Innholdsfortegnelse for May 2017 i BBC Top Gear Magazine

After last issue’s £2.5m, 1,479bhp Chiron excitement, this month it’s time for something a little more real-world. Sorry. We can all admire the Chiron’s capabilities and boundary-redefining engineering, but it will be the preserve of the exclusive few. In stark contrast, the stars of this month’s cover represent the diversity of the fastest-growing sector in planet car, the SUV. Last year, SUVs accounted for more than a quarter of new-car registrations in Europe, while globally they were even more prolific. Car manufacturers keen to capitalise on this booming segment have reacted and created an SUV to target every possible buyer, and there’s more to come. The SUV market has become so fundamental to an automotive brand’s future success that even those for whom creating an SUV would have been laughable…

S ay hello to Sedric, the Volkswagen Group’s idea of a self-driving car. The name? Not an homage to Japanese saloons with posh old Christian names: Cedric, Cressida and Gloria, but a German English joke acronym. Sedric is, simply, a condensing of self driving car. Without a steering wheel or pedals, the engineers and designers have been freed to do a ground-up rethink of the shape and packaging. The doors of this rounded box open by sliding apart from the centre, and once inside you sit face to face. The wheelbase is similar to an Up, but the cabin space is like a Passat. The vision is, at some point in the future, you’d summon Sedric with a button on an internet-of-things key fob. The car comes to where you…

H ow lairy should a hot hatch be? This is the question Hyundai is currently pondering. Specifcally its stability control engineers, who are tucked up in Arjeplog in deepest, snowiest Sweden. We’ve joined them for a day of testing the new i30 N, the Korean company’s frst bona fde hot hatch. Hyundai’s given us fast i30s before, but they’ve been a standard car with a mildly tuned engine. The car you see here is proper. Still front-drive, but with its suspension components refreshed, and new, big brakes up front. Plus an ESC system that’s undergoing very thoughtful development. “Turn the system of and you can play as much as you like – the driver must catch it,” says Alexander Eichler, head of Hyundai’s fast car development. “It’s important to have…

P SA has bought the Opel and Vauxhall brands, their whole range of cars, and a group of plants all across Europe that build cars and powertrains. For that it paid about £1.1bn. Together with bank BNP Paribas, it also bought Opel’s bank, which lends people money to buy and lease the cars. That part of the deal earned GM another £800m. The deal is all about the benefts of being bigger. Combined current sales of Opel and Vauxhall to Peugeot and Citroen and DS make the new entity the number two car conglomerate in Europe, behind only the multi-brand VW Group. So GM in Detroit has found a way to be rid of its European arm, which has lost money for 15 years. The logic is this: all the…

Everything Bremont does has an aeronautical bent, such is its founders' love of historic aircraft. Even its Supermarine dive watch collection, which is named for the aircraft manufacturer that produced the Spitfire. The 40mm S301 is new for 2017. It has a unidirectional ceramic rotating bezel and, like all watches in Bremont's core range, a COSC-certified movement. From £2,995; bremont.com OMEGA SEAMASTER 300 60TH ANNIVERSARY LE A homage to the CK2913 Seamaster 300 - the first 'Professional' Seamaster aunched in 1957. Can be had as part of a special set, alongside anniversary editions of the Speedmaster and Railmaster. £TBC; omegawatches.com TAG HEUER AUTAVIA A reissue of the classic 'Rindt' Autavia, designed in 1966 and made famous by the 1970 F1 World Champion. Size has swollen by 3mm to 42mm, there's…

Mercedes-AMG GT C Roadster £143,245 WE SAY: THE MIGHTY GT GETS A CABRIO VERSION IN TWO SHADES OF ALARMING... E ven if it isn’t playing on the audio system, point the new AMG GT roadster down a sunsplashed Phoenix freeway and ‘Life’s Been Good’ is the sort of chrome-plated rock anthem that’s perma-rotating round your brain. If you have one of these, life isn’t merely good, it’s absolutely ruddy marvellous. Mercedes has waited until the GT v1.5 to unveil the convertible version, complete with dramatic new Panamericana-inspired 15-louvre grille, active air management and, on the GT C, active rear-wheel steering and electronically locking rear dif. In the right spec – Magno grey with the red soft-top, for example – this is a car that stalks the boulevards with magnifcently executed…

Vauxhall Insignia Grand Sport Elite £24,210 WE SAY: EVERYTHING YOUR FLEET MANAGER COULD EVER WANT, AND PEACE OF MIND FOR THEIR DRIVERS “U ser- choosers”. The man from Vauxhall in charge of extolling the virtues of its brand-new junior-executive saloon has used the rhyming couplet about four times in the past three sentences. Everything about Insignia MkII has been focused with lasersighted accuracy on the “user-chooser”. The power-wielding proft make/breaker who’s presented with a list of cars that sit plumb in the correct CO2 tax, retail price and toyson- board Venn diagram. Wondering why ‘Grand Sport’ has been tacked onto the new car’s name? Simple: it’s so you’ll tell new model from old stock on the company feet sheet over the next few months. This car is all about the numbers.…

£64,400 Engine 2995cc s’charged V6, 4WD, 337bhp, 332lb ft Performance 0–62mph in 6.9secs, 130mph, 26.9mpg, 243g/km CO2, Weight 2147kg As diesel falters, LR’s introduced a 3.0- litre s’charged petrol V6 to its 2018 MY Sport line-up. Snappier satnav is at last on offer too. The nav’s crisper, but this 337bhp F-Type engine feels like an odd fit – reedy, not torquey enough and lacking a lusty engine note and clever ’box manners. In regular driving, 20.5mpg was the average. Mind you, the realistic official claim is 26.9mpg; 243g/km CO2 ain’t too clever either – but it’s unlikely to be banned from cities this decade. Time being, we still want a TDV6 RRS, for usable torque and a range over 300 miles. Turbos don’t necessarily improve all cars, but they’d be…

Y et more inappropriate behaviour, yet more important lessons to be learned. Don’t forget, people – speed isn’t just the preserve of racing drivers or testosterone-flled youths, it can be a useful tool for building and maintaining an appropriate velocity when joining a motorway from a slip road. Or making smooth progress up a steep incline. Or… who am I kidding, if you had the chance to drag race eight SUVs, you just would, wouldn’t you? At the head of the feld, it’s little surprise to see the Audi and Bentley, in that order, streaking away with it. In this test, horsepower is king, but what Bentley was thinking, claiming a quicker 0-62mph than the lighter Audi, we’re not sure. At the embarassing end of the feld, the Duster, expertly…

N o, you’re absolutely right. Hardly anyone who buys a Jaguar F-Pace, let alone one that tiptoes around on 22in wheels (twenty-twos!) will subject it to trial by quarry. We’ve done it now, so they won’t have to. And predictably, the Jag was outclassed in the rough. The ride, which it struggles to reconcile with British roads anyway, bounced occupants clean out of the seat, and, like the Alfa, its rear-drive-untilyou- slip set-up isn’t really optimised for bushwhacking. Fearful of splintering the low-profle bumper and tyres on underwater obstacles, or a sharp-edged twig, these unashamedly road-biased SUVs were subjected to the least harsh of-road treatment. These are jacked-up sports saloons, with only a hill-descent mode between them as a sop to their go-anywhere marketing potential. The Peugeot and Skoda are…

“The key to the Bentayga’s success? It performed well in categories we didn’t expect” T he numbers have spoken, we have a winner... and, if we’re honest, it’s a shock result. Not least because it’s a car only a microscopic percentage of the population will actually be able to aford. Costs were taken into account, of course, but given that for one Bentayga diesel you can have two Audi SQ7s, two-and-a-half Jaguar F-Paces, four Alfa Romeo Stelvios, two Land Rover Discoverys, fve Peugeot 3008s, fve Skoda Kodiaqs or nine Dacia Dusters, they probably should have had more weighting. You see, that’s the problem with a verdict that takes opinion largely out of it – it throws up… unusual results. Perhaps the spread of tests unfairly favoured the fast and expensive…

Report 4 Mercedes-Benz E220d £38,430 OTR/£55,480 as tested I n case you missed it, The Stig set a world record last month. We’ve been working with the brilliant engineer and YouTuber Colin Furze to create the world’s fastest dodgem, which involved a couple of days testing this 100bhp, 600cc Honda motorbike-engined creation at the former RAF Bentwaters airfeld in Sufolk. On day two, Stig set his world-record time of 100.3mph – the average of two runs at 107mph and 93mph respectively. All this fun and games meant me commuting from southwest London to Sufolk, clocking up 500 miles in our E-Class in the process. Once out of London, my route was M11/M25/A12 – thus giving me the opportunity to grind out some proper motorway miles in the Merc in the…

Hello Fiat 124 Lusso Plus £23,295 OTR/£23,645 as tested S pring is here and with it a small roadster. This is excellent news. Spring is the season for a small roadster, especially an Italian one. All that fresh air to enjoy, the scent of budding blossom, a hint of actual heat from the sun, actual blue from the sky. So I’ll ignore the fact I live in South London, where it’s not actually that green, the scents are less… enticing, and the car I’m driving isn’t, strictly speaking, Italian. But it is a small roadster, a class of car infused with joie de vivre, and for that reason alone I’m optimistic for the next few months. This summer there’s bound to be a heatwave,* and at some point I’ll be…

T he new Dodge Challenger SRT Demon isn’t just a warmed-over Hellcat, it’s a completely new stand-alone model with 97 new parts, the deletion of a several key components and some serious light-weighting – and you can see the results in the box to the right… In fact, the only similarity between the Hellcat’s and the Demon’s supercharged V8s are the heads. Everything else on the Demon is new. And it needs to be, as it’s carrying a lot more load. While the Hellcat peaks at 707bhp and 650lbft of torque at 4,000rpm, the Demon – using 91-octane petrol – produces 808bhp and 717lbft. That’s a useful increase, but still doesn’t explain those performance numbers. So this is a good time to tell you about the VIN-matched, owner-named Demon race…

S o Sebastian Vettel is the frst F1 winner of 2017 – his frst win since Singapore in 2015. And no, it wasn’t down to either of the Mercedes conking out, or particularly poor strategy from the German champions... Ferrari was simply faster over the full distance in Melbourne, looked after its tyres better and applied enough pressure to force an opening from Mercedes. How much faster was Vettel than Hamilton? It’s hard to say, but the fact he maintained a constant gap in the opening lap despite the dirty air from Hamilton’s car costing him downforce, speaks volumes. How long have we been waiting to say that? Ironically, it was Hamilton who’s been talking up Ferrari’s chances, labelling them the favourites. He probably wishes he’d not been so kind.…

B ack in 1987 Ruf launched a car called the CTR. It was based on the Porsche 911, but had been thoroughly modifed, developing 469bhp. At the time it was widely believed to be the fastest car in the world, capable of 213mph – in a era when the Porsche 959 topped out at 197mph. You might know this vehicle better as the Yellowbird. That was 30 years ago, so, to celebrate the milestone, Ruf has brought it back. Only this time it’s not based on a Porsche 911. Underneath sits a bespoke carbon tub with unique steel subframes front and rear that carry pushrod suspension. There’s still a twin-turbo fat-six in the back and, yes, the dry-sumped 3.6-litre is based on Porsche’s technology, only now it doesn’t develop 469bhp,…

1972 BMW 3.0 CSL Price: £6,399 (when new) Engine: 3153cc 6cyl in-line, 206bhp, 211lb ft Transmission: 4spd manual, RWD Performance: 0–60mph in 6.8secs, 136mph Weight: 1270kg 2016 BMW M4 GTS Price: £121,770 Engine: 2979cc, twin-turbo straight-six, 493bhp, 442lb ft Transmission: 7spd M DCT twin-clutch, RWD Performance: 0–62mph in 3.8secs, 190mph Weight: 1510kg In 1972, ex-Porsche works driver and Ford’s former racing manager Jochen Neerpasch – plus a few other brainy people – had one intention: to make fast BMWs. Over a few steins, they bashed their big foreheads together until some engineering magic spilled out. It arrived as a single letter: ‘M’. This gang were the founding fathers of BMW Motorsport GmbH, a go-faster division that’s gone on to fll trophy cabinets with umpteen race wins and birth some of…

Disaster! You’ve hopped into your car, turned the key and… nothing. Dead. Expired. But fear not. Just work your way through TG’s handy question-andanswer checklist, and you’ll surely be up and running in no time… 1) Do you own a car? Surprisingly common mistake, this. The frst, and arguably most important, step in fxing your car is to determine whether you do, in fact, own a car. If not, you may be sitting in your garden shed, or atop a mighty shire horse named Stephen. Either way, this more than likely explains why it’s failing to fre into life at the turn of your key. Also, where did you get that key? 2) Is the car you’re sitting in your car? Again, an all-too-common error. Even if you do own…

It’s about the biggest slab of digivisual display of any car. The E-Class Widescreen option actually consists of two 12.3-inch screens, mounted side by side under a single glaze. It’s not just about size: graphics and resolution are pretty stunning. On a 4cyl E, you have to spend £1,495 to go from basic Garmin nav to the connected system that swells the central screen to 12.3 inches. Then you’re permitted to drop a further £825 on the widescreen, replacing actual speedo, tacho and other gauges with the second 12.3-incher, confgurable in three diferent visual designs, and multiple variations of info. You can knock out the rev-counter and use that space for all manner of real-time fuel-use data. Or make space for music or phone info, both of which are controlled…

Audi RS3 £45,000 (est.) WE SAY: THE RS3 NEEDED A REBOOT. AUDI CHOSE TO BOLT ON A BOOT AS WELL What’s new here, then? The Audi RS3 has been refreshed. The headlines are a boost for its 2.5-litre 5cyl turbo engine, taking its power figure to 395bhp (now more than the 381bhp Merc-AMG A45, note), and a new saloon version. It’s less practical but better looking than the 5dr Sportback, and will open up the RS3 to brand-new markets, including America and the Middle East. Bet it’s fast. Oh God, yes. Tick the right options box and you get a 174mph top speed. Its 0–62mph time is 0.2sec down on the old RS3, at 4.1secs. The standard 7spd paddleshift is linked to a launch-control system that makes such senior performance…

Ferrari GTC4 Lusso T £199,285 WE SAY: FERRARI’S “FAMILY” CAR NOW COMES WITH A SENSIBLE-SIZE ENGINE... T he GTC4 is the frst Ferrari in over 30 years to come with a choice of engines. Traditionally, the mid-engined sports cars get a V8, and the front-engined GTs get a V12. But now, thanks to this Lusso T, you can have a turbocharged V8 engine in the front of Ferrari’s family four-seater, a car which already ofers a V12. When Ferrari last ofered multiple powertrains, it was putting tax-busting 2.0-litre V8s in the 308 supercar, creating the 208. That was back in 1980. While the company ofers many reasons for giving GTC4 buyers the option of a V8 turbo, we suspect the real motivation might not be dissimilar. The Lusso T’s performance is…

Yes, that’s a wide-body, six-wheel-drive Land Rover Defender pickup with quilted bucket seats, coming atcha outta Bradford priced at £129,545. And that’s for the six-wheel conversion. Throw in the bills for a donor Defender (out of production now, don’t forget) and associated upgrades and it’s £179,994, which makes the Bentley look like a bargain. Note the Kahn musters 122bhp. It’s a long way from being the ultimate of-road toy, this. The rear axles have only a mite of articulation and the ride is so frm, you’re only supposed to engage 6x6 mode “away from hard surfaces, when traction is likely to be lost, and speed has to be kept below 40mph”. So a proper Defender will leave it for spares in the rough. The jiggling steering wheel will damn near…

I n a little under three years, Aston Martin will be building cars in this hangar. There will be people and machinery, infrastructure, logistics, components and, at the centre of it all, a production line, down which will fow the forthcoming DBX SUV and potentially something wearing a Lagonda badge. But that’s not until early 2020. Next week – by the time you read this in other words – they will start tearing up the foor in here. That’s a crying shame. It’s polished concrete, smooth, refective and untouched since the RAF moved out a few years back. Right now, and for the next two days, this hangar is ours. Well, ours and a flm crew’s. But we can share – we have not one, but three hangars to choose…

Hello Volvo V90 D5 Inscription £44,555 OTR/£50,530 as tested I wander through life feeling like a slightly bewildered boy who’s accidentally landed in the saggy skin of a middleaged man. “Owning” a big grand car doesn’t sit quite right with me. Still, to ease me in, it’s not the usual sort of big grand car. It’s not German and not an SUV. The V90 is such a long, low sled. Like those huge American wagons of the Sixties, or a hearse painted spring-morning sky. My avoiding black or silver paint was one way to avoid the big-grand-car design cliches. I specced the interior by the same logic. No black leather, no slabs of brushed aluminium or fake carbon fbre. Instead it’s soft-stitched tan saddlery and matt-oiled timber. Hmmm… I could…

Report 3 Ford Mustang £35,745 OTR/£37,830 as tested I think I’m either thoroughly still in the honeymoon period of Mustang ownership or heavily drugged, because I’m struggling to fnd fault with the 5.0-litre. So the big Brembos are a bit grabby in town, I reckon it could be far noisier and given enough time and warranty-voiding exemptions I could shorten the gearshift linkage a fair bit with some suitably applied castings, but, hey – I drive it every day and like it more and more. This is unusual for me, being as I am a regular farmer of familiarity contempt-breeding. It’s not as if I’m a fanboy. I seem to remember thinking that Mustangs are a kind of US-equivalent Escort – a common car with a range that encompasses both…

Ferrari 641 The 641 is officially a work of art: it’s the only racing car to be part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York H ands up who remembers 1989... hands up who was even born in 1989. Well, panic not, all you need to know is that big things happened in F1 back then. Motorsport’s legislative seesaw meant that turbocharging was banned from the 1989 season, and Ferrari engine man Claudio Lombardi had overseen the development of an all-new, quad-cam 3.5-litre V12, a unit that revved to an ear-popping 12,000rpm-plus. But Ferrari’s 1989 car, the 641, is better remembered for marking the debut of the semi-automatic paddleshift gearbox, an innovation that would turn the sport upside down. It also gave new Scuderia…

This might be the world’s comfiest supermini. The work of Citroen Advanced Comfort, this C4 Cactus prototype gets comfier seats and a much stiffer chassis, which means the suspension can do its job more effectively without the body flexing like a lilo on a choppy swimming pool. In a nod to the classic DS’s suspension you have a regular damper and spring, but also a second chamber into which hydraulic fluid is forced to smooth out the movement. The result: a better ride and Citroen back to its roly-poly best. Give it two years before you can buy one.…

“I t all started with a Citroen Xantia. I inherited it from my dad so I could drive up and down from university in Edinburgh to the Manchester Velodrome. I didn’t actually learn to drive until I was 21; up to that point I cycled everywhere – I just didn’t need a car. That car had about 100,000 miles on it when I got it, and 180,000 when it fnally died. “The frst car I bought with my own money was a BMW 318i saloon. At the time it was my dream car – I cleaned it every couple of days. My dad had a BMW 2002 when I was young, so the 318 was a big deal. “After that it was a Volkswagen Golf GTI, the diesel one, the…

PG BUGATTI BIKE This is, quite literally in fact, the Bugatti of bicycles. German bicycle manufacturer PimpGarage (PG) says its collaboration with Bug is 95 per cent carbon, weighs less than 5kg and is thus the world’s lightest “special urban bicycle”. All that carbon is handcrafted using “materials and methods otherwise found only in the motorsport and aeronautic industries”. And, somewhat predictably, customers can have virtually every aspect of it tailored to match their own Chiron. Different paints, tinted carbon and special leathers can all be specified. Price £TBC; pg.de ITALIAN VOLT LACAMA An all-electric motorcycle, with 3D-printed bodywork, 95bhp and around 112 miles of range. With Brembo brakes and Öhlins suspension, it ought to be quite good. Orders for the Lacama, which does 0–62mph in 4.6secs, will be taken…

ANDY GREEN 15.10.97 The Thrust SSC produced 110,000bhp and covered 0–600mph in 16secs. Makes a Chiron look like a Daihatsu Charade “Although it’s the 20th anniversary of the landspeed- record run, Thrust SSC’s design is well over 25 years old. Remember what computers were like back then? We used CFD (computational fuid dynamics) on the car, but it was still untrusted in the early Nineties. CFD is commonplace now, but we were the frst to use it as the principal design tool – well before F1, in fact. “Thrust SSC designer Ron Ayers and the team at Swansea University did an astonishing job, but they were operating right at the limit of the available technology. When we went supersonic for the frst time in history, we ran the vehicle a…

German tuner TechArt has been listening to all those that consider the 911 Turbo not “super” enough, and come back with this: the GTstreet R. It sports an active aero kit complete with massive two-tier carbon wing, carbon-fibre panels for increased lightness, 20in forged alloys, active coilover suspension and shouty exhaust system. The interior is reskinned with new, colourful leather and more Alcantara before the car is given a splash of rave paint outside. Work has also been done on the engine. Seven hundred and twenty bhp of work (a 140bhp increase over standard) so it’ll hit 62mph in 2.7secs (down from 2.9), 124mph in 8.5 (instead of 9.9), and top out at 211mph (instead of 205mph). The result? It’s hideous, spectacularly hideous. Good work.…

Suzuki Swift 1.0 BoosterJet SHVS £11,000 est WE SAY: SWIFT JUST KEEPS GETTING BETTER AND BETTER N ew Swift. New platform. New fve-door only policy. New, slightly Jaguar F-type-ish nose. Lots of changes then, and this is one of TG’s favourite superminis we’re talking about. If it’s a bit more Ignis, a bit less S-Cross, they’ll have got away with it. If not, there’ll be tears before bedtime. This new Swift, weighing in almost 200kg lighter than the outgoing version, arrives in showrooms in June and the initial range will be made up of two petrol engines, an 89bhp 1.2 four pot or a 109bhp 1.0-litre turbocharged triple. Both of these can be mated to Suzuki’s (very) mild hybrid system, tagged SHVS, which simply trims the fuel consumption and emissions of…

Land Rover Discovery 2.0 SD4 HSE £56,995 WE SAY: WITH THE NEW DISCO, JLR STRENGTHENS ITS GRIP ON THE SUV MARKET I hesitate to confess, but I didn’t realise at frst that two cylinders were absent. I was being driven by a friend in the four-cylinder version of the new Discovery, and we were making good and peaceful progress. Then I had a go myself, and deliberately tried to take it to places where it would likely show indecorum – holding it in low gears and using big revs – and still I was impressed. This is by far the best Ingenium engine yet, thanks to longitudinal mounting and double blowers. It has 93 per cent of the V6’s power and 83 per cent of its torque, and because it’s…

W e at TopGear are not imbeciles. Well, not all the time. We realise that the average SUV owner is more likely to enjoy cheese-grating their own fngers than they are to take their sports utility vehicle to a racetrack and give it a good thrashing. Even if they did, they wouldn’t be able to drive it up to and beyond the limit like our friend here, The Stig. But there is a purpose to setting banzai lap times, other than marvelling at how quickly Stig can fambé the brakes on a 2.2-tonne Discovery. Speed around a track points towards grip (something you’ll appreciate on a wet Tuesday when you’re late to pick the kids up), predictable steering, a punchy engine in tune with its gearbox and brakes you can…

“I went for the white one as I thought it was the new Qashqai. The Land Rover is my dream car MONICA” “I like the Audi, but I’ve got an SQ5. The Bentley’s ugly and overpriced ANDERS” 12 Number of times the Bentley was referred to as “sick”in a complimentary fashion “It’d have to be the Skoda. Just for the value for money MARTIN” 37 Number of selfies taken with the Bentley 2 Number of people who wandered away from the Disco muttering about reliability “I just don’t get the Bentley. It’s hideous. I’d have the Range – sorry, Land Rover PAUL” Of course folks midway through their early evening shopping were drawn to the Bentley. You’d double-take if you found a gold bar in your sock drawer too. But showcasing our contenders…

“ SENSATIONAL, ADDICTIVE, MIGHTY, CORRUPTING POWER” T he frst time you walk around the FXXK, you ask yourself many rhetorical questions. They loop around in your head like some deranged Homer Simpson monologue. What’s that technician doing with that large umbilical cord thing? Who the hell designed those weird rear winglets? And, the one I’m certain I don’t want to be heard outside of my own mostly fabbergasted head: why the hell would anyone want – or, more precisely, need – to make a LaFerrari even faster? Florida sunshine is creeping into a pit garage full of Maranello unobtanium. We’re at Daytona Speedway, not the most obvious place to drive this type of car – it’s more Days of Thunder than Le Mans. But this is the morning after the…

“The BMW’s suspension keeps squirming and clumping after Spaghetti Junction and into the city” Through the sharpest part of Hammerhead. Sharp left, wind of the lock, a touch of throttle, sharp right. And… stop. Red light. Move away, avoid the bus coming in from the left. Check over the shoulder, edge alongside a white van. Big pothole now. You might argue that taking a bunch of diesel saloons and sending them around our famous fgure-of-eight test track is about the most pointless thing we could have done to vehicles whose purpose in life is mostly business travel and family life. Fun, but pointless. But when done at a suitably ambitious scale, we can bring you some actual TopGear consumer advice. What scale? About 140:1. Yes, if you multiply the TopGear…

Report 3 VW Caravelle £45,540 OTR/£52,606 as tested P hotographic evidence, praise be, is lacking, but I’ve always found confession cathartic. I got the Caravelle stuck in a muddy feld. It was a fairly undignifed episode, not least for my cocky overconfdence that winter tyres would be just the thing for brown gloop and, while I managed to avoid falling headlong into it, my wife’s perfectly timed dose of throttle in reverse while I was pushing at the front bumper delivered much the same result, and possibly even more hilarity for those the other side of the windscreen. The fnal act was to be dragged out backwards by a Defender like some useless fy-tipped white good (the green van in the picture is our friend’s Vee Dub, which sufered a…