Innholdsfortegnelse for February 2021 i BBC Top Gear Magazine

Imagine if running your old 911 were CO2-neutral. Well now Porsche is working on it. Take green wind electricity. Use it to drive a complex series of industrial processes. First, to electrolyse water into hydrogen, which is easy. Then to separate CO2 from the air, which is harder and still in early development. Combine the hydrogen and CO2 into methanol, and thence, finally, into e-fuel, aka green petrol. Drive the car with the e-fuel and the CO2 emitted balances the CO2 that went into the fuel. Huzzah! E-fuel is not a new idea, but it’s unusual for a carmaker to invest directly. Porsche is partnering to build a plant with wind turbine manufacturer Siemens, and oil company (needing a new line of business) Exxon. The end plan is half a…

Silicon Valley bicycle firm Superstrata has created a brand-new electrically assisted bike that looks like it’s arrived straight from the future. The e-boost comes in the form of a 250W motor for speeds of up to 20mph, and not only is the frame 3D printed into a single piece from industrial strength carbonfibre composites, but it’s also completely bespoke for each customer. Yep, part of the Superstrata order process includes submitting your height, weight, leg length and even your riding posture to ensure that the frame is a perfect fit for your unique biometrics. Not one for the second hand market then. Superstrata. bike; $3,999+…

1 IT’LL DO 265 MILES ON A CHARGE It’s an impressively aerodynamic design, with a drag coefficient of just 0.28Cd. Combined with a 66.5kWh battery, the EQA 250 (the only one available at launch) has 265 miles of range. It also accepts 100kW rapid charging, which means a 10–80 per cent top-up takes just 30 minutes. 2 IT’S BASED ON THE GLA This is essentially a revised and electrified version of Merc’s crossover’d A-Class. Looks fairly similar to the GLA too, doesn’t it? Of course, there are plenty of EQA-specific styling details, the most prominent being that blacked-out grille and the front and rear lightbars – something Merc wants to make a signature of on its EQ models. 3 THERE’LL BE QUICKER VERSIONS The 250 uses a single electric motor…

£32,255 FOR Bold looks, drives neatly, well integrated tech AGAINST Not as cheap as Hyundais used to be Hyundai describes the new Tucson as “a design revolution” for the brand. It’s not kidding. In an incredibly saturated corner of the market – the middlesized SUV-thingy – it’ll stand out. Which is exactly the point. Whether you like the look its Parametric Hidden Lights lend it or not, it’s surely got your attention among the Qashqais, Karoqs and Tiguans of this world. Backing up the bold styling is a tech-packed interior and a mixture of powertrain options, all 1.6 petrol turbos but hooked up to varying degrees of electrification. There are two mild hybrids, with 148bhp or 178bhp and optional four-wheel drive. Then there’s the big-h Hybrid we’ve tested here, which…

“IT’S A TIDY, COMFY CAR WITH A DEAL MORE FINESSE THAN ITS PRICE WOULD SUGGEST” £11,595 FOR Improves on the old car in every way. Smart looking, spacious and great value AGAINST Very little that can’t be explained away by its tiny price It’s easy to build a car cheaply. You just have to cut corners. Do the bare minimum. Fashion the dashboard out of polystyrene. Beg, borrow or steal engines and platforms other manufacturers have long since mothballed. Pay the designer in ‘exposure’ and buy off-the-shelf infotainment systems. The results are usually pretty poor. But Dacia appears to have done precisely none of those things. The new Sandero – and we’re talking all-new, here – sits on the same platform as the current-gen Renault Clio and Nissan Juke. It…

MERCEDES C300DE AMG LINE NIGHT ED £47,905 FOR Very efficient, excellent long-distance cruiser AGAINST Not as smooth as the petrol, more expensive If you think about it, a diesel plug-in hybrid makes a great deal of sense. Use the oilburner to chug along the motorway, then swap to e-power in town. The C300de isn’t as refined as Merc’s petrol-powered plug-ins, but it is quick (0–62mph in 5.6secs) and sips fuel if you keep it charged and drive mindfully. Bit pricier than the petrol, which is the one you’ll buy. Nonetheless, an interesting exercise. TH FORD FOCUS ST AUTO £34,710 FOR It’s rare, it’s easy to live with, it’s still an ST AGAINST Gearbox not the best, slower, more expensive The ST accounts for only eight per cent of overall Focus…

During this difficult time, we want to make it as easy as possible for you to receive your copies of BBC TopGear magazine. That’s why we’ve introduced a unique offer – three issues of BBC TopGear magazine with free delivery and a 15 per cent saving on the price in shops.* With no direct debit, it’s a simple, no strings way to make sure you get your copy delivered to your home. We also have longer-term subscription offers, available via direct debit – if this suits you better, turn to p56 to see our latest special offer. VISIT buysubscriptions.com/TGSP3M CALL US ON 03330 162 130** and quote TGSP3M *This offer is valid for UK delivery addresses only. You may cancel at any time and receive a full refund on any…

What’s Ford, and when did it start making cars? A big, American carmaker that’s become something of a British institution, its first cars having landed in the UK just months after the company got going in 1903. Named for the man who founded it (Henry Ford – whose family is still in control over 100 years later) and headquartered in Detroit, Ford makes some of the best mainstream cars in the world, and has done so (with a few notable exceptions) for decades. And people buy them in their millions and millions – every year since the late Seventies the UK’s bestselling car has been a Ford of some description, and since 2014 the venerable Fiesta is the UK’s bestselling car of ALL TIME. Meanwhile, the F-150 pickup is the…

Your first glance at this crisp little concept puts one number in your mind. Five. Yup, it’s a new Renault 5. It’s not just candy whistled up for a non-existent motor show, or some designer dead-end render-doodle. A production version will launch in under three years from now. It’ll be all-electric. Oh, and as Renault resets the course for all its brands (see p18) and Alpine goes electric, it’s confirmed there’s a plan for an Alpine hot hatch version of this 5. The idea of a revived 5 was something Renault’s designers had been nurturing for a long time. But the company was in crisis and there was no money. Then, a year ago, new CEO Luca de Meo arrived. In that time he’s marshalled all the company’s expertise and…

Our time on this planet is short and precious. Unless scientists succeed in unlocking that knotty ‘secret of eternal life’ thing sometime soon, statistically you’re looking at about 700,000 hours of conscious, corporeal existence upon this mortal coil. Sounds like a decent chunk of time, but remember you’ll spend close to half of those hours sleeping, and a significant chunk of the rest consumed by the tedious, necessary administrivia of living: emptying the dishwasher, resetting your password for online banking, refilling the dishwasher. Which leaves a soberingly tiny slice of time to enjoy the myriad joys that life on earth has to offer. So it is the responsibility, the very duty, of all of us to make the most of every valuable minute of being alive, right now, on this…

Were there any tactics to trench warfare, or was the whole of WW1 spent repeating the same pattern of shelling the enemy, then advancing helplessly into a volley of machine gunfire, as we learnt from Blackadder? Well, possibly for the first half of the war, but in 1916 both sides started thinking strategically, and the humble watch played a vital role. Barrage bombing before an infantry attack didn’t really work because the enemy soldiers simply hid in their trenches until the artillery stopped, then leapt up to man the machine guns. To overcome this, they came up with an important new move, first adopted at the Battle of the Somme, called the ‘creeping barrage’. The line of bombardment crept forward at a precisely timed rate, with attacking infantrymen advancing in…

£83,720 FOR Supremely refined, now a bit Porschier to drive AGAINST It’s the company car deluxe, not the one you want Why exactly, you might sensibly wonder, has Porsche bothered facelifting the Panamera plug-in hybrid, eking out battery capacity and tweaking its handling? Now the Taycan’s here, surely the big Pan-Am is last week’s news? Porsche insists the Panamera and Taycan couldn’t be more different: one is a luxury long-distance GT that majors on lounging space and continental range. The other is deliberately smaller and sportier. A Panamera driver will schlep longer distances. People travel in the back seats more of the time. In some countries, EVs are now very desirable, very cutting edge. In others, you still need a petrol engine to be taken seriously. So there you have…

“IT LOOKS LIKE EXPERIMENTAL BREEDING BETWEEN A 964 AND A TROPHY TRUCK” In the immortal words of Jørgen Jørgen, author of the fourth highest rated comment on our YouTube walkaround video of this car: “Shut up and take my money! Wait… I don’t have any money.” And here lies the eternal problem with Singer, everyone’s favourite Californian air-cooled 911 fetishist. Each Porsche that the firm plucks from the jaws of rusty death – which it then crafts, restores and reimagines – is an object of such near-perfection that wanting one isn’t just a thought process, it’s a physical pain. But for 99.9 per cent of us, owning one is as likely as Boris Johnson ever brushing his hair. It’s just not going to happen, not in our lifetime. And so…

993 GT2 The car that started it all and which remains the greatest of them all. Simply badged ‘GT’, this was a skunkworks project from Roland Kussmaul and his boys that was part 993 Turbo minus a pair of front driveshafts, part iiber-993 RS. The result was a car that rightly came to be known as The Widowmaker. By today’s standards its 424bhp sounds pathetic, but it was lighter than a moth’s fart, and of course traction control was just a figment of some Bosch engineer’s imagination back then. Equally important was the feeble tyre technology that meant anything less than a dry California day was most likely to lead to a code brown. The riveted on arches were the coolest solution for wide rubber ever conceived and the car…

“EACH VICTIM BELIEVES THEY’RE MAKING A SENSIBLE INVESTMENT” A brand new strain of man-maths was discovered in a Cotswold workshop earlier this week. Unlike its more common variant, which exists solely to justify the buying of an otherwise unaffordable vehicle, this latest mutation specifically targets those already suffering with the ‘project car’ stage of ownership. “When I bought this M6 last year, I thought I’d avoided man-maths altogether because it was so cheap,” explains the surprised, long-haired victim. “It was when I saw the list of work required to make it right that my throat started getting itchy. Three days – and many hours searching YouTube for Group A 635CSi race cars later – the shell was being rolled into a paint shop and I couldn’t stop sweating.’ The strain,…

It’s difficult to trace back the primordial origins of the PC simracing scene, which these days is all virtual reality headsets, thousand quid steering wheels and heated online arguments. We reckon, though, that Indianapolis 500: The Simulation could make a reasonable claim to being the first proper PC sim. Released in 1989, the same year we were all squinting at Super Mario Land on the Game Boy, Indianapolis 500 was shifting coloured 3D polygons around your PC screen at remarkable speeds. Somehow the game crammed in all 33 of the cars from the 1989 Indy 500, a fully functioning pitlane and what we assume are supposed to be hundreds of thousands of fans. The simulation underpinning all this was hugely sophisticated, particularly for an era when Kylie Minogue and Jason…

1 DACIA TEAMS UP WITH LADA, SHOWS OFF BIGSTER CONCEPT Meet the Dacia Bigster. As in, big Duster. A production version is due for 2024, with hybrid power, to sit above the wildly successful Duster. Like any Dacia, it shuns frippery. Design director Alejandro Mesonero-Romanos says it’s “essential, with a touch of cool and an outdoor spirit. It proves that accessible is not opposed to attractiveness.” Dacia is the Renault Group’s quiet success. No industry rival has managed to replicate its formula of straightforward cars that people want, at pared-to-the-bone prices, and still make money. For that reason the Bigster will use a stretched version of the Duster’s platform. And because Renault also owns Lada, huge sales will be added in Russia by redoing it as a new Niva. 2…

“The fastest and most powerful BMW M production car ever!” Given what’s in the back catalogue" that’s quite a statement But the new M5 CS looks and sounds like quite the super saloon. Following on from the hardcore M3, M4 and M2 CSes, the new fastest Five gets a 10bhp bump over the M5 Competition thanks to slight adjustments to its twin-turbo 4.4-litre V8. The result is a monumental 626bhp and 553lb ft of torque delivered to all four wheels (or just the rears if you’re feeling brave), with 0–62mph dispatched in 3.0secs. That’s just a tenth off a Ferrari 812 BMW has shaved 70kg from the standard Competition too, with the biggest savings coming from CFRP exterior panels and the carbon fibre bucket seats in each corner of the…

GAME OF THE MONTH Nickelodeon Kart Racers 2 Given that kids TV channel Nickelodeon is sitting on decades’ worth of fan favourite cartoon characters, you can’t really blame it for pumping out a knockabout racing game that borrows liberally from Mario Kart. Sadly, as in the first Nickelodeon Kart Racers, Spongebob, the Ninja Turtles and co have been rendered completely mute, which robs these genuinely beloved characters of 50 per cent of their personality. It’s a glaring omission that instantly dulls the fun and can only be the result of arguing between stern Hollywood lawyers. The big news is this sequel introduces online multiplayer, so if you’ve always suspected that you were being beaten by eight-year-olds when you play games online, now you can guarantee it. There are a few…

01 Koenigsegg Agera RS A set of ‘Aircore’ hollow carbon wheels save a massive 20kg in unsprung mass. No wonder the Agera needs such a massive wing to keep it on the deck, eh? Christian von Koenigsegg proudly points out the only metal component in the entire wheel is the tyre valve. What about that lug nut? 02 Ferrari 488 Pista The first Ferrari road car to be offered with optional carbon fibre wheels was… the 488 Pista, costing £14,000. They were so popular some Pista builds were apparently delayed as the woven wheels couldn’t be manufactured quickly enough. First world problems, eh? 03 Ferrari SF90 Stradale Once Ferrari copped it could flog pricey carbon wheels to willing punters, it made sure to offer them in a juicy go-faster pack for the ballistic…

For all BMW’s garish grilles and kamikaze social media ads, for some this will be its biggest crime: a front-wheel-drive performance car. The company’s smaller hatches and crossovers have rocked FWD for a few years now, but this is the first dedicated performance car to come out of Munich without a semblance of a rear driveshaft. The BMW 128ti is actually something special, though: it’s BMW’s engineers driving the more complex, 4WD M135i hot hatch and finding a way to make it notably more fun. The simpler drivetrain helps shave off 80kg compared with the other quick 1-Series despite a handful of new devices to reduce wheelspin and torque steer up front. It’s German engineers minimising their spreadsheets and having a laugh. Yet a spreadsheet has clearly been involved somewhere,…

“THE INTERPLAY BETWEEN ELECTRICITY AND COMBUSION IS SMOOTH” £35,020 (Hatch) FOR Rock bottom company car tax and kids may think you’re cool AGAINST Only a vRS in a straight line, only efficient when charged Skoda will now sell you its first vRS plug-in hybrid and this is it, the Octavia vRS iV. No great surprise there, plug-in hybrids are rife right now with diesel dying slowly in the corner and full electrification on the horizon. And the VW Group, with its handy MQB plug-in box of bits, is taking full advantage. For its pokiest plug-ins (Cupra Leon eHybrid, VW Golf GTE… and now this) that means a 148bhp 1.4-litre petrol engine plus a 113bhp motor for a total of 242bhp and 295lb ft of torque – numbers more than worthy…

£35,960 FOR A company car bargain with GTI levels of power AGAINST You only have that power for 30 miles. Use it wisely volkswagen is marketing the plug-in hybrid Golf GTE as a hot hatch, but one that claims fuel consumption in the hundreds of miles per gallon. We’ve got ourselves an identity crisis. Let’s deal with that hot hatch claim first. The GTE deploys a 1.4-litre turbocharged four-cylinder that makes 148bhp and has 184lb ft of torque. The combustion engine is connected to a slick six-speed DSG gearbox and an electric motor, and when both come on song it manages peaks of 242bhp and 295lb ft of torque. That power figure is exactly the same as the 2.0-litre turbo MkVIII Golf GTI – with which the GTE also shares…

Homologation. Stupid word. Responsible for some of the most exciting cars ever to have turned a wheel, and yet ‘homologation’. You can’t abbreviate it (go on, try), you can’t make it sound sexy or cool (again, have a go. Maybe attempt a French accent) and it’s bloody hard to even describe to people what it is. Don’t try. Seriously, just say ‘road racer’ or ‘rally replica’ and move on, change the subject. Do not get into what I’m about to go into. That way lies nothing but social pariahdom. Let me be your guide. And, to compound your pain, I’m going to start with a lesson. I know, back to school time, although here the three Rs are Racing, Road cars and Regulations. Now let’s do some ’rithmetic and write…

McLAREN ELVA Price: £1.43m Engine: 4.0-litre TT V8, 804bhp, 590lb ft Transmission: 7spd DCT, RWD Performance: 0–62mph in 3.0secs est Top speed: 203mph Weight: 1,148kg “THIS IS ONE LAST CHANCE OF DRIVING THE CAN-AM DREAM” One of my earliest prized possessions was a battered and chipped scale model of a McLaren M-series Can-Am car. It was turquoise-y green, flat as a matchbox with gold wheels and had virtually no screen. I’d throw it around homemade imaginary racetracks, scrape it past bookcases and launch it into wild slides across our centrally unheated Yorkshire farmhouse’s uneven stone floors in my quest to understand more about this strange-looking race car. What was it like to drive one of these all-conquering cars, fling it around corners. How did it feel, what did it sound…

YOU MIGHT WONDER WHY MERCEDES PEOPLE GET SO WORKED UP ABOUT THE S-CLASS. After all, it’s just one of Merc’s 30-odd body styles, and less than one in 25 of its total cars sold worldwide. Yet trust me, it so matters to them. Talk to anyone in Mercedes engineering, design or sales and their face lights up when the S-Class is mentioned, their body language gets excited, their very souls become more animated. Because it’s the S-Class that animates this great old company. As the receptacle for the very greatest efforts of everyone in the Stuttgart monolith, it’s their flagship. Never mind the barking AMG GT Black Series, the hulking G63, the sun-blotting Maybach GLS. Never mind the upcoming top end electric EQS saloon. Never mind, even, the mythical AMG…

Modern UK history is littered with examples of cunning but ultimately pointless ways in which the plucky British have stuck two fingers up in the general direction of the dastardly Germans, whether on the football pitch or the hallowed halls of European power. Vauxhall had its own teeny skirmish back at the British International Motor Show in April 1978, whipping the covers off a top secret roadster concept. Vauxhall and German stablemate Opel might have been owned by General Motors since the roaring Twenties, but it wasn’t until the Seventies that GM began merging them in order to cut models and save a bit of cash. Perhaps keen to assert his authority, Vauxhall boss Bob Price wanted to see if the company could offer a more modern take on the…

OH WOW. DOES THAT THING EVEN HAVE DOORS? Well spotted. Back when the Willys was built, doors were a luxurious frippery. The car you’re looking at here is the Willys M38A1, not quite the original Willys, but not far off. Built by Willys between 1952 and 1971, the M38A1 saw extensive service with the US military in Korea and Vietnam. It also got sold to a few friendly foreign nations, which is the version here. This Nekaf edition was built under licence in Holland and was so successful that the Dutch kept using it for over 40 years. How’s that for reliability? I ASSUME THAT MUST MEAN IT’S GOOD AT WHAT IT DOES? Oh yes. With a versatile body – they were turned into everything from ambulances to mobile platforms…