Innholdsfortegnelse for May 2018 i BBC Top Gear Magazine

This issue is an unashamed celebration of the best of the British car industry. And while it’s fair to say that the history of UK Automotive plc has previously been somewhat chequered by strikes, poor build quality, a love of velour interiors and a penchant for rust, the stars of this month’s cover show an industry that has never been in better health. As the British editor of the world’s greatest car magazine, I make no excuses for being hugely proud of the current state of UK Automotive and firmly believe it deserves to be celebrated. Additionally, part of the remit of this magazine, in my opinion, is to inspire the next generation to become part of this movement. But to attract the brightest minds you have to deliver products…

Listen up, Europeans. You might not have heard of Lynk&Co, but in China, its first offering became the fastest-selling car ever in the world’s biggest economy. Now, Lynk&Co wants to bring smartphone contract thinking to cars. No more buying a vehicle–the Lynk&Co 02 is a crossover you subscribe to. There’s no key–it’s unlocked with a smartphone app. Want to lend the car to a family member or friend? Get the app to share the access code. Maybe you’re off on holiday and want your car to earn you some spending money? Lynk&Co says it could rent out your car to paying users via the app. The 02 itself is shorter and lower than the 01 crossover we met last year. Underneath, it shares parts with Geely cars, in particular Volvo.…

Every new car that matters, rated or slated Audi RS4 vs Mercedes-AMG C63S £62,175/£70,130 WE SAY: THE COMPACT FAST ESTATE IS PERHAPS THE BEST REAL-WORLD CAR OF ALL. CAN RS4 DEFEAT C63? Brawny, aggressive and rowdy meets effective, smooth and grippy. Now, guess which one’s which. Not hard, is it? And, relax, this isn’t where I throw you the 180-degree curveball. You’re not wrong. The latest RS4 is everything we’ve come to expect from a fast Audi, likewise the Mercedes C63S. They are caricatures of themselves, and over in the super-saloon playground, they’re the ones at either end of the see-saw. They have plenty in common: they weigh within 10kg of each other, claim identical 4.1-secs-to-62mph times, just 4g/km of CO2 separates them, they have identical 1,510-litre load bays with…

Dallara Stradale from £137,000 WE SAY: DALLARA HAS PUT ITS RACING NOUS TO WORK ON THE ROAD. AND THE RESULT IS EPIC Where do I know that name? Well, from roughly everywhere–pick a race series or supercar maker and, chances are, Dallara has developed and supplied the carbon chassis. It’s never made a road car before–at least, not bearing the Dallara name. But the Stradale’s one hell of a debut. It has no doors–that’d make it heavier and interfere with the aero. The seat doesn’t move either–that’d mess up the weight distribution. The monocoque and all of the bodywork is carbon fibre, so the Stradale weighs just 855kg. What’s the effect of all of this? It’s a revelation. If you’ve never experienced what scant weight, incredible rigidity and 820kg of downforce…

Picture your stereotypical British engineering genius. A mildly eccentric, fiercely independent and free-thinking inventor, leading small teams on a tight budget, shunning big, corporate life. Gordon Murray is that template in living, breathing form. Only thing is, he’s British by choice, not birth. He came here from South Africa in his early 20s, aiming to design racecars and get closer to pop music, two fields of creative endeavour in which Britain was–still is, he maintains–matchless. Since then, he’s designed what most people call the greatest-ever road supercar, plus history’s most dominant F1 car. He’s also become mates with a Beatle and has close to 1,000 gig T-shirts to show for his musical obsessions. Mission pretty much accomplished, then. Yet here he is at age 72, opining his best is yet to…

“It should come as no surprise that the Stelvio is a hoot. It shares most of its oily bits with the Giulia QV” ALFA ROMEO STELVIO QV Price: £69,500 Engine: 2891cc, V6 twin-turbo, 503bhp, 442lb ft Transmission: 8spd auto, 4WD Performance: 0–62mph in 3.8secs, 176mph Economy: 31.4mpg, 210g/km CO2 Weight: 1830kg PORSCHE MACAN TURBO PP Price: £69,505 Engine: 3604cc, V6 twin-turbo, 434bhp, 442lb ft Transmission: 7spd twin-clutch, 4WD Performance: 0–62mph in 4.4secs, 169mph Economy: 29.7mpg, 219g/km CO2 Weight: 2000kg…

Report 4 Mercedes E350d AT £58,880 OTR/£61,260 as tested Recently, I was getting out of my car and met a mate. “Is that yours..?” he said, looking lightly horrified, and when I said “Only sort of…” he announced: “Well, I’m glad because it’s the MOST BORING CAR I’VE EVER SEEN,” and proceeded to tell me, essentially, that it looked like a giant brown slug on wheels. After explaining that I thought slightly differently, involving stats that seemed to make his eyes glaze, it got me thinking: have you ever wondered exactly why you drive the kind of car you do? Is it circumstance, need or preference? Or a bit of all three? I guess it’s usually a blurry lens for most of us. Basically, you buy the car you can…

Goodbye Tesla Model S £111,900/£78,400 (s/h) “The reality is that EV ownership just requires a shift in mentality” Our six months and 9,000-mile test of the Tesla Model S has finally come to an end, and as I drove Ollie, my 13-year-old son, home in the car for the last time and told him it was going back the following day, I wasn’t totally prepared for the response. “That’s OK–I have no emotional attachment to this car.” Teenagers can be so harsh. However, having lived with GC65 VCO on a daily basis and driven it in every type of driving scenario the UK offers–from the daily grind and longer-range missions to the occasional full-fat Ludicrous-mode assault on my favourite B-road and everything in between–I have to agree with Ollie that…

Not content with selling gazillions of well-built, affordable, mainstream cars, Hyundai is targeting the juicier profits enjoyed by BMW, Audi, Merc et al with a standalone premium brand of its own–Genesis–launched a little over two years ago. Trouble is, while Genesis’s efforts to date have all sold well (by offering luxury for less), they’ve also taken the form of rather uninspiring executive saloons. Enter the Essentia concept, revealed at the New York motor show, to right that wrong. If you’re not purring involuntarily or dribbling onto these pages about now, you might want to clean your glasses because, startled front grille aside, this is a remarkable design U-turn. If you want to infuse your premium brand with desirability, a sports car is what’s required (see Jaguar and the F-Type), but…

It’s abundantly clear that Ford’s engineers and designers have altered pretty much everything about this new Focus. Yet one thing, they claim, has stayed the same: that it will be as good to drive as it always was. In the meantime, the bits that have changed… The new one is better-looking to us, and nicer-designed inside, with more room as a distinct bonus. It’s far better connected. It’s overall lighter and lower in drag, leading to better economy in the more realistic new official fuel test (WLTP). And it’s safer, not just in a crash but–with luck–avoiding one, thanks to a pretty serious suite of advanced driver assists. Last year, the Fiesta was given a going-over, not that the design changed much. Ford played it that way because people liked…

The 2018 F1 season is go, and at the time of going to press, the facts are thus: Sebastian Vettel won the Australian GP by a clear six seconds from Hamilton. But what does it all mean? Logic dictates that Ferrari is now the favourite, except it’s not–Mercedes is. The only reason Hamilton relinquished his lead was due to Vettel pitting during a virtual safety-car period, because of a broken-down Haas. Confused? You’re not alone. What happened to the days of banging wheels right down to the last lap, two gladiators fighting it out? But it’s early days and there was much knowledge to be gleaned from the opener… 1. Mercedes is still out in front For a split second in quali we all thought pole was going to be…

Jaguar F-Type vs Porsche 718 Cayman £50,795 vs £42,897 WE SAY: WHICH 4CYL SPORTS CAR MAKES A BETTER CASE FOR DOWNSIZING? The F-Type 2.0 and 718 Cayman approach the two-seat sports car from very different directions. The Porsche is midengined fat-four with a 6spd manual. The Jaguar mounts its in-line four under the bonnet and hooks it to an 8spd auto. Never mind the recent heart transplants, you’re looking at two middle-aged bodies. But, my word, they carry their years well. Inside, the Porsche is a snug cocoon, but easy to see out of and the driving position is spot-on, though the seats are a bit narrow. Some of the switchgear is fiddly, but the connected nav unit is superb and there’s also CarPlay. The Jag’s cabin is just as…

Famous last words. The ferry has disgorged the new Aston Martin Vantage onto African soil bang on time, and as it rolls into Tangier harbour, something to the effect of “We’ll probably get dinner at the hotel by eight” wanders casually from my lips. Idiot. It takes two hours to pass through customs. Still, plenty of time to ogle the first new Aston sports car in 13 years, before we (hopefully) spend three days exploring strange and wonderful roads in the depths of Morocco. This wasn’t Aston’s plan. Aston had laid on a extravagant road and track press launch for the new Vantage in and around Portimão, Portugal, but that was all a bit straightforward. If you really want to get under a car’s skin, nothing exposes its fortes and…

The Universal Law of Sod says that you only do something embarrassing if you have an audience, and if you manage something really cool, you’ll look up to find everyone magically looking the other way. Thus it is with cars. With a small group of Land Rover engineers and PR people waiting expectantly for me to drive away in the new Defender Works V8–and having spent 30 minutes telling everyone how my first three cars were Series Land Rovers–I completely misjudge both the required lock and woefully arcing turning circle, and manage to fail completely to pull out of a parking space. Two big shuffles and some vague windmilling at the steering wheel later, I managed to extricate the short-wheelbase 90 from the carpark, and did what most people do…

The TVR Griffith sounds superb. The noise that flows out from those side exit exhaust pipes is a proper fat, rounded V8 rumble, but with a racer’s edge, sharp and revvy. Yet smooth, too. There’s a lot to it; this 5.0-litre naturally aspirated V8 is multi-layered, an engine you’ll enjoy listening to. Sound: one of the pillars on which TVR was built. The other two were that its cars should look good and go hard. I don’t doubt the latter. The clash of naturally aspirated Cosworthtuned 500bhp 5.0-litre Ford V8 against 1,250kg of bodyweight meet in the middle at 400bhp/tonne. That gives the Grifth an edge over the McLaren 570S. Look good? There’s something of the Sagaris to its roof profile, the rear end is tidy, but the front? I’m…

Stand perfectly still, close your eyes and you can feel it. The muddle of 8-bit sound effects, the chatter, the traffic streaming past outside and the fug of cigarette smoke hovering like a storm cloud over the gamblers. Open your eyes and you’re in the loneliest room in the world. A bleached-out calendar hangs open on 11 March 2011; on the foor, plastic baskets and metal pachinko balls are scattered everywhere, forcing you to pick a careful path through the debris. The sense of loss and upheaval is palpable. You can taste it in the dank, cloying air. Outside the gambling parlour a kid’s bike lies on its side, now rusted through, perhaps in the same position it was tossed seven years ago when its owner dropped everything and bolted.…

Report 4 Vauxhall Insignia Sports Tourer SRi VX-Line £27,810 OTR/£34,575 as tested Last month, I reported a niggle regarding the heated seats in the Insignia. They come on at full chat whether you want them on or not–though it turns out that this feature is, of course, actually quite easy to turn of via the car’s Settings menu. That said, when the Beast from the East hit back in March, I was quite grateful for automatic heated seats front and rear, plus the heated steering wheel. That’s the thing with this Insignia–it’s full of clever stuff that you would only expect in a much more expensive car. Like dual USB charging points in the rear, which are a godsend with kids. And Vauxhall’s genius OnStar system, which will connect you…

Report 5 Porsche 718 Cayman £42,897 OTR/£52,435 as tested Stephen Dobie: Buy a Porsche 718 and you’ve three big choices to make. Cayman or Boxster, 2.0-litre engine or 2.5, and manual or PDK. Our long-termer is the former–and cheaper–of all of those. This Boxster S PDK ticks all the latter boxes and adds about £13k. It’s also, unlike our Cayman, bright fipping yellow. Tom Harrison: Pfft. Good as the Cayman looks, in Harrison’s Britain it would be illegal to have a sports car in a colour so subdued. What’s your problem? SD: I just love how subtle the Cayman is in comparison. It’s cooler, too, at least if you’re a driving nerd; it’s defiantly more about handling than posing. Interesting to try a 718 with more power, though… TH: Oh…

Goodbye Mini Cooper S Works 210 £22,155 OTR/£29,430 as tested Pretty much my final act with the Mini was a trip to the Paris region. A cruelly early start, to Dover for a vast restorative breakfast on the DFDS boat, then to the annual meeting of Car of the Year jurors. That includes testing all the cars on the short-list. Given this year there was an Alfa Romeo Stelvio QV and a V6 Kia Stinger, the Mini could have been upstaged. But when I pointed it down the same twisty 10km of chaussée déformée, it still felt a hoot, full of life and spirit as well as solid quality. Minis handle autoroutes well, too. A lot of it is down to the legs-ahead ew A7 is the preened fashion model…

A couple of years ago, when we first heard about Volkswagen’s MEB electric platform, we were informed it would cover “cars bigger and smaller than the Golf”. Turns out, it will also cover banshee racing cars, too. This is our first proper look–following a shady teaser late last year–of Volkswagen’s brand-new I.D.R prototype. It is a car with two speciffic aims in mind: first, to smash the Pikes Peak electric car record, currently held by Rhys Millen at 8m 57.118s, set in 2016 in the 1600bhp 2016 eO PP100 electric racer. We’ll come to the second later. “It is about time we settled the score,” explains Volkswagen’s motorsport boss Sven Smeets. So it’ll sit on that electric car platform, and, while there aren’t any technical details to run with, Volkswagen’s…

Behind the new Levante Trofeo’s new front grille lives a 3.8-litre bi-turbo V8 built by Ferrari in Maranello and related to the drop-top Portofno’s engine. Here it develops 582bhp and 538lb ft, which punts Maserati right into the sharp end of the super-SUV set. You’ll need a Bentley Bentayga or Lamborghini Urus to trump it. And even in our mind-pulverising age of potty 4x4 performance, the Levante Trofeo’s figures are eye-watering. Maserati has timed the car from 0–62mph in 3.9 seconds. Apparently, weight distribution is a spot-on 50:50 across the axles, and it has standard allwheel drive and a new Corsa driving mode, plus adjustable height air suspension. The top speed is said to be north of 187mph. At which point, we don’t really want to contemplate the forces attacking…

The car industry is changing. The next five years will be more transformative than the first 100. Some see the disruption as an opportunity. Others liken it to a tsunami set to sweep all before it. Silicon Valley is moving in, and leading the charge is Google’s billion-dollar self-driving Waymo programme. The end of days, surely? Not according to CEO John Krafcik, who TG spoke to in New York as Waymo announced a deal with JLR to add “up to 20,000” Jaguar I-Paces to its feet. Krafcik is a Stanford and MIT grad; following stints at Toyota and Ford, he piloted Hyundai to huge success in the US. Then came a call from Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. That’s the sort of call you take. “We became Waymo…

LOTUS 3-ELEVEN FROM EUR 7,500/DAY (EXCL. VAT)  TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS • Engine: 3500cc supercharged V6, 450bhp • Transmission: 6spd manual, RWD • Performance: 0-62mph in 3.4secs, 180mph (289kph) • Weight: 890kg • Power to weight ratio: 0.50bhp/kg • Lap time that an amateur pilot can reach in Spa-Francorchamps: 2m 45s INSURANCE EXCESS TO BE DEPOSITED: EUR 9,000 FERRARI 458 CHALLENGE FROM EUR 12,500/DAY (EXCL. VAT)  TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS: • Engine: 4499cc V8, 562bhp • Transmission: 7spd dual-clutch F1, RWD • Performance: 0-62mph in 3.4secs, 200mph (318kph) • Weight: 1277kg • Power to weight ratio: 0.45bhp/kg • Lap time that an amateur pilot can reach in Spa-Francorchamps: 2m 40s INSURANCE EXCESS TO BE DEPOSITED: EUR 15,000 FERRARI 488 CHALLENGE FROM EUR/17,500 DAY (EXCL. VAT) TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS: • Engine: 3902cc twin-turbo V8, 661bhp • Transmission: 7spd…

MANTA5 HYDROFOIL BIKE Sorry, Jesus, that’s old news now. The Manta5 is a hybrid hydrofoil bicycle that lets you pedal your way across the open seas. With a 400w power-assisting electric motor and an aircraft-grade aluminium frame, the Manta5 has two carbon-fibre hydrofoils that can be used on a wide range of ‘water terrains’–lakes, rivers and the like–and lasts up to an hour on full charge. The bike can be disassembled for easy transportation, although not quite to Brompton levels of ease. Preorder, price TBC; manta5.com MYCANOE FOLDING CANOE MyCanoe is a folding canoe that can be set up in just 10 minutes. Good news for those who can’t bear to ruin their precious car’s lines with a roof rack. It’s full sized at 14.5ft with two seats and a…

Chris Harris 29.01.2018 The point of this bit of the film was to get Eddie to be a bit annoying. He was doing that superbly well and we were crying with laughter. We got to the bottom of the rally stage and the director told us to go back up again, get close behind the tracking car and see what we could do. What became apparent was that the car has just the right amount of torque in second and first gear to do little slides coming out of the hairpins. I was beginning to really enjoy it, but I didn’t want to be a tit. There was nothing to be gained from me pushing it ten tenths. This went on for a few minutes, then I came around a…

Ford Mustang V8 Fastback £41,015 WE SAY: FORD UPDATES THE MUSTANG. MAINLY BY ADDING GEAR RATIOS A Mustang with 10 forward gears. Imagine if you had to keep shoving at a clutch pedal, or finding slots in a manual gate? It’s an automatic, of course, the centrepiece of the Mustang’s 2018 model year updates. There’s also more power from the big V8, less power for the four-cylinder EcoBoost (yes, really), detail improvements to the suspension and interior, and new safety equipment–largely driven by sharp criticism of the outgoing model’s EuroNCAP safety score. The styling, as iconic as ever, hasn’t been meddled with too much. There are new LED headlamps and rear lights, a new bonnet with extra air scoops, while the aero has been tweaked a little to include a…

Vauxhall Insignia GSi £34,475 WE SAY: THE GSI BADGE IS BACK, BUT NO ONE’S REALLY SURE WHY. ALLOW US TO EXPLAIN… We all know what GTI means, whether it’s on a Volkswagen or Peugeot. But GSi? Now that’s a slightly trickier question. Vauxhall is hoping it can put that right with this, the Insignia GSi, driven here as an estate but also available as a hatch. This car is supposedly all about the chassis–“performance through dynamics” is the official line–and it’s the first Vauxhall to get the badge since the early Noughties. Those chassis tweaks, then. Certain Insignias already come with four-wheel drive and active torque-vectoring, but the engineers have sharpened the settings up on this one. The suspension is 10mm lower, there are new, 20-inch wheels and Michelin Pilot…

WE SAY: IT’S A FOUR-DOOR EXECUTIVE COUPE SHOOT-OUT What’s the point? Audi and Merc would insist the A7 and CLS are models in their own right, when in fact they’re more style-led and ‘dynamic’ versions of existing cars. The old A7 was based on the A6; this one shares more with the latest A8… …But the CLS remains an E-Class underneath, as indeed it always has since it gave birth to this whole swoopy four-door coupe thing back in 2004. The two meet in the middle now, at £60k or thereabouts. How are the interiors? It’s very A8-ish in here. Few buttons, but two touchscreens and Audi’s brilliant Virtual Cockpit that makes both of them redundant. Material quality is superb–there really is little to separate 7 from 8–and the tapering…

If you want proof that the SUV is the automotive format that ate the world, look no further than Jaguar’s F-Pace. This is also the car that’s done more to secure the long-term health of the company’s bacon than anything else. To date, Jaguar has shifted 132,000 globally, and sold more of them last year than it managed its entire range back in 2011. The saintly zero-emission I-Pace EV might be cruising silently up the on-ramp, but this is what success looks like in 2018. So even if a high-performance SUV is a ‘development’ of the template that brought us types D and E, let’s just say the new £74,835 F-Pace SVR has something of a celebratory feel to it. It’s also the work of JLR’s fast-moving Special Vehicle Operations…

Hello Jaguar F-Pace £44,615 OTR/£61,590 as tested I’d cherished the idea of an XF Sportbrake, but Jaguar said, “No, what you want is an F-Pace.” Partly, I suspect, because they had this 9k miler to hand, so it’s actually a secondhand test. I don’t see myself as an SUV-er, but there is one advantage–I park on a busy street, and the F-Pace is 21cm shorter yet encloses more people and bootspace than the XF. Unfortunately it’s slower and less lithe. Caesium Blue and black wheels is a handsome scheme. These are £1,255 20-inchers, the Goldilocks size between the sofa-castor 18s and the ride-ruining 22s. Mind you, some of this ride goodness might be down to the £1,185 adaptive damper pack. Elsewhere, there’s an expensive glass roof that I’d rather not…

Goodbye Hyundai i30 Tourer £24,155 OTR/£25,740 as tested After a deceptively short stint with the deceptively long i30 Tourer, the TopGear garage is waving goodbye to EN17 UHC. And in its handful of months with us, the capacious Hyundai has proven one thing beyond doubt: that, for most of us, a decent family estate makes more sense than an SUV-crossover contraption. On sorted winter tyres, the i30 got everywhere we needed it to get, on-and of-tarmac, swallowed everything we needed it to swallow, and looked sleek while doing so. But there are, of course, a whole bunch of decent family estates out there right now. Did the i30 make a case for jumping to the top of your shopping list, ahead of the Ford Focus, VW Golf and the rest?…

Report 3 Nissan GT-R £83,875 OTR/£85,650 as tested The GT-R is a fast car. But for some, well, actually a lot of owners, 562bhp, 469lb ft and a 2.8sec 0–62mph time is not enough. They want more. Whether it be more power, more compliance, more speed or more fames out of the exhaust. So I went to Litchfield. The infamous tuning outfit which has spent the last 10 years exploring how far you can push the R35’s performance. Offering everything from a simple service to complete billet engines, five or six GT-Rs come here for tuning or servicing every day. Initially, Nissan claimed that the R35 was “untunable”. That claim didn’t last long. It was just that the tuning community had to change its tactics. Unlike the old, legendary RB26DETT…