Innholdsfortegnelse for January 2022 i BBC Top Gear Magazine

@jack_rix editor@bbctopgearmagazine.com There is a spectacular phenomenon that happens but twice a year in TopGear land – once on day one of Speed Week in late summer, and again during our Awards shoot in the run-up to Christmas. For the purposes of this column I shall call it spreadsheet vs reality (SVR), and it goes a little something like this. Planning for both these major occasions in the TG calendar starts many months in advance. In a rare fit of organisational brilliance, we set up a shared online spreadsheet and start pulling together a list of potential contenders (Speed Week) or winners (Awards). These lists are long, then hacked back, then the subject of several shouty meetings until we come to an agreement that each car deserves its spot and…

The wand chooses the wizard might make perfect sense in the world of Harry Potter, but could the same thing possibly apply to a watch? Do you choose a watch, or does the watch choose you? Well that’s obviously a daft question, because there are no magical powers at work here – you are a creature of free will and no matter if it’s a watch, a car or a sandwich filling, the choice is yours and yours alone. But hold on a minute. Like it or not, from the moment you walk into a watch shop, or click your way into an online retailer, you are working through a flow chart that lays certain options out for you and doesn’t give you as much say as you might like…

THIS MONTH: RIVIAN R1T KER-CHING That price can get scary. Plus, Rivian charges an extra $10,000 for the Max Pack battery upgrade. That improves range from 314 miles to over 400, but there’ll also be a cheaper, circa 250-mile version at some point. QUICK SMART I love the way the R1T drives on-road. Here’s a fun fact – this is the third fastest EV that I’ve ever tested from 0–60mph. It’ll do the sprint in 3.0 flat, meaning in terms of cars I’ve driven it’s only beaten by the Tesla Model S and the Porsche Taycan Turbo S. Incredible. Rivian may be a start-up, it may have only been formed in 2009 and it may have only previewed its all-electric R1T concept in 2018, but it’s now manufacturing and delivering pickups to customers,…

£45,795 FOR Lovely engine, solid dynamics, easy to use AGAINST No wild child, acts too much like bigger siblings This is a car with a visible and fizzy history. Long bonnet, stubby bootlid, abbreviated cabin, bluff nose, arch extensions on its arch extensions. You don’t have too look hard to see 2002 Turbo, 1-Series M, and M2. So I’m hoping for something taut, sharp, a little bit hod-roddy. What I’m getting is a properly good car, but not that. Instead it feels very much like an M440i xDrive Coupe. But if I had been paying attention to BMW badges rather than BMW history, that’s where I should have set my expectations. This is the M240i xDrive Coupe. It exchanges just one character, a 2 for a 4. Pretty much exactly…

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ENGINE OF THE YEAR The Dynamics and Lightweighting Study. That’s how Singer refers to its latest reimagined Porsche 911. Surely the name tells you what’s been done: weight has been lightened, the dynamics have been, er, studied. Singer developed its own double wishbone front suspension for the DLS to improve front end grip, precision and steering. It put the iconic ducktail spoiler through a regime that sees it serve an actual aerodynamic purpose, now 22mm taller and a few degrees more upright. A ruthless approach to mass and a liberal approach to terrifyingly expensive materials sees a raw DLS tip the scales at a little over 1,000kg. Anyway, given the name and the lengths gone to already, you’d imagine the engine would be the one thing that got a pass.…

FAMILY HATCH OF THE YEAR Little known fact. Renault designers did two versions of the new Megane – the regular hatch and a fancier sporty one, with widened arches and more aggressive bumpers. “The finance department didn’t think much of the sports version,” snorts design chief Laurens van den Acker. Then Renault got a new boss, Luca de Meo, and on his second day, 2 July 2020, he looked at prototypes of both and said: “Just make that one.” He was pointing to the sports variant. The ‘base’ car was shuffed off to oblivion. The one that emerged into the daylight is a cleanly carved block with a bullish stance. Overlaid are details de nos jours: contrast arches and roof, a chrome scythe over the windows, lamp clusters of calligraphic…

FAMILY CAR OF THE YEAR Every so often, remember you’re living in the wild sci-fi future. Your personal telephone can summon a pizza, a car, or a date. Your wristwatch maps your pulse, the telly can forecast weather and every time you connect your phone to a modern car, it downloads your dreams, wants and fears. Welcome to a universe in which a Ford Mustang XXL and a Czech minivan are rivals. Odd, isn’t it? This is where the brave new world of electric motoring leads. Ford has reasoned the only way it can make a battery powered £40k+ SUV palatable is to dress it in pony car pastiche. Skoda doesn’t do retro. It thrives on common sense. So it’s used the foundations of the Volkswagen ID.4 to build a…

FAIL OF THE YEAR COMPUTER CHIP SHORTAGES What a year – Brexit, the pandemic, a crashed cargo ship, no lorry drivers, bad weather and more have all conspired to cripple the global car industry just when it didn’t need the hassle. Of course, some of it is misfortune, but the ongoing production problems have highlighted the fragility of the supply chain. And just how unimportant the auto industry is to modern life. We’re used to going to restaurants where there’s chips with everything, but now more everyday products than ever need silicon assistance. While carmakers were cutting back during the pandemic, consumer appliance manufacturers were ramping up to meet increased demand, and post-COVID the car companies have found themselves at the back of the queue. UK car industry body SMMT…

CROSSOVER OF THE YEAR The term ‘crossover’ seems terribly vague these days, a lazy catch-all for anything that doesn’t seem to fit neatly into the strata of traditional naming strategies. And yet, when you consider something like the Kia EV6, it works. Because this is a car that will happily sit between several modes of operation, and also help Kia as a brand make the transition from also-ran to leader. Let us explain. Kia’s problem has been one of worthiness. Well built, effcient, affordable, Kias in the European market have been very sensible cars to date. But no one desires sensible. Sensible is boring. With the EV6, the brand has gone all-in; wholly electric, wild styling, class-leading charging, gadgets galore. Yes, it might be based on largely the same platform…

“THESE CARS ARE OFTEN BEST ENJOYED VICARIOUSLY THROUGH SOMEONE ELSE” In the past 12 months I have treated car buying like an extreme version of Pokémon Go, and while this isn’t exactly normal it has been good material for here. Yet, what I find most entertaining is the fact that people only question your sanity when you start selling them off. Not when you send a stranger thousands of euro for an armoured BMW in Bulgaria. Or buy a pair of kei cars off Facebook Marketplace unseen and unregistered. Then, there was the barn find Brabus W126 (non-runner) quickly followed by an identical Brabus W126 in Belgium (runner). Picked up by a friend in Germany because travel wasn’t permitted at the time. In the land of social media this behaviour…

FORD PUMA (WON IN 1997) Price now £4,299 Harris says Full disclosure: you’ll have to try hard to pay this much for a stock Puma. Most of them loiter around a grand, but they’re also riddled with rust. Choose between bargain throwaway fun or a pricier minor classic. NISSAN 350Z (WON IN 2004) Price now £8,995 Harris says The 350Z launched almost in tandem with the Mazda RX-8, which is a nightmare to own and thus worth buttons. The Nissan’s aged better, and doesn’t it look good without a bunch of tasteless mods festooned upon it? JAGUAR XK (WON IN 2006) Price now £12,995 Harris says Another mid-Noughties coupe that’s aged an absolute treat. It looks so relaxed beside the pent-up F-Type which superseded it. Base XKs are abundant below £15k,…

GO TO TOPGEAR.COM FOR EXTENDED TG GARAGE REPORTS, AND TO EXPLORE THE ARCHIVE REPORT 6 £24,455 OTR/£25,085 as tested/£273pcm WHY IT’S HERE The old Mokka was appalling, can the new version impress us more? DRIVER  Esther Neve SO FAR THE MOKKA HAS IMPRESSED WITH ITS AGILITY AROUND TOWN and its refined motorway manners. The time had come for a journey of some considerable length on A- and B-roads to see if it induces numbbumitis or any other car-related conditions of discomfort. Thus it was that the Vauxhall was stuffed full of bags and coats and boots and made ready for a nigh-on 500-mile excursion. Initially, there was concern about the bobbliness of the ride, but that was soon dispelled once we realised that, in fact, the road surface was to…

REPORT 7 £158,000 OTR/£185,500 as tested/£1,899pcm WHY IT’S HERE It’s the car to save Aston Martin – is it good enough? DRIVER Adam Waddell WHEN THE DBX WAS FIRST UNVEILED, IT WAS HERALDED AS “THE CAR to save Aston Martin”. Production started in July 2020 and a little over a year later, we have the sales figures for the first nine months of 2021. Although the company is not yet in profit, between January and September Aston reported 4,250 total sales, 51 per cent of which were attributed to the DBX. Based on that statistic alone, one would have to say that the DBX has been a success, although I’ve only seen a couple on the road here in the UK. The V12 and much-needed plug-in hybrid versions that have been…

REPORT 3 £26,605 OTR/£27,200 as tested/£321pcm WHY IT’S HERE Is this the comfiest family car you can buy? DRIVER Sam Philip EVEN AFTER A COUPLE OF MONTHS BEHIND THE WHEEL, I WAS struggling to get a handle on the exact size of the new C4. Not that I’d been scraping the wing mirrors against width restrictors and reversing into bollards. But the C4’s – how to put this? – unorthodox visuals do make it tricky to neatly pigeonhole, dimension-wise. Time to crank out the trusty TG tape measure, and see how the Citroen squares up to its nearest rivals. First up, the new Vauxhall Mokka. Both sit on the same PSA platform, but the C4 clocks in considerably larger, boasting an extra 18cm in the wheelbase and 21cm of overall length,…

REPORT 2 £110,325/£110,325/£1,841 WHY IT’S HERE It’s the world’s default super limo but is it too clever for it’s own good? DRIVER Jason Barlow I RECENTLY DOWNLOADED THE Mercedes Me app. Well, first I had to update my iPhone and migrate a lot of the rubbish clogging up my phone – including a load of novelty apps like the one that mimics a Moog synthesizer – to the cloud, but after that, I downloaded the Mercedes Me app so I could have a more emotionally enriching relationship with the S-Class in my care. Product expert David Axford (dispatched to help me sort out the tech) tells me this means I can now use my phone to park the S-Class remotely (haven’t tried it yet, need a few brave pills for that…

HELLO £40,025/£48,450/£390 WHY IT’S HERE Can the fastest, priciest Golf finally make us fall for the MkVIII? DRIVER  Ollie Kew MIGHT THIS BE THE LAST GOLF WE ever run in the TopGear Garage? By the time the MkVIII is replaced by a ninth Golf, it will surely have ceded VW hatchback rights to the ID.3 and been retired to a petting zoo for well-liked middle-of-the-road hatchbacks. So, might as well go out with a bang. Welcome to the most powerful, fastest, and most expensive road-going Golf ever: the £40,000 R. Mechanically the interesting bit is the Drift mode, or rather, the torque-vectoring rear differential fitted to the MkVIII that – thanks to a new line of code courtesy of the £2k Performance Pack – allows lots more of the 316bhp…

01 Skoda 110 R Coupe From behind the Iron Curtain in the Seventies, Skoda developed this glorious rear-engined, rear-wheel-drive coupe that would go on to spawn a number of rally and race car derivatives. Style and substance. 02 Skoda Octavia WRC Loosely based on the first ever Octavia vRS and debuted at the 1999 Monte Carlo Rally, the Octavia WRC was far from Skoda’s most successful rally car. But just look at it. It’s an infinitely cool thing. 03 Skoda Fabia vRS (2003) The MkI Fabia vRS was the world’s first diesel-only hot hatch, equipped with a 1.9-litre turbodiesel that made 128bhp. That may not sound like much, but you also got 229lb ft of torque from 1,900rpm. Proper grunt. 04 Skoda 1100 OHC Spider Isn’t that just one of the prettiest two-seater sports…

Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos… John Hennessey? Could America’s favourite purveyor of hyper horsepower be about to take the great leap into space? Nah, of course not, just a small step into the outer reaches of his imagination. Meet the Deep Space, an all-electric six-wheel-drive hyper GT with a diamond seating layout. Because as John Hennessey told me, “I wanted to do it before someone else beat me to it.” Er, right John. With 50 per cent more grip it’s a take on how to improve acceleration when four rubber contact patches just won’t do. “I’ve been building some of the world’s fastest accelerating vehicles for decades, yet they have always been performance limited by mechanical grip. Six-wheeled electric propulsion is the solution.” There is more to the Deep Space than…

Retro EV reinventions seem to be the order of the day. But it’s easy for Renault to pop the 5 back into life when the original was so iconic. Hyundai electrifying some old shapes as concepts, on the other hand, is a more curious prospect. A company whose big headline is how vastly improved its products are surely has a harder time revisiting its history. Yet here we are, months after an electric Pony, showing you a converted Grandeur. Those of you who know the moniker will likely know it from flamboyantly depreciating faux-luxe four-doors from the early- to mid-Noughties. Surely next to none of you will remember the original Grandeur – an Eighties saloon that was essentially a Mitsubishi Debonair in costume. And yet Hyundai’s confidently led us into…

Forza Horizon 5 Forza Horizon 5 has arrived on Xbox and PC and, no surprises here, it’s very good. We’ve now reached a quintet of these games and each one has been reliably accomplished, flawlessly slick and effortlessly charming. It’s like the Tom Hanks of racing game series. This new instalment whisks you to colourful Mexico, a setting that hosts the series’ largest game map yet. Even at flat chat in a Koenigsegg Jesko, it’s going to take you a while to visit every corner of this, often literal, sandbox. This is also a game packed with more goodness than an overstuffed burrito, with a now almost sarcastic number of single and multiplayer activities sprayed across the world map and vying for your attention. It’s also worth remembering that, as…

01 Mercedes SLR McLaren 999 Red Gold Dream Emerging in 2009, the 999 Red Gold Dream was the work of a Swiss entrepreneur called Ueli Anliker. Mr Anliker decided what the SLR needed was a Hot Wheels body kit, 600 inset rubies, 5kg of gold leaf and a hole cut in the roof panel. He also rerouted the exhausts to exit just ahead of the rear wheels. 02 Mansory Cormeum The Cormeum, revealed in 2011, is Mansory’s take on the Mercedes SLS AMG. It was, um, gifted a carbon-fibre wide-body kit, an enormous centrally supported rear wing, a sort of SLR/Enzo-ish front beak, and an upgrade from 563bhp to 731bhp. Oh, and headlights from a Ferrari 599. 03 Nimrod Katyusha A Slovakian tuner with a penchant for paying tribute to…

MYTH BUSTER “EVS WILL ALWAYS BE MORE EXPENSIVE” Arguments against electric cars often rely on old information. The CO2 intensity of the grid, the life of the batteries, their manufacturing pollution and difficulty of recycling – all these things are becoming rapidly less problematic, so you have to feed new data into your arguments. Most often, you still hear that “electric cars are expensive”. They were, back when there was nothing available between a Leaf and a Model S. Now they’re not. There’s stacks of choice. They are a few quid more a month on the PCP than ICE cars that match their size and performance. But they cost significantly less to ‘fuel’. Ah, but most people buy secondhand cars, and there are few used electric ones. Right, so the issue…

“UPGRADING TO THE LONGER L2 IS USEFUL IF YOU’RE REGULARLY SEATING SEVEN” £50,000 (est) FOR Easier to drive, more comfortable, more spacious than any overweight SUV AGAINST Awful touchscreen. Would you rather wait for the cooler ID.Buzz? Volkswagen’s van-mit-windows, the ‘car’ formerly known as the Caravelle, is now the Multivan. Which is an odd choice of name, given the main thing you need to know about this van is that it is not, in fact, a van. Instead of sharing a body with the VW Transporter panel van (which continues as is), the new Multivan actually rides on the same MQB platform that underpins the Golf, Tiguan and, erm, VW’s latest Caddy van. Right. By being a car that identifies with van pronouns, VW can offer a wider suite of…

£77,015 FOR Peace of mind, some dynamic gains AGAINST Low speed ride, Touring’s not here till next year How much do you value peace of mind? A sense of security? Because that’s the only real reason to choose this new 4WD version of the M3. It’s the first ever M3 4x4, but really it’s come a generation late. The last-gen F80 M3, that could have really done with this xDrive system. It was brilliant, but a lairy liability at times, always looking for a route out from under your control. All that was corrected for this new G80, which is not short of either traction or precision. Yes, even in the wet. Such is the grip at the front wheels and the cleverness and control of the electronic rear differential,…

I CAN’T THINK OF A WORSE PLACE IN THE WORLD TO DISCOVER HOW A 1,874BHP HYPERCAR REALLY DRIVES THAN MIAMI. Most of Florida in fact is flat, congested and swampy. Smooth, wide, curly bits of tarmac, the type that wriggle their way skywards then tumble down the other side… simply don’t exist around here. And you know what? I’m OK with that, no use in complaining or kicking against facts, I’m here to move with the flow and fully embrace the Miamian way. Nope, not cramming myself into a lycra bodysuit that’s four sizes too small and pounding Big Gulp cocktails (seriously, American tourists are a fascinating species to observe) but getting a little taste of that billionaire lifestyle. Which is why I’ve secured myself a box fresh $7m mansion…

LUXURY CAR OF THE YEAR What’s fascinating (and awkward) about the Mercedes EQS is that it exists to pick up the indulgent barge baton and leg it into the battery powered future, from under the nose of the present incumbent. Mercedes still builds S-Classes. The current – stupendous – seventh iteration has only been on sale for about a year. With the EQS, Mercedes is attempting something most carmakers have failed to pull off in the past five decades: build an enduring rival to literally the S-Class of luxury cars. This takes some time to mull over. About eight hours ought to do it. The rangiest version of the new Benz flagship you can buy in the UK is also the least expensive: the EQS 450+, which only empties the…

PADDY’S CAR OF THE YEAR It’s been a tricky year, hasn’t it? We’ve had the recent fuel shortages, we’ve seen electric cars come to the forefront – everyone wants one now – but my Car of the Year would have to be the V12, gas guzzling, Aston Martin Victor. It costs £4 million, you’ll never see it, you’ll never get behind the wheel of it, but I did, and as I sit here and write this I’m feeling very smug about it. As a visceral driving experience, trust me, it’ll never be topped. I think the thing that stuck with me the most was the sheer uncomfortableness of it all. This car might cost £4 million, but the aircon wasn’t working, there’s no cupholders, everything you’d normally find in a…

PERFORMANCE CAR OF THE YEAR Rain in the desert. It’s something that, by definition, shouldn’t happen. And yet it’s here with a vengeance, a seemingly endless supply of water heaving itself on a tiny blue car in the middle of an enormous red country. There’s more bad news: the storm has closed the only road from where we are to where we want to be. After some swearing that’s every bit as torrential as the rain, we give up and decide to go somewhere else entirely. This forms the basis of Plan B, which is immediately replaced by Plans C, D and E as we discover that every road is closed bar one: the one we arrived on, which will only take us back to where we were this morning.…

In a world where so many things don’t make sense, we love a bit of plain-spoken charm. Take Chevrolet’s CERV III concept car – it stands for Corporate Engineering Research Vehicle Three. It’s a vehicle the company built in order to do a bit of research. The third one, in fact. CERVs I and II were test vehicles from 1960 and 1964 respectively. The first one had an open-topped racecar vibe and was designed to be a pure car from which the engineers could test all sorts of handling traits. The second one was more of a prototype sports racer, all about pushing performance, its meaty V8 taking it to 60mph from zero in less than three seconds and then on to a top speed of 210mph. CERV III was…

HANG ABOUT, YOU’RE TELLING ME THE SPORTIEST CAR KIA’S EVER DONE ISN’T THE LATEST STINGER? Provided you define sportiness as an attitude rather than a statistic, yes. The latest Stinger GT has a turbocharged 3.3-litre V6 for 356bhp and a 0–62mph time of 4.9secs. Not even the new all-electric EV6 hauls that hard. But pleasingly crisp though it is, it’s a GT. The Elan is a lightweight little roadster, so although it makes do with a naturally aspirated 1.8 with a mere 135bhp and a 0–62mph time of 8.8secs, it has the right attitude. I FEEL LIKE I’VE SEEN IT SOMEWHERE BEFORE… That’s because the Elan wasn’t all Kia’s own work. The Korean firm simply purchased the tooling and rights to the Lotus Elan (the M100 version, built between 1989…

REPORT 2 £24,995/£25,545/£311 WHY IT’S HERE  Is TG’s performance car of 2021 as great to live with as it is to drive? DRIVER Stephen Dobie MODES ARE A BIT OF A HYUNDAI N ‘thing’. My i30N possessed 1,944 possible custom configurations of suspension, diff, engine and exhaust settings, which you’d pick ’n’ mix into one steering wheel button press. Much like you can in the i20N, only now there’s a second custom button to configure. It’s easier to choose what I want here, though. But I’m barely touching either N button. The car starts up in Normal, which gives the digital instrument a traditional pair of dials rather than a stocky central rev counter, while leaving every dynamic parameter in its base mode. Because there’s no altering the suspension and…

HELLO £57,030 OTR/£58,180 as tested/£1,503 pcm WHY IT’S HERE Is an electric family SUV charming enough to be a ‘Mustang’? DRIVER Jack Rix UNLESS YOU READ MAGAZINES BACKWARDS, YOU’LL NOW BE AWARE that the Mustang Mach-E is TopGear’s Family Car of the Year 2021. Mustang. Family Car. Doesn’t seem quite right, does it? When the Mach-E was first revealed well over a year ago, I too had a hard time digesting that Ford had slapped a galloping stallion on the front of an electric SUV. But hold your horses because Ford has history in this department. It wasn’t that long ago we were lambasting it for sticking the Puma badge on a new compact crossover. The leap from small coupe to small crossover is clearly less yawning than RWD V8 muscle…

REPORT 3 £40,535 OTR/£42,305 as tested/£644pcm WHY IT’S HERE  To expose “sports crossovers” as the silly idea they are. DRIVER  Paul Horrell I HAD ANOTHER CUPRA ONCE. WHEN CUPRA WAS MORE A TRIM LEVEL than a brand. It was a Seat Ibiza Cupra Bocanegra. Bocanegra being a bit more than a paint package but a bit less than a trim level. It had the VW Group’s 1.4-litre twincharged engine, with a turbo and a supercharger for 180bhp. It also had a 7spd DCT. I didn’t much like that powertrain. The car was the same size and power as the Golf VR6 I’d had back in the mid-Nineties, and the big six in the VW was just as responsive as the little forced-induction four, barely less economical, and sounded far better.…

REPORT 2 £84,870 OTR/£93,646 as tested/£1,010pcm WHY IT’S HERE  Can ‘the only sports car you’ll ever need’ turn its hand to anything? DRIVER Ollie Marriage LET’S TALK ABOUT HERITAGE AND TRADITION BECAUSE THERE’S A LOT of it around the Porsche 911 – 58 years of progress means there’s many historic levers to pull. And the Targa 4S Heritage Design Edition launched earlier this year yanked at most of them, from Fuchs-style wheels to racing decals. But I want to talk about corduroy, which took its inspiration from the original 356 back in the Fifties. I’ve got it in this car as part of the Heritage Design Package. It’s a vastly expensive box to tick (£6,620) so you’d be forgiven for skipping straight past it. The extra tasty bits that come as…

GOODBYE £37,400 OTR/£39,565 as tested/£425pcm WHY IT’S HERE  Is Hyundai’s crossover as ambitious underneath as its looks suggest? DRIVERS  Andy Franklin WIND BACK THE CLOCK 10 YEARS AND REMEMBER WHAT HYUNDAIS were like then, and you’ll realise just how far it has come. Truth be told, we probably wouldn’t have even wanted to run many of its cars then, I know I wouldn’t have done. But here we are at the end of our six months with the Tucson and it will be a shame to see it go, while at the same time Hyundai is picking up our Manufacturer of the Year and our Performance Car of the Year and our Car of the Year. A pretty incredible feat. But how has it done it? The answer is in fact…

What is it? The first-gen Skoda Fabia vRS is a relic of a bygone era. Specifically the early midNoughties, when everyone (wrongly) thought diesel was the future. The vRS is a Fiesta-sized hot hatch not with three doors and a buzzy petrol engine, as was the norm, but five doors and a relatively large 4cyl turbodiesel effectively pinched from a minicab-spec Octavia. Doesn’t sound like the recipe for a runaway success – especially because in 2003 Skoda still hadn’t quite managed to design its way around the ‘cheap and nasty’ reputation that dogged its early years in the UK – but it was an instant hit. Driving Modern four-cylinder diesels are often very quiet and commendably refined. The Fabia’s… isn’t. Its 1.9-litre oil-burner has more than a whiff of Transit…

As a car company, it’s important to give your customers what they’re asking for. Just possibly not everything they’re asking for, all in the one car. See, in the early Noughties, Chevrolet doubtless had many customers requesting a) folding hard-top convertibles, b) pickup trucks, and c) retro hot rods. Problem is, they definitely weren’t requesting all those things atop the same four wheels. This apparent inability to understand the Oxford comma sadly resulted in Chevrolet unleashing the SSR (stood for Super Sport Roadster, was none of these things) on a frankly bemused public in late 2003. Revealed in a pyrotechnic Michael Bay promotional video (but of course), it was the ultimate automotive turducken: a retractable metal roof, sitting on a Fifties-styled ute, sitting on an SUV platform. Blending these disparate…

Recently made the switch to an EV? Struggling to find a regular charging spot or constantly suffering from range anxiety? Brit company ZipCharge has got your back. This is the ZipCharge Go – essentially a portable phone charger scaled up to the max. It’s a lithium-ion battery pack on wheels. Plug it in to a three-pin socket at home when electricity is cheaper (overnight), then wheel it out to your car and plug in. Or whack it in the boot for peace of mind on a long journey. A small bit of peace of mind, that is, because depending on your car you’ll get around 20 miles of range in 30 minutes. Zipcharge. global; £49pm (from 2022)…

1 IT’S TOYOTA’S FIRST EVER FULL EV Yep, the bZ4X is genesis for Toyota EVs. It’s been a pioneer of electrification thanks to several decades of hybrid development, but wanted to bide its time and get the tech bang on for a full BEV. The 71kWh battery should apparently only suffer 10 per cent degradation in 10 years. 2 IT’S BIGGER THAN IT LOOKS Size-wise, you’re looking at something roughly equivalent to the RAV4, only with shorter overhangs and a longer wheelbase for better handling and space. The boot is decent, too, at 452 litres with the seats in place. The looks are also RAV4-esque, only with a whiff of ‘base level Nineties hatchback’ to the rubberised detailing. 3 THE NAME APPARENTLY MEANS ‘BEYOND ZERO’ It would seem that the…

HYUNDAI KONA N £35,395 FORD PUMA ST £29,710 CUPRA FORMENTOR VZ2 £39,830 Performance crossovers start life fully equipped with disadvantages, if you think about it. A centre of gravity migrated vertically means that they’ll always be fighting to keep themselves level – taller bodies require more control, pitch and yaw manifest earlier and more aggressively. Aerodynamics are wounded, economy hurt and they’ll never quite manage to be as much fun as something that hasn’t started out weighed down with compromise. And yet they keep popping up. Audi has the SQ2, VW has the T-Roc R, and there are the three cars we have here. So people like them, even if they don’t make much actual sense. The Hyundai Kona N, for instance, makes no sense with absolute clarity. You’ll think…

£57,400 FOR Drives calmly and has a very zen interior AGAINST This mightily powerful launch version is a touch OTT Volvo making a coupefied crossover was surely inevitable. What’s possibly less inevitable is the fact that the supremely logically named C40 – it’s an XC40 with some of the ruggedness grated off – is purely electric. It helps hammer home the fact half of the Scandi firm’s sales will be EVs by 2025, but Volvo’s surely wilfully sacrificing sales in the meantime by not simply transplanting the XC40’s internal combustion options into its more svelte sibling. Not least because the numbers it launches with are punchy for a compact SUV. Namely a 402bhp peak and a £57k price, punting it firmly into the territory occupied by some big-hitting and already…

FORD FOCUS ST EDITION £35,785 FOR One of the best hot hatch all-rounders gets a trifle more agile AGAINST Unbolting the wheels and jacking the car up to adjust settings Just before the Focus ST is facelifted, the scary faced old version has been treated to geeky suspension. The Edition gets no extra power, but wears 10kg lighter alloys, stickier tyres and it’s all attached to the road with adjustable nerdspension, courtesy of KW Automotive. There are 12 settings for compression and 16 choices for rebound. As a result, it’s a little firmer, but way more accurate and dextrous if you’re really trying hard. OK MERCEDES-BENZ S400d £94,135 FOR 670 miles at 40mpg, stunning body control, gorgeous cabin AGAINST You can’t be seen driving it yourself It often seems £100k…

MANUFACTURER OF THE YEAR We’ve been here before. Three years ago, we named Hyundai our Manufacturer of the Year. This was based on a trio of impressive products, both naughty (the i30N hot hatch) and nice (the hybrid Ioniq and electric Kona). They all remain on sale, joined by an even more diverse and talented cast of characters. The i20N is, in practice, a shrunken i30N with a liberal layer of polish applied. In reality, it’s even more than the sum of its promising parts, a hench little performance car that somehow feels pleasingly basic yet thoroughly engineered. Can’t prise yourself from a crossover? The i20N launched almost in tandem with the Kona N, a thoroughly unique proposition that’s even more of a ‘doing it on their own terms’ quick…

CONCEPT OF THE YEAR CONCEPT CARS ARE SPECULATION GENERATORS. They exist to hint or point, to stir things up, to create a buzz. To make noise. Yes, even the electric ones. Just as well, because boy has the Mission R got a lot to say. But of course it’s not saying anything. We are. The next Cayman, possibly. I wouldn’t be unhappy about that at all. It looks terrific and although we don’t yet know how that car will be powered, we can say that the stylistic devices of this one more closely resemble a Taycan than a 911. An electric Cayman then? Porsche itself says it doesn’t yet know. Pull the other one. Going on a standard industry eight year model cycle means the 982’s replacement will be here…

CHRIS’ CAR OF THE YEAR There’s been two standout cars for me this year – the Porsche 911 GT3 and the Lamborghini Huracán STO. I want to give a special mention to the latter, because it’s such an exciting car to drive, it really surprised me. It’s one of those cars that just makes you feel alive, it’s supremely balanced, and that engine, I mean, wow. But the GT3 just takes it for me. What is it about Porsche with these cars? It’s the essence of the company for me. Porsche is so impressive right now, because it’s smashing it on the EV front, and then there’s also the Cayenne Turbo GT, which although I have no interest in at all, I’m told drives unbelievably well. You’d think those would…

FREDDIE’S CAR OF THE YEAR My favourite car of 2021 is a tough decision. I really enjoyed driving the old Range Rover on the show recently, I loved the Corvette C8 – for the price, you can’t really fault it – but the one car I experienced more emotions in than anything I’ve ever driven before was the Ginetta G55 Supercup. From going for my race licence, to competing in my first endurance race alongside Chris, and being the underdog as well, it was such a surreal experience. I really doubted myself, there were times I was nearly in tears, but honestly, I had so much fun. The thing that really stood out for me was the noise. I’m used to driving road cars on tracks, but this was a…

CAR WE’RE MOST LOOKING FORWARD TO DRIVING IN 2022 What a breath of fresh air the Lotus Emira is. A sports car. And get this: a sports car without an axe to grind. No hybrid or EV. No mega-digit power outputs. No concepty vision-of-the-future nonsense. A sports car for today, then. From a marque where yesterday was a long time ago. And it had often looked like tomorrow might never come. In order to tell you why the Emira has us so excited, I’d like to pull at that thread a little more. You don’t need me to tell you about the Sixties, Colin Chapman and the Elan. You know this brand has a resolute focus on dynamics that has never wavered. Equally, we don’t need to go into the…

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Back in the 16-bit home computer era, there wasn’t a whole lot of pressure for top-down arcade racing games to justify their existence. As long as the track was clearly demarcated and you could successfully identify which handful of pixels was supposed to be your car, you were away. That’s why we appreciated Nitro’s heroic efforts to tell a cautionary Cold War fable about the dissolution of society via the medium of razzing tiny pixelated cars around. Nitro’s races take place on mostly abandoned streets in a bleak future and the three player characters are neat, cyborgised takes on Clint Eastwood, Rambo and Roger Moore-era James Bond. Clearly the copyright lawyers were first up against the wall when the revolution came. Reach the final series of races and it’s evident…

GOODBYE £33,340 OTR/£36,140 as tested/£348pcm WHY IT’S HERE  Does BMW build a better Golf GTI? DRIVER Vijay Pattni DEAR READERS, I HAVE A CONFESSION TO MAKE. AFTER MONTHS OF running TopGear’s long-term 128ti and assessing it through the prism of daily life, the blacked-out nostrils pasted onto its nose offended less and less, to the point where – *shudders* – they became appealing. The 128ti had a sizeable task on its hands, which was to find out whether it was a better Golf GTI than a Golf GTI. It entered in high spirits – earlier test drives had already confirmed its prowess on the sorts of roads the GTI lapped up. This was a front-wheel-drive BMW, eating through Britain’s B-road network with focus and enthusiasm. It is, however, a touch on…

REPORT 4 £74,000/£86,745/£1,260 WHY IT’S HERE  Is BMW’s mighty M3 still the performance saloon benchmark? DRIVER  Rowan Horncastle YOU MAY HAVE SEEN OUR long-term M3 had a seat at the table for this year’s Speed Week. And it may sound odd, but I was thrilled to see my colleagues spank it around track while I sat in the pits – giggling and filming while others destroyed the rear tyres of a car I ultimately had to drive home. Overall, people came back impressed – blown away by how brutally effective it is at getting from one place to another very quickly but also concerned at how hefty it was. There was a remark that was consistently vomited out of a few people’s mouths, though. “Feels different to previous M cars, doesn’t…

GO TO TOPGEAR.COM FOR EXTENDED TG GARAGE REPORTS, AND TO EXPLORE THE ARCHIVE GOODBYE £37,380 OTR/£43,155 as tested/£325pcm WHY IT’S HERE It’s the easiest car in the world to recommend, isn’t it? DRIVER  Ollie Kew I HAVEN’T JUST LIVED WITH THE GTI CLUBSPORT. I’VE LIVED IN IT. This car arrived for a short three-month stint in the TG Garage, sporting 6,632 miles on its digital dashboard. I thought I might add 1,000 to that. But what with the global semiconductor shortage delaying the arrival of other cars we’d have been testing and the world re-opening over summer 2021, the Clubsport has barely stopped. We’ll rattle off the basics first, then dive into the semantics of whether or not this will be a car I’ll remember fondly. So, build quality. Good, but…

GO TO TOPGEAR.COM FOR MORE MIND-BLOWING MANUFACTURER GUIDES The story of Skoda begins on two wheels in a small city in the Czech Republic called Mladá Boleslav. The company’s founders, locksmith Václav Laurin and bookseller Václav Klement, started out making bicycles in the mid-1890s, before moving on to motorcycles in 1899. The pair eventually progressed to manufacturing cars in 1905. The first was a two-seater called the Voiturette A (pictured), which had a two-cylinder engine with 7bhp and a top speed of around 25mph. The price? 3,600 koruna. In today’s money that’s about £30,000. After World War One, Laurin & Klement merged with Czech industrial behemoth Skoda Works to create Skoda Auto and was nationalised in 1948 by the government. Volkswagen took a slice of the firm in 1991, completing its…

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: £26,000–£32,550 RANGE: Up to 145 miles The electric version of the home grown favourite squeezes the BMW i3’s powertrain into a familiar package. Range not massive, but the car’s still fun. 3. FIAT 500e PRICE: £20,495–£27,495 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.…