Innholdsfortegnelse for December 2020 i BBC Top Gear Magazine

The Mirage was everything a cheap and cheerful city car should be, save for two tiny details. One, it wasn’t cheap. And two, it wasn’t cheerful. At all. Arriving in 2012, apparently unaware things had moved on in the city car game since the late Eighties, the Mirage married a bleak interior to a driving experience that was, if anything, even gloomier. The steering wheel and front wheels were on strictly non-speaking terms, while the suspension offered all the cosseting comfort of a nasty fall down a flight of concrete steps. In fairness, the Mirage was not without merit. It wouldn’t cost you much in fuel, mostly because, after driving it once, most owners chose to leave it parked on the driveway and took the bus instead. And it came,…

I don’t know where my love of cars came from. My parents weren’t that bothered – I actually passed my test in my mum’s 10-year-old Golf that had done about 100,000 miles. I was in a great position, though, because I’d just signed a record contract when I passed so I was able to get a Mini Cooper as my first car. I loved bombing around in that, it was such a fun car to drive. Although at that point I loved Audis, so when my album came out and it started to do OK, I bought myself a TT. I think I was 19 or so and I was still living in a little two-bed terrace in my home town, so my car was probably nicer than my house.…

Want to drive the world’s rarest and most coveted classic cars without having to get oil on your chinos? Course you do. Should you have many pounds going spare, you can drive what you want with the eClassic Racing Club and its two simulators. These state-of-the-art classic car sims are built by Racing Unleashed and designed by Zagato and Pininfarina respectively. Each features three pedals, a wooden steering wheel, three HD screens and hydraulics that replicate the movement of almost any classic. Expect a big price tag when they launch next year. tcct.com/eclassic; £tbc (a lot)…

1 IT’S THE FIRST NEW HUMMER IN FOREVER Back in the early Nineties, AM General decided to start selling civilian versions of the Humvee, which it had developed for the US military. GM bought the rights to the brand in 1999, and a few years later launched the H2. It was rubbish. A few years after that, it launched the H3, which was even rubbisher. GM canned Hummer in 2010 as it recovered from bankruptcy. But now it’s BACK (baby). 2 IT’S WAY FASTER THAN IT NEEDS TO BE Billed as “the ultimate off-road EV supertruck”, the Hummer EV has three electric motors that power all four wheels and together produce a casual 1,000bhp. Blimey. A special WTF mode – that’s ‘Watts to Freedom’, not the other thing – allows…

The all-electric small car market really has gone bonkers in the past 12 months or so, hasn’t it? Not that long ago, if you wanted something pint-sized and plug-in powered you pretty much had the choice of a Renault Zoe or the considerably more expensive (but extremely cool) BMW i3. Have we reached the fabled ‘tipping point’? Now your choices span the Honda e, Mini Electric, new-gen Zoe, Peugeot e-208 and the Vauxhall Corsa-e, sparking a style vs substance debate at every fast charger in the land. As we’ve learned, they’re all effective things, but they’re still essentially a bold choice with modest range on the whole – with winter coming you’ll be looking at even fewer miles. So, what if you’re in the market for an environmentally friendly supermini…

£38,000 (approx) FOR Looks, handling (for a crossover), space, equipment AGAINST Fiddly touch-sensitive heater, explaining the badge The Formentor will only ever be badged as a Cupra, Seat’s sporty and electrified offshoot marque. So, if you thought all Cupras were just rebadged Seats, this hunkered down ‘coupe-SUV’ just came and trampled all over your argument. Obviously, it’s not a completely bespoke machine from the ground up. It’s based on the same raw ingredients as the Seat Ateca, or for that matter the VW Golf: same basic chassis, shared gearboxes, and the latest touchscreen infotainment centre from the Leon hatchback. That means you also get touch-sensitive heater controls, which are rubbish, and a busy, tricky touchscreen interface amid the dour dash. To give the Formentor a butch stance, it’s longer and…

PORSCHE PANAMERA TURBO S £135,610 FOR Much improved comfort and handling, crisper visuals AGAINST You’ll be paying at least six figures The most complete and accomplished Porsche Panamera since it first appeared over a decade ago. Ride and refinement are well judged, but it also feels smaller and is notably nimbler and more engaging to drive. The Turbo S is stand-out excellent, a real alternative to super saloons such as the Merc E63, while the more potent 552bhp, £101,690 E-Hybrid, now with 34 miles of e-range, looks compelling. OM JEEP RENEGADE TRAILHAWK 4XE £36,500 FOR It all works great as long as you drive it smoothly AGAINST It all falls apart if you happen to be in a rush Jeep’s first PHEV (the whole range will be electrified by 2022)…

The internet has spoken. And the internet detests the look of the new M3. We all know why: it’s that double grille, which has swaggered over from the 4-Series. The online commentariat didn’t like it there either. Everyone knows what the front of a BMW should look like, and a pair of blacked-out octagons approximately the area of Wales isn’t it. But the internet doesn’t buy M3s. M3 buyers do. They seem to be a remarkably loyal bunch, and no-one knows them better than BMW does. After all, BMW has been at it for six generations now. M’s product manager Hagen Franke, who sets the cars’ spec and characteristics, says that what M3 customers asked for was clear: a greater visual distance between the M340i and the M3. Job done.…

Got hairy quite quickly, this one. One minute I’m winding serenely past a loch, popping M&Ms and listening to a podcast about the birth of rave culture, the next I’m reversing down a greasy slipway and attempting to insert a VW ID.3 into an ex-MOD landing craft built in the same year I was born. My wing mirrors are useless since folding them in is the only way I might fit, and the metal ramps separating 58kWh of high voltage lithium-ion battery from a swim in the sea are bobbing side to side in rhythm with the waves. A crowd of curious onlookers has formed to watch me try and blindly back an electric car through a moving width restrictor and the only person offering me any help looks like…

FRENCH INFATUATION WHO: STEPHEN DOBIE, DEPUTY EDITOR, TG.COM My parents had a couple of rear-drive Ford Escorts, but the earliest car I remember is a white MkI Cavalier. Chiefly the night it broke down outside the chip shop… and was never seen running again. It was replaced by a red Peugeot 309 with a whopping 1.1-litre engine. I loved it and it’s probably partially to blame for my infatuation with French hatches now. A red 309 GTI has a place reserved in my lottery win garage, a racy homage to the car that used to run me to school. TRIUMPHANT RETURN WHO: ANDY FRANKLIN, CREATIVE DIRECTOR My earliest memory was my mum’s Triumph Herald saloon that I used to go to school in, sliding around on the pleather backseat. That…

You don’t have to be a Japfest regular to know that the Japanese are crazy about cars. They may not have invented the combustion engine, but they did invent drifting, and that’s really all you need to know. They took motorsport and turned it into tyre shredding art. Similarly, they did not invent the watch, but took ideas from elsewhere and quickly set about the rulebook with a Samurai sword. Mechanical watchmaking first came to Japan in the 1500s, and the Japanese started making their own clocks to fit in with an antiquated system where the day was divided into six periods, which changed length according to the season. These wadokei – traditional Japanese clocks – are prized by collectors, but when Japan opened up to the world after centuries…

It accelerates differently from any other car I’ve been in. Because rather than the acceleration tailing off as you go faster, in the Lotus Evija it just keeps ramping up. The more speed you add, the more you’re pinned back into the seat. At some stage, physics dictates, it must let up. But when? At 160mph down Goodwood’s back straight, the force multiplier still appears fully engaged. Trying to get your head around what this must feel like? Put your internal combustion car in third at 20mph and floor it. Not much to start with then a growing crescendo of acceleration, right? If it’s turbocharged you’ll get the big push at around 3,000rpm. Weirdly then, the all-electric, four-motor Evija is more like a naturally aspirated car – progressive delivery all…

Don’t get too excited. The new Golf GTI Clubsport is not the follow-up to 2016’s Nürburgring FWD record holder, the Clubsport S. It’s not a limited edition and no effort has been made to save weight. While VW claims it’s 13secs quicker around the Green Hell than the standard MkVIII GTI (7:54 vs 8:07), mainly thanks to almost 300bhp and tweaked suspension, it’s hardly what you’d call hardcore. In reality it’s a replacement for the old Golf GTI TCR – a normal GTI with added focus, but not so much that day-to-day usability is compromised. Classic GTI. And while the TCR arrived towards the end of the Golf MkVII’s life, the new Clubsport has made its debut mere weeks after we experienced the standard MkVIII GTI for the first time.…

We usually bang on about stratospheric numbers in horsepower and top speed, but here’s a car that grabs our admiration for a teensy-weensy number. The new Dacia Sandero will start at less than £8,000. Amazing. It really is new too. There have been times when Dacia has relied on expired hardware borrowed from other carmakers. But this one uses an up-to-date Renault-Nissan platform, mostly the same as the current Clio, which starts at £15k. Full disclosure, you probably won’t choose the base model – it has just 65bhp – but a small step up brings a 95bhp turbo and six-speed box. Exact UK prices will be known next year. Plus, even with that 65bhp engine, LED headlights, cruise control and phone connectivity are standard. The Stepway faux-by-four returns too, a…

£53,155 FOR Design, build quality, performance, handling, ride AGAINST First Edition is pricey for a ‘small’ SUV Volvo’s smallest SUV has big ambitions in its newly fully electric form. And a big price in First Edition guise at £59,985, although a slightly sheepish spokesperson insists it “has almost every possible piece of equipment fitted as standard”. Detail exterior differences – blanked-off grille, new colours – are all that set it apart from its fossil-fuelled siblings, but it remains a design exemplar. Underneath is the familiar Common Modular Architecture. The P8 is powered by a 78kWh lithium ion battery pack mounted under the floor that feeds two electric motors, with one on each axle to provide all-wheel drive. Power output is 402bhp, torque an outrageous 487lb ft, which in turn translates…

I have a recurring dream in which the chief engineer of the latest, pointless 800bhp supercar is standing there, telling me how great his new creation is. “Zero to 150mph in seven seconds, 230mph top speed, Inconel headrests, blah blah.” My face has the blank expression of a man who no longer cares. And I stop him, and I say: “Here are the keys to an Alfaholics GTA-R. Please go and drive it, and then tell me that your car doesn’t feel like a massive blob of bloated turd after that little slither of perfection, and that these supercars totally miss the point because they are no fun to drive.” Then I wake up and go to work and nothing changes. Another unpronounceable car company makes another unusable machine and…

“WE KNEW IT COULDN’T JUST BE ANY WALL OF DEATH” Zac Assemakis, TopGear producer: We knew it couldn’t just be any old Wall of Death. We wanted to create something bigger and bolder and faster and meaner. Problem is, we sit around in a meeting room where everything is possible, then it’s the cold light of day and you think, ah, we’ve got to make this happen. Fortunately, in the last series we’d done something equally stupid – bungeeing a car off the side of a dam – so we knew a bunch of boffins who were very good at maths. And they said it was crazy, but mathematically possible. Chris Matthews, structural engineer, Atelier One: We knew it was going to be tricky. Using road cars meant much higher…

“HAVING JUST SUNK £3K INTO IT, I LOST MY RAG AND MOVED THE CAR TO A FRIEND’S BARN” This whole barn find thing has puzzled me for years! How does anyone forget about a Lamborghini Miura? A Subaru Forrester in the middle of Gloucester I can get on board with" but you could leave that for a century and it’d still start on the key! Recently I’ve had to change my stance on this. Not that I’ve found an old Porsche Turbo rotting away, but rather a Nineties Mazda RX-7 I’ve abandoned for nearly three years. Outside and exposed to the elements. Oh dear. I’ve owned my RX-7 for nearly seven years now, racking up some 20,000 miles in the first four. One thing about rotaries is they’re a lot…

By 1992 arcade cabinets with steering wheel and pedal sets were nothing new and an era of exciting 3D racing games was just around the corner. That’s presumably why Namco chose to innovate with resolutely two-dimensional driving game Lucky & Wild by adding a pair of semi-automatic pistols bolted to the dash. Playing as the titular pair of plain clothes detectives, your job is to ‘investigate’ a drug cartel by bulldozing your way along public roads distributing more lead than a Victorian pencil factory. The genius of the game is that it’s designed for two players, one concentrating solely on shooting with a single gun, the other trying to juggle firearm accuracy with not ploughing the car into the street furniture. This is all accompanied by the gurning cartoon faces…

REPORT 2 £34,720 OTR/£38,445 as tested /£409pcm WHY IT’S HERE BMW’s brilliant but forgotten EV now thinks it’s a hot hatch DRIVER Paul Horrell THE I3 WAS FIRST CONCEIVED AT BMW IN 2008/09, AND IT WAS known as the ‘megacity vehicle’. It wasn’t going to have much electric range, so it was shaped and proportioned for the urban squeeze. Now its battery doubles the range. Does it make sense for longer trips? I live in London, have no driveway and park in cramped streets. We’re a family of three. Every journey begins or ends with traffic. Ah, but very few are just that, because who’d drive here voluntarily? I get about town by bike or bus. So the car is mostly for longer trips. For street work, the i3’s Fiesta-matching…

REPORT 2 £54,340 OTR/£55,050 as tested/£504pcm WHY IT’S HERE Is the new Supra a better daily than a Porsche Cayman? DRIVER Rowan Horncastle A FRONT-ENGINE, REAR-WHEEL-DRIVE JAPANESE SPORTS CAR THAT just so happens to be built in Austria… but for romanticism’s sake, we’ll scoot over that. A long, arcing corner with a consistent radius and decent camber. You know what comes next: big drifting. Yep, GY20 XCG was recently summoned in front of the cameras for an upcoming video series – ‘Stig Drifts’. Best keep your eyes peeled for that, it’s a goodie. But it also came at the perfect time as I’ve been struggling with the communication of what the front and rear of the car are doing. And nothing brings the true colours of a chassis out like…

REPORT 3 £29,160 OTR/£29,170 as tested/£299pcm WHY IT’S HERE It’s cool, but can it cope with family life? DRIVER Jack Rix LET’S TALK ABOUT LONG-ISH JOURNEYS, THE KIND THAT WITH ITS pitiful 125-mile range I didn’t think the Honda e would be capable of. Three months in though and my confidence is growing, and the Honda’s horizons broadening. First big test was a return trip from home (Streatham, south London) to Dunsfold: 36 miles (and an hour and 20 mins in the saddle) each way, with no charger to use when we got there and a good chunk of A3 to negotiate. Strictly 70mph on the fast bits, some fun on the bendier stretches past Guildford, and I made it with 20 per cent to spare. Easy. Next, something a…

In May 1952, a British-built de Havilland Comet flew from London to Johannesburg at speeds approaching 500mph. This was the first passenger jet to offer commercial flights and it opened up a bright new future. Not for de Havilland itself, sadly. The Comet was beset by problems – there were several highly publicised crashes, the fleet was grounded and by the early Sixties, the company went out of business. But the Jet Age had arrived in all its glory and a whole new genre of watches came along in its wake. The ability to jet around the world at great speed presented a new challenge to watchmakers. With all the endless hopping across timezones, how was a chap to keep track? The answer came in the form of the GMT…

Our experience in most rally games is about 60 seconds of frantic sawing at the steering wheel and stabbing at the throttle before unceremoniously slamming the car into a fir tree. Art of Rally somehow manages to take the exact same sport and present it as a slice of relaxing, zen escapism. It’s like discovering the Dalai Lama can heel and toe in those sandals. The game is played from a hovering, swooping top-down perspective, which means you have a great view of the stage ahead and are guaranteed to never be caught out by a surprise hairpin. Combine that with a hazy, dream-like art style and Art of Rally is essentially meditation for petrolheads. Even for £20 it’s a slight package – you’ll feel like you’ve seen everything on…

01 Daihatsu Copen How could you say ‘no, we’re not putting the roof down, my ears are chilly’ to that happy, bug-eyed face? All of the elements that make a car cute are here – round headlights, a grinning grille, a weeny footprint and a total lack of aggressive styling. 02 Au stin-Healey Frogeye Sprite Meet Austin-Healey’s impossibly cheerful Sprite. The cuteness here was an accident: the car was designed to have pop-up headlights. But, in a classic piece of cost-cutting, this was deemed frivolously expensive, so the lights were fixed inboard of the wings instead. Cute. 03 Fiat 500 Obviously the original was adorable, given it’s the size of a child’s teddy bear. What’s impressive is how much of that adorable-ness was retained when Fiat upsized the 500’s design…

SPECIAL SUBSCRIPTION OFFER SAVE 45% WHEN YOU SUBSCRIBE & GET A CORVETTE! Subscribe before 16 November to receive our incredible Awards issue, with 2021 calendar Subscribe to BBC TopGear magazine for just £34.99 every 13 issues and we’ll send you a LEGO® TECHNIC™ Chevrolet Corvette ZR1, worth £39.99* LEGO® TECHNIC™ CHEVROLET CORVETTE ZR1 Collectable replica model with a wealth of realistic features • Includes a large rear wing, four tailpipes and black-spoked rims with low-profile tyres • Working steering and a detailed V8 engine with moving pistons • A great gift for a friend or for your own collection! GREAT REASONS TO SUBSCRIBE Save 45% on the usual shop price Britain’s best-selling car magazine delivered direct to your door Unique and collectable covers – only seen by our subscribers Money-back guarantee –…

POLESTAR 1 £139,000 FOR Very cool. Solid EV range with IC muscle to back it up AGAINST Very heavy. Still feels like a tarted up Volvo in places BMW M8 COMPETITION GRAN COUPE £120,970 FOR One of the best looking BMWs in the company range AGAINST It’s been slightly left behind in the tech stakes Nobody has any clue what a Polestar 1 is. Not yet. They know it’s electric because it wooshes where the M8 rumbles. But they don’t know it has an IC engine too, that it sits on a heavily modified version of the same ‘SPA’ platform as the XC90, or that it costs a huge £139,000. They don’t know it’s quite unlike any other car. Everyone knows what the BMW is, though. Effectively an M5 under…

£96,625 POR Noise, quality, the joy of being in something different AGAINST Logic-allergic interior will send you loopy Welcome to one of those moments when, every now and again, Lexus nails it. Even Lexus doesn’t quite know when these moments might happen. Once upon a time, the new LS limo came along and gave the Mercedes S-Class sleepless nights. A decade ago, something called the ‘LFA’ came along and rewrote dream garage line-ups the world over. Yes, this £100k roadster is slower than that new Cupra Dementor thing on the previous page. So what? This idiosyncratic masterpiece is one of the treats of 2020. This is a machine to be savoured, lusted after, and worshipped. The LC Convertible is only available with a V8 engine: Lexus decided not to bother…

PORSCHE CAYMAN 987 2005 “I couldn’t afford a 911” is the slight usually aimed at a proud Cayman (or indeed Caywoman). Only, that doesn’t apply to second-hand steals, because with the earliest hard-top Boxsters now trading at under £10k for a 3.4 S, they’re identical money to a leggy 996 Carrera. The Cayman will be quicker, more grown-up inside, and better balanced, thanks to its almost tediously laudable handling. Plus, with a big boot in the nose and a smaller one aft of the engine, Caymen are practical too. Thank goodness, then, Porsche fluffed the engines on the early 3.4s, flooding the internet with horror stories of £5k flat-six rebuilds. Even though such detonations aren’t as common as you’d think, that’s all the excuse we need to see what alternative road…

Where does this all stop? The track car for the road schtick. I ask because I’m not sure it can go much further. Oh sure, Merc could have whipped out the aircon and CarPlay, lost the leather, but that’s all surface gloss anyway. Underneath this thing has woven carbon fibre transmission mounts, a completely new cooling system, a body that’s positively perforated with gaping, gulping holes, slats and vents, a pull-out front splitter and a rear wing like a stack of kites. That exerts so much downward pressure (up to 270kg) there are supports in the boot to prevent the tailgate from collapsing. This is not a road car. It’s not been designed to function on the B4091. It’s barely been designed to work in the wet, since the only tyre…

THEY’RE CERTAINLY MORE SUBTLE THAN THE NEW M4 Most things are, but the car on the left has aged just majestically. An unmodified E46 M3 looks fine, but the CSL’s asymmetric front air hole and dished wheels can still make most of TG a bit teary. It was also a sub-eight car around the Nordschleife before there was something called ‘YouTube’ to host an onboard video. The M2 CS could almost have been designed purely for Instagram likes given its cartoonish appearance alongside. I BET THEIR DIMENSIONS ARE CLOSE Yep, 17 years is a long time on Planet Car, so the M3, technically a size above the M2, is just 3cm longer in both length and wheelbase, while its 1,385kg kerbweight is 165kg skinnier. Its extra ‘L’ stands for lightweight…

HELLO £79,185 OTR/£89,470 as tested/£1,020pcm WHY IT’S HERE Is Audi’s electric SUV the future or just a stepping stone? DRIVER Charlie Turner ACCORDING TO AUDI, FUTURE IS AN ATTITUDE. NOW THAT’S CLEAR, we are delighted to welcome the Audi e-tron Sportback 55 Quattro to the TopGear garage to understand precisely what attitude we need to adopt. Let’s start with the design. The Sportback looks are supposed to be, er, more sporting, but to be honest, I prefer the regular e-tron, the design feels better resolved. That said the revised rear end does deliver increased aero efficiency and a whopping six extra miles of range (240 WLTP claimed, 170–180 real world) and only loses minimal bootspace. So it’s a purely visual choice. But despite only seating five the Sportback weighs in…

HELLO £62,995 OTR/£71,245 as tested/£279pcm (Morgan finance scheme) WHY IT’S HERE They claim the Plus Four is a modern Morgan. Time to see if it’s true DRIVER Stephen Dobie MORGAN SAYS THERE ARE OVER A TRILLION WAYS OF SPECCING ITS new Plus Four. Given I’ve gone off-piste and picked a colour far from the traditional greens and creams, ours was already on its way to being distinctive. But after my day amid the ‘ting, ting’ of hammers in the Malvern metal shop, it’s going to be more unique still. I’ve clocked into the factory one week into the car’s month-long build, its ash frame already finished. I’ll be helping Paul shape the twin bonnets of our car, before stamping in their 35 louvres (each side!) right before the hometime bell.…

GOODBYE £22,815 OTR/£23,595 as tested/£285pcm WHY IT’S HERE Does an EV have to be pricey to be good? DRIVER Tom Harrison STRANGE TIMES. THE CITIGO LANDED ON MY DRIVEWAY JUST AS THE country was starting to open up again, as people were allowed out of their homes more than once a day, encouraged to return to the office, pubs and restaurants. Now, with winter looming, it’s going back. And that makes me sad, because it’s a great car. Take the range: Skoda claims between 140 and 170 miles – way more than you get on Jack’s Honda or Jason’s Mini, both of which are much more expensive. The most I’ve seen from the Skoda is 138 miles, which is… OK. I’ve done a few long trips, but while the Citigo…