Innholdsfortegnelse for April 2019 i BBC Top Gear Magazine

Pinpointing the precise moment that a movement shifts from alternative subculture to the mainstream is challenging, but arguably this month’s cover could mark that moment in the rise of the EV. That may be attributing far too great an importance to a cover featuring only electric vehicles. But a features run devoted solely to them? That is significant. What used to be a market led by early-adopter curiosity has developed into the most vibrant, diverse, creative and fast-moving side of planet car. This issue takes a deep dive into the full breadth of the EV offering – the EV future is now. A recent survey of our readers revealed that only 2 per cent of you own an electric vehicle, but 45 per cent think you’ll own one in the…

Lagonda appears to have gone for the scatter-gun approach when it comes to naming design influences for its All-Terrain Concept, with everything from super yachts to Mars exploration via the “planetary forces of gravity fields” all attributed to the car’s aesthetics. But it’s going to get made, and it will look more like this concept than you’d expect, even that elongated tail. An SUV will be the first production car from new-age Lagonda (because what else do you launch a brand with these days?) though little is divulged about what powers the All-Terrain at the moment, save for it being fully electric.…

Imagine being paid to rifle through the Bugatti back catalogue before choosing a car to completely re-imagine in a manner appropriate for the 2020s. But while Ettore and his son Jean Bugatti were responsible for a truly outrageous group of cars, there is one that nudges above the others – the 1936 Type 57 Atlantic. ‘La Voiture Noire’ is the result, an extraordinary-looking machine that uses the Chiron as its basis, with the 1479bhp, 8.0-litre, quad-turbocharged, 16-cylinder underneath that majestically reworked rear end. There’s one other thing: this one-off has set its new owner back £12 million, making it the most expensive new car ever. Sheesh. The Type 57 Atlantic is the guv’nor because only four were made between 1936 and 1938. Three are still in existence, one owned by…

My first car was a Volkswagen Beetle with about 50 horsepower. It was very reliable – it never broke down. In fact, it was actually so slow to break down that I had to kill it myself in order to get on to the next one. After that I bought a Golf GTI 16v, the MkII. I pimped it up, put black rims on it, leather seats inside, and then sold it. That meant I could afford a crashed Golf G60 which I repaired. It never went straight but it looked spectacular! Then I changed from the G60 to a Seat and started racing in the Seat Ibiza Cup. I couldn’t afford another car at the time so I had to use it as my road car too. It only…

Since making its very first car in the 1960s, Hyundai has always had one foot in the future. It made its first electric car in 1991, its first hybrid in 1995, and in 2013 – after several successful prototypes – launched the world’s first production hydrogen fuel cell vehicle. And just wait until you see what’s next… ALL-NEW NEXO: HYDROGEN HERE AND NOW Hydrogen isn’t just a future fuel – it’s right here, right now, and a big part of the zero emissions revolution. Just look at the allnew Hyundai NEXO. Under the bonnet is an advanced hydrogen fuel cell, which makes electricity from an electrochemical reaction between hydrogen and air. The electricity it produces directly powers the car via a 120ps motor. When the hydrogen runs low, you simply…

2% of you own an EV now, but 45% think you will own one in the next five years 41% of you have no idea what it costs to run an EV for a year 63% of you have no idea what it costs to charge an electric car 33% of you do not see EV as the future of motoring (That means 67% of you do, right?) Love them or hate them, new ones are arriving faster than we can charge them. But fear not – the future is cleaner, better connected, more convenient and more thrilling than we could’ve imagined. Being the diligent types we are, we carried out research (above) to test the temperature among you, our readers, and the message was clear: an appetite for EVs…

It takes five hours and 48 minutes to drive to Devon. A journey that would normally take just under three. More than a trip, it’s an education. By the time I arrive at Exmoor, I have five new apps on my phone, have battled malfunctioning charge points, know the desk staff at Tiverton leisure centre and have come to the conclusion that to buy an electric car you need a spirit of adventure. If you’re planning on driving it a long way, that is. Electric cars make perfect sense as a second car. A 120-mile range is fine if you’re never doing more than 60 a day. Your home charger is your lifeline. But trying to drive a long way is like casting yourself adrift in a life raft –…

To misquote Dr Emmett Brown, “If you’re going to build electric into a car, why not do it with some style?” Meet the most modern car Aston Martin has ever made. It’s from 1970. Valkyrie? Pur-lease. Still a prototype, confined to simulators and test beds. Propelled along by a cacophany of exploding ex-dinosaur vapours. No, this 49-year-old slab of ivory and red is the cutting-edge. Aston Martin’s first electric car. Humming as it charges in one of Aston Martin’s skunkworks garages at Silverstone, the DB6 MkII Volante is proudly introduced to me by a beaming Paul Spires, boss of Aston Martin Works. Fingers crossed it does. Works is the Newport Pagnell-based classic arm of the company. They’ll complete a certified restoration of your latest barn-find for, ooh, £425,000. Fancy converting…

Report 3 Hyundai Santa Fe £43,295 OTR/£44,485 as tested I’m not as lucky as my colleagues, and don’t have the ability to swap into different cars often. Mainly because I choose to catch the train most days, so my day-to-day running of the Santa Fe tends to consist of commuting to the station. And then at weekends I find myself ferrying the kids to football, karting, play dates, parties and swimming events. And that’s how cars are used in the real world. So it’s a brilliant opportunity for me to really get to know a car and tell you what it’s like to live with every day. I’m sure there are things you love about your current car, but also things that just piss you off. The Santa Fe is…

Goodbye Kia Stinger £40,535 OTR, £41,180 as tested Each time I walked up to the Kia, or parked and glanced back, a little swoon ran down my insides. It’s a fabulous-looking thing, so much the better for the absence of pretence in the nameplate. At red lights, folk would knock on the window: “That’s a Kia? Wow mate, lovely.” Kia people are careful not to call it a sports car. I wish other makers of 1,900kg four-doors were as transparent. If it tried to be scalpel-sharp, that’d undermine its appetite, and yours, for long distances. But it will wink and join you for some fun when the road allows. It’s properly powerful and clearly – very clearly – rear-driven, yet the way it communicates the grip and traction is really…

There have been numerous performance cars spun from the Renault Clio during its nearly 30 years, but perhaps none is as sharp, precise and downright fun as this one. Which, with bundles of joy like the Clio Williams and utter madness such as the Clio V6 in the family, is quite a claim. But something good was clearly in the water when RS was putting the finishing touches to the Clio 200 in 2009. This wasn’t a case of teasing out a bit of extra power and fitting some stiffer suspension: the whole engine was unique to the model, and new suspension components were accompanied by a slightly longer wheelbase and broader track widths, the latter necessitating those magnificently swelled wheelarches. If you follow one from behind, it looks so…

“This will probably sell more than the Model S and Model 3 combined.” Not our words, the words of his holiness Elon Musk, high priest of the EV evangelists, speaking at the reveal of the Model Y SUV at Tesla’s LA design studio. I’m in the bear pit, surrounded by doting customers who can’t stop screaming. “We love you Elon!”, “I’ll take two!”, “Thank you for bringing sexy back, Elon!”. The latter referring to his naming structure (Models S, 3, X and Y), not his smasual attire. It would be easy to sneer at the superfans, but listening to Musk recap the journey from exactly 10 years ago, when there was only the Roadster in existence (Musk owns this black Roadster, and points this out as it drives on stage…

Hard to keep up with Aston these days, such is the ferocity of its launch schedule. It brought three new mid-engined models to the Geneva show – the first a working Valkyrie validation prototype, the 003 (on sale 2021) on the opposite page, and this, the Vanquish Vision concept, Aston’s answer to the McLaren 720S, Lambo Huracán and Ferrari 488 GTB. Except by the time the Vanquish arrives, in 2022, all the above will have moved on to even greater heights and bigger numbers. Ferrari already has. This is the F8 Tributo, basically all the best bits from the 488 Pista in a 50kg heavier, restyled, marginally more usable and affordable package. So 711bhp, 0–62mph in 2.9 seconds and 211mph, all bang in line with the Pista, except for the…

This is the new Peugeot 208, and the big news is… it’s gone electric. Or at least the e-208 version has. Fully electric; a 100kW (134bhp) motor teams up with a 50kWh battery to deliver over 200 miles of real-world range, not to mention an 8.5sec 0–62mph time. That makes it quicker than any petrol or diesel option currently available. Though not as quick to refuel, of course. It’ll take over 20 hours to fully charge on a traditional domestic socket, but eight hours from a dedicated fast charger, with the ability to gain 80 per cent of charge in just 30 minutes if you can find a vacant rapid charger at motorway services. The time it takes for a wee ’n’ tea, essentially. Other practical gubbins include the ability…

Range Rover Evoque P300 HSE R-Dynamic £ £51,050 Viewed from the dry breadhead perspective of a car industry executive, the Evoque is a real heavyweight. It’s JLR’s biggest seller, and rivals including BMW and Mercedes have been uncharacteristically candid in admitting it spurred them into building the X2 and GLA. And yet… car enthusiasts have a bit of trouble with the Evoque. Something so style-led has got to be a bit iffy, hasn’t it? And true to our intuition, it has been adopted as a bit of a trinket. Just observe the buyers and the use cases; for many, if not most, it’s an it-bag on four wheels. But don’t write off the Evoque as superficial just because people like it for shallow reasons. The old one had some strength…

Cheap or cheerful? Both, but with a focus on the former. While this is a new-gen, slightly fancierlooking Duster, it’s as cheap as ever. Getting any brand-new car for £9,995 is an achievement nowadays, let alone one that’ll take five people off road. Both, but with a focus on the latter. The £15k-plus Jimny is all neat design touches and fun detailing. And where the snobs may say ‘tacky plastic’, the Jimny responds with ‘wipe-clean’. How is it on the road? Like a proper car. The steering is light, the gearbox precise, the suspension designed not to loosen your head from your neck. It covers the basics of transport with accomplishment, and with a choice of engines including a sweet petrol turbo or this slightly rattlier diesel, for full parsimony.…

The EV movement needs a poster star, a car that spikes our collective “I need one of those” sense, and offers transportation in an affordable package. For too long, EV design has conformed to a “Look at me – I’m different” aesthetic, but for EVs to genuinely make the shift to mass market, we need one we can fall in love with. So when Honda revealed the concept-car perfection that was the Honda Urban EV at the Tokyo show in 2017, the world started paying attention… and hoped that the migration from concept to reality wouldn’t dilute the proposition. It’s fair to say the levels of expectation in the nondescript German photographic studio in advance of the reveal of the car ahead of its Geneva debut were high. By now,…

Imagine you had the chance to start a car company from scratch. What would it look like? Unmoored from an industry that says you have to build your cars like this, and sell them like that, would you have the nerve to be different or stay close to the pack? A little over three years ago, in the space I’m standing in – a giant echo chamber of polished concrete, white pillars and glass – Volvo made the call. “Sometimes in life it’s funny how click, click, click, a lot of things happen at the same time and yes, electrification came in.” That’s Thomas Ingenlath, Polestar’s new CEO, who’s also senior vice president of design at Volvo. Busy chap. “Founding a new car brand, I mean, Jesus, what a crazy…

Goodbye Volvo XC40 £ £34,570 OTR/£41,495 as tested When I was little, my family was all over Volvos. We had many Swedish tanks, and I loved them all… so it is with a heavy heart that I wave off the XC40. As winner of our 2018 Sensible SUV of the Year award, I knew the XC40 wasn’t going to be a disappointment, but even this undercover Volvo aficionado was surprised by how much this baby SUV got under my skin. It was big when it needed to be (Vijay’s multiple tip trips with beds and sofas proved that more than adequately) and small when it needed to be (city-centre back-road ratruns are a breeze). It carried many and varied people, and no one complained about aching backs or cold feet…

Report 5 Mercedes A-Class £ £28,700 OTR/£30,830 as tested The A-Class and Ed Sheeran. Two things wildly popular with the British public, which I’ve simply never understood the appeal of. I’m professional, though, so to see if I can be won around, we’re going to spend some time together. Me and the Merc, that is. Ed’s too busy writing twee, M&S advert-friendly music. What better way to get acquainted than a roadtrip, and thus my first journey in the A200 was a weekend away in Belgium. Far enough to get to know each other, but not so far that a blazing row would lead to endless awkward silence. Some of my struggles with the A-Class revolve around it costing proper hot hatch money with barely half the power and none…

Goodbye BMW M5 Competition £ £97,925 OTR/£109,885 as tested “Out in the real world… 600bhp super-saloons just don’t make sense.” That was Chris Harris on the TV show recently. He’s got a point. I’ve mentioned before that I think the M5 is a bit much, that I actually enjoyed running an M3 more, so how best to reflect on almost a year of living with an M5? It was blue before, nicknamed Baloo for its amiable bearishness, then replaced with Slim, because it still wasn’t. This, of course, is an M5 Competition. This one is fractionally more alert, with fractionally better body control, but not £10k’s worth. And I never got it to match the awesome acceleration the standard car delivered on a warm day last summer (2.99secs to 60mph,…

Hello Range Rover Velar £ £67,740 OTR/£72,145 as tested A lifestyle car. They never mention what lifestyle, do they? So I’m going to find out if the Range Rover Velar fits mine. Which mainly involves commuting, bikes, teenager hauling and tip runs. And very little hanging around on the steps of five-star hotels modelling luggage. I’m not sure what to think about the Velar. I love the way it looks, but really don’t know what it says about me. Took my son and a mate to a bike park a couple of weeks back. The weather was filthy, and so was the car park. The Velar seems to me rather dirt-averse. I felt a bit self-conscious parking up next to the massed ranks of VW T5 vans. The Velar has…

Who: Stephen Dobie Where: Wantage, UK Proof that the internet never sleeps. Dep ed Stephen hard at work in the middle of nowhere Who: Tom Ford Where: Bergen, Norway Big, hairy creature tries to entice adorable fluffy dog into playing. Fails What: battery charger Where: Silverstone, UK Good to know that the new/old Aston is being charged by new/old friend TopGear Who: Chris Rowles Where: TG car park, UK Divine justice for the man who laughed at the Peugeot 1007 for having sliding doors… Who: Jason Barlow Where: Sveta Nedelja, Croatia Jason waiting to see how the automonous driving mode works on the Rimac Greyp… Who: John Wycherley Where: Stuttgart, Germany A sneaky peek behind the scenes of the unglamorous world of car photoshoots…

Yep, the base Tesla Model 3 is now available for order… in the US. European sales will be rolled out in the next six months, and Asian orders will have to wait until the new Shanghai gigafactory starts churning out enough batteries. Until now, Tesla has concentrated on selling Model 3s with long-range batteries and more equipment, meaning the average price paid was around $50,000 (£38,000). The new Model 3 Standard Range will go 220 miles between recharges, get from zero to 62mph in 5.6 seconds and top out at 130mph. Its $35k price converts to around £26,000 at current exchange rates, but there’s no word on a confirmed UK price for the right-hand drive version just yet. Inside, you still get the megascreen interface, but the seats are cloth…

The Centoventi concept is a boxy city car that explores what the new Fiat Panda could be. Electric, cheap, spartan, nononsense but desirable electric transport. The car would only be produced in one colour, with a choice of four body colour wraps, four roof colours, four wheel trims and, you guessed it, four bumpers. The flexibility extends to the batteries. Fiat starts you off with one, giving you 62 miles of range. Then you can buy or lease up to four more, each one giving the same amount of range, up to the full-fat 310 miles. Clever, no?…

As thank yous go, this beats chocolates and a card. Named after Christian von Koenigsegg’s father, the man who helped him start the company as a starry-eyed 22-year-old, the Jesko could be the first car to crack 300mph, according to CvK’s simulations, albeit in a lower downforce set-up than the one you see here. Expect 1,578bhp (on E85) from a new flat-plane crank, twin-turbo V8, an all-new 9spd seven-clutch gearbox, carbon everywhere, 880kg of downforce at 155mph and only 125 built at £2.7m each. Ooof.…

While the new 208 was designed from the get-go to accommodate an electric motor and the batteries to power it, the Mini… wasn’t. The Cooper S E – yep, that’s its name – uses bits from the BMW i3, squeezed in where they’ll fit. Impressively, it still has back seats, and the boot isn’t full of battery. Exact specs will be released nearer to the car’s reveal in July, but we know battery capacity is 33kWh, giving around 181bhp and probably just over 100 miles of range. Not far – but the average Mini owner only drives his or her ICE car a quarter of that distance every day. Work and back. Weight is up by 250kg on a normal Mini, blunting performance somewhat, but weight distribution is actually better.…

PORSCHE DESIGN 911 SOUNDBAR BLACK EDITION Considering we won’t be needing exhaust systems in the EV world, we might be better off finding another use for them. Porsche has one idea – its design branch is turning the silencers and tailpipes from old 911 GT3s into limited-edition speaker systems with 2.1 virtual surround sound and Dolby Digital tech, it doesn’t get much cooler than this. Recycling saves the world too, so you’ll be doing your bit for the planet at the same time, even if it does annoy the neighbours more than an actual 911 would. porsche-design.com; €3,500 JARVISH X-AR For those motorcyclists who don’t want to replace their trusty old steed with a modern, tech-filled bike just yet – the Jarvish X-AR is the answer. This carbon-fibre helmet has…

Toyota Corolla 2.0 Hybrid £ £27,500 All manner of news stories surround the arrival of the new Corolla. First, the return of the bestselling badge in car history to UK showrooms, after 13 years of the Auris. Second, the fact it’s British built, when certain rivals soon won’t be. Third, well, it’s actually interesting to look at for once, isn’t it? Based on a brand-new platform, Toyota prioritised good looks and decent handling during development. At one glance, the former appears to have been nailed, though it’s worth noting the fancy two-tone colour scheme is only optional on top-spec versions. And the latter? Well, it’ll likely take the arrival of a Gazoo Racing hot hatch to properly tap into any sporting nous in this car’s chassis. Because for now, the…

Peugeot 508 GT-Line Hybrid £ £tbc Just to confuse us, Peugeot has two different plug-in systems upcoming. This 508 snuggles an electric motor next to its petrol engine, so it’s FWD. The 3008 will have that, plus another electric motor aft, to become an actual 4WD crossover. Oh, and the 508 Engineered by Peugeot Sport will amp up that 4WD system to 350bhp. Peugeot wants to posit electrification as a way to be green but with fun attached. That’s why we have Peugeot’s familiar 1.6-litre turbo, rather than one of those super-economical but wheezy Atkinson engines deployed by the true hybrid believers. I asked a Peugeot engineer about that: “If you want efficiency, plug this in,” she said. That’s me told. The battery of 11.8kWh is tucked under the seat,…

McLaren 600LT Spider £ £201,500 This roadster has an appetite for track work that has to be experienced to be believed. Even then, you might not believe it. The way the 600LT Spider dives at apexes, the energy it carries through corners… I can’t recall another roadster that conducts itself with quite the same focus and aggression. Not many other cars, full stop. Whatever happened to roadsters being the softer, baggier versions of their coupe counterparts? Carbon fibre, that’s what. Every McLaren is built around a carbon core, roadster and coupe developed together to use the same tub, so each is as structurally stiff as the other. The only weight gain over the 600LT coupe – a paltry 48kg – comes from the roof mechanism. That operates electrically rather than…

There is a place on the Norwegian RV7 road between – roughly – Maurset and Øvre Eidfjord, just to the south of the Vøringfossen, where you transition from slightly anonymous trunk route to breath-snatching beauty via a rock tube made by drunk people. One moment you’re happily pottering along, the next you enter an innocuous tunnel – there are lots hereabouts – and spiral around inside a mountain like a confused marble, looping twice before popping out in the gaping granite maw of a giant crack in the landscape. There are waterfalls frothing mightily from the edges of cliffs, a river filled with the boundless energy of excess gravity, the softer features of the area swept up and stuffed into this little landbased cove of green and grey. It’s not……

“WELCOME, HIGH-NET WORTH, GUILT-FREE, ZERO-EMISSIONS ULTRA-PERFORMANCE” In the midst of a welter of startling facts, those tasked with communicating the Pininfarina Battista have plenty to draw on. It’s the most powerful road-legal car ever to come out of Italy, a country that’s produced its fair share of powerful road-legal cars. Thanks to a 120kWh lithiumion battery pack and an electric motor on each wheel, it produces approximately 1,900bhp and 1,697lb ft. Both are barmy and imbue the Battista with an accelerative urge to rival an F1 car. Zero to 62mph takes a tarmac-melting sub-two seconds, 186mph up in less than 12. All without the haze of spent hydrocarbons. Welcome, high-net worth, guilt-free, zero-emissions ultra-performance. But elsewhere there’s talk of creating “the first car to make the world love electric vehicles”…

x:/ <WARNING>_50 miles range was immaterial. You’d die of boredom long before then x:/ <WARNING>_Available with ‘extra long’ cable for range-anxiety-free trips to the shops x:/ <WARNING>_Regular use of this car may cause extreme listlessness and ennui x:/ <WARNING>_“If you’re soggy and you know it raise your hand, raise your hand…” x:/ <WARNING>_When a mummy Mini and a daddy Little Tikes Cozy Coupe love each other very much… x:/ <WARNING>_“Er, lads. Don’t you want me *out* the car before you crush it?” REVA G-WIZ Just how much damage did this hunchbacked plastic quadricycle do to the electric car cause? Emerging in 2001, the G-Wiz depended on a lead acid battery, good for only 50 miles of range and less performance than a moped. It dodged the Congestion Charge, but cost…

Step 1 Acquire an old banger/shed/classic. Ideally one with plenty of room in the transmission tunnel or engine bay to store awkwardly shaped batteries not intended to power a home-brew classic car. Step 2 Remove the old engine. Do not lose it. You may well need it later, to preserve the car’s value. Or your chances of getting to work. Or out of the garage. Step 3 Keep your new EV propulsion simple. If you’re not axle-mounting the motor, you may well be able to route drive though the old gearbox. Presto, analogue thrills! Step 4 Neat wiring will make life easier when there’s inevitably a fault to iron out. Colour code and clip those wires tidily. Or you’ll be in a world of ‘amateur electrician meets bomb defusal technician’…

Hello Volvo V60 £ £34,410 OTR/£44,055 as tested When told that I’d be running a Volvo estate for the next six months, I wasn’t exactly excited by the prospect. The last time I’d run a Volvo was exactly 10 years ago, when I had an XC70. This was in the days when Volvo was part of Ford’s Premier Automotive Group alongside Jaguar, Land Rover and Aston Martin, but there was nothing ‘premier’ about my XC70. It was bland-looking, the interior felt cheap and it was unrewarding both to drive and to live with. Since 2010, however, Volvo has been under Chinese ownership, and these days my colleagues are unanimous in the view that Volvo is on fire in terms of both design and quality. They promised that I’d love the…

Hello Cupra Ateca £ £35,900 OTR/£41,175 as tested I know, I know. Not another bloody SUV, I hear you say, and I’m with you but this is something slightly different. What we have here is a slightly sharper but much quicker Ateca. Which was a good car to begin with. Bodes well. But then Seat has removed its perfectly fine logo from the front and stuck on what has been described by some as a cheap tramp stamp tattoo-style badge in its place. No, I’m not sure why either. It gets a lot of bemused looks out on the road, that’s for sure. I could not be more nailed on target for this Cupra Ateca, considering my car history of hot hatches pre-children and SUVs/MPVs since. I need a car…

Report 3 & 2 Ford Fiesta ST-3 & Merc-AMG G63 £ £21,995/£24,890 & £143,305/£148,005 What we have here are the bookends of the TG Garage. Both have been basted in performance by their respective ‘go-faster’ brands, and both are TopGear award winners. But they couldn’t be more different to live with. At one end, the ST: a featherweight packing a heavyweight’s punch in a nimble and usable package. At the other, the G63 AMG; a sumo wrestler in a pair of wellies with an abnormal amount of fast twitch muscles and a serious drinking problem. For a while, Charlie Turner and I have been flipping between them for comparison purposes. But which has sparkled? RH: This is a toughy, isn’t it? Two fantastic cars engineered to operate in two different…