Innholdsfortegnelse for Dec-22 i BBC Top Gear Magazine

The new BMW M2 ticks off quite a few of M Division’s traditional performance car boxes. There’s a straight-six engine up front. There’s the option of a manual gearbox in the middle. And it’s rear-wheel drive. And perhaps in the biggest box-filling exercise yet, it appears to have sprinted off with the idea of a boxy silhouette first employed by the E30 M3; arguably the spiritual successor to this second-gen M2. So a warm welcome to the car you’ve probably already formed an opinion about. On that, BMW calls it a “powerful design that conveys its segment leading power”. Well, at least the grilles are in proportion. Indeed, it’s 90bhp more powerful than the very first iteration of one of the great performance BMWs of modern times, with a massive…

Dakar Desert Rally The real Dakar Rally offers up everything you’d want for a licensed rally game: hundreds of miles of stages, a huge mix of vehicles and big cartwheeling accidents. Somehow Dakar 18 managed to make all that boring, so in follow-up game Dakar Desert Rally there are comically massive thunderstorms, more wheel to wheel racing and an ‘arcade’ navigation system that doesn’t require you to bring your own sextant. It’s an improvement on the previous title, but for a game about mastering a variety of terrain, there’s little sense of connection to the surface. What’s more, when you’re flat out the physics model occasionally throws its hands in the air and gives up, leaving you fishtailing like a drunkard. Who knew deserts had so many things to crash…

If you stick around for a long time, people get fed up with you. But hang in there and eventually they begin to love you again. I give you Paul McCartney’s headlining at Glastonbury and Abba’s sold out avatar gigs, or the remarkable rehabilitation of ELO. All have lived through eras of tragic uncoolness. But now people love to see them retread the old stuff. Cars, if they stay in production long enough, can follow that U-shaped curve of affection. By the time it was 20 years old in the late Seventies, the original Mini was widely derided. It had to face up against the first wave of superminis, the Fiat 127 and MkI editions of the Renault 5 and Polo and Fiesta. In that role it was a disaster,…

£54,805 FOR They’ve kept all the good stuff, still great fun to drive AGAINST When did a 3-Series get so expensive? It’d be a sad day if BMW screwed up the 3-Series. Delightfully, that day is still yet to come. This mid-life refresh for the G20-gen car drips in lots more digitalisation and touchscreen reliance but without messing the whole thing up. A chat with the 3-Series dynamics team reveals a moment of wonderful frankness. They realised the car was already leading its class for handling and left well alone. It takes a brave engineer to admit their meddling on a project would be wholly unnecessary. And so this car drives as brilliantly as it always did. The steering is about as good as a mainstream electrically powered system can…

Me wandering around Koenigsegg HQ in Angelholm is how Augustus Gloop must have felt waddling into that chocolate factory. It’s diffcult to process that such a cave of wonders really exists, or whether my plane came down somewhere over the North Sea and I am, in fact, strolling around my own personal heaven. Smiley Swedish people whistle and wave as they hand polish the most exquisite carbon components, abuse a V8 on the dyno, or stitch the Koenigsegg crest into a slab of thick, expensive looking leather. Regeras to the left of me, Jeskos to the right, here I am stuck in the middle of a hypercar fever dream trying to remain vaguely professional. Here comes Willy Wonka, a hard hat balanced on his dome, high-vis vest hung around his…

There can hardly be a more suitable drive for a Rolls-Royce than electric motors. CS Rolls himself said it in 1900: “The electric car is perfectly noiseless and clean. There is no smell or vibration.” Although, presciently, he did add that he had infrastructure concerns. After 120 years of trying, no petrol Rolls-Royce has a powertrain as smooth or silent or responsive as that of a 2011 Nissan Leaf. Or perhaps more relevant, a 2015 Tesla Model X – a powerful, heavy car that goes a long way and charges fast. But this is changing: in a year’s time, this rather fabulous all-electric Spectre will land with its first customers. So TopGear asks Rolls-Royce boss Torsten Müller-Ötvös the obvious question: what kept you? His reply is emphatic. “The customers always…

Most concept cars you can take one short look at and easily understand why the hulking monstrosity never managed the leap into production. Others – like the Audi Quattro Spyder for instance – will leave you scratching your head as to why there aren’t millions on the road. It was unveiled at the 1991 Frankfurt Motor Show – right in the middle of Audi’s push to move into the posher but more mainstream territory occupied by Merc and BMW, but before the mid-Nineties renaissance that saw the company’s modern period begin with the TT concept by Freeman Thomas in 1995. It would’ve been a delightful early Nineties sports car curio, taking the best of Ingolstadt’s design cues of the time (look at those rear lights, a delightful progression of the…

REMEMBERING THE CLASSICS ARCADE/DREAMCAST, 1999 For a certain generation of gamers, the opening strains of ‘All I Want’ by punk band The Offspring are inextricably linked to the image of a bright yellow taxi launching clear over a San Francisco-style trolley car. Sega’s open world arcade racing game was a chaotic, colourful breath of fresh air when it arrived in the late Nineties, binning off closed circuits for an entire 3D city full of traffic. Your task was simple: screech to a halt in front of a potential passenger and then deliver them to their destination as quickly and stylishly as possible. In a neat and probably highly profitable piece of early gaming product placement, many of those destinations were real-life stores and eateries, including Levi Jeans, Tower Records and…

What’s Jeep and when did it start making cars? Jeep is a strange company in that its product existed long before the company did – in June 1940 the US government put out a request for bids from 135 different carmakers to come up with a lightweight 4WD reconaissance vehicle. The Bantam Car Company came up with a feasible proposal, but the army didn’t think it would be able to cope with mass production. And so Ford and Willys-Overland were handed the blueprints and Willys asked to come up with a better engine. And so the Willys MB and Ford GPW became WW2 icons, running as recon vehicles, ambulances, fire engines and even being fitted with train wheels. Willys tried to trademark the Jeep brand name in 1943, but was slapped…

CITY CARS These small cars are perfect for urban life, but the trade-off is a much lower range 1. HONDA e PRICE: £34,420–£37,520 RANGE: Up to 136 miles This TG favourite has retro styling and a brilliant interior, but it’s a smidge expensive and the range isn’t great. Somehow we can’t help but love it… 2. FIAT 500 PRICE: £23,835–33,835 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. 3. V W e-UP PRICE: From £24,085 RANGE: 159 miles It’s always been one of the finest city cars out there, but you’ve got to be sure you could cope with all of the Yorkshire-accented jokes…

It’s that time of year when the clock on your dashboard’s an hour out of whack, which must mean a new series of TopGear is here! Yes, Chris, Freddie and Paddy are back for their seventh series, which means they’ve offcially outlasted The Sopranos, and they’re closing in fast on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Big league stuff. In this jam-packed, marmalade upholstered new series, you’ll find French waxworks, Italian taxi ranks, Thai pickups, German sausages, Croatian hypercars and, of course, a triple-helping of premium British beef. Here’s what’s on the menu… SCHNELL, SCHNELLER, AM SCHNELLSTEN! When we talk about supercars, it’s always about the big numbers. Horsepower, top speed, price. And don’t get us wrong, while we’re all about those numbers being as big as possible – well, the first…

01 Ford Excursion 6.8 V10 The Ford Excursion is classed in its American homeland as a ‘full-sized SUV’ and everywhere else as ‘a small planet’. The maddest engine was the optional 6.8-litre V10, which developed 310bhp. So, less power than a VW Golf R, from an engine over three times the size. 02 Dodge Ram 8.3 SRT-10 Ford is not the only carmaker to have seen a V10 lying about near a large truck and thought “hmm, those two should get together”. From 2004 to 2006, Dodge would sell you a Ram pick-up with the 8.3-litre V10 from a Viper under the bonnet. One of the most American objects to have ever existed. 03 VW Touareg W12 The Europeans are by no means above slotting preposterous engines into normcore cars. The looniest Toerag…

RENAULT MEGANE E-TECH TECHNO £35,995 / £39,445 VOLKSWAGEN ID.3 LIFE PRO PERFORMANE £36,990 / £39,910 MG 4 SE LONG RANGE £25,995 / £28,495 The very existence of this test is another sign electric cars are at maturity. Until now, it wasn’t really possible to assemble a three-car electric comparison among what you might call heartland hatchbacks. Not in the old Focus vs Golf vs 308 fashion. There just weren’t enough EV hatches around, so you’d end up with one in the group that was too big or small, or had a mismatch in battery size or power. But today, we’ve got three cars all very close in size and spec and absolutely matched in purpose. Except for one thing. Price. The MG is £11k less than the other two. Lease…

£278,893 FOR Engine, handling, looks, performance AGAINST Expensive, good luck getting one Then is an open top Ferrari a GTS and when is it a Spider? Back in the day, a GTS was effectively a ‘targa’, ie it had a removable panel rather than a fully folding roof, as debuted on 1977’s 308 GTS (remember the opening credits of US telly classic Magnum PI?). On the Nineties F355, you could have a GTB, a GTS or a Spider. Since 2011’s 458 Italia Spider, open Ferraris have had a retractable aluminium roof, ingeniously packaged conduits for high-speed hedonism without structural integrity wobbles. That’s the deal with the 296 GTS, the first road-going Ferrari, erm, Spider to use a six-cylinder engine. If you discount the Dino GTS, which was never badged as…

£42,495 FOR Handles with uncommon keenness for its class AGAINST The powertrain could be better calibrated Welcome to a different kind of Alfa Romeo. One that puts rationality a little further up its priority list with a surprisingly logical interior and bags of room. It’s at risk of Buckaroo-ing under the weight of all its styling influences – see the ghost of the Alfa SZ in its front lights, or the window line of the 8C supercar in its glasshouse? Yet it carries them off well, not least because more than half of its colour palette is blues, reds and greens rather than a swathe of grey. The UK range is all hybrid and the car kicks off Alfa’s planned electric onslaught. A 271bhp plug-in version is set to arrive…

The supporting press info for the new 992 generation GT3 RS contains many memorable words and statistics. It is possibly the most extreme road car the company has ever made, including all the expensive supercars, but there is one piece of information that is quietly glossed over. To become the fastest track-oriented 911 of all time, this car had to become the slowest modern GT3. A ‘normal’ GT3 will hit 198mph, but the RS stops at 184mph, because it has so much drag and a shorter final drive. I can’t think of another car whose speed is so obviously curtailed by a rear wing. A Honda Civic Type R isn’t much slower. Silverstone was the launch venue for this outrageous looking machine. The thinking was clear – few other circuits…

LET ME TAKE YOU BACK. June 21, 2022. The longest day of the year. Sunnier, more illuminated times. And you join me at the stunning curve of Kylesku Bridge in northwest Scotland. It’s very early, grey and lightly blustery, with dampness drifting through the air. The smells are heathery and fresh, the sounds are seabirds. I deliberately parked last night so I’d wake up with a view over the mighty sea lochs and when I did it was utterly captivating. To lift a blind and see such majesty doesn’t half make you question your priorities in life. There’s no one else here. I wasn’t aware of a car passing in the night, and none will pass for another half an hour while I walk around nursing a hot cup of…

“IF YOU WANT TO DIMINISH A MAN’S PRIDE, PUTTING A GT3 ON A LOW-LOADER IS RIGHT UP THERE” Rule one of Silly Car Club isn’t that you don’t talk about Silly Car Club; I’ve got a page to fill in TG after all. Instead, it’s that you own at least one ‘sensible’ car to keep you mobile when everything else inevitably breaks. And this instalment of Ricci’s Garage is brought to you by the letters AA and RAC. For BBC impartiality reasons, there are many other good breakdown services out there – all of which I look forward to experiencing in the not too distant future when something is actually working again. Now I know this is a very First World problem; there’s an energy crisis going on, mortgage rates…

Jeep certainly isn’t the car company to come to if you’re after a low-cost bargain – with its range consisting exclusively of SUVs and a brand that focuses heavily on its off-roading prowess, you know these things aren’t going to come cheap. The Renegade is your entry into Jeep life, with the Upland spec and its 1.5-litre mild hybrid petrol setting you back £31,640. You get LED lights front and rear and gloss black 17in alloy wheels. Fancy. If you want to go straight to the top of the Jeep price chart then the new PHEV Grand Cherokee is the car to go for, starting from £82,900 in top spec Summit Reserve trim. That model gets you a 19-speaker music system, swanky leather interior, 21in wheels and even a 10in…

One of the things we particularly like about Jeep is its healthy awareness of its own heritage, and its willingness to create some truly insane concept cars. Both of these ideas come together each year at the Jeep Easter Safari in Moab, Utah. Our unequivocal favourite concept is the Wagoneer Roadtrip from 2018. Essentially a heavily worked over 1965 Wagoneer with modern underpinnings, it had a fully working extended Wrangler chassis with a 5.7-litre V8 borrowed from a Dodge Ram pickup. We sent Tom Ford to Moab to drive the concept, and despite his obvious enthusiasm it still isn’t in production. What gives, Jeep? What was Jeep’s best moment? Between 1912 and 1918, Willys (the precursor company to Jeep) was the second largest carmaker in the US after Ford. No mean…

As boardroom-wall-motivational-poster slogans go, FOTC will admit this doesn’t have quite the go-get-’em-tiger zing, of, say, “if you can dream it, you can do it”, or “life begins at the end of your comfort zone”. But sometimes a bit of self-doubt, no bad thing. Take, for example, the case of the C6W, the six-wheeled supercar from Italian firm Covini Engineering. Because, yes, a car with an extra axle up front has its hypothetical merits: more grip, more braking force, less chance of a massive tank-slapper in the event of a front tyre blowout, 50 per cent more sick rimz to show off to your mates in the Halfords car park. But before spending many years, and presumably many millions, developing it, perhaps Covini should’ve considered… Ferrari? And Lamborghini? Porsche? Pagani?…

You might expect a watch column within the pages of a car magazine to try to lure you in by saying how a mechanical watch is a piece of finely tuned machinery that is basically like wearing a sports car on your wrist. But there is no need this month, as the watches are making the point themselves with their very own go-faster stripes. Presumably this is another attempt to bring some glamour to watches by associating them with cars – watches, after all, just tick away quietly and don’t do a great deal. If you tried to make a TG-style show about watches, without any burnt rubber or whitened knuckles, it would just be people sitting around talking about wristwear. It might appeal to a certain audience, but the…

POLESTAR 3 1 IT HAS M3 LEVELS OF POWER Yep, option the Performance Pack and you get 510bhp. That’s nicely up from the standard car’s 482bhp. Both versions feature a dual-motor set-up for AWD and rear-biased performance, meaning 0–62mph takes 4.7secs in the PP car (range of 360 miles), or 5.0secs in the regular car (380-mile range). 2 IT LOOKS… GOOD Polestar prides itself on its Scandinavian design, and the Polestar 3 features signatures that incorporate new-found technological muscle like the ‘dual-blade’ headlights and a so-called ‘SmartZone’ area below the front aero wing, which is packed with forward-facing sensors. 3 IT’LL BE A FAMILY FRIENDLY SUV We’re assured that despite super saloon performance, there’s still space for five, a 32-litre frunk, 484 litres in the back with the rear seats…

£130,000 (est) FOR Supremely refined, has a high-tech interior AGAINST Heavy, numb driving dynamics, expensive The EQS SUV is the first full-size off-roader based on Merc’s pure electric ‘EVA2’ architecture. It’s a vast, 5.1m long seven-seater and weighs almost 2.8 tonnes. The UK is in line for two models: the 450 4Matic, which averages 2.5–3.1mpkWh for a claimed range of 378 miles, and has the equivalent of 355bhp and 590lb ft of torque, and the 580 4Matic whose 536bhp output and 632lb ft sees overall effciency drop just a fraction. On our test, we saw closer to 2.5. The 4Matic cars are all-wheel drive and dual motor; these are permanently excited synchronous ones, and the batteries and software are developed by Mercedes in-house. The battery’s total useable capacity is a…

£n/a FOR Plenty quick enough, practical and posh interior AGAINST Infotainment system is messy and confusing Right, let’s clear up that name before we go any further. This is the Smart #1. And yes, you do have to say “Hashtag One” in full like someone who has just discovered ‘The Internet’. It’s not “Number One” and neither is it just “One”. This is the first new car that Smart has launched in its current form, with the company reborn in 2020 as a 50/50 joint venture between Mercedes and the ever expanding Chinese firm Geely. Size-wise it’s similar to a Mini Countryman, but underneath it’s based on one of Geely’s pre-existing, dedicated EV platforms. There will be two trim levels, called Pro+ and Premium. Both get a 264bhp motor that…

CATERHAM SUPER SEVEN 2000 £39,990 FOR Classic Caterham looks with modern Caterham ability AGAINST Huge price tag for such a teeny thing After a short hiatus, Caterham has reintroduced a heritage range in the form of the Super Seven 600 and 2000. This is the latter, which uses a 2.0-litre engine and shares most of its underpinnings with the Seven 360. With flared front wings and Smiths gauges, the retro look is certainly successful. It’s hard to be disappointed with any Caterham driving experience, although this one is slightly too soft and torquey for our liking. Pricey too. GP PEUGEOT e-2008 ALLURE PREMIUM £35,300 FOR Quite stylish, handles decently, easy to use AGAINST Performance slightly dull, not as roomy as you’d think Peugeot has jiggled the trims and released a bit…

Over to one side, a mascot clad head to toe in primary coloured nylon staggers into a barrier and dislodges their own oversized head, obviously overcome by 40°C heat and humidity that makes the air breathe like warm cotton wool. Mechanics clad in various team-based and sponsor uniforms stride about doing Important Car Things, while a portly man follows them around pushing a plush three-foot-high doll in a pram. Grown women dressed in weirdly abbreviated school gym outfits totter around on ankle-crippling five-inch heels as GT cars spit and fuss at idle, and overhead, a platoon of military types rappel from a hovering helicopter just over the start/finish straight. Just as we pass, a man with a T-shirt cannon accidentally shoots a spectator in the face with a balled-up garment,…

THESE TWO LOOK LIKE LITTLE BUNDLES OF FUN Who doesn’t love a Mini? You surely know the story by now – in the late Fifties, the Suez oil crisis had sent fuel prices soaring, so Leonard Lord, boss of the British Motor Corporation, challenged an engineer by the name of Alec Issigonis to design something small, efficient and affordable. Issigonis pushed all four wheels to the far corners and fitted a space-saving transversely mounted engine, and over the next 41 years an incredible 5,387,862 were produced, making the Mini a true British motoring success story. WHERE DO THESE ONES FIT IN THE FAMILY TREE? To the right we have #306 of the final 500 ‘original’ Minis to roll off the production line, complete with John Cooper-signed certificate and a unique…

REPORT 6 SKODA FABIA Disaster! Something went wrong in the Skoda Fabia recently. And by ‘disaster’, we mean, ‘the phone didn’t connect properly when we plugged in the USB’. Dark times indeed. Until this hour of sorrow, the Fabia had been unrelentingly dependable. Having hooked up a rather cracked and shabby old iPhone in an attempt to fire up CarPlay, it just refused to work. It required a journey into the forests of the unknown. And by ‘forests of the unknown’, we of course mean ‘the manual’. But like all morally sound quests, we succeeded. CarPlay… worked. VP REPORT 5 AUDI Q4 E-TRON Never has the bandwidth of new cars been wider. Porsche’s latest RSes represent the pinnacle of enthusiast cars in the combustion engine’s twilight era, every part of…

Jeep has never really gone in for racing, for some reason, so there are no ancient F1 efforts we can dig out of the archives that did 300mph. The previous generation of Grand Cherokee did come with an absolutely bonkers Trackhawk version, mind. That car, produced between 2018 and 2021, came with a 6.2-litre supercharged hemi V8 (from the Dodge Challenge Hellcat) rammed into the engine bay that produced a ridiculous 707bhp and 645lb ft torque. The 0–62mph run was mercilessly dispatched in 3.7 seconds on the way to a physics bending 180mph top speed. The Trackhawk actually went on sale in the UK in 2018 with an extremely limited release of 20 cars costing £89,999 each, but given the new version of the car comes in regulation-friendly PHEV guise…

Jeep Wrangler YJ / 1986–1995 If you weren’t what would be described as a hardcore Jeep enthusiast, then you could be forgiven for thinking that the Wrangler has just always been around. In fact, the doughty offroader was a mere twinkle in Jeep’s eye until it was introduced in 1986 as a replacement for the CJ model that was on sale for over 40 years and was directly linked to the iconic WW2 car. The Wrangler was a big upgrade on the original Civilian Jeep when it came out in 1986. Well, we say a big upgrade – it had square headlights. It still came with a ladder chassis, live rigid axles on leaf springs and canvas doors, but it was definitely more comfortable and easier to drive on normal…