Innholdsfortegnelse for December 2019 i BBC Top Gear Magazine

Editor-in-chief @TopGearEditor editor@bbctopgearmagazine.com When is a Porsche not a Porsche? What are the key characteristics that take a set of components and turn them into the physical representation of the company? I would argue that if you blindfolded any of the TopGear staffers and put them inside vehicles from the heavyweight carmakers we’d be able to tell you what brand we were sitting in. The road test department could do it by smell alone… but that’s for another time. The fundamental touchpoints, seating position, steering-wheel thickness, pedal feel… all of these parameters are carefully engineered to differentiate, to deliver a specific experience. Sound used to be a key differentiator too. Arguably, the sound a car made was a key part of its character. Then there’s the gearbox: the connection that…

1 Your company makes cars in Britain. How will Brexit affect that? I’m sure you’re not allowed to answer, but I’m not allowed not to ask. Quite. Let’s say Nissan supports frictionless trade. 2 Some of the strongest brands mean the same wherever you go. But Nissan means different things in different parts of the world. What’s Nissan really about here? We don’t sell all kinds of car but we do have three definite leaders. Juke – segment leader. The new one is the perfect car to be launching now. Qashqai – leader. Leaf – leader. And the NV200e is the leading electric van. 3 Others sell more cars in total when they add more models. When will there be another electric car besides the Leaf? We don’t grow by…

THE GOOD I am not a fan of John H or his business practices, but I love that the ethos of this car is the polar opposite of the Chiron TacoPants Wow, finally they made a cool car that is more Hennessey than anything else. I like the design but I don’t know how it will transfer to real world Fatalpotato HOLY GUACAMOLE, WHAT AN AMAZING AUTOMOBILE James L Campbell 275 HP PER LITER!! LONG LIVE PUSHRODS!! 8) warps The Chiron is tamed, this thing is wild Paul Aesthete THE BAD I’d rather a Chiron than this. Anytime Hazy Leftie Does it turn or go only straight? Carruba Within a week of one being on the road, it will achieve a top speed of 38 miles an hour sideways into…

Audiomeccanica turntable That’s just a cool-looking, but ultimately bog-standard record player, right? Wrong. OK, we know you’d already guessed that from the name, but the ‘meccanica’ part is what makes this thing interesting. This turntable uses a smooth-running electric motor to drive a belt. So far, so normal. But that belt then turns a real-life valve from an internal combustion engine, allowing your record to spin and make lovely sounds in the process. Its maker, Italian start-up Studio Mandato, claims it ‘combines the company’s two greatest passions: music and fast cars’. It should be available to buy soon, and will arrive at a time where analogue-everything is making a comeback. Our advice? Stick it in the garage, put some vinyl tunes on and work away on that naturally aspirated, manual…

“IT RIDES PRETTY WELL, GIVEN ITS TITCHY DIMENSIONS” £28,620 FOR Renault mends the bits that needed mending and leaves the bits that didn’t AGAINST Fast-charger not standard and ‘only’ 50kW, can’t carry four adults comfortably Tiny EVs are about to become a big thing. Till now Renault has had the market for such cars all to itself, but with the cute Honda e, long-awaited Mini Electric and Peugeot e-208/Corsa-e soon to land in dealers, life is about to get much more complicated for Europe’s best-selling electric car. The new Zoe doesn’t totally rewrite the formula. It looks much the same as before, largely because underneath it’s still that same car – the one that was launched in 2012 and since upgraded a couple of times with more efficient motors and…

“THE INEVITABLE PRICE FOR THE AGILITY IS A BUSY RIDE” £22,495 FOR Small crossovers are never exactly dynamic, so you might as well get one that’s distinctive AGAINST ‘Distinctive’ is a double-edged sword. Be prepared for some to loathe it The Juke was a pioneer. Nine years ago, it packed the attitude and altitude of a crossover, and shrunk out-there styling into a supermini’s length span. In the years following, most manufacturers launched small crossovers and we lazily called them ‘Juke rivals’. But they weren’t rivals because they weren’t as useless. You could swing a cat in them. That first Juke’s driving position was hunched, its back seat cramped and dark, and its boot little more than a rear-mounted glovebox. So the new Juke’s packaging engineers got stuck into that…

Porsche has built the world’s first mainstream electric sports car. News which will doubtless be received with great indignation by fans of the 0–60-in-2.4secs Tesla Model S. And every sports car manufacturer, given that both have four doors and weigh as much as a Range Rover. Welcome, then, to a new world of performance, where nothing is quite as you expect. Until now, Tesla has been writing the fast EV rules. Traditional car companies, having taken years to catch up, have chosen safer first steps on the EV path. SUVs from Audi, Jaguar and Mercedes, hatches from Renault, Vauxhall, Nissan and Peugeot, a proto-Golf from VW. Big marques re-typecasting their most popular cars as EVs in the quest for an early sales kick. Looks like they all learned from the…

The apocalypse is coming. Not ‘if’ according to some bits of slightly gloomy internet, but a definite ‘when’, driven by a self-stimulating paranoia that imagines every flavour of Doomsday. The walking dead feature a bit. Chatroom rabbit holes involve viral attack, dirty nukes, alien invasion, meteors and mass brainwashing by reality television. But one that keeps cropping up – and the one with the most likelihood of actually happening – concerns basic societal breakdown after a particularly violent stock market crash or technological giga-malfunction. Stuff stops working, wholesale; the general population goes doolally. Responses vary almost as much as the imagined stimulus. Some detail what they might do with their final days (which generally involve drugs, sex and variations on suicide-by-cholesterol), others vomit religion all over their keyboards. Apparently there…

Given that this month sees the release of Le Mans ’66, which should turn the Ford GT40 into a bona fide movie star, let’s turn our attention to one of the great motorsport liveries: Gulf. Inevitably endurance racing was a big corporate play for the Blue Oval – as the film makes very clear – so it was no surprise that Henry Ford II pulled the plug on the works effort once the car had won Le Mans twice. In many ways, the GT40’s privateer afterlife is the most impressive part of its history. The first and original car to wear Gulf colours was chassis no. 1049, raced in the Daytona 24 hours and Sebring 12 hours in 1967 as an independent entry at the behest of Gulf VP Grady…

THANKS FOR REMINDING ME JUST HOW AWESOME GULLWING DOORS ARE Aren’t they? We wish they’d made it into the AMG GT too. But alas, the GT was never really meant to replace the SLS, which Mercedes saw as a rival to the Ferrari 458 and so on. It was a supercar, hence it could justify a pair of theatrical, expensive, impractical doors. The GT, though, is supposed to be a viable alternative to a Porsche 911 – a car you might consider using every day. So it needed normal doors. Doors you can close if you’re under 6ft tall, and whose hinges don’t need to be rigged with explosives to blow them off if you roll. USE A GT R PRO EVERY DAY? BRAVE Quite. And well spotted – this…

REPORT 4 £31,835 OTR/£36,185 as tested/£455pcm WHY IT’S HERE Meh first impressions. Can RenaultSport redeem itself over time? DRIVER Rowan Horncastle A FEW WEEKS AGO, I WAS OOP NORTH – SO SWUNG PAST THE PEAK District to let the Megane off the leash. And sweet mother of Dijon mustard this thing grips. Up until now, I’ve found the handling to be unpredictable. But having turned down the erratic 4WS and conducted some – ahem – dynamic grip-based testing, I think I’ve sussed out what I’ve come to call the ‘lift-off-oh-shiiiittt-O-steer’. Well, I think I have. Famous last words, and all that. Tune in next month when I’ve wrapped it around a tree. Anyway, like many older cars, to get the best of the 300 you’ve simply got to be cognisant…

GOODBYE £20,810 OTR/£29,090 as tested/£282pcm WHY IT’S HERE Can a (very posh) supermini work as your sole family car? DRIVER Sam Philip I’VE DRIVEN A VEYRON. I’VE DRIVEN A MCLAREN P1. I’VE DRIVEN A Koenigsegg Agera. But, no word of hyperbole, I honestly think this Audi A1 might be the best car I’ve ever driven. Obviously it’s not quite so fast as a Veyron. Or quite so heart-threateningly exciting as a P1. But in terms of utterly, utterly nailing its design brief – namely, to be a very posh city car – this A1 is all but flawless. It’s so damned… complete, this A1. Everything, everything, from the seats to the satnav to the pedal weights to the looks to the stereo to the throttle response of the sweet little…

The ID. 3 hasn’t taken over just yet – the Golf is still, and will probably remain for years to come, the ubiquitous Volkswagen. Still the answer we’ll give pretty much anyone when they ask us what new car they ought to buy. Assuming it’s not terrible, that is. There is more distance between the MkVII Golf and the new MkVIII than there was between the MkVI and the MkVII. On the inside, at least. Gone is the old car’s unimpeachably user-friendly, button-laden interior. Now, save for a few on the doors and steering wheel, there are virtually no buttons. Everything is routed through the big touchscreen, which runs a new UI, and what few physical controls remain – volume, temperature, sunroof – are of the terrible swipy/touchy variety. We’ve…

To get your hands on one of Aston’s tremendous DB4 GT Zagato continuations, you had to sign up to buy something called the ‘DBZ Centenary Collection’ – a two-car multipack featuring said DB4, plus a mystery Zagato-bodied DBS. The two cars were only offered as a pair – you couldn’t buy one without the other – for a combined £6 million. Before tax. Quick recap: like its forefather, the DB4 GT Zag’ is track-only. However, while the looks and the Rosso Maja red paint may be an exact replica of the original, some of the bits under the skin have been subtly adapted to make it even better to drive. For instance, under the bonnet there’s a 4.7-litre version of the 3.7-litre, 302bhp engine found in the DB4 GT Continuation…

The inspiration for this month’s watches comes from genius filmmaker, martial arts expert and all-round stylish geezer Guy Ritchie. He was asked on a US podcast why he always wears his suits with a pocket square. Ritchie said that by adding a deliberate sartorial twist, you take ownership of an outfit, making a suit something you are proud to wear, rather than being forced to by your boss, or your mum. This is the same approach you should take to watches. When you are buying a car, there are always some practical considerations, like whether it will fit into your garage, or whether your children will fit into it. With a watch, there really isn’t much practical stuff to think about at all. Of course you can buy one that…

Since the original BAFTAwinning Race Driver: Grid back in 2008, the series has lost its way a bit. Time for a reboot, then, with Grid, which is what everyone called the original anyway, rather confusingly. Grid is not a simulator. You can hustle even reallife racecars exactly as you do in your daydreams, rather than having to worry about tedious realities like ‘the limits of adhesion’. This is proper elbows-out competition and overtakes are less likely to be precision moves, more four locked tyres, crossed up steering and an exchange of insurance details. The only problem is the rather sparse selection of circuits, all of which are rinsed for as many configurations and variants as possible. Grid brings the drama; we just wish it didn’t take the old performer’s maxim…

Yes, right now recharging an electric car on the go is a colossal ache. That’s partly why most charging happens at regular places while owners do something else – eg at work. Infuriatingly, for on-the-go rapid charging, there are literally dozens of networks, all requiring their own app, sign-up and often a RFID key too. Grrrr. It needn’t be that way. There’s no technical reason we can’t roam freely. Despite the hilarious efforts of electricity companies to pretend they’re brands, they’re not. They’re commodities. No one gives a crap about brand, just availability and price. But a bit of a war is going on in the UK charging industry. Some of the big providers including Ecotricity, BP Polar and Podpoint have decided against co-operation. They think they can get more…

VOLKSWAGEN IS OFFERING POTENTIAL customers the chance to test drive the Touareg for 48 hours. Yep, you read that correctly, you can now experience two whole days in Volkswagen’s premium, flagship SUV. The only problem is, once you’re in it, you won’t want to get out. In R-Line Tech trim, the Touareg comes as standard with the class-leading Innovision Cockpit and Active Info Display, which places a gorgeous and feature-packed 15-inch touchscreen at the heart of the interior. Among those features is Volkswagen’s Connected Navigation. The 3D mapping makes directions as clear as day, and you’ll always be on the best possible route thanks to the self-learning, online navigation. Then there’s Hybrid radio – which combines FM, DAB and Internet radio to constantly search for the best reception, meaning you’ll…

“PEUGEOT HAS PULLED OFF SOME LOVELY TOUCHES IN THE 208” £23,350 FOR Truly great mix of powertrains, genuinely stunning interior AGAINST The ride’s too firm, and, as per usual, the touchscreen’s unhelpful I’m trying really hard here to avoid a lazy linguistic pun like ‘vive le difference’ or ‘French revolution’, but Peugeot’s not made that easy, because it’s done something pretty much forbidden in the tightly contested white-hot arena of ‘building a good small car for a reasonable price’. It’s taken a gamble. Because, see, there isn’t just a new Peugeot 208. There’s also a new Peugeot e-208: see the panel on your right. All-electric drive, but identical looks. No blanked-off grilles, platypus nosecones or even bespoke paint. It’s just a new 208, and just as you’ll choose between petrol…

£20,570 FOR It’s different. Not exactly a hatch, not exactly a crossover AGAINST Not exactly a great car, either Way back when, ‘crossover’ was the coinage for something that crossed between a car and an SUV. The XCeed is midway between a car and a crossover. Cross-crossover? Crossunder? Any old how, it’s not as tall as a Nissan Qashqai. It’s a bit less hatch-y than a Ford Focus Active. It’s somewhere around the VW T-Roc or new Mazda CX-30 ballpark. For people who find a crossover too clumpy and a hatch too normcore. The suspension is raised a little and the tyres have taller sidewalls. Sitting in it, the driving position is entirely car-like, but you’re higher off the ground. They’re aiming this thing at young families, but the slightly…

AUDI RS7 £95,000est FOR A big burly RS car that feels sharp in corners. Hurrah AGAINST It won’t be cheap. An RS6 wagon is cooler RS7 MkI wasn’t one for the hall of fame, so Audi’s gone back to the drawing board: 4WS, cleverer quattro and mild-hybrid tech all nestle beneath a bespoke widebody. It looks ace and the driving experience doesn’t disappoint. You’ll barely notice the low-speed electrification stuff, but you will notice one of the most involving, interesting RS chassis in years. An E63 is more fun, but this’ll be easier to live with. Bodes well for the RS6… BMW X3 M £77,190 FOR Looks less appalling than most current BMWs AGAINST The ride is completely savage, a car without nuance This car contains the engine of the…

0-60 2.61 268 0–100 6 .12 6.46 ¼ MI LE 10.69@ 131.6MPH 11.08@ 124.0MPH NO POINT IN MESSING ABOUT – THIS IS what we all came to see, which is why our first stop was an airport runway. Manufacturer figures favour the Porsche, marginally, from 0–100mph, so it starts favourite, and given Tesla’s times are set on a warm drag strip with one-foot roll-out, it really doesn’t look good for Elon. Having said that, we’ve witnessed Teslas obliterate pretty much everything over the quarter-mile in the last few years, so an upset wasn’t out of the question. As we rolled up to the line (both cars with over 85 per cent charge), exchanged evils and prepared to race, Ollie realised he hadn’t prewarmed the Tesla’s battery to unlock Ludicrous+ mode.…

Is this pressure? I’ll admit to feeling apprehensive. I grab hold of the harness and pull my feet up the footwell, the light on the dashtop turns blue, the car emits an electronic fart, the steering wheel twitches and off it whirrs. Apprehension goes once we’re around Copse. Devbot 2.0 is a tugger. I hadn’t really been worried about letting the car drive me around. Silverstone has plenty of run off and no one these days is going to put you in an autonomous racing car without being pretty damn confident in their technology. And their legal team. It feels way riskier letting a self-driving car take control on the road. But what if the car was faster? That I’d find harder to handle. But why shouldn’t it be? Supercomputers…

Upcycling is currently all the rage. And last year, FCA got in on the trend – turning an old (and huge) transmission workshop at its historic Mirafiori factory into the best retirement home ever. It’s called the Heritage Hub, a huge display of 300+ cars from its 120-year back catalogue. Every marque from the FCA family represented, and the ever-growing haul is currently worth more than €60m – that’s not including the 300 other cars tucked away in storage. But the sheer breadth of creativity, innovation and craziness in the room makes it more of an asylum than a museum. It’s Italy at its best. And here are TG’s top picks from the breathtaking box of bonkers. 1988 LANCIA ECV 2 You probably recognise the rally car in the background:…

REPORT 5 £28,330/£29,400 as tested/£290pcm WHY IT’S HERE Do crossovers work best when they’re determinedly anti-sporty? DRIVER Paul Horrell WHY DO WE HAVE CARS? WE LIKE THEM, OBVIOUSLY. BUT ALSO THE freedom. Two examples this month. One, a family weekend in Chester. My wife argued, persuasively, that it’s easier, greener and faster to take the train. We got to Euston only to find the whole mainline blocked. I got on a hire cycle, rode home (not far), picked up the car and swung back past the station, then on to Chester. Easy. The Aircross might ride softly, but it doesn’t make our kid any more nauseous than other cars do, even though she’s sat in the back, eyes pinned to a screen. That’s despite the fact on motorways it gently…

This, ladies and gentlemen, is a bit of a milestone moment for Volvo. Not only is the new XC40 Recharge the company’s first-ever fully electric car, but it’s the start of an EV offensive. Five EVs in the next five years – all badged Recharge. By 2025, 50 per cent of the cars it sells will run on battery power alone. So, back to the XC40 – a pretty standard XC40, only with a twin-motor, AWD, electric powertrain. Park it alongside its internal combustion-engined sibling and the only differences you’ll notice are the closed-over grille and a slightly deeper floor. That’s where the 75kWh battery lives. The headline figures are a promised range of more than 250 miles on the WLTP cycle, and a zero to 80 per cent charge…

As if buying a German sports saloon wasn’t already tricky enough. The BMW M5 and Mercedes E63 have now reached some sort of 1,200bhp dead heat, the Audi RS7 Sportback is all of a sudden good, and the AMG boys have concocted something else entirely in the shape of the complex but wonderful GT 4dr. A car which BMW’s now made a direct rival for in the shape of the M8 Gran Coupe – aimed at all those M5 fans with another £30,000 stashed in their wallet. It’s a mighty-looking thing. One of the best-looking BMWs on sale, though that’s not difficult nowadays. Regardless, we think it looks spiffing, especially in metallic aubergine. A special First Edition – limited to just five cars in the UK – will come in…

01 Skoda Yeti The original was a cute, bug-eyed crossover that was deservedly a complete smash-hit. It became… corporate. Skoda binned the cute lights and went for a totally forgettable face instead, before killing off the Yeti altogether in favour of the dull Karoq. 02 Citroen C4 Cactus Airbumps! For everyone who’s ever had their pride and joy dented by an errant shopping trolley, Citroen had the solution with giant bubble wrap. Then decided the Cactus would be ‘better’ if it lost its funky looks and Airbumps and become an Astra/Focus rival. 03 Ferrari 512M Well, it began with the Ferrari Testarossa. Need we say more? Then one facelift later… oh dear. A gawky face instead of pop-up headlights, badly conceived circular taillights and the ugliest wheel design ever devised.…

An electric car with 1,000 miles of range that you never need to plug in to recharge. How does that sound? Impossible? Californian startup Aptera Motors is adamant that its solar-powered Aptera does just that. Aptera was actually founded in 2005 and initially took deposits from customers for a 300mpg hybrid that looked curiously like the new EV. The company was liquidated in 2011, however. Now it’s back. Cost? Somewhere between $36,000 and $59,000, which is quite a wide range to be aiming for. Even so, Aptera says 10,000 cars will be produced by 2022, with pre-orders opening soon.…

You can’t please all of the people all of the time, but a hot hatch gives it a damn good try. A natural event horizon of utility versus fun-to-drive, a practical-only car that still manages to amuse when the situation arises. Except that hot hatches aren’t actually just ‘hot’ anymore. Bars have been raised, performance figures have punched happily through various ceilings, and the fastest now operate strictly under sports-car rules. Take these three for example: none are what could be called the most extreme of the breed, but all manage 62mph from rest in less than six seconds, hit 155+mph, run with locking differentials and switchable drive modes. Not one has less than 270bhp, all three would – if well driven on an unknown twisty road – seriously put…

“THE RIDE IS MORE AGREEABLE THAN IN MOST SALOONS” £149,995 FOR The most exciting, involving Vantage on sale AGAINST Spiky in the wet, not the most intuitive of manuals This Vantage AMR is so much more than some fancy paint and stickers. Sat in the middle of all 200 examples is – hurrah! – a manual gearbox. Y’know, like they used in the olden days. It debuts here but will soon be available on all Vantages, and Aston expects 10 to 20 per cent of buyers to choose it. Thus it hasn’t bothered developing a brand-new bespoke transmission, instead opting for the same 7spd Graziano as the old V12 Vantage S. That means a dogleg first gear. So just like an old racing car, you move the stick left and…

What happens when you cross one of Audi’s most efficient petrol engines with an electric motor and all-wheel-drive? You get the new Audi Q5 TFSI e, a plug-in hybrid with 362bhp and an electric range of up to 26 miles. But that’s not all. Here are five more reasons to want one… It’s electric when you want it to be Making the most of its 14.1 kWh lithium-ion battery, the Q5 TFSI e can travel up to 26 miles in EV mode, depending on the model trim chosen. So you can do all sorts of everyday journeys on battery power alone, without help from the petrol engine. And with all-electric driving at up to 84mph, you can continue the zero-emissions part of your journey out of town, too. When plugged…

This is a story precision-tooled for Hollywood. It’s 1963, and in the emerging world of Mad Men, The Beatles and James Bond, Detroit automotive behemoth Ford urgently needs an image overhaul. The Mustang is imminent, but motor racing offers apparently instant and global kudos. The company’s brilliant vice president Lee Iacocca pushes the Total Performance Programme on his boss, Henry Ford II – Hank the Deuce – and they hatch a plan: Ford will buy Ferrari. The Italians have the glamour, the cars, and most of all they’re riding a competitive streak that has netted four wins in the world’s top endurance race, the Le Mans 24 Hours. Ford major-domo Don Frey leads a deputation to Maranello to check the place out and court Il Commendatore. Frey is an engineer,…

Relax, Robocar does not want your clothes, your boots and your motor racing. The humans on the team realise that watching autonomous AI cars race each other is not spectacular. Well, not unless they’re allowed weaponry. Or have to have a human clinging desperately to the fuselage like Major Kong (look it up…). The plan is to blend the real and virtual worlds, maybe allow gamers in an online environment to drive real cars around real tracks for real money. Remote control cars with VR headsets. Roboracer is remote controlled actually – currently it’s basically a giant programmable Tamiya, powered by the same hardware as Devbot, but with less weight and double the electric motors for somewhere around 1,100bhp. It recently became the world’s fastest autonomous car, recording a Guinness-verified…

When I started this project, pulling the 306 out of its lock-up captivity, the one thing I wasn’t that fussed about was how it looked. Well, I wanted shot of the bird droppings and cobwebs, but, beyond that, every blemish tells a story, right? Yet look at me now – freshly resprayed panels last month, off for a full Meguiars makeover this month. Into the detailing bay it goes, on go the lights and in goes the breath. Jeepers, this is unforgiving. Stand well back and it’s OK, but get up close and all you see is chips, scratches and swirls in the paintwork and… “Has a cardboard box slid down the bonnet at some stage? You know, one with staples underneath?” says Meguiars senior marketer, and my guide today…

A spiritual successor to Out Run, Rad Mobile’s premise was simple: hop into a car that looked like a street-legal Le Mans prototype, tighten up your obligatory fingerless leather driving gloves and hare across the USA like you’re late for the birth of your first-born. While it was significantly more detailed than its 1986 predecessor, Rad Mobile was still from that gloriously pixelated pre-3D era, choosing instead to fling two dimensional sprites at the screen quicker than your eyes could process them. The result was a game of sweeping banked corners, plunging drops and a Las Vegas stage that appeared to take place entirely in the sky. On your trans-American route, you’d have to contend with night driving and freak rainstorms, prodding at the physical wiper and headlight buttons installed…

REPORT 2 £159,900 OTR/£200,345 as tested/£3,000pcm WHY IT’S HERE Is living with lux all it’s cracked up to be? DRIVER Ollie Marriage A BENTLEY IS A VERY EXPENSIVE THING. UNTIL YOU REALISE WHAT AN astonishing amount of work goes into it. Let me give you a few examples. In the paint shop, the body is sanded between primer and main colour coats. It prevents orange peel. In a week, that department alone gets through 5,900 sanding pads. There’s a side panel where the rear passenger’s elbow rests. The diamond pattern in that single panel requires 27,000 stitches. The wiring loom is one of the first of 170 processes on the assembly line. It comes packaged in a particular way from the supplier so four people can fit it in 12…

GOODBYE £36,439 OTR/£37,314 as tested/£467pcm WHY IT’S HERE Can avant-garde style save the saloon? DRIVER Jason Barlow THE 508 MIGHT BE AN OLD-SCHOOL AND RATHER BOURGEOIS confection, but it’s also extremely good. Established indices of satisfaction – the sort French cars were once flawed in, like basic reliability – are so nailed-on that new ones have arrived. For example, you feel better after a 250-mile journey in the 508 than you do at the start. Its NVH levels make it a sublime long-haul companion, its performance ruthlessly optimised for maximum motorway mindfulness. Nor does it sacrifice chassis alacrity for comfort; its gearbox can feel a bit random and its steering is over-light, but dynamically it’s not far off the BMW 3-Series. Design is fiercely subjective, but here too Peugeot is…