Innholdsfortegnelse for May 2021 i BBC Top Gear Magazine

@jack_rix editor@bbctopgearmagazine.com You know that bit in the original, animated Jungle Book at the monkey temple when Baloo the bear catches the beat and can’t help himself putting on a grass skirt, a coconut snout and getting involved? Something like that is happening to me, and I need to talk. My name is Jack and I’m getting deeply into electric cars, I mean they’re fascinating me in ways most petrol and diesel cars don’t anymore and I feel bad. It’s like I’m moving on before the divorce is even finalised. Don’t get me wrong, I love a properly fizzy petrol engine, always have, always will – nothing electric is coming close to matching the adrenalin spike of many cylinders at full chat anytime soon. But something has switched in my…

Case for the defence: it was a concept car! Concept cars aren’t meant to be taken seriously! Concept cars are about pushing boundaries, about dipping toes in water, about running mad ideas up flagpoles to see who salutes and who starts making quiet retching noises while weeping gently to themselves. Yes, as any racing driver will attest, you must go beyond the limit to learn where the limit is. So discovering that the sight of a five metre long, 740bhp limo-cum-whoopee-cushion causes mild panic attacks in most right-thinking humans, well, that’s valuable consumer research right there for Mercedes. Case for the prosecution: it was a concept car! Concept cars are a chance to explore just how exciting, how glorious the automotive form can be when not stymied by the practicalities…

Ceramic brakes sound very fancy, but do you know the science behind them? Most people care more about the headline stuff. If it’s a supercar, you want to know how fast it goes. If it’s an electric car, how far. Because of its resistance to heat and chemical change, ceramic has a ton of uses in engines, but as an average punter you probably wouldn’t know what they actually are, unless someone sat you down and explained. There has been so much chatter about ceramic watches recently that you’d be forgiven for thinking it was some newly discovered space age material. But ceramic is simply any non-metallic mineral that’s had its chemical composition changed by heating. So a lump of clay becomes ceramic once it’s been in the oven. How…

THIS MONTH: MERCEDESBENZ EQS PROTOTYPE SUBSTANCE OVER STYLE Look, I get the EQS’s shape is dictated by aerodynamics and making the car as slippery as possible, but it’s just not my style. It has a drag coefficient of 0.2, which is impressive, Merc’s not messing around and clearly putting efficiency and range above all else, but yeah, it’s just a bit bleh. A bit meh. Maybe I’d appreciate it more without the camouflage, but honestly, I doubt it. BACK SEAT DRIVER Obviously it’s not supposed to be sporty, and for many it’s a car not to drive but be driven in, but I was surprised by how much I liked driving it. It’s fast, there’s a Sport mode if you’re feeling brave, but it feels more like a boat than…

7/10 £53,995 1.6T 4cyl hyb 355 bhp 8spd auto 5.2 secs 138.9 mpg 46 g/km FOR It drives well, looks exotic and offers intrigue AGAINST Some rough edges. And it’s not cheap privately The 508 Peugeot Sport Engineered is Peugeot’s first performance car in five years. It’s also, unlike almost every single one that’s gone before it, demonstrably not a hot hatchback. What we have instead is a sports saloon and estate with a plug-in hybrid powertrain. The marketeers cite two key rivals: the Audi S4 and BMW M340i. Cars which aren’t hybrids, and ones they hope the PSE will mercilessly take down in fleet sales, where its unrealistically low official CO2 claim ensures 12 per cent BIK and thus competitive monthly costs. If you’re buying at retail you’d better…

8 10 £39,680 2.0T 4cyl 191 bhp 9spd auto 7.3 secs 53.3 mpg 139 g/km FOR World’s best 2.0-litre diesel engine. Outstanding economy AGAINST Facelift tweaks make the E’s interior rather annoying This is not the Mercedes E-Class you buy because you want one. This is the E you buy because you require a 750-mile range from a single tank, or because you think ‘AMG’ is some sort of chemicals corporation, or because you haven’t actually bought one at all. Your company has, and you’ve just got to shell out for the CO2 tax. Not much, in this case. It’s the E by numbers. And yet, this is some technological marvel. Now, I know telling you about a diesel-powered, un-hybridified saloon car in 2021 is like turning up to the…

8/10 £136,643 3.0TT flat 6 444 bhp 8spd PDK 3.8 secs 25.4 mpg 253 g/km FOR Heritage interior touches, engine, wonderful controls AGAINST Heritage exterior touches, the price uplift Welcome to the least dynamic, most flawed Porsche 911. Which still means it’s a beltingly good sports car. It’s the Targa 4S, and if you’re thinking it looks very familiar, well what did you expect? This is a Porsche 911, they just keep doing what they do, the Targa has been a staple of the range since 1965 and here’s a new one with the same complex roof mechanism as the last gen car. It’s priced the same as the full convertible at £109,725 for the 4S (4WD, higher power) car we have here. However, this one costs an additional £26,918.…

Now go and watch the video on topgear.com Isn’t electric car jargon ugly? Previously we could salivate over horsepower, torque, injectors and manifolds. Now we’re stuck with miles per kWh and charging socket numberjumbles. One of the terms you’ll see us regularly lauding is the ‘bespoke EV’ or ‘ground-up electric car’. That’s a car designed to only ever be electric (like a Honda e, Mustang Mach-E or any Tesla) as opposed to say, a Vauxhall Corsa-e. Stuff that’s born electric rather than bastardised with batteries generally tends to be better sussed out. This is why the Ioniq 5 is exciting long after you’ve drunk in its retro-angular shape. After all, we’re merely talking about a 5dr, five-seat Korean hatchback here. But because it lives on Hyundai’s all-new, EV-only platform, it…

“WE HAVE SOUGHT PEACE, AND A DECENT SPOT FROM WHICH TO OBSERVE THE NIGHT SKY” IF I still smoked, I would. Even 15 years past the habit, my fingers still twitch for that little papery cylinder, ghost for the click and sandpaper roll of a brass Zippo. Stress finds comfort in the pathological, and at this point, I am very definitely stressed, and being trolled by my own stupidity. Imagine the scene: having bumbled around for the past couple of days over a decent chunk of Kielder Forest in Northumberland, we have spent the time traversing the logging tracks of Forestry England, marvelling at the beauty of this 250 square miles of working wood. There are deep greens and dappled light. There are moorland vistas and views across Kielder Water that…

JAGUAR XK8 CONVERTIBLE (1998) Price now £7,950 Harris says While everything goes electric, we should savour the V8 – even those of us who aren’t after utmost precision. If that’s you, then may I suggest a silver Jag with its 4.0-litre V8 wearing a modest 61,000 miles? TVR CHIMAERA 400 (1998) Price now £15,000 Harris says The Chimaera is the cheapest way into a TVR, and they’re commonplace at this money. Cheaper if you’re happy with a project. But stretch to a whacky colour – it’s what TVRs are all about. This one is in Blaze Yellow. WESTFIELD SEIGHT (2004) Price now £17,895 Harris says This little car is the answer to the question ‘what if I want a V8 with little else strapped to the back of it?’ as…

HELLO £85,580/£100,722/£1,073 WHY IT’S HERE Because it’s the cool one that could make us fall in love with EVs DRIVER Jack Rix THERE IS A MAMBA GREEN Porsche Taycan 4S parked outside my house and it’s killing me. It’s been outside for 48 hours now and beside a quick run around the block, it hasn’t moved. I have big plans for it, but for now let’s just appreciate the perfection of this spec. By all accounts the 4S is the Goldilocks model to go for – as fast as the Turbo and Turbo S in most normal situations, but not as eye-wateringly expensive. Bits I love then: the 20-inch Turbo Aero wheels (£1,524), the plush ride, the magnificent colour. Other choice options include the Performance Battery Plus (£4,613), the electric…

GOODBYE £50,635 OTR/£58,990 as tested/£570pcm WHY IT’S HERE To prove LRs are best when they’re more ‘utility’ than ‘sport’ DRIVER Tom Ford A SMALL ASTERISK IS A WINDOW INTO A WORLD OF HALF-TRUTHS. A get-out clause that allows a company to stab the best features into your mind’s eye, asterisking the small print somewhere towards the bottom of the page, the stuff that says ‘only if you spend twelvety thousand pounds more’. Thus you can have ‘available from’ next to figures that you only achieve with the car that’s twice the price. But at TopGear, we are not fooled. And so, in a month of unscientific deconstruction, we have subjected our Discovery Sport to some rigorous real-world testing. I started with the obvious stuff; speed and efficiency, based on Land…

GOODBYE £26,230 OTR/£30,655 as tested/£367pcm WHY IT’S HERE Can Skoda still do practicality at an attractive price? DRIVER Adam Waddell I DON’T REMEMBER A TIME WHEN MY FAMILY DIDN’T HAVE A CORTINA, Granada or Sierra estate on the drive, so I felt a twinge of sadness when Ford announced that it is ditching the concept of large family cars. As of next March the Mondeo will be no more. Thankfully, for those who still see the virtue of a keenly priced, practical family estate, Skoda launched the latest Octavia last July. Technically, it competes with the Focus, but to my mind the Tardis-like interior makes it more of an alternative to the Mondeo. Everything in the cabin is well thought out and put together. The touchscreen controls work well and…

You won’t find many more diverse ranges on any configurator. And you can thank the niche-busting one-upmanship of BMW and its key rivals – Audi and Mercedes – for a good chunk of that. Technically the cheapest car BMW builds is a Mini. But the cheapest car you can buy with a BMW badge is the 1-Series hatchback. Though it still starts at a chunky £25,000 with a threecylinder engine and weeny wheels. Rest assured that a fair chunk of that cash is shown off to onlookers via the sheer quantity of raw material in its front grille. Most expensive is the £140,000 BMW M5 CS – the lighter, more hardcore, more powerful version of the regular M5 saloon. That’s the largest sum any road-going BMW has cost, and no doubt…

This jaunty, two-tone wedge previewed the first ever M Division product, the legendary BMW M1. But the Turbo previewed so much more than a limited-run supercar. Here’s a sports car utilising the kind of downsized turbocharged engine that’s almost consumed the genre. It also looked ahead to a future of impact protection being integrated into a car, rather than bulbous bumpers tacked on the front and back. And there’s even a system that senses how far cars in front are to audibly warn its driver to brake if they’re too close. A precursor to clever cruise control systems, and a cure for tailgating BMW drivers seemingly way ahead of its time……

READY TO MAKE THE SWITCH? WE SEPARATE WHAT’S HOT FROM WHAT’S NOT CITY CARS These small cars are perfect for urban life, but the trade-off is a much lower range 1. HONDA e PRICE: £28,215–£30,715 RANGE: Up to 136 miles TG’s reigning city car of the year has retro-tastic styling, but the range isn’t great. No worries – you don’t need to drive anywhere, just sit inside it. 2. MINI ELECTRIC PRICE: £24,400–£30,400 RANGE: Up to 145 miles The electric version of the home grown favourite squeezes the BMW i3’s powetrain into a familiar package. Range not massive, but the car’s still fun. 3. FIAT 500 PRICE: £19,995–£26,995 RANGE: Up to 199 miles The latest version of the 500 offers sharper looks, good value and decent range – and a…

“When we showed it to people in clinics, the best compliment we got was when they said they didn’t know what it is,” says Citroen’s design director Pierre Leclerc, talking about his new big car, the C5X. That’s not what you expect to hear from a car designer. They’re usually aiming for clarity. He doesn’t mean it’s not clearly a Citroen. He means it’s not a car that can be boxed into the usual categories of saloon, estate or crossover. While most of the world continues to flock to crossovers, Citroen thinks – hopes – that some people are already just a bit over them. They don’t want the bulk, the weight, the fuel consumption. But on the other hand they do want a slice of a crossover’s height and…

Welcome to the new Toyota GR 86. Yes, GR 86. Not GT86. That’s not a typo either. That keyboard slip and smash of the space bar brings the friendlier looking 86 in line with Toyota’s other Gazoo Racing (GR) brethren; hopping on the back of the performance-oriented conga behind the GR Supra and GR Yaris. But this new 86 is very much a successor in all but name to the driverfocused, RWD sports car we crowned TopGear’s Car of The Year in 2012. Once again, it’s done in collaboration with Subaru, using the same chassis and engine as the new BRZ. However, this time we won’t be able to buy the BRZ in Europe – so it’s GR 86 or nothing. Huge props to Akio Toyoda for giving this the…

Monster Jam Steel Titans 2 If you play modern racing games and think “I wish the suspension felt more like it was made of blancmange” then Monster Jam Steel Titans 2 may be for you. You’ll spend at least 50 per cent of your time bouncing wildly out of control having clipped some divot or other. Fortunately, the game recognises there’s only so much realism anyone wants from a monster truck game. That’s why after a couple of hours of tearing around fairly anonymous rural America, punctuated with visits to the various real-world Monster Jam arenas, the scenery changes to a sci-fi alien planet and later the twisted terrain surrounding a haunted castle. Ultimately, though, Monster Jam Steel Titans 2 is not a great game. The cycle of race and…

DeLorean A truly rubbish joint venture V6 designed by Peugeot, Renault and Volvo, the DeLorean’s 2.8-litre motor generated just 130bhp. It should’ve been mid-engined with a lustier Ford V6, but the weighty American motor wouldn’t fit in the engine bay. Whoops. Smart Roadster Powered by a 0.7-litre turbocharged 3cyl engine that tickled the rear tyres with just 81bhp, the Roadster was then diluted by a painfully slow automated manual gearbox with ‘F1 style’ sequential shifting that had as much F1 pedigree as a can of Rich Energy drink. Ferrari 208 GTB In 1980 Ferrari decided to pull a fast one on the Italian tax authorities, who’d decided to double the duty paid on cars with engines larger than 2,000cc. The engineers slung a de-bored version of their Tipo V8 in,…

“SOMEONE WILL STEAL MY EV’S CHARGE CABLE WHEN PLUGGED IN” Even though I’ve done it hundreds of times, I’ve got to admit an electric car charging in the street does look a bit, well, vulnerable. Poking out at 90 degrees from the bodywork is a fairly sizeable and awkward plug, feeding into a thick cable crossing the pavement or gutter, and terminating in another plug that pokes out of the socket in the charging post. Won’t the neighbourhood urchins come along and unplug it? Won’t some other EV driver disconnect your umbilical so they can use the charge post? Won’t the local crims, fresh from nicking the lead off the parish church roof and the cats from under the neighbourhood Uber Priuses, steal your cable, possibly by cutting it, for the…

5/10 £50,595–£52,575 2.5 4cyl hyb 244 bhp eCVT auto 8.3 secs 39.2 mpg 163 g/km FOR Looks/feels more expensive than it is. Quiet and relaxing AGAINST Battery space. Safety assist pack should be standard The Highlander has been merrily knocking about in other markets for a while now, starting – relatively – small way back in 2000, growing gently over the years until this current gen based on Toyota’s GA-K platform. And that means just under five metres of your finest SUV, seven seats and lots of space. Rivals? Anything between the Kia Sorento and Volvo XC90. It comes equipped with a Toyota hybrid powertrain that means it’s passably efficient for a modest behemoth, making use of a 2.5-litre 4cyl Atkinson cycle engine mated to electric motors fore and aft…

MERCEDES-AMG A35 4MATIC £44,360 (£45,855 as tested) FOR Barely contained tempertantrum under the bonnet AGAINST Flat seats, brittle ride, noisy cabin 2.0T 4cyl 302 bhp 4.7 secs 35.8 mpg 188 g/km VOLKSWAGEN GOLF R £39,270 (£42,260 as tested) FOR Easy pace meets clever, comfy chassis for all weather fun AGAINST Bland engine note, annoying interior 2.0T 4cyl 316 bhp 4.7 secs 36.2 mpg 177 g/km Here’s a theory: the Merc A35 only exists because the old Golf R was a blinder. AMG made its play in 2013, insisting the best posh hot hatch was the most powerful one… ever. The utterly crackers, AWD A45. Five minutes later VW’s MkVII Golf R arrived – £10k cheaper and 70bhp worse off. And most of us thought, “That’ll do nicely. Love your work…

7/10 KIA SORENTO ‘4’ PHEV 1.6 T-GDI £50,595 FOR Good value for a sevenseat plug-in hybrid AGAINST This top-spec model is pricey for a Sorento though 1.6T 4cyl +e-motor 261 bhp 8.4 secs 176.6 mpg 38 g/km Latest Sorento is a comfortable family barge and works well as a PHEV. The 67kW electric motor is plenty powerful enough to tickle the Sorento around town and 13.8kWh battery good for around 30 miles or so. Best thing is to leave the car in Auto mode and let it decide, maximising efficiency and using the petrol engine to boost acceleration. Not cheap in ‘4’ spec (albeit well kitted), but its only seven-seat PHEV rival is the Volvo XC90. SB 6/10 CITROEN e-C4 £32,495 (after gov’t grant) FOR Bold, distinctive looks, long travel…

Without question my favourite electric car of 2021 is the Porsche Taycan. The thing about the Taycan that just blew me away was because it’s electric you don’t expect it to feel like a proper Porsche, and then you get in it and it does. And then you start driving it and it really really does. It’s a car I just loved driving, so much so I asked if I could keep it a little bit longer. Handling aside, it’s so bloody quick – I had the Turbo S, and honestly, it was actually painful on full throttle – not sure I need all that to be honest. I’d probably go for something a bit gentler, a Taycan 4S is plenty. Anyway, it’s a car that made me breathe a…

Electric cars are here to stay. The number being sold increases month by month, the percentage share of the marketplace grows… it’s inevitable. The politicians want them, it seems the people want them. I’m not entirely convinced they’re perfect, however they’re very impressive and the offerings are getting better and better. What’s clear is that engineers are very clever people… once they’re sure it’s worth investing their time and effort they will always manage staggering feats. If you spend any time in an EV from the last year and then go and spend time in one from five years ago, the advances are enormous. I remain excited about the electric landscape, I’m still not sure they’re as engaging as combustion cars, but you just know soon there’s going to be…

“ARMOURED VEHICLES ARE NOTHING NEW, BUT FEW LOOK QUITE AS COOL AS THE 7-SERIES” ‘You do realise that’s not normal?’ These were the words muttered by my girlfriend, moments after telling her I’d be popping out that evening to do ‘car’ things. Obviously, there’s more to this than going to use a jet wash. But I fear the more detail provided, the more factual her statement seems. Mainly because I was off to collect another old car. And this particular car was being dropped off by a transporter all the way from Bulgaria, just to throw up another red flag. To explain, it wasn’t so much a car I’d bought, rather a tank disguised as a 1993 BMW E32 750iLP. And if that model number looks like a typo, it’s…

REMEMBERING RETRO GAMING THE CLASSICS Based on an early version built by French developer Daniel Macré in his evenings and weekends, Vroom on the Amiga and ST attempted to bring home all the high speed thrills and glamour of the Formula One championship. What’s more, it tried on computers that, these days, wouldn’t have enough processing power to successfully run the delicates cycle on your washing machine. In spite of this, Vroom was blisteringly quick compared to other racers of the day, firing 16-bit scenery at your eyeballs like a motorsport-themed remake of the end of A Clockwork Orange. While it was by no means a simulator, Vroom was surprisingly authentic. The six circuits in the game were rough approximations of real life layouts, such as Fuji and Silverstone, albeit with scenery…

HELLO £30,345/£32,045/£400 WHY IT’S HERE Does Mazda’s first EV have substance beyond gimmicky (but cool) doors? DRIVER Tom Harrison ON THE DAY I COLLECT TG’S NEW Mazda MX-30 the UK government drops the plug-in car grant discount to £2,500 on an EV costing no more than £35,000. Admittedly of little consequence to anyone interested in the Mazda, with prices starting at £26,045 post-grant, but still pretty damn annoying. Still, generous incentives aren’t enough on their own to lure people into EVs. We’ve got six months with the Mazda to see how it stacks up. The headlines are thus: the MX-30 might be crossover-shaped, but it’s priced and pitched as an alternative to EV city cars like the Honda e. So it doesn’t have a very big battery and won’t go…

Rather like the Queen, BMW has several birthdays (and German blood). The initials stand for Bayerische Motoren Werke AG, which in turn translates as ‘Bavarian Engine Works plc’. It can trace its roots back to 1913 and a company called Rapp Motorenwerke, which made aircraft engines during – inevitably – World War One. You can guess which side for. And now you know where the apocryphal idea of the propeller on the badge comes from. BMW considers its actual birth date to be 7 March 1916, though, and after numerous company name changes and alterations to what it actually manufactured post-war, it produced its first road transport via the BMW R 32 motorbike in 1923, and the BMW 303 car, which was born in 1933.…

Will you allow us some poetic licence to claim that it’s the McLaren F1? A car famously powered by a BMW-made V12 engine, and one which – until Bugatti barged its way onto the scene – was the official holder of the ‘world’s fastest production car’ trophy. Its 240.1mph two-way average far outstrips anything that BMW itself has made, its roadgoing cars never freed to roam past 200, despite a handful of M cars surely being capable of it. The F1 even trumps BMW’s V12 LMR racecar – which hit a 214mph peak on the Mulsanne Straight in 1999 – or any one of its gaggle of Formula One cars. The fastest car you can currently buy with a BMW badge is, once again, the M5 CS. Its 626bhp makes…

DJI says this is the world’s first ready-to-fly, first-person-view drone, which offers the full racing drone experience with a 150° field of vision cast to the pilot’s goggles, and also shoots ultra-smooth 4K video with its gimbal-mounted camera. The FPV has a new singlehanded controller that directs the drone with your hand movements, and there are racing motors that get it from 0–62mph in just 2.0secs. No worries filming a Chiron, then. There are three flying modes that mean even novices can pilot the FPV, while the Emergency Brake and Hover features will stop you slamming into the floor if you get into a vomit-inducing spin. Store.dji.com; £1,249…

1 IT’S BASICALLY AUDI’S VW ID.4 This is the first Audi built on the bespoke electric platform underpinning all VAG’s most affordable EVs. And knowing what its buyers want, Audi’s spun an SUV from it before anything else. Prices start at £40,750, though, so it’s not eligible for UK gov’t subsidies. 2 YOU CAN GET 300+ MILES OF RANGE Audi’s not chasing the headline 0–62mph times of Teslas; the cheapest Q4 takes a yawning 9.0secs. You’ve a choice of 52 and 77kWh batteries and 168, 201 and 294bhp peak outputs, all but the most powerful being rear-wheel drive. Maximum range belongs to the middle-rung Q4, offering 328 miles in slipperier Sportback form. 3 YEP, THE SPORTBACK IS CLEANER As well as the ‘normal’ one (above), Audi’s offering a coupe-fied Q4…

PORSCHE 911 GT3 £127,820/£150,628 as tested The 911 GT3 is the answer to that question. Every generation since its first iteration appeared in 1999 has been the answer, unless you happen to be one of those strange people who disavows the 911 – like QAnon supporters, they’re out there – when in fact everyone knows it’s the world’s best sports car. The GT3 is the best version, distilled motorsport genius rendered surprisingly biddable on the road. But these are strange times, and the optics on the highly engineered hedonism that the 911 GT3 has always represented might not have the absolute clarity they once did. One of Porsche’s top brass assured me recently that the mighty work it’s done on the Taycan hasn’t pushed internal combustion into the background. Frankly, he…

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What’s with the ship? We need to get to some difficult locations and minimise our footprint. A complication is some of the places we’re going don’t have normal infrastructure. Without the ship there would be no championship. What do you say to those who object to racing in these sensitive parts of the world? There are people who think we’re taking big SUVs to beautiful places and destoying them, but the places we’re racing in are already damaged. It’s impossible to damage a beach full of plastic or a deforested region. We won’t achieve anything by sitting on our hands. We came up with the themes – desertification, deforestation, ice caps melting and ocean pollution. By going to these places and racing, we’re going to raise awareness and help fix…

BEST GT AUDI/E-TRON/GT/ Employ the world’s best chefs to produce a meal for you with the finest, freshest ingredients, and short of the oven exploding halfway through, you’re in for a tasty treat. And so, the least surprising thing to happen in the last 12 months was the Audi e-tron GT – based on the same platform and using the same powertrain tech as the Porsche Taycan – being brilliant. A little more laid-back than the Porsche and, let’s face it, better looking, it’s the kind of car you could cross Europe in – stopping only for teas, wees and electricities. Not just the best electric Audi, but one of the best fast Audis ever, full stop. BEST CROSSOVER PEUGEOT/e-2008/ Should you find yourself in the market for a compact, electric crossover,…

The problem with SUVs… OK, one of the problems with SUVs is they’re quite dull. Some are fun to drive, though not as fun as a proper car, while others offer neat interior parlour tricks that make life a smidge more tolerable. Nissan’s Juke offered rare style but was sadly rare on substance too. If it was a person it would wear a motorbike jacket even though it didn’t own a motorbike. It wasn’t always meant to be like this though – when Nissan’s earlier designers sketched out their fever dreams of a glorious future they showed up at the Tokyo Motor Show in 1987 with the Judo concept. Apparently no one told Nissan judo means ‘the way of gentleness’, because this car would’ve hit the market mercilessly hard. Nissan…

A PUKKA RALLYING PAIR? One more so than the other. That Toyota developed the GR Yaris as a platform for a better rally car isn’t in doubt, but as yet it hasn’t competed. Fingers crossed for 2022. The Celica GT-Four WRC you see here formed the basis for Toyota’s frontline rally car in 1995, with Didier Auriol taking it to victory on the Tour de Corse. HOW CLOSELY RELATED ARE THE ROAD AND RALLY CARS? They used to be closer. The current WRC regulations are a silhouette formula. It’s got to look like a car you’ve built at least 25,000 of, but apart from engine size, the mechanics don’t have to match. Back in the Celica’s day, 2,500 cars had to be built and they were the basis for the…

REPORT 4 BMW M440i Head over to Colin Furze’s YouTube channel and you’ll see his latest project getting a shakedown with a special guest. TopGear challenged the inventor, engineer and semi-pro lunatic to build a Bond car on a £7k budget, but we needed a villain to give chase to Double-oh-Stig. Enter the menacing all-black TG M440i, playing the role it was always born to. OK REPORT 3 KIA SOUL EV A couple of times I’ve needed to eke out range for a 220-mile day in cold weather. Turning off the heating/climate saves energy. But at speed, cold air still blows on my toes by force of natural ventilation. Trick is to turn the direction control to face-only before turning off the system. This sets the internal baffles to block…

HELLO SEAT LEON A new, blue Seat Leon has joined the TG fleet, and I am effervescent with anticipation. Call me a badge snob, but I’ve always found the VW Golf – especially in MkVIII guise and its evolution-not-revolution styling – just too conservative, too… business-suit to really float my boat. But Golf tech and engines wrapped up in a jauntier, pointier uniform? Looking forward to this one… SP REPORT 5 TOYOTA GR YARIS OZ Rally Racing. The wheels worn by Carlos Sainz’ Toyota Celica back when he won his first WRC title back in 1990, wheels that stand for everything I want the GR Yaris to represent. They cost £1,200 for the set, look a treat, but they have added 2.6kg of extra weight at each corner. There’s a…

REPORT 7 £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 DID YOU KNOW THAT THERE’S A 60 PENCE TOLL FOR CROSSING THE Thames? I didn’t, until the Morgan prompted a stark change to how I get places: I’ve fixed my nav app settings to ‘no motorways’ and never looked back. Should you ever have the pleasure of dropping a couple of coins into a small fishing net dangled sweetly out of Whitchurch Bridge’s cabin – in lieu of the 50mph speed camera monotony of the M4 – neither will you. The Mog simply feels happiest away from the grind and gridlock. Where it also feels a humongous step on from…

BMW 2002 The 2002 and its ‘Neue Klasse’ cousins effectively saved BMW from financial ruin in the Sixties. They established the company as a major player, and set an enduring precedent that would serve it well for decades to come. Nowadays hugely desirable. BMW M1 Remained BMW’s only mid-engined ‘supercar’ until the plug-in i8 arrived in 2014. Widely regarded as the first-ever M car, it was a homologation special designed by Giugiaro with a legendary 3.5-litre inline-six that would later be installed in the first M5. Proper. BMW 3.0 CSL ‘Batmobile’ Another homologation special, built to compete in the European Touring Car Championship. BMW used thinner steel, aluminium panels and perspex instead of glass to keep weight low. Later cars were shipped with an extreme aero pack and nicknamed ‘Batmobile’.…

Where are BMWs built, and how many does it build a year? 2.17M* BMW is a big old company nowadays, and the complexities of its range (plus the fact it owns Mini and Rolls-Royce) means its cars don’t all roll out of one country, never mind one factory. There are 31 plants in 14 different territories, in fact. Crikey. That’s four sites in Germany – headed by BMW HQ in Munich, where you’ll also find a brilliantly nerdy museum – while every size of BMW SUV rolls off a production line in South Carolina in the USA. There are plants in all corners of the world, though, with factories in Brazil, China, Indonesia and Thailand, to name just a few. *BMW brand only, 2019…

What is it? Words like ‘hero’ and ‘icon’ are thrown about at will where fast cars are concerned. But no one can argue about the BMW M3’s claim to either. It brought high-performance rear-wheeldrive cars to the mainstream. It’s an ideal stepping stone between a hot hatch and a bona fide sports car, wrapping qualities of each in a body that can slip seamlessly into traffic without warranting undue attention. It’s also matured in a fascinating manner over its 31-year life, growing from a pugnacious little four-cylinder coupe into a turbocharged fire-breathing saloon. It’s spawned many iterations along the way, folding hard-top convertibles and two-seat trackday specialists among them. The car you see here, though, is the only one to use eight cylinders. Sold between 2007 and 2013, the E90-series of…