Innholdsfortegnelse for August 2023 i BBC Top Gear Magazine

@jack_rix editor@bbctopgearmagazine.com Gone are the days when talk of 2,000bhp, a £2m pricetag, neck crippling acceleration and being fully electric were enough to shock and amaze… and sell magazines. Those numbers are all routine for a booming hypercar industry these days, so to successfully spanner a few million from someone’s hand you need to offer something genuinely different. Raw performance claims won’t cut it. I have no doubt that Porsche’s target of a road car Nürburgring record and more downforce than the GT3 RS for its new EV hypercar, the Mission X, will be met… but that’s the bare minimum, surely? It’s given itself roughly four years to develop the car, to find that X factor, because right now what does it offer, besides whiplash, that a 918 Spyder doesn’t?…

Looking like something straight out of a Black Mirror episode or a skiing holiday, Apple recently announced the Vision Pro – its first ever ‘spacial computer’ (buckle up, there’s going to be a lot more of that kind of chat). The Vision Pro is essentially a mixed reality headset, so once it’s on you can see the world around you, although the picture is live and is created using lots of teeny cameras. You can then control apps, watch telly or play games using only your eyes and hand gestures. And yes, you will look absolutely ridiculous to anyone who walks into the room in the real world. apple.com; $3,499…

1 IT’S SMALLER THAN AN XC40 Volvo’s new entry car, the EX30, is a bit smaller than the rather good XC40, and the looks are smoother too, like it’s been crossbred with a pebble. The old ‘paint the roof black’ trick makes it look lower and sleeker, but this isn’t one of those sporty aggressive SUVs – it actually looks quite cute from some angles. 2 IT’S THE GREENEST VOLVO EVER The EX30 might sell on its looks, but for Volvo it’s what’s on the inside. A quarter of the aluminium is recycled, nearly a fifth of the steel too, and the same proportion of repurposed plastic. You can even spec carpets made from reclaimed plastic bottles. With its production under scrutiny, Volvo insists no car can beat the EX30’s…

£150,000 (est) FOR Noble’s welcome return, gearbox, wonderful chassis fluency AGAINST No ABS brakes – will that stop it finding an audience these days? You might dimly remember the Noble M600. Come to think of it, Noble itself is hardly a household name, so let’s start there. It sprung to prominence in the early Noughties, producing mid-engined sports cars with remarkable chassis fluency. Being a British cottage industry marque it then stuttered before coming back a decade ago with a supercar, the aforementioned M600. Again one with a supple chassis, but this time the twin-turbocharged Ford V6 had given way to twin-turbo 4.4-litre Volvo-Yamaha V8 and 350bhp had become 650. It was mighty. The looks were perhaps a touch simplistic, so Noble only ever sold a couple of dozen. Shame.…

£39,995 FOR Looks great, super quiet inside AGAINST Jiggly ride, £10k more than a petrol Astra Astra. There aren’t many more recognisable names in the heartland of British motoring, and there’ll be even fewer when Ford inevitably decides that it’s time up for the Focus. But the retirement home doesn’t beckon just yet for the Astra. It’s now in its eighth generation and going strong. So, instead of creating a whole new model just for the sake of an electric powertrain, Vauxhall has stuck a load of batteries and e-motor into its hatch. Under the floor is a 54kWh battery that can accept 100kW DC rapid charging to top up from 10 to 80 per cent in just 30 minutes. Said battery feeds a motor that drives the front wheels…

MERCEDES-AMG S63 E PERFORMANCE £186,015 FOR Big luxury, bigger power, rounded ability AGAINST Big price, somewhat subtle looks for an AMG flagship Battery power and an e-motor join a 4.0-litre bi-turbo V8 for a combined output of 791bhp and the promise of the best of both worlds. And it does exactly what you hope it might, being a peerless luxury car and surprisingly agile and able when the roads get interesting. Around 20 miles of EV range is useful, as is the extra punch the e-motor adds. A clever if weighty and expensive solution to justify the sacking of your chauffeur. KF GENESIS GV60 FACIAL RECOGNITION £53,905 FOR Difficult to catch out, biometric data isn’t uploaded from the car AGAINST Takes it a few seconds to recognise you Genesis is the…

IT’S 4AM AND ONACO, HE VAMPIRE RINCIPALITY HAT COMES UT TO PLAY T NIGHT, IS EATHLY QUIET. Maybe they all overdid it at the weekend. That was the Grand Prix. This is the aftermath. I weave past lorries, forklifts and workmen, all out here stripping the F1-woz-ere evidence from the scene. Monaco clearly doesn’t want this unsightly spectacle happening during the day, so the teams operate like grave robbers, creeping around in the dark. The DB12 weaves through. I can already tell it has fundamentally moved the game on from the DB11. Amazing what you can learn about damping from a speed bump. The composed compression and slick rebound, the tight control of the body, it bodes well for what comes later. But cars like this spend their lives in…

A car covered in a sheet. That’s what I’m looking at, but beyond that… well, it’s clearly not an SUV. Assuming it’s pointing the right way the proportions are cab forward, the front arches pronounced, the rear deck flat and wide. If I’ve got it the wrong way round, it’s Vision Gran Turismo or Hot Wheels all the way. Normally we’d already know what lies beneath. There are very, very few genuine surprises nowadays – information and images are released to media early on the understanding we’ll abide by an embargo. But not this time: no early teasers, no leaks, nothing. All we have is rumours. Pretty educated ones. Ones that were reinforced when we arrived on the roof of the Porsche Museum in Stuttgart to find three cars lined…

I’M ON THE EDGE, both mentally and literally, peering over the brow of the obstacle that earned this trail its infamy. A series of giant ledges flanked by some loose looking rocks and several thousand miles of fresh air. When you’re climbing there are off-road techniques to be deployed – left foot braking with smooth dabs of throttle to ensure all momentum is of the forward variety, sawing the steering wheel side to side to find the tiniest sliver of traction and my personal favourite… gunning it and hoping for the best – but on the descent, your only real option is full send with as much mechanical sympathy as possible. Otherwise known as driving forwards and falling off. I drop the nose over the edge, then the rear –…

It is occasionally amusing to think of our naive former ways – like a couple of decades ago, when large saloons were still a thing. It was a big deal when Ford came to the Frankfurt motor show in 2005 with a cheeky glimpse at the sexy new Mondeo, set to arrive in 2007. The Mondeo, much like the Vectra/Insignia, was a car that was eternally acknowledged as a slightly dull car with the next version promising an injection of cool, a dash of style, or even (God forbid) ‘relevance’. This was a pretence that a new version of either car could manage in the carefully curated, brightly lit isolation of a motor show stand, but would evaporate instantly on contact with the grime of the real world, sitting on…

AH, THE OG LUXURY OFF-ROADER Well, sort of. The original Range Rover was tremendously refined for its day, thanks to the velvet glove V8 engine and feathery soft coil springs. But luxury? The Jeep Wagoneer had arguably got there seven years earlier. The first Range Rovers had wind-up windows, PVC seats, rubber floor coverings, manual transmission and muscle straining power steering. But the off-road smarts were certainly there, thanks to huge axle articulation, permanent 4WD, a low-ratio transfer box and centre diff lock. WE KNOW THE NEW ONE IS POSH Indeed. During the Seventies and Eighties, Land Rover discovered that every time it added a version with more luxury kit, it became the bestseller. So these days it knows offering a poverty spec car would be commercial stupidity, and doesn’t…

HELLO £29,995/£30,960 as tested/£295 pcm WHY IT’S HERE Drifting’s great, but is Toyota’s RWD hero also a great daily? DRIVER Ollie Kew PEOPLE ARE TAKING DESPERATE MEASURES TO ACQUIRE TOPGEAR’S Sports Car of the Year. Scrambling to import one from Japan. Pricey, and such hassle. You could save yourself the bother – and pay well over the odds. Of the seven Toyota GR86s for sale in the UK at the time of writing, prices stretch from £37,500 to a wince inducing £48,900. We’d given up hope of being able to run one for a few months. Then I heard of a chap who could be tempted out of ‘his’, into a new Supra. His name? Ricky Collard, British Touring Car Championship driver for Team Speedworks in the GR Corolla. Would you…

REPORT 5 £41,600/£47,185/£643 WHY IT’S HERE Is this hatchback where the DS master plan finally comes good? DRIVER Esther Neve I HOPE YOU HAVE A PEN AND PIECE of paper to hand, because important information is imminent. If you are planning to travel to France in your car on holiday, you now need a Crit’Air sticker. You have, in fact, since the start of the year but there was no publicity to tell UK drivers about it. For many large towns and most cities (plus the Alpine tunnels and some motorways) in France all vehicles now need clean air certification. Without the correct vignette you could be fined, and knowing our neighbours, you probably will be. The marvellous news is that it is simple to apply for and will arrive in…

REPORT 6 £59,545/£65,521/£665 WHY IT’S HERE Is this the SUV antidote you never knew you needed? DRIVER Elliott Webb IT’S ALREADY BEEN SAID MANY times while we’ve been custodians of the Multivan – it’s the best wagon you’d need for a family. This month’s jaunt was to the Lake District and Coniston Water, with a preamble through the Yorkshire Dales. We fit in (with room to spare) everything from swimwear and the week’s luggage to a truckload of nappies, the high chair and toddler’s travel cot. Fully loaded with passengers the interior is still spacious enough, especially with the van’s roof height and massive glass roof. This means the best place to travel is in the middle rows as the 360 degree views are immense, if your location plays ball. I…

HELLO £137,435 OTR/£144,175 as tested/£1,650 pcm WHY IT’S HERE Is the world’s most luxurious SUV the world’s best luxury car full stop? DRIVER Ollie Marriage HOW DOES RANGE ROVER DO IT? HOW COME IT CAN BUILD A CLEAN lined, square jawed, downright handsome SUV and no one else can? They all just shove massive grilles on the front as a brand identifier then fail to sort anything out behind that. Only Range Rover manages to combine dignity with subtle road presence and desirability. It’s a clever trick. And it means people react better to the Range Rover than they do to any other SUV. It’s cut some slack where others aren’t. And this one is given extra clearance because it’s a hybrid. One that actually works. A 31.8kWh battery that…

GOODBYE £39,495 OTR/£40,445 as tested/£715 pcm WHY IT’S HERE To prove our love of hatches in the face of a crossover-mad world DRIVER Paul Horrell WELL THAT WAS ALL PRETTY UNEVENTFUL. USUALLY OVER THE COURSE of a half year with a car you learn new things about it, or even about yourself. That’s why we do these long-term tests. But not so much here. I liked the Megane when I first tested it, and was looking forward to its arrival here. I enjoyed it for mostly the same reasons, and now it’s gone I miss it. It’s a fine design, outside and especially in. Inside, it’s not just about quality and materials, but ergonomics including seat, screen graphics and menus. Most of all, the abundance of physical switches improved day to…

A fancy brand like Bugatti isn’t the sort of place that deals with such prosaic notions of ‘cheapest’ or ‘most expensive’. Mainly because even its most reasonable models will still set the majority of us back more than we’d earn in a lifetime. An off the rack Chiron will cost you just under £3 million, for instance – lottery cash for most. Let’s not even mention the £15m one-off Voiture Noire that was sold back in 2019. If you want a taste of the Bugatti life at a fraction of the cost (albeit still rather expensive) then you might consider surrending some of your dignity and squeezing into the Bugatti Baby II from the Little Car Company. It’s a beautifully detailed 75 per cent scale tribute to Ettore Bugatti’s Type…

MAGAZINE Order a copy at MagsDirect.co.uk SUBSCRIPTION OFFER buysubscriptions.com/TGSP3M DOWNLOAD The TopGear app from your App Store WEBSITE Visit topgear.com for your rolling hit of news, reviews, entertainment and advice YOUTUBE Subscribe to the TopGear YouTube channel to watch the best car videos on the planet PODCAST Visit topgear.com to download the TopGear podcast @topgear facebook.com/topgear @BBC_TopGear…

Sure, 2001’s Unibox concept resembled a Meccano project assembled in the dark. Sure, it looked like it could be dismantled by a car crim wielding nothing more than a 5mm hex key. But that didn’t make it a fail. Self-assembly chic, very in right now. Nor was the Unibox a fail because it failed to spawn a production car. In FOTC’s opinion, any concept that morphs into a recognisably similar production car was too damn dull to be classified as a concept in the first place. Its woeful aerodynamic profile? Also not an issue. FOTC has had quite enough of air getting its own way, and it’s high time someone stood up to it. No, the reason for the Unibox’s #epicfail status was… those transparent lower body panels. Great for…

Driving a skeleton car has very obvious pros and cons, as any Ariel Atom owner will tell you. It saves weight and looks cool. But it’s also noisy and lets in all of the weather. Skeletonising a watch does not come with these disadvantages, but the process of stripping it back to the essentials has long been a great challenge. The reason for early skeleton clocks was simple. Nowadays if you want to let people know how well business is going, you can buy a Bugatti. Around 200 years ago a good way of making people jealous was a fancy clock. Just owning one set you apart from the masses, but clockmakers, looking for new ways to stand out, hit upon the idea of stripping away the metal casing so…

MYTH BUSTER “EVs ARE CHEAPER TO TAX AND RUN” We have a fixed date to switch new cars to ZEV. We’re neglecting to plan other necessary changes. Electric drivers pay little tax at the moment. It’s just five per cent VAT for the energy if charged at home. Petrol drivers pay something above 100 per cent in duty and VAT. For company car drivers the difference in BIK is even starker. A 40 per cent taxpayer choosing between a 4-Series Gran Coupe petrol and the equivalent i4 would be £8,000 a year better off if they went electric. The government – which means the people, assuming we are a functioning democracy – wants to encourage electric cars. Two problems. First, the tax breaks help only those who can afford a…

What are we to make of the EU’s exemption from its 2035 ban on new petrol cars, to allow those that run “only on e-fuels”? See, a litre of e-fuel is – even at the molecular level – identical to a litre of the petrol that began down an oil well. That’s its entire point. So if a car can run on e-fuel, it can also run on the old stuff. How will they police this? Each litre could have its own blockchain to ensure traceability. But the computing energy behind blockchain is itself carbon intensive. Or maybe they could use the same method as farmers’ diesel. Diesel dyed red, on which there’s low tax, is for tractors. Road diesel has more tax. If a farmer’s Land Rover has a…

£87,650 FOR Superb engine, monster point to point pace, the looks AGAINST A110 and Cayman still better drivers’ cars, sold out Here is a car that celebrates one of Audi’s very finest designs and the less is more philosophy it proudly exhibits. In 2023, the TT marks a quarter century of service having first burst onto the scene in 1998 with one of Ingolstadt’s most alluring shapes. Which is of course why this special edition features motorsport inspired aero addenda bolted onto every visible flank. Perhaps we don’t understand Bauhaus after all. For the record, the ‘Aerokit’ as Audi calls it, has been honed in a wind tunnel and is comprised of a lot of new pieces: a new front apron with side flicks, a new splitter, new blades in…

GREAT REASONS TO SUBSCRIBE Subscribe and get our Supercars 2023 bookazine with your September issue Pay £5 for your first 3 issues then pay £23.50 every 6 saving 35% on the usual shop price Unique and collectable covers – only seen by our subscribers Get your copy before it hits the shops and never miss an issue! buysubscriptions.com/TGP823 03330 162 130 and quote TGP823** *This offer is open to UK delivery addresses only and is subject to availability. Offer end 9 August 2023. You will pay £5 for your first 3 issues, then pay £23.50 every 6 issues – still saving 35% on the usual shop price. All savings are calculated as a rounded percentage of the full shop price. Should the magazine order change in frequency, we will honour…

Thus far, the Bentley Batur is the most expensive and most powerful production Bentley ever produced. It costs upwards of £1.6 million before local taxes and options, and accommodates one of the final iterations of a 6.0-litre W12 bi-turbo engine that’s nearly two decades old, made ‘more effcient’ by people with big brains and complicated spanners. Though ‘more effcient’ in quaintly demure Bentley speak translates as ‘more powerful’ than ever before – 730bhp, with 737lb ft of torque (1,000Nm if you prefer numerical cleanliness), delivered from 1,750rpm until 5,000rpm on a torque curve that looks like a park bench. It is gravely expensive, exclusive, powerful and very, very fast. Which hurts. Because for the past four hours, I’ve been doing a maximum of 35mph in torrential rain, deploying about 60…

PORSCHE CARRERA GT Having weathered an existential crisis in the early Nineties, Porsche was feeling bullish by the decade’s end. When Walter Röhrl drove the Carrera GT concept from the Arc de Triomphe to the Louvre on 28 September 2000, the world went crazy for it. Over to a small team in Weissach to justify the business case, then figure out how to engineer it. Porsche had a few tricks up its sleeve. An entire Le Mans project in fact, codenamed 9R3, and intended to race in 2000 but abandoned on cost grounds. The Carrera GT’s 5.7-litre V10 actually had its roots in a forgotten F1 project, and its spec included sodium cooled exhaust valves, Nikasil coated bores, titanium conrods and forged pistons. The whole unit weighed in at a…

AUDI A6 ALLROAD (2007) Price now: £2,995 Harris says: The king of lifted estates has been around since the C5-generation A6 and is still going strong today. This C6-gen from 2007 has a 3.0-litre turbodiesel V6 that’s probably only just run in at 140k miles. VOLV0 V 70 CROSS COUNTRY (2003) Price now: £3,775 Harris says: Pretend you’re a detective in a rugged Scandi crime drama with this chunky V70 Cross Country. It comes complete with a 2.4-litre turbocharged 5cyl engine and space in the back for at least 34 dogs. SUBARU OUTBACK (2006) Price now: £4,490 Harris says: It might not have as much plastic cladding as the other two, but stick a set of all-terrain tyres on this all-wheel-drive Outback and it’ll manage more off-roading than most modern…

REPORT 4 £54,370 OTR/£54,990 as tested/£774 pcm WHY IT’S HERE Is the vRS badge still relevant in the electric age? DRIVER Ollie Marriage YOU’VE HEARD THE ONE ABOUT THE PEOPLE WHO LIVE NEXT TO A church and wake up in the night when the church bells don’t ring? Well, I noticed the Enyaq when the suspension suddenly smoothed out. A rare patch, a few hundred metres of perfectly laid blacktop and the Enyaq glided across it. No tyre noise, no suspension grumble, no apparent effort. It was calmness personified. Like being airborne. Back to normal 300 metres later. ‘Turbulent’ describes the Enyaq vRS’s ride rather well. It’s constantly busy, constantly bucking slightly, overreacting to everything, fidgeting. It’s 2.3 tonnes, you’d think it ought to be able to squish stuff, but no,…

REPORT 5 £31,995 OTR/£32,790 as tested/£398 pcm WHY IT’S HERE Is Chinese domination of the small EV scene inevitable? We find out DRIVER Greg Potts THE TOPGEAR GARAGE IS CURSED. SERIOUSLY, SOMEONE MUST HAVE put a hex on the cars that we’re running at the moment. You see, just weeks after Ollie Kew’s Audi S3 was stolen (and eventually recovered) and Sam Philip’s Vauxhall Astra was hit twice by fellow motorists, the Funky Cat has also been in the wars through no fault of its own. While the car was parked on a London side street, someone clearly decided that they didn’t like the styling of the Ora, and that it would look much better with a hefty dent in a couple of the rear panels. And they didn’t leave…

REPORT 8 BMW M8 While Rowan’s been busy in America, I’ve had custody of the M8, and I think I’ve pinned down why this car is a bit of an enigma. One reason is BMW’s fault: it feels generic. A flagship, top of the range model should have a sense of being above the everyday. A little bespoke. The 8-Series doesn’t. But the other reason is it’s an autobahn car. In Germay one of these would make a genuine difference to your day to day life. Over on the Isle of Brexit… not so much. In a country where it can’t show off its superpower, it’s just a little too unremarkable everywhere else. PH REPORT 7 AUDI S3 Since last month’s theft and recovery, I’ve had several phone calls from…

Bugatti was founded by Italian-born Ettore Bugatti in 1909 in Molsheim, Alsace. Not much space here to get into the intricacies of 20th century European politics, but it was in Germany when it started, then France, then Germany and now sits in France. Bugatti became known for its sleek tourers and roadsters, as well as its elegant racing cars. A privateer Bugatti won the first ever Monaco GP in 1929 and the firm’s works team won at Le Mans in 1937 and 1939. Bugatti’s test driver son Jean died in 1939 testing a Type 57 racecar, and with the onset of World War Two the company never really recovered. Ettore’s youngest son Roland tried to revive Bugatti’s fortunes after his dad’s death in 1947. The Type 101 of 1951 is widely…

Bugatti seems to have set itself the unoffcial mission of creating the world’s fastest production cars – since the Veyron broke the McLaren F1’s 11-year record at 253.81mph in 2005 the firm has built ever faster models to maintain its crown. The Chiron Super Sport 300+ went 304.77mph in 2019, the first production car to top 300mph. A limited run of 30 of them were built to celebrate Bugatti’s 110th anniversary back in 2019. A new challenger to the Chiron’s crown will arrive in 2024 in the form of the Bolide, which the firm claims will reach an incredible 311mph. Given that the Bolide will cost £3.5m and is intended purely as a track car, you’d have to imagine that it’s the sort of speed that will remain theoretical, unless…

You’d be well within your rights to suggest the EB 18.4, the conceptual origin of the Veyron, but we can’t overlook the gorgeous 16C Galibier concept with its 8.0-litre 16cyl engine, 1,000bhp, four-wheel drive and four doors. A production Galibier would have been the ultimate Rolls-Royce challenger, marrying Veyron speed with Rolls luxury. And while we’re not exactly the 0.1 per cent who could actually afford to own a Bugatti, that doesn’t mean that we wouldn’t benefit. We didn’t all fly Concorde or ride a rocket to the moon, but that doesn’t mean these creations didn’t form the bedrock of countless aspirations and inspirations.…

“I’M NOT SURE I’VE EVER HAD A CAR DELIVER MORE OF AN OPTICAL HAYMAKER” Let’s just marvel at this one for a while shall we? I suspect you have been already. Maybe you’d like some more time? Go back, just check that rear arch is as mad as it looks? It is, take it from me. I saw this car a few months back as a clay model. I’m not sure I’ve ever had a car deliver more of an optical haymaker. The proportions, the width, the haunches, the rear wing… OK, the wings – I’ll come onto that shortly. Right, pick your jaw up, it’s fact time. This is the Dynamics and Lightweighting Study – Turbo, an amalgam of Singer’s last two interpretations of the Porsche 911. Those were…

At long last, Volkswagen has revealed the new ID.Buzz long wheelbase, complete with up to seven seats. The seating options run five (two up front, three in the back, big boot), six (two up front, two in the middle, two in the back, smaller boot), or the full seven (two/three/two, tiny boot). The second row is a bench but can be optioned as two chairs, while the two back seats can be folded, angled and moved back or removed completely if you want a proper electric van. It also gets the biggest panoramic roof ever fitted to any VW. The rear drive chassis can now accommodate a slightly bigger 85kWh battery, taking claimed range to around 300 miles, together with a more powerful e-motor delivering 282bhp. There’s more torque –…

F1 23 The official F1 game, out now on Xbox, Playstation and PC, returns along with its 200mph soap opera mode Braking Point. It’s more complex this time around with more mid-race objectives, a narrative that’s more reactive to your actions and there’s more depth to the off-track decision making. It’s a slower burn than before, but better for it. And yes, there’s still plenty of histrionic paddock bickering. F1 World, meanwhile, is the game’s tilt at a FIFA Ultimate Team money spinner and sees you building your own car with a unique performance profile by opening unlockable or purchasable ‘packs’. If you can bear to race against people who have built a faster car because they spent more real world cash, it could become a serious time sink. Otherwise,…

01 McLaren F1/Gordon Murray T.50 We had to start here. Gordon Murray says he had the idea of a centrally positioned driver as far back as the Seventies, but couldn’t realise his tri-seat supercar dream until the Nineties, with the iconic McLaren F1. Naturally his new T.50 keeps the layout – but is easier to climb in and out of. 02 Yamaha OX-99 This could’ve been Japan’s McF1: a Formula One inspired carbon lightweight with a 10,000rpm V12 in the back and a tandem central seating arrangement just ahead. Only three were made before the project was kiboshed by the early Nineties recession. 03 Carver Is it a car? Is it a bike? Whatever it is, the Dutch entry in the urban transport solution battle is this charmingly bizarre leaning contraption, which has…

RIP – after 47 years of ubiquity Ford’s Fiesta has come off sale (cutthroat business this, no room for sentimentality) thanks to barely controlled inflation. Not the economic kind, though that can’t be helping, rather the fact that cars are getting too big. People want high riding SUVs, or more spacious, well appointed hatchbacks. Throw in ever stricter emissions rules and making a supermini at lower volumes is getting too expensive. Can’t blame Ford for deciding it couldn’t be bothered. The Fiesta was long the default choice – you could recommend it to anyone and they’d be happy. There’s no obvious natural successor, but we’ve brought together the cheap one, the all-rounder and the current UK bestseller (although it was dethroned by the Ford Puma while we were writing this)…

£231,885 FOR Gorgeous looking, great to drive, supple and quiet AGAINST Not enough bootspace for the long journeys it invites Maserati is confident. It’s invested a lot in the MC20 and come out punching. Mainly on price. You’ve seen how much it is. As tested this one was £306k. Hitting Ferrari head on. But with a very different car. Many of its rivals are so fast, so stiffy suspended and harsh, they’re a painful frustration on real roads. The MC20 is more languid. That doesn’t quite suit the coupe – well, not if you’re intent on fast driving, where the brakes, gearbox and steering struggle to keep up. But the Cielo drop-top has a different remit. Open up and say “ah”. Relax, let the cowslip covered hedgerows slip by. You’ll…

£39,495 FOR Unpretentious, comfortable, and above all, great value AGAINST Bland looks, dull drive, small-ish boot, avoid the hybrid The ZR-V is the first of three crossovers Honda will introduce in 2023. Boo. And yet, that’s what the people want, so the ZR-V is here to fill the gap between the HR-V and CR-V. No, we didn’t know there was a gap there either. Quite why Honda didn’t pick any of the letters between C and H for the name is a mystery. The ZR-V borrows much from the Civic eHEV, so there’s the same complex hybrid (not plug-in) powertrain that sees a 2.0-litre engine paired with a small lithium-ion battery and two e-motors. One of those motors drives the wheels with 181bhp most of the time, with the petrol…

This isn’t a car that requires a review. Rolls-Royce customers do not concern themselves with the views of the unwashed proletariat. If they did, they’d have waited to hear what it’s like, instead of already ordering so many it’s sold out until the middle of 2025. The car is the Rolls-Royce Spectre, and it’s not just the first fully electric product of the modern Rolls-Royce Motor Cars Ltd which BMW seeded in 1998. Since Charles met Henry 119 years ago, no production spec car in their marque’s potted history has been battery powered. Occasionally, Rolls-Royce itself likes to pay attention to journalists. In 1907, a writer in Britain’s The Autocar declared the underwhelmingly named 40/50hp model was “the best car in the world”. Granted, he only had about three to…

ELECTRIC CARS RUN ON POWER THAT’S PRODUCED IN FOSSIL FUEL PLANTS, SO THEIR OVERALL CO2 PER MILE IS HARDLY LOWER THAN PETROL CARS. IF WE DID HAVE A WIDESPREAD CONVERSION TO EVs, THE GRID WOULDN’T COPE ANYWAY. BESIDES, THE BATTERIES WON’T LAST, SO A CAR WILL NEED TWO OR THREE IN ITS LIFETIME AND THAT IN ITSELF MEANS HUGE MANUFACTURING CO2 AND WASTE DISPOSAL HEADACHES. WHO’D HAVE ONE ANYWAY, GIVEN THEIR RANGE IS INCONVENIENT AND CHARGING SPOTTY? ALL PERFECTLY LEGITIMATE CONCERNS… IN 2013. A decade on, those objections have all pretty much gone away. What makes electric cars so fascinating is the speed of change. Whatever you knew about them is wrong. Whatever you know now will soon be wrong too. Let’s go for a drive to look at some…

“I’M GOING TO SAY IT. MY FAVOURITE CAR IS THE CHEAPEST I OWN – MONEY DOESN’T BUY HAPPINESS” Isn’t it convenient when people who have made millions suddenly announce that the key to happiness isn’t actually money? A statement that is made infinitely easier without a mortgage and with Waitrose staff on a first name basis with you. And isn’t it convenient when, despite owning several cars worth a decent amount of money, the one you favour most also turns out to be cheapest. Time to donate the GT3 RS to Age UK in that case. I very nearly started this month’s update with those exact words before realising the man of the people angle wears thin while owning double digit cars. So, we’ll phrase it a little bit different.…

PC demolition racer Carmageddon was allegedly created when developer Stainless Steel Software decided that racing games were more fun when you drove backwards and crashed into everyone. Really, though, Carmageddon was most famous for the fact that you could mow down swathes of pedestrians with gleeful abandon. Naturally as soon as they heard about the game the tabloid newspapers promptly detonated, with headlines that included ‘Ban Death Game Now’ and, as you’d expect, the game went on to sell two million copies. Who needs a PR agency? By the time Carmageddon actually landed on British shores in 1997, all the human fender fodder had been replaced with green-blooded zombies, allowing you to plough through crowds of them and retain a clean conscience. In direct contrast to the state of your…

GOODBYE £28,710 OTR/£29,310 as tested/£409 pcm WHY IT’S HERE Does the sharp-suited new Astra prove you don’t need that SUV? DRIVER Sam Philip SO AS THE ASTRA IS RELEASED AFTER HALF A YEAR’S HARD LABOUR in the TopGear gulag, here’s the million dollar question (OK, the twenty something thousand pound question): should you buy one? It should be on your shortlist, for sure. Not least because the list of new hatches isn’t so long as it once was. If you can find a dealer prepared to offer you a chunky discount, stick it towards the top of that shortlist. No, the Astra might not be a game-changer, but it’s a good car. Which I realise is, as verdicts go, a bit inconclusive. Apologies. I’d love to have given the Astra the…

GOODBYE/HELLO £48,380 OTR/£50,030 as tested/£629 pcm WHY IT’S HERE Can Mazda join the large/luxe SUV party? DRIVER Andy Franklin NO, YOUR EYES DO NOT DECEIVE YOU: THERE ARE TWO CX-60s IN THIS picture and yes, we’re running another one. It’s goodbye hybrid and hello diesel. Why? Well, I’ve been a bit disappointed with the hybrid but always had this underlying feeling that deep down there’s a decent car in there somewhere. We’ve always been a fan of Mazda – let’s face it if you don’t like the RX-7 then you’re not really a petrolhead – and the majority of the cars we’ve run have also had good reviews. In fact, I was reminded of its strong heritage while I was swapping cars at Mazda HQ thanks to the fantastic array of…

REPORT 6 £60,300 OTR/£60,300 as tested/£819 pcm WHY IT’S HERE Has the world finally come around to a non-sporty large French car? DRIVER Jason Barlow I REMEMBER THE FIRST TIME I DROVE A HYBRID – ON ‘OLD’ TOPGEAR I made a film about Honda’s original Insight and the early Toyota Prius. Things have moved on somewhat. My drive down to Le Mans this year was in a Ferrari SF90 Spider, a PHEV whose intergalactic acceleration went mostly underexploited for fear of the omnipresent gendarmerie, but whose ‘blended’ brake by wire and regen capability meant we were able to get from our digs to the track each morning without troubling the 3.9-litre V8. Or even having to plug the car in. The C5 X obviously sits somewhere else altogether on the dynamic…

GOODBYE £60,300 OTR/£60,300 as tested/£819 pcm WHY IT’S HERE Is this electrified crossover as good as a bespoke EV from Polestar? DRIVERS Jack Rix and Rowan Horncastle JR: VOLVO HAS RECLAIMED ITS XC40 AND C40 RECHARGE RO, SO AS we’re supposed to be sharing the BMW M8 and electric Volvos I’m curious – how was the whole running an EV for the first time thing for you? RH: Well, given that I’ve spent most of the time in a 4.4-litre twin-turbo V8, I’ll chalk this one up as: ‘not well’. JR: Ah. It worked brilliantly for a family of four like ours: lots of room for two smallish kids and two smallish adults and a decent sized boot. In a few years’ time we’ll need more space for it to be…

Bugatti Veyron After Volkswagen acquired the Bugatti brand in the late Nineties, it felt the need to make a statement. So, what better way to do it than with the hypercar to end (or perhaps should that be to begin) all hypercars? The Veyron’s 8.0-litre quad-turbo W16 started an all-out power war. Bugatti Type 35 Built between 1924 and 1931, the iconic Type 35 is widely cited as the most successful racing car of all time. And not even Red Bull’s current dominant F1 car will surpass its reputation, because the Bugatti racked up over 1,000 wins in its various forms. Bugatti Chiron Super Sport 300+ After taking a modified, longtailed Chiron to 304.77mph at Ehra-Lessien in 2019, Bugatti decided to commemorate the car’s success by selling 30 production versions…

Bugatti Veyron / 2000–2015 People must’ve been confused in 1998 when Volkswagen snapped up the high-performance European trio of Lamborghini, Bentley and Bugatti like it was playing a round of Monopoly, but there wasn’t too long to wait. The Veyron was previewed by the third of three concepts trailed by VW during 1999, the 18/3 Chiron appearing at that year’s Frankfurt motor show. A sports car, rather than a saloon like the others, it was immediately the more enticing option. The 18/3 (18 litres, three turbos) Chiron would become the 16/4 Veyron by the Tokyo show, a format that would stick. VW supremo Ferdinand Piëch wanted the first car with over 1,000 metric horsepower (the production car in 2005 managing 1,001PS [986bhp]), and his engineers in essence fused two V8s to…