Innholdsfortegnelse for March 2017 i BBC Top Gear Magazine

At TopGear we’re always striving to do things a little bit differently. We push for better access, drive a little further, challenge the norm… to ensure we are always in a better place to deliver the best to you, our audience. So, as the rest of the automotive world headed to a desert in Utah to test the all-new Discovery we saved on the plane ticket and set out across Europe to test this fifth generation in the real world. While I’m sure Utah would elicit some stunning scenic backdrops and much opportunity to test the Disco’s capabilities on sand, what we wanted to know was how a car with a global reputation for go-anywhere diversity could cut it in the more extreme variety of surfaces it’s more likely to…

VW Golf 1.5 TSI Evo £21,000 est WE SAY: BRILLIANT NEW ENGINE, BUT THERE ARE SNAGS... The facelifted MkVII Golf arrives into the world two years after the dieselgate scandal shook carmakers, buyers and governments. And wouldn’t you know it? The headline act for MkVII.5 is a new petrol engine. And not even a downsized one. Goodbye, 1.4-litre 4cyl turbo. Hello, 1.5-litre TSI Evo. It’s a 180° trend aboutface that’s more interesting than the new (standard on all models) LED lights, autonomous-in-trafc mode, more assertive bumpers, smattering of fresh alloys and golden shower paintwork. The 1.5-litre four-pot will be available in two tunes: a 130bhp version that’ll account for the majority of sales, and a 148bhp one that won’t, because it’ll cost around £21k and produce a toppier 116g/ km…

Mazda MX-5 RF £23,095 WE SAY: HARD-TOP DRIVES EVER BETTER. PITY THAT IT’S SO BLUSTERY… Buttresses? On an MX-5? RF is a new initialism in the MX-5 family. It stands for Retractable Fastback, which means a new origami pile of aluminium, steel and plastic buttresses that fold the roof away electrically. It takes 13secs, but only happens under 6mph, so if you’re out of the car park already, you’re outta luck. Isn’t the MX-5 supposed to be light and uncomplicated? That’s what we love about the soft-top roadster – it only weighs a tonne. The RF is 45.5kg chunkier, and because that weight has mucked up the centre of gravity, Mazda has stiffened the RF’s ride to cope. But if any car could do with being a bit stiffer, it’s…

Engine 2494cc, 4cyl plus electric turbo, RWD, 220bhp, 221lb ft Performance 60.1mpg, 107g/km CO2, 0–62mph in 8.4secs, 125mph Weight 1620kg £38,995 Half of all Lexuses sold are ISs. Ninety per cent of those are hybrids. Smart decision, shunning diesel for CO2 tax-dodging petrol-electric drive, eh? Public opinion and legislation is being nudged from turbodiesels to the sub-100g/km charms (on 16-inch wheels) of hybrids. So can Lexus’s 3-Series trump the real thing? Nope. The IS remains a gorgeous object, but revisions to its suspension haven’t made it sharper to drive. Too much tyre noise and CVT lethargy, too. It’ll make sense on paper, especially if the government attacks diesels, but it’s a curiously remote car that overpromises with sporty pretensions.…

MORE POWER AND NEW LOOK FOR STANG, HERE IN 2018 1It’s got more ponies Ford has “thoroughly reworked” the 5.0-litre V8, promising that it’ll rev higher and punch harder with better torque, more horsepower and improved fuel efficiency. Torque rises on the 2.3-litre EcoBoost Mustang too, thanks to overboost tech during “wide-open throttle acceleration” (read: flat out). There’s only one tiny snag: Ford hasn’t yet confirmed figures for either variant. Place your bets... 2It’s had a nose job The bonnet and grille have been remodelled with new vents and refined aero, it comes with LED lights front and back, a new rear bumper and optional performance spoiler. The 2.3-litre Stang gets a dualtip exhaust, while the V8 GT gets quad pipes. There’s also more alloy wheels to choose from, new…

1966 Belvedere What’s the backstory on this car? It’s every petrolhead kid’s dream, to build a car that looks almost bone stock on the outside but has the chops to eat any other car on the road when asked. But few of us get to indulge that dream in quite the same way David Meyer has with his 1966 Plymouth Belvedere. This car has a top speed that would make even a Bugatti Veyron sweat. Why did he build it? Two main reasons. It’s the car his dad always wanted but never owned – he’s wanted a ’66 Belvedere since he had a ride in a brand new one in ’66. And the exact same year and model was David’s frst car when he was 16. “I bought it for…

Here in the UK, we don’t do sand dunes that blot out the sun, or rocky wastelands that stretch beyond the horizon. We have rolling green hills, pebbly beaches and trafc jams. All the more remarkable, then, that Sam Sunderland – a 27-year-old from Dorset – managed to keep all his bones intact and beat the world’s best on 9,000km of South America’s gnarliest terrain across Paraguay, Bolivia and Argentina. He topped the time sheets – 33 minutes ahead of his nearest competitor – with a total of 32 hours, six minutes and 22 seconds saddle time on his KTM 450 Rally. Let’s hope he talc’d up. This was Sunderland’s third stab at the Dakar, retiring hurt in both 2012 and 2014. His reaction, then, was understandable: “When I crossed…

e’wre strapping in. I haven’t even started the engine yet. A voice pipes up from the back. “Dad. Just so you know. There’s going to be a rattle. I’ve put my water bottle in the holder.” Out of the mouths of sucklings and all that: our child has absolutely got my number. She’s barely eight, but she’s grown up watching my unhealthy obsession with staunching every audible squeak and rattle from every car I drive. It had never dawned on me that she’d been silently observing as I ran my hand around the console trays, scraped the detritus out of door bins, repeatedly opened the armrest and slammed the glovebox lid, all to try to trace some untoward aural irritant. How I enquire of my darling wife, through unfairly gritted…

If you sit at a neat veneer desk working as an automotive industry marketing analyst, this test will mess with your tidy head. Here are four cars that upset the applecart of “segmentation” you use to populate the cells of your cold, dry databases and spreadsheets. Anyway, here we have two 00-gauge hatches, the VW Up and the Hyundai i10. But in this case they’re not in frst-wheels (or repair-shop discourtesy-car) spec. They’ve got higher trim and more power than that. Then we have a supermini, the C3, the one that we recently named “World’s Best Urbanite” because it’s better furnished and smoother-riding than baby cars, yet still compact enough not to be a pain in the parking space. And fnally the Suzuki Ignis, which is a bit of supermini,…

Price/as tested £23,245/£28,655 Model 1.4 TFSI 150PS Driver Sam Philip Why it’s here What’s the point of Audi’s smallest SUV? 1395cc, 4cyl turbo, FWD, 148bhp, 184lb ft 52.3mpg, 124g/km CO2 0–62mph in 8.5secs, 131mph 1340kg REPORT 3 Hashtag untaggable, runs the Q2’s marketing slogan. Conclusion: not even Audi is quite certain what its smallest crossover is, exactly. SUV? City car? Coupe-thing? All of the above? Even Paul Horrell, the man who understands more stuf about more stuf than anyone else on the planet, cornered me the other day to enquire whether I had, in three months living with the Q2, discovered its raison d’être. I hadn’t. Does it matter? Audi, it seems, regards the Q2’s untaggability as a selling point. Most I’ve talked to feel rather the opposite. If you…

Price/as tested £28,255/£28,800 Model Excel 1.8 Petrol Hybrid Driver Paul Horrell Why it’s here Does the new Prius move the hybrid game on? 1798cc, 4cyl, FWD, 70bhp, 120lb ft 85.6mpg, 76g/km CO2 0–62mph in 10.6secs, 111mph 1375kg HELLO The new Prius sure is a mad-looking thing, but of course no one looks at it and sees its curves. They’re too busy making other assumptions. Driving a Prius in central London is like driving a black Merc E-Class: it just screams hire-and-reward. At certain times of the day, fully one-third of the cars passing the end of my street are Priuses on cabbing duty. I’m very glad of that. This is London’s inner ring road, and the air here is often illegally choked with NOx and micro-soot particulates. Since I walk…

WE SAY: AVENTADOR IS TRANSFORMED BY THE ADDITION OF 4WS Everyone’s ftting fourwheel steering now, aren’t they? Porsche, Mercedes, Ferrari – they’re all at it. We’ll have it on hot hatches soon. Not that you’ll notice – the system is intended to be subtle, the machinations of the hydraulic actuators designed to be unobtrusive. But this is Lamborghini and Lamborghini does not do unobtrusive. Ahead is a slalom test, an easy second-gear weave through cones at 30mph. No stress, just a gentle guide through to get a feel for things. I’ve done it already in the old Aventador, although its presence here is itself unusual. Car frms very rarely wheel out the old model at the launch of its replacement, probably for fear you’ll notice areas where old beats new.…

WE SAY: EVEN THE MOST BASIC FAST GOLF IS ONE OF THE BEST ALL-ROUNDERS VW Golf GTI £27,865 hat’s most interesting about this MkVII.5 Golf GTI is how VW is happy for its role to shift, or rather, to let the sands shift around it. We think of this as heartland hot hatch, don’t we? But with 227bhp, it’s closer in output to a Fiesta ST than a Peugeot 308 GTi, as the wildly, rightly successful AWD Golf R is propelled above 300bhp to duel with future Megane RSs and Civic Type Rs. From being right in the heart of the action, the 227bhp Golf GTI is now, performance-wise, an underdog. Even with DSG on board (six-speed for the standard car, and seven gears in the 245bhp GTI Performance), the…

Mini Countryman Cooper S All4 £26,350 WE SAY: BIGGER THAN EVER, BUT THE JURY’S OUT ON WHETHER IT’S BETTER THAN EVER For a relatively small SUV, the Countryman excites a lot of argument. Endless backchat from the trolls opines that it’s over-styled and too cutsey, it isn’t really a Mini, and it’s another of those pointless crossovers. In striking opposition to that heckling chorus, people beat a path to the dealers, paying through the nose to satisfy their love. The second-generation Countryman will do nothing to bring harmony between those groups. Whatever the old one was, this is more so. Bigger and brassier, yet endowed with more of the qualities that make it satisfying and cheery to own. SO,WHAT ELSEIS NEW? Infniti Q60 2.0T What should I know? Infniti takes…

WE SAY: YES, 7-SEATER MPVS ARE STILL A THING DESPITE SUV BOOM. FORM PLAYS FUNCTION One of these is not like the other... Renault is out to reverse the fortunes of the humble MPV. “If this doesn’t sell, the segment deserves to die,” says Renault’s design boss. Grand Scenic is thus wilfully different from the MPV norm, ie quite cool. The Touran is an MPV done the old-fashioned way. Where function trumps form, where style plays second fiddle to practicality. So while it’s plain to look at and sit in, everything works as it should. How are they for carrying stuff? You won’t fit seven adults, but few cars in this class can claim that. Middle row can be a bit tight, but seats slide about to suit. Fitting kids’…

Yes, it’s another urban, chunky crossover. Weirdly, Citroen refers to its C-Aircross concept as “daring”, despite the fact it’s efectively a close-to-production look at a jacked-up C3-based small crossover. Aimed at the likes of the Nissan Juke, and replacing the C3 Picasso, the C-Aircross’s eventual production version won’t have a cabin this outlandish, or door mirrors so slim. But you’re looking at a pretty-much fnished body, taking the bug-eyed face of the new C3 and adding some blufer stance and Cactus chunkiness. It’s actually a rather handsomely proportioned thing, even if having oblong spokes in round wheels makes us feel a bit funny if we stare for too long. Under the skin, it’s front-wheel-drive, but crossover pretensions must abound to give those marketing wombles something to fll brochures and hashtags…

UP, UP AND AWAY IN AN, UM, HOVERCRAFT Like a tiny version of the Russian ekranoplan monsters, the Hoverwing is essentially a personal GEV (ground efect vehicle) that uses proximity to an external surface (like earth or water) to reduce lift-dependent drag. Put in more simple terms, it’s a hovercraft that can “fy” a couple of feet in the air, “jump” six feet for short distances and generally make you feel like an experimental pilot while only needing a boat licence. Though it’s probably not suitable to start charging around the UK’s road network in one, as stopping distances are somewhat variable. The 19XRW model can manage about 140 miles and carry four people or 450kg over pretty much any surface, and hit nearly 80mph fat out if you’ve got…

01 Adidas Originals sunglasses. Metal-rimmed and layered for timeless two-colour combo retro look. £109; italiaindependent.com 02 Porsche Driver’s Selection men’s jacket. Classic cut and clear, quilted lines mainline the Sixties. £300; shop2.porsche.com/uk 03 Porsche Design Ombré cable sweater. Soft cotton rib knit crew with harmonised colour elements, best deployed during après ski carousing. £325; porsche-design. com 04 Zai Testa ski. Polished walnut veneer gives each ski its own patina while the stainless steel trim enhances rigidity. €4,900; zai.ch 05 Bogner Tobi-T ski trousers. Waterproof and breathable shell to repel moisture, stretchy fabric, zipped leg vents. £520; mrporter.com 06 Porsche Design San Diego sneaker. Denim fabric combined with nappa skin, and single-piece cupsole. Will save an extra tenth on the drive back. £295; porsche-design.com…

You say this schoolrun favourite is good off-road, Land Rover? Well, we'll br the judge of that... STUCK. It had to happen. After ritually abusing the new Land Rover Discovery for many hours over several diferent and increasingly obscure terrains, I’ve fnally pushed it too far and got it stufed up to its axles in what can only be described as brown gloop. Gloop with the consistency of half-set glue. Ah. Embarrassing. Foot-deep clay mud and standard road tyres have fnally defeated us, and it’s not really a surprise – driving into a bog just to see what would happen was a monstrously stupid idea. The problem is that this is a muddy lake somewhere in a backwood in the Netherlands, evening is drawing in, and this looks like just…

"The dark lettering, exhaust tips and wheels add just a flicker of menace" I wouldn’t call it rain per se, more like the air is sagging under several gigatonnes of moisture. There’s barely a puddle, but the roads are ofering all the adhesion of a greased otter, and I appear to have early onset cataracts because visibility is limited to the few feet in front of my face. Out there, somewhere, is the B4560 littered with sheep that skipped the health and safety briefng and other trafc, probably. Yet I’m still getting frothy at the prospect of the three mud-splattered cars in front of me: all turbocharged, all 4WD, all with diferent degrees of insanity hunkered over the rear axle. Three marker posts in the sprawling 911 range. Picking a…

MARK THE SPOT? YOU MIGHT REMEMBER RAYMOND BAXTER FROM OLD TOMORROW'S WORLD CLIPS. But he also few Spitfres in the War. Afterwards he had several BMC works drives in the Monte Carlo Rally. As a BBC commentator, he covered, among much else, Churchill’s funeral and Concorde’s frst fight. Leonardo da Vinci, there’s another prodigiously multitalented individual: anatomist, artist and endlessly creative inventor. If you want to compare the Tesla Model X to a human, this where you must look. No car is more of a polymath than the Model X. It’s extremely fast, and because of its low centre of gravity has the potential to feel genuinely sporty around corners. It can haul a family in three rows of seats. Quietness is astonishing, luxury abundant. Yet even listing this breadth…

Price/as tested £134,520/£150,720 Model V10 Plus Driver Ollie Marriage Why it’s here Is Audi’s everyday supercar still special to live with? 5204cc, V10, 4WD, 602bhp, 413lb ft 23.0mpg, 287g/km CO 0–62mph in 3.2secs, 205mph 1454kg Want to know what it’s like to drive an Audi R8 every day? Besides pretty damn special, I mean. Now maybe it’s just me, but I doubt it, because you care about driving as well. So here’s the thing: the Audi R8 makes me feel guilty. Not because of the speed it achieves up the on-ramp to the M4 at Chieveley Services, or the occasional speed-bump chin scraper, but instead something that applies to any supercar. They are supercars. They work best when doing super stuf. And when you’re not, they remind you constantly, via…

Price £27,425/£30,700 Model Xcellence 2.0 TDI 4Drive Driver Esther Neve Why it’s here Is Seat’s Ateca the new crossover king? 1968cc, 4cyl TD, 4WD, 148bhp, 251lb ft 55.4mpg, 129g/km CO2 0–62mph in 9.0secs, 122mph 1548kg REPORT 4 No two ways about it: I am a hard taskmaster. The Seat has not had a day of rest since it arrived last year. But that’s the way it goes with cars – that’s what you buy them for. So, this issue, the Ateca fnds itself deploying its towbar and getting down with the dirt... One of the stipulations I had for this long-termer was that it should have a towbar. It’s the kind of thing you use infrequently, but if you don’t have one, you really miss it. However, it’s not exactly…

Kia Rio 1.3 T-GDi £17,500 WE SAY: IT’S GOOD VALUE, AND THAT’S PRETTY MUCH ALL KIA THINKS YOU WANT Pleasantly roomy inside, but dull as ditchwater to actually pilot To be blunt, it looks like a full-strength price for a watered-down car. I mean, £17.5k? WTF? That is for the top-spec Launch Edition, but you wouldn’t pick it out in a crowd. Its design, inside and out, is neat but generic. The road noise is an assault on your ears. The ride lacks fuency. It’s not a premium proposition. Good points? The three-cylinder turbo engine gets along well (cheaper unblown fours are available), and there’s a liveliness to the quick steering. But this car appeals to left-brain buyers, so surely Kia would have been better of working on the comfort.…

Honda Civic 1.5 Turbo Sport Plus £25,335 WE SAY: HONDA BRINGS OUT ANOTHER TAKE ON ITS ICONIC HATCHBACK While the rival VW Golf’s evolution has been perfectly orderly since 1974, the Honda Civic – also around since the early Seventies – has meandered all over the map. It’s been tall, low, square, blobby, sharp and soggy. You’ve never known what was coming next. So listen up… This one is global: anyone anywhere buying a 5dr will be keeping the people of Swindon occupied. Its busy design is – and looks – Japanese but the platform was engineered for fast-peddling Europeans. That means a more sophisticated chassis with multi-link rear suspension. The engines are new too, downsized turbos. That’s not all. You’re struck by how much lower and longer it is…

Has there ever been another car so inseparably entwined with one name than the NSX and Aryton Senna? McLaren F1 and Gordon Murray? Maybe. Model T and Henry Ford? Interesting point. Mr Bean and the Mini? Stop it. Remarkably, though, Senna’s input to the NSX only really came at the eleventh hour, after the production car had already been twirled at the ’89 Chicago motor show, but his tweaks to the ride and handling (he requested for the suspension to be 50 per cent stifer among other things) were sufcient to sprinkle Honda’s all-aluminium bodied, mid-engined supercar with magic dust that’s yet to wash of. Honda is famous for taking its time about things, especially fast things, so some 38 years after it was frst revealed, Honda has built a…

IN DETAIL Storage wars Hidden cubbies abound: a secret dash drawer behind the A/C controls, double glovebox and a cupboard under the, erm, cupholders. Intelligent Seat Fold Satisfy your inner geek by pushing the many boot-mounted buttons that electrically fold each seat. They stop automatically if there’s an obstruction. Cage fighting A full suite of “lifestyle” accessories is already available for the new Discovery; pictured is the new “unfavoured child cage”. Activity Key Sports-proof, watch-like band that acts as a key when you're off doing "lifestyle" stuff and don't want to risk dropping the keys into an abyss. Possibly the best place to be when it comes to new Discovery is on the inside. First, it’s a full seven-seater, with second-row seats getting 954mm of legroom and the third row…

HOW DO YOU CREATE A PERFORMANCE SUB-BRAND 1Show you’re serious with elite motorsport In 2014, TopGear magazine’s Ollie Marriage won the Wales Rally GB B2 class in a converted Hyundai i20 road car. Undaunted by this potential peak in its motorsport career, Hyundai gamely battled on in the elite World Rally Championship, taking an altogether more serious i20 WRC to fourth in the championship in 2014, then third in 2015 and runner-up to the dominant (and now absent) Volkswagen team in 2016. The size of the operation has to be seen to be believed – the team garage looks like an entire dealership has been airlifted into the service park by Thunderbird 2. For 2017, it looks as if the Hyundais are going to be properly competitive – i20 driver…

The back seat of a Faraday Future FF91, as it drives itself around a car park. There are several places I expected to be today, but this was not one of them. I expected to sit in a plush executive ofce, to talk to people, to walk around a facility, to see desks and maybe a show car. But this is better – a practical demonstration that Faraday Future could be more than smoke and mirrors. This is why we’ve been let in, of course. Faraday Future seemingly came from nowhere, arrived at the CES show in Las Vegas in January, and claimed that next year it would put into production an all-electric, self-driving superluxury minivan that will out-accelerate any supercar. It’s a tech start-up as much as a car…

Price/as tested £35,745 /£37,830 Model GT Fastback Driver Tom Ford Why it’s here Is the latest gen of US muscle any use in the good ol’ UK? 4949cc, V8, RWD, 410bhp, 391lb ft 20.9mpg, 299g/km CO2 0–62mph in 4.8secs, 149mph 1720kg HELLO “Yep, it’s a new Mustang.” “The 5.0-litre V8. Manual.” “Not as bad as you might think, actually, about 25.” “Just a bit over 35 grand.” These are the answers you need to get printed on a T-shirt if you drive a Ford Mustang. Mainly because everywhere you stop, you will likely be accosted by interested parties who just want a chat. It’s like owning a particularly interesting dog at the park. The opening gambit is usually “Is that a new Mustang?”, which seems sensible. And yes, it is.…

Price/as tested £45,540/£52,606 Model SE LWB 2.0 BiTDI Driver Ollie Marriage Why it’s here Is this a genuine SUV alternative? 1968cc 4cyl turbodiesel, FWD, 201bhp, 332lb ft 44.8mpg, 164g/km CO2 0–62mph in 9.9secs, 126mph 2416kg HELLO Blends in like a penguin on a zebra crossing, doesn’t it? The French Alps didn’t have much snow, the roads were mucky, so both wound up a similar shade of grimy white. Probably not quite grimy enough to disguise the fact that this is not the Ice Cream Van, as the strawberries ’n’ cream Gen6 was afectionately known round here, but a new Caravelle. A new, longer Caravelle. Because the old one was a bit poky. OK, no it wasn’t, but the LWB version features an extra 400mm in the wheelbase, so length leaps…

Price/as tested £24,949 (CV price)/£29,938 Model Warrior Driver Tom Ford Why it’s here It’s the TG project truck! 2442cc 4cyl turbodiesel, 178bhp, 317lb ft 37.7mpg, 196g/km CO2 0–62mph in 11.8secs, 109mph 1860kg REPORT 3 First job on any build is always, always decide what you want to achieve, and then plan how to get there in the most efective manner possible. Unfortunately, this is TopGear, so in reality it involved coming up with 352 mildly-silly-but-fun-looking ideas, and then panicking about not having enough time. There are, however, some basics that can be covered. First I know I’m going to be going somewhere sandy for the L200’s adventure when it’s fnished, so the thinking is to do a kind of Euro-spec pre-runner. Now a “pre-runner” is generally a vehicle designed to – you…

T hat’s the problem with supercars, isn’t it? They’re a bit bloody one-dimensional. I mean, who hasn’t crawled over speed bumps in a £200,000 wedge of carbonfibre excess wincing as the asphalt delaminates its chin and thought, “There has to be a better way...”? Well, if just buying a sensible SUV like everyone else isn’t an option, there is hope. Or more accurately, there was. Behold the Aixam Mega Track, a mid-engined supercar that thinks it’s an SUV – an idea so preposterous and brilliant in equal measure that it’s a wonder we haven’t seen its like since. In fact, that’s not strictly true – in 2013 Audi brought the Nanuk concept to the Frankfurt show (see roundel above...) based on the Italdesign Giugiaro Parcour concept, but even Audi wasn’t…