Innholdsfortegnelse for January 2024 i BBC Top Gear Magazine

The problem with the Presto wasn’t that it was too daft. It wasn’t daft enough. The unmistakable handiwork of the Swiss mavericks at Rinspeed, it attempted to solve that age-old riddle of ‘small car, easy to park/big car, fits more people’ with the aid of an ingenious extending wheelbase. Yep, it stretched. A central electric motor elongated the Presto’s floorpan on the fly, transforming it from two-seat roadster into capacious four-seat roadster at the push of a button. FOTC has no issue with this. FOTC is all here for transforming cars. The problem with the Presto was that it just didn’t transform enough. It extended by a grand total of 750mm, thus in fact transforming from ‘two-seater’ into a ‘two-seater with small amount of space behind for very uncomfortable rear…

Spotting a fake watch used to be pretty easy. You could pick it up and feel the weight, look at the finishing on the corners of the case, listen to the movement, check the quality of the glass and the lettering on the dial. There were always loads of little tyre-kicking details that would end up leaving a supposedly expensive luxury watch looking distinctly cheap. Things have changed. Rubbish fakes that you can spot a mile off do still exist, but they are the type that people buy with open eyes. If you go to a market stall and spend £40 on a watch that claims to be a (possibly misspelt) Panerai, you’re not being ripped off – you know full well what you’re doing. But at the other end…

1 THERE’S STILL AN ESTATE Volvo’s just ditched all its estates and others are starting to fall away, but rest assured that the new fourth generation of Superb retains the load lugging wagon we all love. The Skoda family styling looks sharper, there’s more safety tech and even a permanent internet connection for OTA updates. 2 IT’S VERY SIMILAR TO THE OLD ONE There’s a lot carried over to this fourth gen Superb – the wheelbase is the same as the old version (the new one uses a refreshed version of the MQB chassis the old one is built on) but Skoda has managed to find 40mm of extra length and a bit of height (it’s a smidge narrower), which means extra headroom plus 20 litres more bootspace in the saloon…

£42,045 FOR Low carbon, safe, good looking, comfy, decent to drive, quick AGAINST Infuriating screen system, cramped back seat Eco warrior. Strange term eh? War is surely the most ecologically catastrophic of all human activity. Anyway, spoiler alert, the EX30 wins TopGear’s Eco Warrior of the Year award (see p96). It emerges from a green factory using a reuse/recycle/reduce strategy. It gets down the road on relatively little electricity. So the lifetime carbon footprint, including manufacture, is less than half that of a small petrol crossover. But is it a car you’d want? If no one buys it, the planet gains nothing. A small car is greener than a big one, which is why we really wish there were a properly small and light mainstream EV. This isn’t that, but…

£130,200 FOR Drives as well as Cayennes ever did. Crazy fast AGAINST Crazy expensive, too, with crucial tech optional Flick through these pages and you’ll see numerous performance SUVs, but none as pioneering as the Porsche Cayenne. While its badge is over 20 years old it remains relevant, not least with the launch of a handful of new hybrids as the third-gen SUV gets a big ol’ refresh. Most buyers will likely choose between the E-Hybrid and S E-Hybrid; these pair differing tunes of V6 petrol engine with a 172bhp electric motor and 25.9kWh battery for decent performance and emission-free range of up to 56 miles. The S is quicker (naturally) and gets standard air suspension – as an everyday Cayenne, it ought to be the one. But when a…

“What do I think? I think it’ll never see the light of day,” says the perplexed gentleman standing next to what I have just explained is the production version of a pickup with first deliveries at the end of the month. Coming in hot, a barman has abandoned his post at a nearby restaurant for which his boss “scolded him a bit” but he doesn’t care because “it’s so beautiful”. He proceeds to polish the car off with a boozy rag and when I let him open the door… the hyperventilation begins. The Cybertruck is less a vehicle, more an A-list celebrity, hounded wherever it goes. Every move recorded, every morsel of information twisted and reinterpreted until none of it makes sense. It’s a self-fuelling frenzy – every mention sends clicks…

Let’s put the title of this award to one side for a second. It’s a distraction. The T.50 isn’t like other hypercars. Less hype, mainly. First let’s think bigger. Cars exist to be driven, and since you’re reading TopGear you believe driving should be fun. Well, this drives better than anything else. So naming it the best hypercar of 2023 sells it just a tad short. I don’t know what else you might put in your personal list of ultimate driver’s cars. Ferrari F40 or F50 maybe, Porsche 997.2 GT3 RS, Lotus Elise, Singer DLS, Caterham Seven, McLaren F1 or P1, Alfaholics GTA-R, Honda NSX Type R? All would have a place on mine. And right now, I’d take the T.50 over any of them. It would be all too…

Admittedly, the monstrous swan neck mounted wakeboard sized wing is a bit of a giveaway. But it’s only when you go to put your bag in the front of a 992 GT3 RS you realise how keen the folks in Flacht were to win TG’s Track Car of the Year. See, the 911’s frunk is now a central radiator. Why? So the front wing vents can manage air more effectively. There are also flicks, flaps and rubberised roof trims for the same reason. Plus, a load of knobs to adjust the dampers, differential and TC. It’s the most extreme track focused 911 ever. So understandably intimidating. But then you drive it and find it’s approachable, alluring, and thrilling thanks to a screaming and addictive revvy racecar engine. So, you drive it…

BIGGEST MEH Grey UK car industry body the SMMT announced a fifth straight year with grey as the most popular new car colour. Green is languishing in seventh spot, but it was a big grower with numbers up 74 per cent on 2021. BEST CONCEPT VW ID.GTI Volkswagen has given us all hope with its new ID.GTI concept – the GTI badge will live on in our glorious electric future and it’ll only be glued onto proper hot hatches. This concept previews a GTI version of the ID.2 and will arrive in 2027. Sounds a bit slow, actually. At any rate – it looks good, VW, now you’ve just got to make it drive good. BEST MOMENT Ferrari wins again It was almost enough merely for Toyota’s five straight run of Le…

Typical conversation with an EX30 engineer. Me: “Why does it have almost no switches and put every function on the touchscreen? It’s driving me bananas. Because that’s the fashion? To be updatable? Or to save money?” Her: “None of those. It’s more sustainable.” Any switch has multiple little parts of different materials. And at least two cores of insulated connector wire into the loom. Lots of energy to assemble, and a recycling nightmare. For details see the WEEE bin at your council dump. Now, I’m not saying this decision wasn’t also swayed by cost or fashion, but if the climate gains then let’s celebrate. This philosophy permeates the car. Those dotted deco trims on the dash and doors? Their irregular white spots are chopped up waste uPVC window frames. Another option…

“NOW SEEMED LIKE THE PERFECT TIME TO SINK A LOAD OF CASH INTO NEW WHEELS AND MUD TERRAIN TYRES” On my neverending quest to ignore every car-shaped red flag imaginable, there was a small detail I missed out last month when buying a Mitsubishi Pajero Evolution. That being its eBay advert which proudly stated “cheapest Pajero Evo for sale right now”. Research and actually viewing the car were replaced with blind optimism. ’Cos it was the cheapest by over £6,000, and if it needed any little bits and bobs sorting – a dab of paint here and there – six grand is a pretty decent buffer. How bad could it really be? From the outside, not bad at all. The numberplate is broken, and the bumper has had paint which…

PLAYSTATION/PC, 1997 One year before Colin McRae Rally burst onto the scene, all four tyres lit up and leaving a crowd of pebble-dashed, thermos-clutching spectators in its wake, there was V-Rally. Launching on the PlayStation, V-Rally was a brilliant game that seemed to fundamentally misunderstand the concept of rallying. Instead of pitting you against the unyielding stopwatch, you instead battled directly against three other rally cars that occasionally would yield. Especially if you cynically shunted them into a pine tree. Still, if you were busy quibbling over the definition of rallying, you were missing out on one of the best and fastest racers around. For a start, V-Rally landed during a golden era of rally, when the Subaru Impreza and Mitsubishi Lancer Evo IV reigned supreme. Secondly, at the risk…

REPORT 11 MAZDA CX-60 Reason #489 to have a towbar: bikes. You can strap a triple bike rack on which is perfect for taking your kids’ bikes to the local pump track. But there’s a downside… you can’t open the boot while they’re attached. While I’m pretty sure the CX-60 isn’t alone in this, a boot hatch would make perfect sense, especially on this car. Mazda are you listening? AF REPORT 6 RANGE ROVER Lately, the Range Rover has been refusing to start in electric mode. This is annoying, as this is when I most need it – in this case, leaving a hotel. I charged overnight, sandwiched between an MG4 and a Nissan Leaf. The next morning their owners shot daggers: I’m not a proper EV. And then the…

If it looks like a GT-R and terrifies like a GT-R, is it… well, it’s actually called the Nissan Hyper Force, a radical high performance electric supercar that capped off Nissan’s run of concepts at the Japan Mobility Show. Concept, yes, but all the hallmarks of a future electrified Godzilla are present and correct, including a bombastic power output and bleeding edge tech. The HF Concept features a solid-state battery – they’re finally here!(ish) – and produces up to 1,000kW of power, which equates to 1,341bhp in old money. Nothing old about the way it’s delivered, of course. That herculean output is harnessed by e-4ORCE all-wheel-drive tech, packaged up inside a lightweight, angular body that not only pays homage to the current GT-R – boxy silhouette, quad tail-lights, anger –…

Though Mazda’s Japan Mobility Show stand was awash with MX-5 messaging – even going so far as showcasing a mint MkI – this stunning new concept coupe instead doffs its cap to the RX-7. About. Time. Welcome to the classiest show car on display in Tokyo. It’s called the Mazda Iconic SP, a compact, classically proportioned sports car built to simply embody “the joy of driving”. The fundamentals are fairly straightforward. There’s a rotary engine featuring twin rotors, though here – as in the MX-30 R-EV – it’s used merely to charge the battery which in turn powers the electric motors. No word on how many motors, but we know the rotary has been fitted “in the centre of the car, resulting in a low hood”. Mazda’s designers were keen…

01 Ferrari F50 GT Imagine an ‘F50 XX Evo’. Fixed roof, gnarly aero, slick tyres and a V12 with 740bhp. It very nearly happened, deafening grandstands across the continent. But dismayed at Porsche’s rule-bending 911 GT1 homologation special, Ferrari canned its GT1 after only three cars were made. 02 Alfa Romeo 164 Procar An intended replacement for F1’s BMW M1 Procar, Formula S should’ve been legend. Somehow, only Alfa Romeo was organised enough to build a 600bhp, 750kg prototype, and after its easygoing demo runs failed to impress, one Bernie Ecclestone snuffed out Formula S. 03 Porsche LMP2000 A real enigma of a tale, this: Porsche plotted a Le Mans winner for the new millennium using a mothballed V10 originally plotted for the 1992 Footwork F1 team. However, the car never raced. All…

“EVs ALWAYS CATCH FIRE” This summer a car park at Luton airport went up in an inferno. Social media speculation, authoritative as ever, pinned it to an EV fire. Thanks social media for your contribution. The fire brigade later said it was a diesel car. Now, an EV battery fire is bad news. It burns hot and is hard to extinguish. Indeed it can ignite again after several days. But burning isn’t a battery’s sole purpose in life. Whereas a combustion car carries a tankful of stuff whose one job is catching rapidly on fire. And it can do so when you don’t want it to. Electric car fires are very rare. They might stem from a fault or crash, but no offcial crash test ever caused one. EVs are…

£31,250 FOR Convenient in a way the EV isn’t, novelty factor, neat interior AGAINST Boring drive, small boot, having to explain the powertrain By any objective measure the MX-30 is Mazda’s worst car. It’s poky, it’s insipid to drive and it’ll run out of juice after barely more than 100 miles. Mazda isn’t fully sold on electric yet, and it shows. Predictably, not many MX-30s have found homes in the UK. To rejuvenate its oddball crossover (was it ever juvenated at all?), Mazda has wound the clock back to the final days of the RX-8. Two words: rotary power. Yup, the vehicle you see before you is Mazda’s first rotary engined car in over a decade. Two main reasons why: one is the soothing hit of nostalgia, the other is…

MERCEDES-AMG GLC 63 S E PERFORMANCE £108,995 FOR Technological prowess, more fun than we’d like to admit AGAINST Does a 2.3-tonne fast SUV deserve its place? The GLC 63 wades in with an enviable Top Trump card. A 470bhp tune of the Mercedes-AMG A45’s 2.0-litre engine sits up front and pairs with a 201bhp electric motor on the rear axle. Against the current BMW X3 M, this GLC 63 is a stern opponent. But those of us who adore driving will be acutely aware that a handsomely specified M3 Touring comes with less complication and a bigger boot for several thousand pounds less. SD HYUNDAI KONA ELECTRIC ULTIMATE £43,095 FOR Bigger boot, more spacious inside AGAINST Not everyone will like the Daft Punk styling If you thought the old Kona looked…

There was a suspicion about the M3 Touring, lurking beneath the hype. That it’d be a firework car. That beyond those who write for car magazines and about four others, no one actually wanted an M division 3-Series estate. This time last year – as we counted down the days until BMW handed over the keys to its perfect union of 500 horsepower and 500 litres of bootspace – sceptics pointed to the appetite for super SUVs (like the X3M) and how ye olde M5 Tourings welded themselves to showroom floors. Oh, and the new XM turned out to be a three-tonne turd. One dud in a year is careless, but two would’ve been a crisis. Panic over. Not only was the M3 Touring a dynamic triumph, it’s sold handsomely. In…

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Honda can make a good fast car. It’s been at it for some time, hitting all the right notes, creating a symphony of a performance back catalogue. What is a surprise is that the relatively humble Civic Type R could take on serious sports cars. And win. This is a car that can perform on your favourite back road any day of the week, and still put a smile on your face on the occasional weekend track day. It’s not about a perfect road and a vanishingly small operating window of opportunity, but a performance car whose adrenaline is closer to the surface, more accessible, and in many ways, more real. And that’s why the Honda Civic Type R is the TopGear Performance Car…

All carmakers seem to have premium pretensions. Even the premium ones will fix their output with a hard stare and wonder if it couldn’t be any posher. Take Peugeot, for instance – the French carmaker has made sporadic, largely unsuccessful attempts to spiff up its bargain bin cars over the last 20 years. But imagine back in 2003 when the firm strolled into the Frankfurt motor show to try and upstage the premium German set in their well defended backyard. This concept car was a preview for the production 407, due the following spring. The car to take the fight to the likes of Audi and BMW, sealing Peugeot’s place at the mid-level executive’s company car table, reserving a spot at your local fancy golf course, top of the list…

IS THE CONTI GT REALLY 20 YEARS OLD? Yes, it’s two whole decades since the two-door W12 coupe spearheaded the VW Group-bankrolled resurgence of the bewinged Crewe marque. The MkI version was heavily revamped in 2010 then replaced entirely in 2018, so the only component these two share are the motors for retracting the rear side windows. HOW MUCH DID THE CONTINENTAL REVITALISE BENTLEY? Its effect was sensational. In 1998 Bentley sold just 414 new cars. But £500m of factory investment later, and thanks to a platform which also supported VW supremo Ferdinand Piëch’s Phaeton superlimo, Bentley had a £110k bestseller shifting over 7,000 examples a year by 2004. These days one in every three Bentleys sold is a Conti. STILL BIG, HEAVY, AND LUXEY: WHAT’S CHANGED? The spirit of…

GO TO TOPGEAR.COM FOR MORE MIND-BLOWING MANUFACTURER GUIDES What’s MG and when did it start making cars? MG was started as a side hustle from Viscount William Morris’s car garage, with manager Cecil Kimber modifying Morris Oxfords and selling them on with the Morris Garages badge on the front. The viscount’s entire business (which also included Wolseley, Riley, Morris and various manufacturing outfits) was folded in with Austin to create the British Motor Corporation in 1952. Another merger saw BMC become the British Leyland Motor Corporation in 1968, and the whole thing was partly nationalised in 1975 after it collapsed. British Leyland was renamed the Rover Group in 1986, then it was owned by British Aerospace for a while and eventually bought by BMW in 1994. The Germans kept the good…

EA Sports WRC Glancing at yet another licensed WRC game, you might be wondering why you should give a flying… uh, finish about EA Sports WRC. But for the first time this new WRC game is built on the foundation of the superlative Dirt Rally series. The convincing handling model that made Dirt Rally so brilliant can be enjoyed here whether you’re on a joypad or a marriage-threateningly expensive sim setup. For the sport’s part, it brings with it the hybrid Rally1 vehicles, which are phenomenally capable machines with an alarming turn of speed on a gravel track. The game also hosts the best rally stages we’ve played, plucked directly from real world routes. Brilliant as it is as a recreation of the sport, with the game simulating just about…

THIS MONTH: AMAZON RIVIAN VAN Something a little bit different this month because you can’t actually buy this vehicle and, unless you get yourself a job at Amazon, you’re unlikely to ever drive one. Depending on where you live in the world though, you could see them on the road every single day. Yep, it’s the Amazon Electric Delivery Van. Amazon contracted Rivian to build 100,000 of these things by 2030, and it recently announced that more than 10,000 are already in use in the US, plus over 1,000 in Germany. They’re used in the day, charged overnight. The van comes in two different sizes, called the 500 and the 700, with the latter being slightly longer and wider. It’s big business for Rivian too and might end up being one…

An SUV with a nose lift. Well, that’s a new one on me. But then this isn’t an SUV, is it? It’s an FUV. Ferrari Utility Vehicle. God it’s hard not to make fun of Ferrari sometimes. Not that you need to when it comes up with this stuff itself. FUV?! Ho, ho, ho. Nose lift?! Ha, ha, ha. And it charges how much for it?! He, he, he. Well, £313,360. Funny, provided you’re not the one laying down the folding. And it gets better. This one, as it sits here, is £411,619. A Porsche 911 of options – £4,109 of that is the nose lift. No, seriously, it is. Ferrari doesn’t joke about these things. That’s why the number is so exact – it has calculated precisely what it…

£55,570 FOR Quiet and comfortable cruiser. Backlit controls at last! AGAINST Not very exciting to look at. Infotainment still not perfect VW’s all-electric saloon has finally arrived. Certainly says something that the ID.4 and ID.5 SUVs were more of a priority after the ID.3 hatch, doesn’t it? Anyway, the ID.7 is still an important car, not least because it’ll go up against the likes of the BMW i4, Hyundai Ioniq 6 and Tesla Model 3. VW has focused on making it as aerodynamic as possible, so there’s a drag coefficient of 0.23. Unfortunately, that comes at the expense of any real styling. There’s a light bar across the front and some more LEDs at the rear, but the actual surfacing is pretty plain. Some might like that though, and if…

PLUS a £30 M&S gift card and TG’s Ferrari Collectors’ Edition Subscribe to BBC TopGear magazine and save an impressive 47 per cent on the usual shop price PLUS get a £30 M&S gift card and a TopGear Ferrari Collectors’ Edition! SUBSCRIBING IS EASY. SIMPLY GO ONLINE, CALL OR SCAN GREAT REASONS TO SUBSCRIBE > Subscribe and get our Ferrari bookazine and £30 M&S Gift Card > Pay £37.99 for your first 12 issues – saving 54% on the 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/TGP124 03330 162 130 and quote TGP124** * This offer is open to UK delivery addresses only and is subject to availability. Offer will end…

BARGAIN OF THE YEAR Dacia Spring LUXURY CAR OF THE YEAR Rolls-Royce Spectre Don’t laugh. OK, laugh then. A Rolls-Royce beside a Dacia. The most expensive usable electric car against the cheapest. I say usable so as to disqualify the outliers, the electric hypercars and the Citroen Ami. But apart from both acting as respective bookends of the price dimension, they have something else in common. Each, more so than cars in between, is a compelling use for electric power. Rolls-Royce has spent 117 years perfecting petrol propulsion, culminating in a twin-turbo V12 with an eight-speed auto box that can time its shifts by reading the road ahead via its satnav. This marvel of a powertrain conveys a new Phantom with smoothness and silence that almost matches that in the…

If you want to start a very specific fight with people on the internet, then you merely have to deal in absolutes. Something like “The 70 Series is peak Toyota Land Cruiser” will do it. Then you just sit back and watch the digital world eat itself with all the empathy of a recently fired bullet. But while the refreshed 70 Series Toyota is making for some markets is a remix of an old favourite (literally a 70 Series with LED headlights and added Apple CarPlay), the company has also delivered on new material. And in terms of sweet spots, it looks like it hits quite a few. Land Rover Defender and Ineos Grenadier customers prepare to be irritated – there will a new king in town in 2024 and…

If you’ve ever had to pop into the office on a Saturday morning, or bunked off the school disco and gone exploring the dark corridors after hours, you’ll remember that weirdly invigorating sense of being somewhere that should be hustling, bustling, noisy and alive when it’s empty. A little bit eerie, yet slightly thrilling. That’s what I was expecting from out of season Ibiza. Desolate beauty. The superclubs have all held their closing parties, the DJs have boarded their private jets, and the hotels are commencing Operation Fumigate. For six months, this rock in the Balearic Sea hibernates. Nobody throws their hands up in the air. Apart from me. We’d aimed to drive onto Ibiza Town’s bougie marina, park alongside the yachts, and photograph the chunkily handsome Kia EV9 looking…

When was the last time you had a big idea? I’m talking about a real brain fizzer with boundless possibilities. Usually, these are identified by intense periods of daydreaming that follow, focused on how you’ll spend your billions now that untold riches are merely a formality. The problem is that bit in between – all the figuring out, organising and worrying – and so another solid gold money maker slips away. Christian von Koenigsegg has these lightbulb moments more often than I cut my toenails, but he doesn’t operate like the rest of us. That pesky middle part? It’s where he chooses to live – without fear of cost, or doubt of outcome. Christian’s latest brain biscuit involves taking his already fiercely complicated and innovative nine-speed Lightspeed automatic transmission and…

CAR OF THE YEAR 2023 Several Hyundai N engineers tell me they were reluctant to join the Ioniq 5 N project. They’re petrolheads. Mind you that makes them just the right people to do it. Their i20N and i30N models are prime examples of how a great manual petrol car feels. Analog and engaging. But the N people’s petrol cars show a prominent digital forward orientation too, giving you endless configurability of their electronic functions: ESP, traction control, e-diff, damping, throttle map, sound enhancement. So these same engineers set out to make the Ioniq 5 N feel like a lairy petrol car, but then they became converts to what electrification could do. They took advantage of an EV’s digital domains to give you a vast extra set of adjustable parameters.…

ME YERS MANX (1965) Price now: £8,242 Harris says: OK you might not be able to get an original Meyers Manx at this price point, but you’ll get a very decent replica buggy built on an original Beetle chassis and with an air-cooled engine. Perfect for the daily commute. CITROEN MEHARI (1975) Price now: £15,000 Harris says: Originally imported from Spain, this gloriously orange Mehari with an impressive 82,000 miles on the clock currently lives on the UK’s south coast. Almost seems like a bargain at this price, doesn’t it? AUSTIN MINI MOKE (1968) Price now: £27,995 Harris says: This is an original 1968 Austin Mini Moke that was restored (at a cost of over £17k) in 2012 and has apparently only covered 400 miles since. Remarkably it has only had…

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…