Innholdsfortegnelse for June 2021 i BBC Top Gear Magazine

@jack_rix editor@bbctopgearmagazine.com It won’t surprise you to learn that pulling together our world exclusive ‘holy trinity of speedsters’ test was not the work of a moment. After months of pitching, explaining, chasing, reassuring we still only had two out of the three cars on our hit list. So we decided to crack on anyway – a head-to-head instead of a three-way, with a Caterham thrown in to not-so-subtly show you can have the full flappy cheek experience for less. The call came late, about a week before the shoot. McLaren had found a prototype Elva down the back of a sofa and could get it to Scotland. Job done? Not quite. Sailing north to Fort William, through a nine-hour monsoon in an Octavia vRS, I had time to contemplate that…

Not that we’re calling the Avenger a catastrophic sales flop, but put it this way. By 2008 – a mere year after Avengers went on sale in the UK – Dodge dealers were offering British customers a two-for-the-price-of-one deal. Literally, genuinely, no strings attached: if you bought one Avenger, they’d throw in a second Avenger for free. Avengers assemble! It was a sales policy that raised some interesting issues. In particular: what, exactly, was one supposed to do with two Dodge Avengers? One for weekdays and one for Sunday best? Clone the numberplates and stage a series of increasingly elaborate pranks on the neighbours? Not that it mattered, because pretty much no one took up Dodge on its generous offer. Two Avengers simply meant twice as much bad stuff. Because,…

Eggcelerate! Eggcelerate! is a game based around a primary goal so ridiculous, so nonsensical, so completely without basis in logic or scientific method that we’re surprised it hasn’t appeared as a challenge on TGTV yet. Almost certainly a design that started with the title and worked backwards from there, Eggcelerate! is a PC game that tasks you with negotiating a series of increasingly tortuous courses without fumbling the fragile egg from the basket mounted atop your car. It’s also a delivery vector for increasingly awful egg puns. What begins as a deceptively simple exercise in driving smoothly becomes a fiendishly difficult obstacle course, peppered with traps designed to launch your egg into the lower stratosphere. There are also a host of in-game achievements awarded for things like playing keepy-uppies with…

BMW 3.0 CSL Goodness knows what people made of the 3.0 CSL in 1972 when it first took to the streets. The wraparound tricolour stripes alone made the Batmobile more Seventies than Noddy Holder riding a Raleigh Chopper in platform shoes and flares. Ask your parents. Ferrari 360 CS Ferrari’s ‘Challenge Stradale’ was in effect a street-legal version of the 360 Challenge racecar, so painting a thick white line over the top did at least have a dash of track-born pedigree. Naturally, you had to pay extra for it – just like on any striped Ferrari since. Dodge Viper ACR Good on Dodge for morphing the Viper into a track day weapon. The ACR broke the Laguna Seca lap record for a road legal car with this wingshod special. The…

“ IT’S CARMAKERS’ JOB TO SORT OUT THE CHARGING NETWORK” Kodak didn’t make it from a film business to the digital era. But Fuji did. You’d think the oil companies would want to get into electric vehicle charging, as much as they want to get into renewables generation. They certainly pretend they’re ‘energy companies’. Nowhere on the homepage of BP’s website will you find the word ‘oil’. They’re in an ideal position to invest in charging. They’ve had a century of making spectacular profits, becoming some of the biggest corporations on the planet. Their primary product is soon to be legislated out of existence. (OK, they can still sell oil for plastics production – these oceans don’t pollute themselves you know.) And indeed BP Pulse is one of Britain’s bigger…

PORSCHE CAYMAN GT4 MANUAL (YELLOW) £76,530 (£94,506 as tested) FOR A truly delightful gearchange built into a superb sports car AGAINST It doesn’t sound as frenzied as early, non-718 GT4s PORSCHE CAYMAN GT4 PDK (RED) £78,530 (£97,132 as tested) FOR The GT4 experience tailored to be easier going AGAINST Some character’s gone AWOL with the clutch pedal One of the key protagonists of the #savethemanuals movement now offers a paddleshifter. And if it’s anything like the 911 GT3’s, around half of 718 GT4 buyers will tick PDK’s £2,000 options box. Given the GT4 legend began with its wanton simplicity – modest size, power and grip allied to RWD and a manual – it seems like a plot twist. But look at any of the sales ratios for performance cars offering…

£TBC FOR Still a wonderful stylish lux-GT. But it now adores corners AGAINST Not a very charismatic 12-cylinder. But still eh, 12 I spun it. Around the apex of one of the Silverstone GP circuit’s slower corners I requested the full 663lb ft. The rear end progressively made its emphatic outward move. I countersteered, foot extended, fully expecting the 4WD to straighten matters out. But no. Twiddle the right knobs and press the right buttons – as the engineer next to me had lately done – and the new Continental GT Speed is quite the hooligan. As my sluggish brain awoke to the rear-driveyness of the situation, the rotational inertia of this 2.3-tonne luxury yacht was unstoppable. The Speed is a different Continental GT. Or rather, it sometimes is. If…

I’VE JUST BEEN UNDRESSED BY A £1.4MILLION McLAREN ELVA. It’s my own fault for refusing to wear the unforgivably dweeby McHelmet designed for this roofless, screenless screamer. My cosy bobble hat substitute is forcibly ejected, dances through the heat haze across the rear deck and is lost in the slipstream. If you were in the Fiat Panda overtaken by a solid gold rocket car on the A87 near Fort William last month and pulled over to retrieve it after you’d finished laughing, could you post it on to the Inverlochy Castle Hotel? I’d like to stay again. TopGear staffers do not habitually overnight in castles, but it’s important to get into character. We’re here to rendezvous with the apex of supercar excess: speedsters. Cars devoid of shelter, practicality, and any…

“ IT’S THE LEFTOVER ONE-77 WITH SOME SPARE VULCAN BITS” Start. Stop. Victor. It’s only a button on the steering wheel, but you can read so much into those curt instructions, that indisputable final outcome. Victor. How perfect a name for this car? The symbolism of it: it carries the Latin-derived language of coats of arms, the connotations of empire-era sporting success and the actual first name of the man who single-handedly hauled the failing company through the Eighties. Victor Gauntlett. The lantern jawed industrialist who so embodied the cars that were created on his watch. It was a troubled period in Aston’s history: production had stuttered and almost died before the already successful petrochemicals entrepreneur got involved. It was he who did the deal to get Bond back in…

“THE ORIGINAL MANTA WAS KNOWN IN CERTAIN CIRCLES AS THE ‘PEOPLE’S PORSCHE’” At the Nürburgring 24 Hours race a few years ago, I went a bit Louis Theroux in one of the campsites overlooking the Foxhole. As the smell of charred bratwurst drifted between the trees, I noticed a couple wedged up against the chainlink fence, spectating. The woman’s left shoulder was exposed to the elements and emblazoned on her skin was a prominent tattoo of the Opel ‘Blitz’ logo. I remember wondering if she had a British doppelganger with Vauxhall’s griffin mascot branded on her body somewhere. It seems unlikely. A brief history: Opel began making cars in 1899 and was doing it rather well when American behemoth General Motors swept in and bought the company in 1931. Vauxhall…

FORD PUMA 1.7 (2001) Price now £1,000 Harris says Want an Aston, but scared witless of a high-mileage DB9? Well, here’s something Ian Callum designed earlier. It also allows you to hark back to the time a Puma was a sweetly styled coupe rather than a small SUV. TOYOTA IQ (2009) Price now £4,795 Harris says The Aston Martin Cygnet morphed from April-Fool-made-real ignominy to a genuinely sought after little car. So much so, its Toyota base is now worth barely a tenth of the value. With just 35,000 miles, this is a bargain. LANCIA FULVIA SPORT ZAGATO (1973) Price now £8,500 Harris says Numerous Aston specials have had Zagato styling applied to them over the years. They’ll cost you. So instead, take a punt on this Lancia, in need…

REPORT 2 £30,345 OTR/£32,045 as tested/£400pcm WHY IT’S HERE Does Mazda’s first EV have substance beyond gimmicky (but cool) doors? DRIVER Tom Harrison EVS COME IN DIFFERENT FLAVOURS. THERE ARE THE COMPLETELY bespoke ones like the BMW i3 and VW ID.3, which use EV-only platforms developed at vast expense. Then there are the “Oh s***, we’d better do an EV” ones like the Mini Electric, where a manufacturer is forced to quickly adapt a platform meant for ICE cars to fit batteries/e-motors. Lastly there are the in-betweeners – cars on platforms developed for both types of powertrain, like the Peugeot 208, Vauxhall Mokka and ‘our’ little Mazda. The MX-30 is currently only available as an EV in the UK. But it shares its platform with the CX-30 crossover and 3…

HELLO £48,045 OTR/£48,660 as tested/£596pcm WHY IT’S HERE Just what is the Cupra Formentor… for? DRIVER Tom Ford SOME CARS ARE TRANSPARENT IN THEIR PURPOSE FROM THE OFF – fast, practical, deliberately tiny, off-roaders. Whatever they’re designed for will be obvious just looking at them. But TG Garage’s newest inhabitant has caused confusion, because identifying the Cupra Formentor’s mission statement from its looks is difficult. There is, it has to be said, a lot going on. So what is it? SUV or hatch with a Cuban heel? Both? Neither? Stand back and consider: it’s a hatch-looking thing, but with a long bonnet. It stands tall, with generous arches, and looks fairly aggressive, especially from the front. The proportions are slightly off. Actually, that’s not entirely true, the proportions aren’t wrong…

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 parcel shelf full of soft toys shouldn’t hurt the battery too much.…

In dramatising the regal, Shakespeare hath no equal. And yet, despite giving new language to love and loss and delivering some of literature’s greatest ever one-liners, we suspect even the big man would have struggled to describe the noise this Ferrari V12 will likely make at full chat. If all the world’s a stage, then allow us to present one of its loudest players. This is the Ferrari 812 Competizione and its open-topped sibling, the Competizione A. Cry 9,500rpm, and let slip the V12, he probably wouldn’t have written. The 812 Competizione is, rather unsurprisingly, a version of the 812 Superfast; a sort of alternate reality Superfast where everything has been turned up to 11. And as with any self-respecting Ferrari, we venture once more unto that mesmerising V12. It’s…

Pronounced arches. A swoopy, Sportback-style rear end. Fully customisable daytime running lights up front. Suffice to say, this new Audi A6 e-tron concept is quite striking, especially if – like us – you’re thinking of the multitude of rude words you could spell out using those LEDs. The all-electric concept is actually heading into production too. Audi is aiming for a 2023 launch date and what you see here is apparently 95 per cent accurate to the final design. The A6 e-tron also represents our first proper look at Audi and Porsche’s new PPE platform. Slightly awkward name these days, but here it stands for Premium Platform Electric. PPE will sit above VW’s MEB platform that underpins the Q4 e-tron and both the ID.3 and ID.4, whereas it’ll be below…

Nope, not the actual wheel from the 2020 Ferrari F1 car… but damn close. This is the Thrustmaster Formula Wheel Add-On Ferrari SF100 Edition, as literally no one will call it, and it can be bolted to your humble home sim rig. You’ll need a compatible Thrustmaster wheelbase, but the new LCD screen in the centre has been configured to display live telemetry from F1 2020, with support for more games on the way. Our daydreaming about being the young, talented and handsome Charles Leclerc just got that bit more real… thrustmaster.com; £329.99…

1 IT’LL TORQUE STEER Yep, Albert Biermann’s team has stuck with FWD for what is essentially a taller, slightly fatter i30N. The N Division considered 4WD, but only briefly, deeming the extra weight and complication unnecessary. You get the same LSD as in an i30N, so it should be a riot to drive. 2 IT CERTAINLY WON’T BE SLOW The jacked up i30N theme continues under the bonnet, with the hot hatch’s 276bhp 2.0-litre turbo four-pot making another appearance. That helps the Kona achieve a 150mph top speed via a 5.5-second 0–62mph sprint. It also gets N’s new eight-speed dual-clutch paddleshift gearbox as standard – you can’t have a manual Kona N. 3 THERE’S PROPER PERFORMANCE TECH The Kona N will offer a “Performance Driving Data System” that’ll monitor circuit…

Families are terribly inconvenient arrangements which have a tendency to transform small journeys into big efforts, requiring the logistical execution of a military campaign. Something like the European Axis invasion of the Soviet Union, except with more prams. Which brings us neatly to the subject of this particular head-to-head; full-size family SUVs. Full fat, added sugar, extra e-numbers SUVs, the dimensions of which, should they not be capable of doing the job, would require you to buy an actual lorry. For the face-off, we have a pair of particularly fine examples: the Audi Q7 and the Land Rover Defender 110. And before anyone gets too excited, the cars in the pictures do not compete directly (the LR being a D250 SE diesel and the Audi a 50 TFSi petrol), but…

£71,995 FOR Comfortable, quick and properly posh inside AGAINST Not as engaging as other performance SUVs Welcome to the most powerful production car in Volkswagen’s long history. It’s also the first R model to utilise electric power. It’s the Touareg R, a car chockful of ‘mosts’, ‘firsts’ and ‘biggests’ baked into its lengthy equipment list. Good job, really, as it’s £71,995 before options. Its plug-in hybrid set-up is familiar from the Touareg’s not-so-distant cousins, the Audi Q7, Bentley Bentayga and Porsche Cayenne. So it pairs a turbocharged 3.0 V6 petrol engine with an electric motor for a 462bhp peak, 0–62mph in 5.1secs and up to 28 miles of zero emission range if you’re light-footed. To help make sense of it there’s an 8spd auto and AWD, allowing the R to…

ISUZU D-MAX V-CROSS DOUBLE CAB AUTO £39,244 FOR Massively capable offroad, improved interior AGAINST Commercial vehicle road manners, rattly diesel With Mitsubishi leaving the UK, VW discontinuing the Amarok (for now) and Merc stopping X-Class production, Isuzu reckons it’s time to go more lifestyle. The V-Cross is the poshest trim, with leather, comfy armchairs and 9in infotainment screen. Not bad. Only engine is still a clattery nat-asp diesel though, and it’s far from refined on the road. Standard 4WD and a new diff lock though, so it’s mighty in the rough stuff. GP MERCEDES-AMG GLB 35 £51,700 FOR Does its job with a certain ruthlessness AGAINST Ultimately quite pointless though Did Mercedes ever see a niche it didn’t like? An AMG version of the reasonably small seven-seat GLB SUV is…

How much of the hyperspeedsters experience does a Caterham give you, for one thirtieth of the price? Enough, trust me. Twenty minutes of blundering with Allen keys and a fiddly wire connector divorces this 620S from its heated windscreen, replaced with pleasingly effective carbon aero ramps. Cold? Not a bit of it. The heated seats are furnaces, but the rasping side-exit exhaust keeps you just as toasty. What the Seven does better than anything else on four wheels is distil driving into its component actions. With just 610kg summoned along by 310bhp, it’s as rabidly quick up to cheek-rippling speeds as any of the unicorns, but you’re savagely busy on the way, snicking gears and feathering the gas. There’s never a moment you can’t hear exactly what the willing supercharged…

So and find something beautiful in your house. An object, not a person, please. And it must be man-made. The words will still be here when you get back. Right, got something? Is it actually beautiful? If so, you’ve done better than me – 10 minutes of poking around and I reckon the most beautiful thing in my house is the fireplace tongs. But ask yourself if what you’ve found is actually beautiful. Does the shape and form captivate, draw your eye, or does it just work well? That’s not beautiful, just functional. Like the tongs. The point I’m trying to make is that actual beauty is rare. Now cars: a fair few older ones make my list, but I can’t actually think of a single new car that is…

I AM BEING PROBED. “NO, NOT A CHANCE. ARE YOU REVVING IT TOO MUCH?” “I DON’T THINK S0…” I mutter vaguely, failing to mention that I’m actually holding the car some 1,000rpm under the level it should be. “You’ll have to take it out of Track mode then. It’s way too loud…” “Ah. Uh. Yes. I shall do that!” I exclaim brightly, fiddling theatrically with a large toggle on the dash and lifting off the throttle. “That will be fine then – thanks!” I drive away, leaving a confused looking marshall swatting his noise-o-meter at empty air. The Mustang wasn’t in Track mode. It was in the quietest setting I could find, and it still failed the noise test so spectacularly everyone thought the exhaust had fallen off. This, it…

“PLANES, TRAINS AND ALMOST ALL OEMS HAVE RELIED ON RECARO OVER THE YEARS” A few years ago, while working in Japan, I fell quite ill and needed taking into hospital. Long before COVID-19, I was on something of a food rampage centred around how much sashimi the Japanese offered. This was right up until I was rolling around in pain with gastroenteritis. First, I was put on a stretcher designed for Japanese people. Which meant I resembled one of those giant bratwursts you get in Germany served on a tiny bread roll. Then, I was loaded into a kei-sized ambulance which – if I had stretched my arms out – I could’ve held on to like some kind of JDM fairground waltzer. Finally, I was wheeled into the hospital by…

Long before the Need for Speed series became synonymous with fibreglass bodykits, neon underlighting and the sort of paper-thin plotting even The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift would be ashamed of, there was the first game, initially released on the now forgotten 3DO console. Rather formally titled The Need for Speed, this game instead focused on supercars, or ‘exotics’ as they were known at the time. Makes them sound less like cars and more like a breed of rare parakeet. The Nineties have a lot to answer for. Still, you can’t argue with the selection. The headliners were the Ferrari 512TR and Lamborghini Diablo, two of the most trouser troubling cars of the era, but there was a wide variety including the Dodge Viper, Mazda RX-7 and a tragically…

GOODBYE £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 SINCE ITS ARRIVAL WE HAVE COVERED 4,343 MILES OVER 137.5 HOURS in the Audi e-tron, at an average of 32mph, consuming electricity at a rate of 2.0mpkWh. The majority of the miles have been local journeys to school and back, or essential shopping – it all adds up. Lockdown has prevented us from travelling further, although there was a solitary trip to the office which the 150-mile real world range covered easily. So life with the e-tron has been spent enjoying the convenience, comfort and quiet of electric travel at a local level, unblighted by the challenges of longer journeys and the vagaries of the UK’s charging infrastructure.…

REPORT 2 £26,025 OTR/£26,025 as tested/£267pcm WHY IT’S HERE Is this all the sensible car a sensible family could need? DRIVER Sam Philip I’VE NEVER SEEN MYSELF AS A VW GOLF SORT OF PERSON. IS THAT snobbery? Reverse snobbery? Despite the fact I am, by pretty much every metric, definitely a Golf sort of person. Averaged-sized family? Tick. Average-sized commute? Tick. Like nicely engineered things? Tick. Think driving an SUV if you’re never planning on going off-road marks you out as a bit of a wally? Tick. Tell someone you’ve got a Golf, they’re never going to say, “oh, interesting, what made you choose that then?” They’ll say, “good choice, heard they’re reliable”, then they’ll wander to the bar. Which is why the Seat Leon has always appealed. Golf tech…

REPORT 6 £29,995/£34,375/£396 WHY IT’S HERE Does this hot hatch genuinely channel the spirit of the WRC? DRIVER Ollie Marriage I CLOBBERED A PHEASANT recently. They’re running a higher population density than the pub gardens out my way. The tweed and Schöffel set clearly wasn’t allowed out to blast at them over winter, which meant not even a GR Yaris could pick its way around four of them on an evening strut. Result: offside foglamp knocked back inside the bumper. Nothing else. I thought it would be unwise to take the Yaris to the dealer wearing its OZ wheels, as someone might get excited about non-standard spec and refuse to pop the foglamp back, so swapped the car back to the forged BBSes. Which immediately felt better: more nimble, steering…

What’s McLaren, and when did it start making cars? McLaren is named after Bruce McLaren, the New Zealand racer/engineer who never won the F1 world championship, but set up a team that has managed exactly that 12 times so far. But the question of when McLaren started building road cars isn’t quite so straightforward – 1994 is the answer that makes most sense as that was when McLaren released the production F1. Arguably the world’s first hypercar, the three-seater was revolutionary. But 26 years earlier Bruce had tried to homologate an M6A Can-Am racer for Le Mans. The project never materialised, but two road cars were made and Bruce actually used one as a daily driver. McLaren didn’t properly get going as a road car manufacturer until 2010, with the…

If you think cartoon watches are for children, you may have a point. eBay has an endless supply of brightly coloured ones designed to appeal solely to kids. Even if you could squeeze one onto your wrist, a plastic Spider-Man watch for £1.99 (including p&p) won’t get you taken seriously at the grown-ups’ table. But now there are many cartoon watches that are clearly not aimed at little people, and have the big prices to prove it. How did this happen? A lot of it is down to NASA. The Apollo crews were obsessed with Peanuts cartoons. On Apollo 10, the Command Module was given the call sign ‘Charlie Brown’. The Lunar Excursion Module, tasked with scouting landing sites for Apollo 11, was ‘Snoopy’. The cartoon dog returned the favour…

DOPE TECH MB’S FAVOURITE FEATURE Using Android software is smart, it has huge potential for OTA updates so your screen will keep getting better over time. That’s the future I’ll be honest, I hadn’t seen a whole load of advertising or press around this car, it flew under my radar. But that’s a good thing, I brought no preconceptions, just excitement to see what it was all about. I’ll just dive right in – on the surface this car does absolutely everything right… except the price – it’s over $60,000 in the US. However, since I drove the dual-motor long range model, I noticed that Polestar has introduced a new structure with a single-motor version with the option of a smaller 64kWh battery. That’s good news on two fronts –…

£125,010 FOR A luxury limo that corners like a true sports saloon AGAINST A luxury limo that rides like a true sports saloon Yep, turns out Maserati still makes the Quattroporte. No, us neither. It’s been in luxury barge purgatory for a while now: not as pretty as the old one, nor as boisterous thanks to a sales-chasing switch to downsized turbo and diesel engines which, like every Maser masterplan of the past 50 years, gloriously failed to overthrow the Germans. So, in a final thumb-to-middle-finger-waggling gesture of defiance before it has to settle down and go all-electric, the firm has taken a 3.8-litre, 572bhp twin-turbo V8 and shoved it everywhere it could find room. Now there’s a Levante Trofeo SUV, a Ghibli Trofeo supersaloon, and this Quattroporte Trofeo pursuit…

“If you want to go for a bespoke seatbelt colour, it’s about £50,000,” says Simon Lane, Aston Martin’s director of Q and special projects. “We’re asked about it all the time, but a new seatbelt colour has to be fully homologated, including crash testing.” Wondering how car companies justify the seemingly extortionate prices of one-offs? Well, here you go. “We had a request recently from a Middle Eastern customer for a full vegan interior, which means the adhesives as well as the materials, and as soon as you do that you’re into airbag deployment tests and so on. It starts to get very expensive. By the time we’d costed this out for his DBS it was seven figures.” The customer declined, but Aston is now looking into the feasibility. Q…

“ THE BEST SOUNDING THING HERE? YEP. HARD TO PUT A PRICE ON THAT” A halfway house between the seriously limited numbers stuff – like Vulcan and Victor and the bespoke colour, trim and badges Q commissions – the V600, on first acquaintance, is some way from justifying its astronomical price. Sure, only seven coupes and seven roadsters were ever built, but £1.2m a pop, seriously? Intended as a fitting swansong to the last-gen Vantage, it pays tribute to the monstrous twin-supercharged 600bhp Vantage from the Nineties… hence the old-school spec sheet that includes a nat-asp 5.9-litre 592bhp V12, and Aston’s dog-leg 7spd manual box. Yes, it has pumped up bodywork and a hole-punched bonnet like Bond’s DB10, but essentially this is a manual and de-winged version of the mighty…

Electric retro revivals are all the rage right now, but once all of the main candidates have been raised from the scrapheap, what next? Well, carmakers could do worse than look to some of their erstwhile concepts of the future. Take Fiat’s 126 Vettura Urbana, for example, penned in 1976 for the Italian firm by venerable designer Giovanni Michelotti of 1961 Alpine A110 fame. He probably didn’t put this one at the top of the old CV, mind. The Vettura Urbana is a design study for the future of urban transport, the concept car equivalent of a slice of buttered bread. The name even translates from Italian as ‘city car’, and like everything else sounds much better in Italian. Based on the Fiat 126, the concept kept the donor car’s…

I RECOGNISE THAT BIG OLD BENZ… So you should. The 450 SEL 6.9 made a brief but memorable appearance in Ronin, mandatory viewing for any TG reader. It was the car to which French director Claude Lelouche strapped a 35mm camera and drove at high speed through Paris early one Sunday to create C’était un rendez-vous. James Hunt had one. It is without doubt one of the coolest Mercedes ever built. And what better excuse to have a go than the launch of a new S-Class? GIVE US SOME HISTORY The W116 wasn’t Merc’s first flagship saloon, but it was the first to officially adopt the S-Class name (short for Sonderklasse, or ‘special class’). It launched in 1972, right before the ’73 oil crisis. Undeterred, the 6.9 arrived a couple…

REPORT 4 £34,630/£36,605/£347 WHY IT’S HERE It’s a family crossover and an EV, what could be hotter right now? DRIVER Jason Barlow I WONDER HOW MUCH LONGER the incentives will last. Fuel duty currently generates £28bn a year, so the stakes are high. The gov’t grant has already been reduced and soon it’ll go altogether. For now, though, the feeling that you’re pulling a fast one on some starch-collared government mandarin is one of the biggest buzzes about driving an EV. The e-2008 continues to blend seamlessly into family life. It handles perfectly acceptably despite its relative porkiness, but having established that fact you’d be disinclined from verifying it a second time. There’s just no point. An EV reverses the normal rules, and the name of the game is hypermiling…

REPORT 2 PORSCHE TAYCAN 4S A moped/Porsche interface, barely 50m from my house. Rider joining the road between two parked cars, neither of us had a hope of avoiding the other. Everyone fine, thankfully, but the Taycan’s gone back to Porsche GB to assess the damage. I can’t think of anything naffer than EVs pumping out fake engine noises but it’s worth considering until our ears adjust to the electric era. JR REPORT 4 KIA SOUL EV We escaped to Cornwall, a journey I know ridiculously well. I figured the Kia would be able to do the 225-mile trip without a top-up in spring weather, but it snowed all the way from London to Salisbury Plain. Snow sticking to the front stopped the cruise radar from working. But I kicked…

REPORT 6 £54,645 OTR/£62,995 as tested/£769pcm WHY IT’S HERE Is the new 4-Series good enough that we forgive its cursed face? DRIVER Ollie Kew RIGHT. M440I vs M4. IT’S A VERY SIMPLE QUESTION: WHICH DO I prefer on first impression? 00:05 Flipping heck this M4 is an eyeful. I know the relative specs are Darth Vader vs Billie Eilish but the M4’s nostrils are more flared, the haunches wider and sharply creased, XXL exhausts and the wheels are so deeply dished I reckon they’re bolted directly to the differential. 00:18 Ouch. Just sat down inside the M4 and it appears to have kneed me in the unmentionables. Turns out the bucket seats feature a pointless carbon fibre codpiece slap-bang in the middle of the squab. Good job I’ve been skipping…

McLaren P1 The company’s first proper hypercar since the F1. A plug-in hybrid with Formula One-style KERS and DRS that can run for a few miles at a time on e-power alone. One of the legendary ‘holy trinity’ of hypercars together with the Ferrari LaFerrari and Porsche 918 Spyder. McLaren 675LT When ‘new’ McLaren really clicked. The lighter, faster reworking of the 650S (itself an evolution of the 12C) is without doubt one of the all-time supercar greats. A proper alternative to a Ferrari 458 Speciale that will be remembered fondly for years to come. McLaren 720S The 650’s replacement. Not only hugely fast, but genuinely usable day-to-day. One of the most complete, accomplished supercars money can buy. And relative to its performance, actually a bit of a bargain at…