Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2023 i BBC Top Gear Magazine

@jack_rix editor@bbctopgearmagazine.com We thought about it of course, getting every new car currently on sale in the UK together on the Brooklands banking for a precise tribute to the cover of issue #1… for about a minute. Such is the proliferation of choice over the past three decades that would plainly be idiotic, we’d need to shoot it from space. Needless to say, BBC budgets don’t stretch to away days on the ISS. We refined the idea to a Brooklands gathering of the 30 greats, one per year we’ve been around. Much more manageable. For most these would be offcial ‘Cars of the Year’, crowned at the time in our annual Awards. For a few, mostly in the early days before the TopGear Awards existed, we had to fill in…

MYTH BUSTER “THERE AREN’T ENOUGH CHARGERS” A new set of government figures for charger installations has arrived. They’ll soon be out of date, because contrary to popular myth, charger installation is proceeding at pace. In April to July this year, the number of public charge points went up by 10 per cent. It’s about the same percentage for AC (7–22kW) as for rapid points. In the past year, the total rise has been 25 per cent. So the speed of rollout accelerated the last quarter. Critically, in the past year, the total number of EVs on the road has risen by slightly less than 25 per cent. So public charger installation continues to outpace the number of EVs. It feels a lot better even than that. Driving long distances in…

You keep reading that PHEVs never manage to hit their WLTP fuel economy figures. In view of which I need to take a new look at Horrell’s Universal Law of Fuel Consumption. Horrell’s Law was outlined on this page years ago, and goes like this. “Everything does 35mpg. With a few corrective factors.” The Law’s origins were in the days of pure petrol and diesel cars and the corrective factors were simple. Driving fast costs 5mpg, or driving gently saves 5mpg. Diesel improves things by 10mpg. A non-plug hybrid also adds 10mpg. Superminis add 5mpg while a big car costs 5mpg. A crossover body costs 3mpg, a true SUV costs 7mpg. Four-wheel drive costs 3mpg. GTI-type performance costs 5mpg, very high performance 10mpg. You simply take 35mpg, then correct cumulatively.…

£n/a FOR Deathly quiet, impressive tech, comfier than most sofas AGAINST No sense of identity, too techy for its own good The exec saloon is back for a sixth generation, not counting the half century of predecessors that came before the advent of the E-Class name in the Nineties – around the same time as this magazine, actually. Anyway, 16 million ancestors is significant heritage. At launch the UK gets three engines, though more are on the way. All are 2.0-litre turbos – one petrol and one diesel (both mild hybrids), the other a plug-in with a 25.4kWh battery and 62 miles of WLTP range. A nine-speed auto is omnipresent throughout the line-up. The entry level petrol is our favourite so far. It isn’t quick, but it’s enough. And that…

Subscribe and get our Supercars 2023 bookazine with your first issue! CELEBRATE 30 YEARS OF TG MAGAZINE! GREAT REASONS TO SUBSCRIBE Pay just £30 for your first 12 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/TGP1023 03330 162 130 and quote TGP1023** SUBSCRIBING IS EASY. SIMPLY GO ONLINE, CALL OR SCAN * This offer is open to UK delivery addresses only and is subject to availability. Offer will end 4th October. You will pay £30 for your first 12 issues, they pay £23.50 every 6 issues – still saving 35% on the usual shop price. All savings are calculated as a…

“The right shape, the right noise, the right pace, the right poise. All at the right price.” That price being £24,000, in 2004, for the Nissan 350Z. The mid-Noughties were a healthy period for punchy, affordable coupes, with the Audi TT and Mazda RX-8 making strong cases (and the Chrysler Crossfire and Alfa Romeo GT less so). And the brawny, squirtable Nissan had enough about it that TG forgave the unsophisticated cabin plastics and lack of sound deadening. “In a year that has so much good stuff, it’s a no-brainer.” Nissan obviously thought so too, because it really didn’t rock the boat much when the 350 was replaced by the 370 – another handsome brute powered by a lazy V6. And though the new 400Z has sprouted a couple of turbochargers…

You what? A Mondeo? A Multipla? What were you people on? From a 2023 perspective those are entirely understandable questions, but let’s cast our minds back for a brief moment. Ford used to be massive in Britain. But apart from motorsport specials, the cars were cheap to own and tinselly, but crude and dreary to drive. Then came the Mondeo. For decades after, Ford was everyone’s hero for making cars at ordinary prices that pulled the rug from ‘premium’ stuff by looking smarter and driving better. It even became Blair’s political shorthand for a new generation who deserved and expected better than the old. For three generations the Mondeo nailed it. It was shorthand for excellent everyperson family car. (Confession: it was the MkII that won our gong back in the…

We were surprised as well. Only one Porsche has ever been crowned TG’s Car of the Year, and it’s the one without a combustion engine. Meanwhile, no BMW M car has ever taken the top prize. The only Beemers to walk away with the laurels are an executive saloon still held in high regard today, and a petrol-electric sports car that bravely looked to a future that hasn’t materialised. Raises the question really: which of this pair is a surefire future classic? We know a winner when we see one. BMW’s £900m investment in its i range is now a cautionary tale of how to go too far, too fast with cars of the future, with the i3 and i8 now relegated to history and the current range taking the…

Time heals all wounds, they say. Which is probably why carmakers are able to give their heritage such a kicking and flog whatever cash they can out of it, basking in the glow of nostalgia. It’s been 21 years since the Chrysler California Cruiser concept was rolled out at the 2002 Paris Motor Show – some wounds need more time than others. Back in 2000 the DaimlerChrysler megacorp was at the height of its hubristic powers, with big boss Dieter Zetsche ready to take over the world. The Thirties-inspired PT Cruiser was trying to capitalise on the recent success of the retro BMW Mini and VW’s New Beetle. Of course, those cars were based on models people were still alive to remember, a distinct prerequisite for making money out of…

MOST POWERFUL GOLF EVER, YOU SAY? Yep, in 2022 VW decided to celebrate two decades since it launched its first R-badged car. The Golf was the obvious recipient for the resulting special edition, not least because that very first car was the MkIV Golf R32. The Golf R 20 Years arrived with a hefty 328bhp from its 2.0 turbo engine – 12bhp more than the standard MkVIII R. THAT CAN’T HAVE BEEN THE ONLY CHANGE, SURELY? Correct. The 20 Years was given the MkVIII’s Performance Pack as standard, which meant larger 19in wheels (now finished in blue and matching the wing mirrors), a little rear wing and two special drive modes. Some extra thump was also added to the DSG box’s gearchanges, and the turbo was allowed to stay spooled…

No one buys an MPV for its lissom good looks. They buy it for unpretentious space, and the Rodius certainly offered a lot of unpretentious space. It seated as many as 11 humans, provided all had (a) small legs and (b) no sense of shame. So is it really fair to brand the Rodius a failure on aesthetic grounds alone? Probably not, but we’re going to do it anyhow. Because the Rodius wasn’t just ugly. It was an unprecedented assault on the world’s rods and cones, a veritable war crime of automotive design. Ssangyong claimed the Rodius had been inspired by luxury yachts, suggesting they’d somehow confused the phrase ‘luxury yacht’ with the very similar phrase ‘used aeroplane sick bag’. Or perhaps the phrase ‘that fetid juice that pools at…

At first glance the watch industry doesn’t seem to have much in common with video gaming. One is a world of cogs, springs and physics based timekeeping, the other a land of power ups, med kits and reality free chaos. Why then do we see so many collaborations between these unlikely disciplines? Well perhaps they’re not so different. Both rate pretty high on the list of things that nonbelievers think are a waste of money. There’s certainly no denying when it comes to the bottom line, gaming is big business. Estimates value the global market at £200 billion. Depending whose numbers you believe, the watch industry is around a third that size, so when it comes to money, the digital newcomer has way more clout. And it’s not just the…

F1 Manager 23 F1 Manager 23 makes a big deal out of how realistic it is, but if it were 100 per cent realistic you wouldn’t be able to win with any team other than Red Bull. Thankfully, the game lets you meddle with this season’s stultifying predictability via a new Scenario mode, where you start a race with the grid and weather matched to the real 2023 event, or take control mid-race during a key moment. Scenario mode is a brilliant addition both because the game now has a pick up and play immediacy that the previous version didn’t, and because it offers instant repeatability, which is the quickest way to learn what works and what doesn’t. We still reckon that management isn’t as much fun as actually driving…

01 Alfa Romeo V6 In production from 1979–2005, the ‘Busso’ V6 is notable for its long life, warbly noise and the chromed inlet pipes which make it look like a robotic sea creature lurking under your bonnet making lovely noises. A treat whenever you need to open the bonnet, which in an Alfa… 02 McLaren F1 V12 The gold heat reflecting foil. The delicately machined girder spanning the opening. The V12’s carbon intake plenums. The organ-like exhaust pipes. The F1’s engine is astonishing, with a neat but imposing block nestled amid the jewellery, but the whole engine bay is a treat for the eyes. 03 Ferrari 250 Testa Rossa V12 Engines were restricted to 3.0 litres for the 1958 World Sportscar Championship – Ferrari employed the ‘Colombo’ V12 with its distinctive red single…

Much as we love the emotional zap of Italian cars, we aren’t blind to a troubling fact. Fiat, Alfa and Maserati are all sadly prone to launching an all-new car that’s the equal of, but not significantly superior to, a German rival that’s been around for years. And because the Italians, unlike the Germans, are neglectful of updating their stuff, before long they fall well out of contention. Who’d have bought an Alfa Giulietta over a Golf by the time it died in 2020? Today’s Alfa Giulia is sagging behind the 3-Series. The Fiat 500 – petrol not electric – has been around for 15 years, or two near complete generations of VW Polo. And only last year, Maserati ended production of a Granturismo that had spanned the 997, 991 and…

£47,195 FOR If you want a small electric Honda SUV then this is one AGAINST It’s all a bit middle of the road, no standout features Is this Honda’s first proper EV? Put it this way, if you set off in a Honda e now, it would need charging before you got to the end of this sentence. The name of the new car isn’t a clever acronym and it’s three characters too short to be a password – it’s the Japanese carmaker’s first EV off its new e:N platform. So there. Apparently it also stands for ‘energise yourself’, which is like getting down with your bad self but with fewer emissions. The company is energising itself for a bright new electric future with a white badge up front and…

£108,165 FOR Fast and grippy, 4cyl SL43 beats the V8s AGAINST Steering is opaque, screen system can be baffling It’s pretty obvious that to AMG buyers, the correct answer to any debate is always ‘more power’. Well I bring disappointing news. The nicest SL is the least powerful one. Of course there is no such thing these days as an SL that isn’t an AMG; the hot-up division was given responsibility for developing the whole car, and it shares its aluminium understructure, suspension and much else with the next-generation AMG GT. So it’s meant to be a sports car. SL, they’ll tell you, stands for Sports Light, but this generation of SL shows a troubling case of mission creep. The top-end SL63 V8 grazes two tonnes. This SL43 is a…

375 ISSUES AGO, TOPGEAR “AT LONG LAST, POWERED INTO PRINT”, FINALLY supplementing the telly show that had been on British screens since 1977 with a paper-based companion. To set the tone, the team set about bringing ever single new car model on sale in the late summer of 1993 to the banking of the storied Brooklands motor racing circuit in Surrey. A Lamborghini shared the front row with a Lada. “Only one carmaker failed to provide a car – Ferrari.” Cars beyond the fifth row were lost as “blobs of colour”. It was an ambitious stunt that intimated TopGear magazine would indeed have something for everyone. Jump forward to the summer of 2023 at the TopGear offce, and we’re debating how to commemorate 30 years of the magazine, with a single shot…

The 2002 Range Rover. If Land Rover has a touchstone, this is surely it. Yes, we can all point back to the 1970 original, but really this is the car that all modern Land Rovers riff on. Older cars may be the roots, but this, the L322, is the trunk of Land Rover’s Tree of Life. Look what followed on: the Discovery 3 in 2004, the Range Rover Sport in 2005, the Evoque in 2012 and finally 2020’s Defender. All branched off from this. Not the mechanical aspects, you understand, but the design, the philosophy, the feel – 2002 was when the Range Rover gained maturity. It was also when rivals woke up and realised what it represented, how potent a symbol it was, how they wanted a piece of…

Within the kaleidoscope of stupid things car journalists get up to, driving concept vehicles has to be right up there (alongside badgering car execs to build more of the cars they sell the least of) as our biggest waste of time. Inserting yourself into a rickety shell plonked on top of whatever means of propulsion designers found lying about in the studio cupboard and hoping to discern, what? That the production car it previews won’t sound, steer, stop, ride, handle or smell remotely like this, but here’s a picture of us grinning while rolling down a hill in it anyway! It’s a futile exercise at worse, a desperate plea for clicks at best. Either way it’s not a great look and TopGear deplores it. Except that’s me, behind the wheel…

FIAT COUPE (1997) Price now: £3,200 Harris says: It’s a Nineties Italian sports car wearing bright red paint and with leather seats inside. What more could you want? What was that? You want it to be reliable too? Erm, maybe best to look elsewhere. ALFA ROMEO GTV (1999) Price now: £5,250 Harris says: You can pick up an Alfa GTV for less than this, but you’re reading TopGear magazine so of course you have fantastic taste and want one fitted with the glorious 3.0-litre Busso V6 engine. MASERATI 3200 GT (2000) Price now: £10,995 Harris says: Cheating a little bit here, but it’s worth it for those boomerang lights. And anyway, the 3200 GT was penned by Giorgetto Giugiaro in the Nineties and was unveiled properly at the Paris Motor…

CITY CARS These small cars are perfect for urban life, but the trade-off is a much lower range 1. HONDA e PRICE: £37,395 RANGE: Up to 136 miles This TG favourite has retro styling and a brilliant interior, but it’s very expensive and the range isn’t great. Somehow we can’t help but love it though… 2. FIAT 500 PRICE: £28,195–£37,195 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. CITROEN AMI PRICE: £7,695–£8,695 RANGE: 47 miles Say hello to your little French friend. The pared back Ami is the perfect car for the city streets, as long as you don’t have ambitions to go…

Our idea behind this car was to take a racecar and not change anything for the street,” says Ford boss Jim Farley as the wraps are pulled off the new Mustang GTD. “In fact, let’s add some stuff that’s outlawed in racing.” This already sounds very promising indeed. And would you just look at the thing? Yes, that is a DRS-equipped rear wing on a muscle car. But then again, this is no longer a muscle car as we know it. “We love our Mustang Shelbys and stuff,” says Farley. “But that’s not what this car is. It’s for the AMG GT Black Series. It’s for the 911 GT3 RS. We want to beat them not only at Le Mans, but with a street car too.” That is a serious…

This is not a restomod. This is not a continuation. This is an all-new, old Lotus. Pray silence for the arrival of the Type 66, a 1970 project that never saw the light of day. Until now. We need to go back 53 years to get to the origin of this car: Colin Chapman, busy dominating F1, asked Lotus draughtsman Geoff Ferris to come up with a design that would do the same in the lucrative Can-Am series across the pond. Lotus’ success in F1 meant the plan never went beyond the drawings and model stage, and so it sat in a cupboard waiting for the right moment. Now that time has come. The Type 66 stays true to the original designs, and at its heart is a period-correct V8…

My first car was a Mini Cooper, but I actually learnt to drive before that in a field in a little Rover. It was a Metro I think, a super cheap thing, so in terms of learning how to drive a car, that’s where it all started. We also had a modified Subaru that we drove off-road at home. We used a lawn mower to cut out a little track in the grass. I was far from a rally driver, but I guess I started driving on grass and that’s about as far as I went with it. Then it was the Mini Cooper when I passed my test, but now what I’m driving depends on whether I’m in Monaco or in the UK. If I’m in the UK and…

1 IT COMES IN TWO FLAVOURS There are two versions of the new Zenvo Aurora (named after the northern lights) – the Aurora Tur, and Aurora Agil. While they service different ambitions – the former built for long distance roadtrips, the latter for attacking the track – both are armed with a brand new 6.6-litre quad turbo V12 engine. 2 IT’S BASICALLY A PRIUS The Aurora is a hybrid, believe it or not. The V12 has been developed by Mahle Powertrain and develops 1,250bhp while revving to 9,800rpm. It’s a ‘hot V’ set-up (the turbos sit inside the ‘V’ of the engine) mounted in the middle, and both versions of the Aurora get a seven-speed gearbox with an electric motor nestled inside, adding a further 200bhp. 3 IT’S QUITE FAST…

£125,499 FOR An engaging and characterful gem. One that sadly might be overlooked AGAINST It’s the last Boxster/Cayman with an actual combustion engine. Boo! The Spyder RS is the last mid-engine sports car with an internal combustion engine from Porsche. Which is a rather heavy and depressing thought. You can think of it as the soft-top sibling of the Cayman GT4 RS. And, as you may well know, that’s TG royalty thanks to the high revving, naturally aspirated, 4.0-litre flat six from a 911 GT3 racecar and some clever intake trickery shoved behind your head. We’re glad to inform you the Spyder RS has that engine and trickery. But where the wonderfully immersive and tactile GT4 RS was created and focused for track use, Andreas Preuninger and his GT department…

£42,870 FOR Relaxing and refined, has proper VW quality, roomy for AGAINST Not that engaging, still some driver interface annoyances VW’s mainstream electric family hatch has been given an early facelift. Which it rather needed. First, because having arrived among the vanguard of hatches this size, it inevitably found itself surrounded by newer rivals stealing its thunder. And second because the original ID.3 just wasn’t quite Volkswagen enough. It didn’t have the necessary feeling of interior quality. Plus it was in many ways quirky or just plain irritating. This is the fix. The facelift makes the ID.3 slightly less oddball. VW pitched the first ID.3 as the car to pick up the baton from the Golf. But it wasn’t that. Whereas a Golf always feels comfortingly conventional, the ID.3 looked…

MAZDA 2 115PS HOMURA AKA £23,835 FOR Handling, functional interior, superminis deserve to live on AGAINST Meek engines, limited tech, long overdue an update Superminis are a dying breed but the Mazda 2 clings on. This decade-old car still does the basics well, with its agile handling, general comfort and sensible cabin layout undiminished by time. We wish more cars stuck to the same path, but the touchscreen looks ancient now and this latest style-and-trim refresh can’t paper over the neglect. The Mazda 2 needs a proper overhaul; with crossovers taking over, we worry it won’t get one. JH SKODA ENYAQ iV vRS £52,670 FOR Extra performance has minimal impact on range AGAINST It’s a vRS only by name and not by nature Several months after the Enyaq Coupe vRS was released,…

We got these two right. These are the best mid-engined V8 Ferraris there have ever been. No ifs or buts. I’d love to know the mindsets of the men that created them, because both are astonishing pieces of engineering. You’re probably aware of the rough background to the F355. It followed on from the 348, a car that had the misfortune to arrive at the same time as the Honda NSX, which proved not only more usable, but also friendlier at the limit and with an equally compelling engine. The F355 GTB (B for Berlinetta coupe, the open air GTS had a lift-out roof panel) was Ferrari’s riposte, its demonstration that it could rise above the Japanese upstart. Fundamentally, not much was new. It used the same base V8 engine,…

“THERE’S MORE DNA BETWEEN FIRST AND LAST HERE THAN BETWEEN ANY OTHERS” The story of the Ford hot hatch over the past 30 years doesn’t start with any of these cars. Its genesis, I’d argue, was the Puma. Or the fourth generation Fiesta. Or even the first Mondeo. All drove with a sweetness absent from any other ordinary car. They were the mid-Nineties inkling that Ford had good stuff coming down the pipe. It just needed to realise that hot hatches, insured into oblivion a decade earlier, were ripe for a comeback. They’ve been, well, not so much coming back as coming atcha, for the past 20 years. Cars good enough to earn our ‘best car of the year’ tag four times. Oddly perhaps, I think there’s more DNA between…

“FARVE HUNNER MILE? JEEZ, FARVE HUNNER MILE WOULDN’T GIT YOU OUT OF TEXAS.” A PAUSE, “UNLESS YOU WAS HEADING TOWARDS LOUISIANA.” Surely that depends on where in Texas you start from, I think, but decide not to voice. It would only add to the general air of confusion. He’s on holiday. You can guess where from. I thought racking up over 500 miles on an island that measures only 44 by 30 was pretty good going, but Oahu, it ain’t like America. It’s an itty bitty little place, smaller than Houston. But it packs it in, and so have we: film sets, Mustang meets, surfing, volcanoes, daft shirts, a bloody gyrocopter, an autosolo. We came, we shaka’d, we brah’d and we left. There is no element that ties these things…

The new Land Rover Defender is a fantastic car. TopGear’s Car of the Year in 2020, no less. And yet, while the move upmarket may make it an ideal SUV for most people, there are still a select few who just can’t get onboard. Some of those people might not want to get onboard, but others genuinely aren’t able to thanks to the price of entry (around £63,000 for a 110) and the treatment that their old school workhorses receive. So, what are all of these folk meant to do when their Defenders finally give up the ghost? Well, that might just be where Ineos comes in. After trying and failing to buy the tooling for the old Defender, chemical magnate and extremely rich man Jim Ratcliffe decided that he…

“DOUBLING OR TRIPLING THE POWER TAKES MORE THAN A ZESTY EXHAUST AND A REMAP” Modern car configurators love to boast about the customisation they offer. Performance aero, bigger wheels and an infinite number of paint codes are all commonplace, but this tends to stop the moment you get into something techy like a car’s powertrain. “Excellent choice on the yellow over purple stitching. Have you thought anymore about what thickness head gasket you’d like to run?” Because clearly letting every customer muck about with their engine’s insides would be a recipe for disaster. Aside from plunging a business into financial ruin, giving people free reign of exterior colours is scary enough without letting ’em near important things like compression ratio or cam profile. There’s a reason that engineers are kept…

SNES, 1990 If you’re unfamiliar with the naming convention in formula racing, the lower the number, the faster the racing, with Formula One the fastest of all. So what happens when you invent a futuristic motorsport that’s so fast it makes F1 look like competitive glacier racing? You call it F-Zero, of course. F-Zero was one of the launch titles for the Super Nintendo and, much like Super Mario Kart two years later, it used a technology called Mode 7 to move and spin a flat circuit beneath your hovering racer like it was being tossed around by a pizza chef. The result was a blisteringly fast pseudo-3D racing game that positively melted minds when it arrived alongside Nintendo’s brand new 16-bit console. In a genius move we’ve yet to…

What’s Aston Martin and when did it start making cars? Businessman Lionel Martin and engineer Robert Bamford founded Aston Martin in 1913 – ironically they became friends through cycling with the Bath Road Club after Martin got a two-year driving ban in 1909. Bamford and Martin Ltd sold cars initially, its first in-house creation in 1915 a two-seater with a 1908 Isotta Fraschini chassis and Coventry Simplex engine, called the Coal Scuttle because of its look. The second came in 1920, thanks to WW1 – Bamford retired that year but Martin ploughed on, building racecars. Strap in – the firm went bankrupt in 1924, was rescued, got into trouble again in 1925 and Martin forced to sell. More owners, another war. Tractor impresario David Brown bought Aston Martin in 1947, moved the…