneered so many new concepts over the years, from the Espace (the first mainstream MPV in Europe) to the Twizy (ahead of the EV-lite curve), with fascinating diversions through bustle-back Meganes and the roomy Avantime and Vel Satis, via some of the best hot hatches ever, including the 5 Turbo and coveted Clio Williams. What a roll call! Which makes it all the more intriguing that Renault has picked the old guard, not the avant garde, to inspire its…

After the hulking mass of my last car – a Mini Countryman JCW – this Cooper SE has the cuddliness of a week-old puppy. It’s 575mm shorter and almost 100mm lower than the Countryman. And unlike the bigger car it has the proportions that made the original Mini such a hit. We had an R53-generation Mini in the office the other day, a reminder that in the 20-plus years since BMW started building Minis it has managed to keep to the script on the three-door. The latest one has a bit more bulk in the sides, so needs bigger wheels, but the proportions are right. This is the electric Mini, hence the ‘E’ in SE, built in China on an all-new platform; the petrol car (Cooper or Cooper S) is…

There are two big things I’d change about the Swift – the way it looks and the way it rides. There’s not much that can be done to ease the Swift’s geeky look, but the chassis would definitely benefit from a polish. Arguably a little supermini doesn’t really need to handle, simply because the target market isn’t fussed about engagement on a trip to the shops. Fair enough (though Mini is a star witness for the prosecution), but the ride should be better. The Swift bumps around in town, which I can kind of tolerate because those trips are typically shorter, but it never settles on the motorway, to the point that I’ve come to dread longer journeys. Suzuki Swift 1.2 Hybrid Ultra Month 3 The story so far Swift…

Growing up, I was taken to school in a string of Peugeot and Renault family cars. I still recall the baby-blue Renault 4 we had, with the dash-mounted, umbrella-handle gear-change that seemed so weird and wonderful even then. But what really staggers me – now I’ve grown up and had kids of my own – is how we actually went on holiday in these tiny cars. Nowadays, a Land Rover Defender 130 is barely big enough to fit all the expeditionary equipment, food rations, wardrobes, wellies, electronic hardware, charging cables and salt-and-vinegar-flavoured snacks needed for even a brief weekend away. My earliest holiday memory is of heading off for a week in the Lake District in a burgundy Renault 16, that ground-breaking, award-winning hatchback of the 1960s and ’70s. Our…

It’s down on power compared to its arch rival, but quicker where it matters The recently revised S3, now with a bunch of RS3 chassis tech, has been given a very positive reception. So what’s the point of the more expensive RS3? Especially as in its newly refreshed form it doesn’t have any more power than before… The answer is under the bonnet. The engine has a unique tone, and the standard-fit sports exhaust, reworked to be more vocal at lower revs, emits an intoxicating sound. And although that magical 395bhp 2.5-litre turbocharged unit – the only five-cylinder engine currently on sale – hasn’t gained any bhp, you can now make better use of it, as Audi has fine-tuned the torque splitter to minimise understeer and allow quicker corner exit…

Mmm… maybe not Your interview with the neer busy signing off the new M5 in Wales sounded like one of those unfortunate instances of a good answer to a bad question. Maybe not as egregious an example as the much-mocked AMG C63, but it’s on the same slippery slope. Surely someone in the chain of command should have said, quite early in the process: no, stop, this is clearly going to end up too big, too heavy and too expensive; we’re not building Rolls-Royces here, we’re making high-performance versions of regular cars. But if that happened, they were clearly over-ruled by someone higher up. It’s frustrating that so many talented people, with amazing resources at their disposal, aren’t being encouraged to work within more realistic parameters. And while I’m at…

Charles Leclerc is delighted. ‘We’ve finally done a car with a “normal” driving position,’ he says. To understand just how pin-sharp the new Ferrari hypercar should be when it arrives in late 2025, it’s worth taking a moment to consider ‘normal’ in this context. Leclerc is an F1 driver and a man used to sitting in a car like it’s his bathtub and his feet are on the taps. To deliver the fiercest road car it’s ever made, Ferrari has, it claims, made no compromises – even down to a driving position to make its F1 drivers feel at home. The F80 is that rarest of things – a Ferrari road car that perches at the very top of the canopy, a roughly once-a-decade occurrence. There are only five previous…

Today is Friday, it’s sunny and I am at Santa Pod raceway for the venue’s annual Dragstalgia festival, where I’m leaning against Glenda Thompson’s immaculate Dodge Charger trying to restore my credibility after wrongly identifying the Charger as a ’68 when of course any fool knows that it is a 1969 model because of the grille divider and rectangular brake lights. This year’s Dragstalgia is a particularly special event because it is celebrating 60 years of drag racing in the UK. A marquee has been erected in the paddock and in it are displayed a selection of vintage and historic dragsters. At one end of the tent a very sprightly 84-year-old gentleman is sitting in a deckchair next to three dragsters that bear his surname. He is Alan Allard and…

Have you ever wondered what happens when an electric car needs a service? Judging from Google search data, many Brits think EVs don’t ever need maintenance, which is mildly worrying. So when the warning light flashed up on our Abarth’s dashboard, that triggered a dive into the topic. Just what is it that mechanics do when they service a car with no engine? We were surprised how early the 500e needed its first round of maintenance. A scant 4311 miles were showing on the odometer, but a look in the manual confirmed that the all-electric hot hatch does indeed need an inspection annually or after 9000 miles, whichever comes soonest – exactly the same service intervals as its combustion equivalent. It’s perhaps a reflection of the small battery and limited…

Some routes make life tough for EV owners. If you drive regularly from London to the West Country at peak times you’d still have good reason not to buy an EV. For us, the regular big schlep is Sussex to the Peak District: 210 miles. We’re on our fifth EV now: some needed to divert to Rugby to charge; the others required us to steal the relatives’ electricity via an agonisingly slow three-pin connection if we wanted to get home. Not the Skoda: a real-world range of 270 miles leaves us a comfortable 60 on arrival, and a new bank of a dozen 300kW Osprey chargers in Chesterfield means we can fast-charge en route. Our journey is now sorted: hope yours is too, soon. Skoda Enyaq Coupe iV vRS Month…

This is going to be an interesting one. BYD, or Build Your Dreams, is a relative newcomer to Europe. The Chinese brand has only really been actively selling cars in this part of the world for the last year or so, its range starting with the in-offensive Atto 3 SUV then the Golf-sized Dolphin. This, though, is the heavy hitter. In case you’ve missed our previous dalliances with this car in these fine pages, the Seal has come closer than anything to beating Tesla’s Model 3 on its own terms. While BYD might be new to Europe, it’s a household name in China. It started as a battery maker, then moved onto electronic consumer goods – so much so that it now manufactures half of the world’s iPads. BYD made…

Not long ago, recruiting CAR readers with EVs wasn’t easy. Now you can’t move for them. Martin Fitz-Gibbons, a journalist, runs a pre-owned Kia e-Niro. Dean Clarke, head of motor sales at finance firm Charles & Dean, has just signed on the line for a Honda e:Ny1. And teacher Emma Hollander has the E-2008 on her shortlist to replace her Ford Ka. Martin’s first into the hot seat, keen to see how the Peugeot compares with his Kia. Expecting an easy win for the newer E-2008, I’m pleased to see it bag some early points as Martin threads it down a twisty stretch of B-road. ‘Yep, impressive. It turns in nicely, grips well and I can feel what it’s doing. I like the steering; I guess it’s a slightly quicker…

Porsche has filed patents for an engine cycle with two combustion events for every six strokes (or three rotations of the crankshaft). They call it a 2 x 3-stroke. I’d humbly suggest it’s a 4 + 2-stroke. The conventional four-stroke cycle has phases comprising induction, compression, expansion, and exhaust (with combustion occurring just before expansion). The new cycle drops a two-stroke event in, enabled by a pretty complex crankshaft arrangement that allows two different top and bottom dead centre positions during the same cycle. It now includes second compression and expansion events after the first expansion phase: the two-stroke bit. Except it’s even more complex than that… In its patent illustrations, Porsche has shown a ‘scavenging’ phase between the first expansion and second compression as the unusual crankshaft arrangement comes…

The (barely) hot hatch Mini wheeled out John Cooper’s grandson (and racing driver) Charlie to pull the covers off the first ever electric John Cooper Works model. Quite a big deal, then. And yet the result is pretty damp. Mini has already stolen its thunder on the design front, having offered broadly the same thing on the Cooper S Sport trim for the last year or so. And the expected power increase over the Cooper S? About 40bhp, with most of it relegated to a time-limited boost button. Punchy at £38k, and makes the Alpine A290 sound more tasty. Too much? A combustion version with 225bhp is available from £31k. The SUV disruptor BYD’s new Sea Lion 7 is here to make you wonder whether that Polestar 3, Audi Q6…

Way ahead of the curve when it brought electric power to the mainstream with the first Leaf, Nissan has drifted to EV also-ran status in the decade and a half since. It’s a symptom of a wider malaise that has seen Nissan become overshadowed in Europe by its Alliance partner, Renault, which is dynamic and on-trend by comparison. But behind the scenes, squads of Nissan engineers, researchers and designers in Europe and Japan have been flat-out, and soon we’ll see the results. The brand has a manufacturing strategy for its electric motors, ensuring many of the same parts are used between future battery-electric cars and the E-Power range-extender models – nothing to do with Renault’s E-Tech Hybrid system – rather than buying parts in. ‘The Alliance is not the same…

Gearbox in manual mode, exhaust set to anti-social and both double-glazed front windows open a few inches. Just listen to that: surfing the midrange gives a delightful baritone that rises and falls as straight becomes corner becomes straight. This is going well. May it never end – although in fact our time with the Vanquish will be quite short, so we’re determined to make the most of it. The newly developed 5.2-litre V12 is boosted by twin turbochargers and revs to 7000rpm, a figure made to look oddly small by recent arrivals from Italy. Ferrari and Lamborghini still rule the roost for sonic savagery, especially at the top end, yet this is leagues better than the Bentley W12 (RIP) and crucially, the AMG V8 used in Aston’s own DB12. Chances…

Isn’t it just so cuuuuuuute! You just want to pinch the new Aceman’s plump wheelarches and tell it what an adorable little EV it is. It’s baby hippo Moo Deng in car form. And THAT is how Mini sucks you in. Given just how large the Countryman has become, Mini needed something to sit below that and above the three-door Cooper, to increase the chances of people with kids or dogs finding a Mini that suits them. It sits on the EV platform co-developed by BMW and Great Wall, as used in the latest Cooper E and SE, with slightly inflated bodywork and some back doors. The Aceman is around 200mm longer and a smidge taller than the Cooper, with most of the additional space being deployed behind the B-pillar.…

Scroll back through my diary and there it is: ‘30-31 Oct 2014: LaFerrari vs P1’ – the last time CAR tested Ferrari and McLaren hybrid hypercars. I left a family holiday to collect LaFerrari from Maranello, ready to join CAR’s Chris Chilton waiting in the hills to the south with a McLaren P1. Time was tight, but Ferrari insisted on a tech deep-dive and lap with test driver Raffaele de Simone. To be fair there were important differences between the two. The Italian car used a 789bhp naturally-aspirated V12, harvested braking energy and made 950bhp total, but never cut its V12. The British car combined a 727bhp turbocharged V8 with a greater percentage of e-power for 903bhp all in. It offered up to 6km emissions free. Both were rear-wheel drive and…

A subscription to CAR gives you incomparable industry access, breaking news, must-read tests and immersive long-form stories. CAR covers everything from racing to technology, superminis to supercars – and it does so with the best writers, photographers and designers in the business. PRINT+ 6 ISSUES FOR £19.99 Get your first six months of a CAR Print+ Subscription for only £19.99* this festive season. Includes ✓ FREE UK delivery to your door each month ✓ Instant digital access to the latest & previous issues via the CAR app ✓ Access to rewards, discounts and prizes ✓ Enjoy the ‘CAR Supercharged’ e-newsletter from the Editor every month ✓ Easily control the text size, use audio mode to listen to each issue in the app! VISIT greatmagazines.co.uk/car OR CALL 01858 438 884 LINES…

The lock and unlock beeps the Stelvio emits are the central locking equivalent of Dom Joly’s classic ‘I’M ON THE PHONE’ routine, and it’s driving me beeping mad. I’M LOCKED! it yells to my neighbours when I try to slink in at 1am. NOW I’M UN-LOCKED AGAIN BECAUSE HE FORGOT HIS PHONE! NOW I’M LOCKED AGAIN! I get that some owners find the beeps reassuring, but it’d be nice to have the option to turn them off. And why are they so loud? There’s no menu setting that silences the din (one long beep for unlock, two for lock) but Google tells me it could be fixed with a proper workshop code-reading device. Alfa Romeo Stelvio Quadrifoglio Month 5 The story so far Loud colour and loud exhaust; louder alarm;…

In keeping with the i5’s mind-melting tech, I’ve upgraded our wallbox and energy supplier. Out with the Chargemaster unit and Ovo Energy, and in with a new Ohme Home Pro unit, and Octopus Energy’s EV-friendly Intelligent Go tariff. This ensures the BMW is charged when electricity is at its cheapest – 7p/kWh versus the standard 23.71p/kWh – irrespective of the time of day. Using the Ohme app I can set the smart Home Pro unit to charge the i5 on the cheapest juice available, ready to go at a specific time. The day it was installed the i5 was topped up with 37.4kWh at a cost of £2.62. That would have been £8.87 on the standard tariff. BMW i5 eDrive40 M Sport Pro Touring Month 2 The story so far…

TOP 5 HOT HATCHES HONDA CIVIC TYPE R THE GOOD: Feel, feedback, focus: a phenomenal full-sized hot hatch THE BAD: Now £50,050 for a front-drive hatchback with barely any more power than before THE UGLY: Probably the last of its kind; good job it’s one of the best THE ONE TO BUY: There’s just the one model; £529 a month on a three-year PCP with an £11k deposit TOYOTA GR YARIS THE GOOD: A modern-day rally homologation special that’s thrilling to drive THE BAD: Road noise like a death-metal gig; joke rear seats THE UGLY: Long waiting list, even with some versions priced at £60,000, although it starts at £44,250 THE ONE TO BUY: Now has optional auto but go for the manual HYUNDAI IONIQ 5 N THE GOOD: Electric gets…