Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2025 i BBC Top Gear Magazine

Car launches are strange but wonderful things. A tense battle of wits between PRs and journalists played out in stunning locations. Every detail is meticulously planned, from the road route to the seating plan for dinner and, of course, the strategy to position the car just as the manufacturer foresees. There are always one or two lines that appear time and again, drumming the key message into the brains of motoring journalists. Of course, sometimes these trips allow extra latitude. One that springs to mind was way back in 2004, where as a fresh faced 12 year old I was flown to Australia for the ‘Vauxhall’ Monaro launch. A rebadged Holden fitted with a 5.7-litre V8 and shot through with an infectious Aussie sense of humour, there wasn’t much ‘positioning’…

ISSUES 1–100 NORTHERN IRELAND The TG timeline TG 001 October 1993 TopGear in paper form lives! Every new car on sale is gathered on the Brooklands banking. Ambitious. But unrubbish TG 012 September 1994 Our first ever Awards issue rates the McLaren F1 as “most overhyped” and Nissan Micra as “best supermini”. Eh? It’s called Windy Hill Road and I’ve never heard of it. I know most of the Antrim coast but this is a little further south and inland, so doesn’t get the love reserved for its higher profile neighbour. We prefer twists and turns, as a rule, and this is pretty much a long straight, 12 miles or so connecting Limavady to Coleraine beneath Binevenagh cliffs. But what it lacks in corner entertainment it more than makes up…

TG 305 February 2018 Normally we do new cars… but new cars are getting expensive and complicated. Would you buy a used car from this man? TG 309 June 2018 Ace new Fiesta ST takes to the skies as we embark on a UK encircling roadtrip in yet another mega fast Ford. RIP TG 310 July 2018 Attempt to drive Jag EV from London to Land’s End causes marital strife for Paul Horrell and Rowan Horncastle ISSUES 301-400 WALES TG 311 August 2018 McLaren’s downforcey supercar looks truly hideous… apart from on TG’s Ayrton inspired cover treatment TG 312 September 2018 New Bullitt Mustang’s landmark shoot with McQueen original. Then we annoy the Congestion Charge zone in V8 Aston Cygnet TG 322 June 2019 Snazzy manga cover offsets our disappointment…

Because of pesky inconveniences like the occasional bankruptcy, mutual loathing and being literally dead, history has not recorded what Ettore Bugatti reckoned to a LaFerrari, if Enzo would’ve rated an Aventador SVJ, or if Ferrucio Lamborghini wouldn’t have bothered creating a Prancing Horse rival if he’d had a bash at launch control in a Chiron Super Sport. But here at the inaugural TopGear Test Track Big Boss Level Hypercar Track Day, we are about to find out what the brains behind the modern world’s most extreme performance cars think to each other’s homework. Don’t ask us about the insurance bill. Just don’t. Joining us on Stig’s patch we have Christian von Koenigsegg, founder of the record breaking, patent collecting Swedish hypercar outpost based on an old fighter jet base. From…

Small electric cars – whatever happened to them? Wasn’t that long ago we had BMW i3s and all sorts scampering around, then suddenly… we didn’t. Vanished off the face of the earth, leaving only a trail of crudely sellotaped posters withering on street lamps across the country. ‘MISSING: HAVE YOU SEEN THIS E-UP? ANSWERS TO THE NAME OF TIDDLES, REWARD.’ There are precious few e-runabouts so our leaner, greener future is being shouldered by crossovers right now. Make it make sense. Anyway. These two – the new Renault 4 and Ford Puma Gen-E – are the result of polar opposite strategies. One’s a ground up effort on a bespoke platform from a brand that’s smashed its EVs out of the park lately, the other… is the Ford. Not to write…

GO TO TOPGEAR.COM FOR EXTENDED TG GARAGE REPORTS, AND TO EXPLORE THE ARCHIVE £114,015 OTR/£135,058 as tested/£1,560 pcm WHY IT’S HERE: Furiously complex, huge and heavy – is the M5 headed in the right direction? DRIVER: JETHRO BOVINGDON THIS MONTH THE M5 TOURING was pressed into towing duty. I needed it to pull my stricken D Super (which was leaking hydraulic fluid, as usual, but also had various split hoses and fuel lines) from my house in Northamptonshire to Citroen Classics in Staines, plus carry four adults on a boiling hot day. Not quite the conventional M5 use case, but it does rather demonstrate the breadth of capability of the M division’s hybrid super estate. It coped beautifully. The ride is actually better with four blokes aboard and with Sport mode selected…

GO TO TOPGEAR.COM FOR EXTENDED TG GARAGE REPORTS, AND TO EXPLORE THE ARCHIVE £65,870 OTR/£69,335 as tested/£609 pcm WHY IT’S HERE: Is living with a cartoonishly rugged American icon in the UK charmingly adventurous or just a recipe for discomfort? DRIVER: ROWAN HOR NCASTLE GRAB YOUR SUNGLASSES AND pray for your retinas as a bright green Mojito monster truck has entered the TopGear Garage. Please give a warm welcome to our brand new Jeep Wrangler Rubicon. Yep, an icon is in the house. The Wrangler is the OG. This is the brand that gave the world the go anywhere 4x4 during World War Two – and now gives it to anyone who wants to pop to the Co-op. The Wrangler, which first appeared in 1986 as a spiritual successor to the Willys…

GO TO TOPGEAR.COM FOR EXTENDED TG GARAGE REPORTS, AND TO EXPLORE THE ARCHIVE “Longer exposure to it only heightened its many qualities” £51,905 OTR/£52,605 as tested/£777 pcm WHY IT’S HERE: To find out if any front drive hot hatch can be worth £51,905 DRIVER: JETHRO BOVINGDON HONESTLY, I DIDN’T DO ENOUGH. The Civic Type R took me to SpaFrancorchamps, Le Mans and Silverstone. Even so, now that it’s gone there’s a nagging feeling that I should have enjoyed and exercised it even more, especially as it’s disappearing from UK showrooms altogether. Honda recently released detailed of the Ultimate Edition, a swansong for the FL5 Type R and perhaps the very last of its kind. This seems tragic. A focused, lithe, highly efficient performance car that’s being killed by legislation that rates a…

My knuckles have just reseated from Bobby Bolton’s handshake. He’s now 15 feet above me, shirtless, merrily sawing a hefty tree branch that’s blocking the progress of his towering camper-truck. His fiancée, Marie, surveys from a safe distance while their two dogs, Red and Rubia, snooze in the cab. They’ve seen more unusual Monday mornings than today’s. Bobby’s story is the one we’ve all toyed with after that bad day at work, that heartrending break up, that moment of ‘sod this, I’m going to tell my boss to shove it, cash in the house, pool my savings, and go see the world’. Normally, a good night’s sleep smooths it over. Not Bobby. After an 11 year relationship dissolved and he spied a well travelled Land Rover Defender pulling up outside…

EVERY ONCE IN A WHILE LAMBORGHINI GRABS ITS LATEST V12 supercar, dresses it with edgier bodywork and sells a handful to its most fanatical collectors. This is the latest in the line. Named after a Mexican fighting bull, the Fenomeno is quite simply the fastest, most powerful Lamborghini road car… ever. With 1,065bhp and a 0–62mph time of 2.4 seconds, it earns King Lambo bragging rights over the 1,001bhp Revuelto on which it’s based. Only 10bhp of the power bump comes from an upgraded 6.5-litre V12, with Lamborghini engineers admitting it’s been very difficult to find those gains in an engine that already revs to 9,500rpm while complying with worldwide emissions rules. So it’s actually the electric bit that’s doing more heavy lifting. Three electric motors generate 242bhp – 50bhp…

AUTONOMOUS CARS RAISE DEEP ethical questions. Questions like: if a self driving car causes a crash, who’s responsible? And: who owns the data they generate? And: if a company keeps claiming, over and over, its self driving car will reach the road next year, but it never happens, does it still deserve the oxygen of publicity? Ahead of our self driving car reaching the road next year, at TrustUs Laboratories we’re tackling these big ethical dilemmas head on. Top of our list is decision making in emergency situations - the so called trolley problem. If a crash is unavoidable, how should a self driving car choose between, say, hitting a school bus or a car full of pensioners? But what if baby Hitler is driving that school bus? Thanks to…

TG 120 September 2003 Clarkson’s column gets a shoutout for winning an award on the cover. Meanwhile, remember when £25k coupes were all the rage? ISSUES 101-200 SCOTLAND TG 131 August 2004 Forget new 911 vs baby Aston: Paul Horrell calls it for the BMW 1-Series over the VW Golf. What does he know? TG 132 September 2004 Three hardcore supercars rendezvous in Paris after dark, plus we test every fast Audi RS wagon… ever. And a Renault Kangoo MERCEDES-BENZ CLK 63 AMG BLACK SERIES Price new/now: £99,517/£110,000 Powertrain: 6208cc nat asp V8, 507bhp, 464lb ft Transmission: 7spd auto, RWD Performance: 0–62mph in 4.2secs, 188mph Economy: 18.5mpg, 369g/km CO2 Weight: 1,760kg Are you, like this 2008 car, passing your 17th birthday? Time to get a driving licence. Congratulations. As a prevocal toddler you wouldn’t have…

It’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye. Or in this case, loses a clutch master cylinder and the dignity it provides for a 35 year old Lamborghini Diablo on the Great St Bernard Pass. Because yes, that was me living through cliche, hazards on, wondering what the hell I was going to do with a venerable Diablo on a twisty mountain road with a clutch pedal that had gone from requiring 42kg of pressure (yes, really), to feeling like the footrest of a pedal bin. It was all going so well, too. A 1990 first generation Diablo on a sunny mountain road on the Italian/Swiss border, Matt Monro playing vaguely in the back of my head, the craggy bits of Italy dopplering the deep chested yowl of…

Sometimes the warm hug of nostalgia you receive from playing an old racing game extends to the cars that feature in it. Jaguar XJ220 on the Amiga, and later the Sega Mega CD, is a 16-bit tribute to the Jaguar XJ220, the British made supercar that was, until the McLaren F1 rocked up, the fastest production car in the world. One of those cars that looked the length of a canal boat at the time, but would probably fit into the boot of a 5-Series these days. Much like the Lotus Turbo Challenge games, this is a pseudo-3D racing game that sees you touring the world, racing through different environments and weather conditions. Unlike the Lotus series, though, this isn’t solely a one-make race. In the Wild West of 1990s…

“The general feel Mini is going for seems to be ‘organised fun’” £29,100 OTR/£39,700 as tested/£695 pcm WHY IT’S HERE: Is the largest Mini ever overinflated or a big success? DRIVER: ESTHER NEVE THE TIME HAS COME TO LOOK AT the Mini’s ‘experience modes’. For anyone unfamiliar with the whole Mini vibe, the general feel seems to be ‘organised fun’. Which means – theatrically overexcited intake of breath – you can choose one of eight thrilling options. These experience modes are: Go-Kart, Core, Vivid, Green, Personal, Timeless, Balance and Trail. Most of these simply change the cabin lighting, sound preferences and look of the screen. The much vaunted Go-Kart mode (I know – ridiculous name, but Mini won’t relinquish the whole go-kart thing) not only yells a WOO HOO when you…

£68,045 OTR/£71,816 as tested/£725 pcm WHY IT’S HERE: Is the souped up Buzz a top spec EV worth saving for? DRIVER: JACK RIX RARELY, IN EV LAND, IS THE MORE powerful ‘performance’ variant the one we’d recommend. How times change. Problem is most standard EVs already feel pretty fizzy off the line and up to 40mph, so all bigger wheels, wider tyres and extra/more potent motors achieve is trashing the range, and potentially the ride. Naturally when VW offered the chance to swap our standard seven seater Buzz for the more powerful one, we ignored this and bit their arm off. For a mere £3,700 more than the Style seven seater, we now have a GTX also in LWB form, but with a six seat configuration. That means two captain’s chairs…

Dear TopGear, My trusty 37-year-old Volvo 740 has come to a sudden irreversible stop. As an antiques dealer I need a car to carry wardrobes and various bits of ancient tat that I can whack a hefty margin on. Can you help? Lovejoy, Melford The antiques trade never gets old, does it. After all, one person’s tat is another person’s treasure the difference between the two seems to be a few hours of sanding and a fresh lick of paint? but if you put in the hours you deserve the reward. You must have treasured that Volvo for it to have lasted so long, LJ, though most of the rest of the car world seems to have decided that estates sit firmly in the tat column these days? Such a…

YOU MAY HAVE SEEN THE F1 GTR-apeing S1 LM? This is the other model revealed by the newly formed Gordon Murray Special Vehicles – a homage to iconic longtail racers. It’s the first under the ‘SV Design’ pillar, which focuses on ultra low volume runs based on GMA production cars. There will only be 24 of these built, one for every hour of some race in France, and they’re all sold out. Sorry about that. The fundamentals are a blend of T.50 and T.50S, so it’s a three seater, with a six speed manual and the T.50’s 654bhp, 4.0-litre, 12,100rpm V12, which let’s face it, is a handy place to begin. Beyond that it’s all new. The bodywork is inspired not just by Gordon’s own F1 GTR longtail racecar –…

ALTHOUGH CAR DESIGN IS A CREATIVE process, it’s also one that entails applied knowledge. Which is what AI is good at. By the way, in talking about design, I don’t mean the very creative process of visual design. It’s trivially easy to type ‘photo rendering of 2028 Porsche 911’ into the subject line of a generative AI. So it’s a shame cost cutting bosses are now pushing skilled and creative humans out of their design studio jobs. I’m talking about using AI for the engineering design. An early example is bio-mimicry. The shape of animal bones has evolved over millions of years to be the strongest and lightest possible for the job each has to do – even though they look nothing like the regular geometric shape of conventional structural…

The finest failures in automotive history What’s the opposite of nominative determinism? Whatever it’s called, meet the dictionary definition: Arrival, the British electric vanmaker that never quite… arrived. Founded in 2015 by former Russian politician Denis Sverdlov, Arrival appeared destined for the big time. Instead of a single megafactory, Arrival planned to establish a bunch of small assembly facilities around the world, building intelligent, battery powered vehicles spun off their scaleable ‘skateboard’ platform. These vehicles would include vans in a range of sizes, a bus and even, if things went well, a car. To start, things went well. Despite Arrival’s prototype creations boasting absolutely no styling, investment for the Bicester based startup poured in, including more than $100 million from Hyundai and Kia. In 2020, the American parcel delivery firm…

What’s Frank up to? This past month has been busy, starting off in Hong Kong to review his full size marine vessel design. Then to Shanghai where his eVTOL design work with AutoFlight is Hying forwards fast. Next up an exciting meeting in Sarnico on Lake Iseo. Then off to a congress in Vienna… Bentley EXP 15 concept AFTER JAGUAR’S CONTROVERSIAL TYPE 00, Bentley has followed suit with a divisive concept of its own. Starting at the front, the gargantuan grille gives recent BMWs a run for their money. And annihilates them. Design over purpose like this is a surefire way to create a short lived design feature, especially when it’s meant for a futuristic electric car. The front lighting signature and headlight design regrettably fall prey to the boring…

CARX STREET £25/£15, Xbox/PC With the Need for Speed series on hiatus for the time being, CarX Street has arrived to fill the void in the hearts of people who maintain that the very first Fast and Furious film is still the best one. Arriving in Sunset City, possibly the most generic looking video game city of all time, you're immediately presented with a map full of challenges and tasked with impressing a variety of characters whose artwork and voice lines have more than a whiff of ChatGPT about them. Still, the drift oriented cars are reasonably fun to chuck about, particularly when you rip the handbrake at high speed, and while graphical performance is choppy it's hard to ignore that the game costs a fraction of big budget releases…

Evidently there should be a Veyron here. Its benchmark mangling, excess all areas numbers defined the TopGear era. And the BMW i8 was a landmark, even if it didn’t outsell the old guard. And there’s the hybrid hypercar Holy Trinity, and the McLaren F1 GOAT, and the F1 obsessed Ferrari Enzo… and that’s just the supercars. What abut the off roaders, the luxury expresses, the everyday bargains? Trying to sum up each century innings of TopGear magazines with just four cars since October 1993 is like trying to give Stig a proctology exam. A thankless task guaranteed to end in a fight. So, forgive us if your favourite isn’t here. These aren’t definitively ‘the four best cars of TopGear magazine’s lifetime’. That’s for you to argue in the pub. They’re…

ISSUES 201–300 ENGLAND TG 215 March 2011 Bad issue for the English. New McLaren loses to 458. Lotus loses to Porsche 911. Back then we were rubbish at footie too TG 220 August 2011 We’re back on form! Baby Rangie excels in Scotland, Iceland, Vegas and Dubai (and impresses the telly trio) TG 221 September 2011 Cover coated in rubber (really) leads to many dirty fingerprints. First drone crash in TG history on this shoot… FORD FIESTA ST 200 Price new/now: £22,745/£12,000 Powertrain: 1596cc turbocharged 4cyl, 212bhp, 236lb ft Transmission: 6spd manual, FWD Performance: 0–62mph in 6.7secs, 143mph Economy: 46.3mpg, 140g/km CO2 Weight: 1,163kg TG 234 September 2012 Aston says we’ll never drive its One-77 supercar. TG ignores it. Borrows one off an owner. Rival mags still salty TG 248 October 2013 Happy 20th birthday!…

ON ROAD The Mustang GTD is an all in kind of a car. Nothing by halves. It doesn’t merely rumble, it bellows like Pavarotti with his pipes fully open. Its Popeye bodywork doesn’t just attract your attention, it clubs you on the nose, puts you in a headlock and pins your eyelids open, and it doesn’t lightly grill its tyres… it causes natural disasters. Had I known les pompiers were on high alert for forest fires, perhaps I would have thought twice before sending a plume of smoke off the hillside matched only in height and density by the last eruption of Vesuvius. But here we are being rapped on the knuckles, for playing silly buggers in a car that was designed for precisely that. To be fair to the…

BENTLEY BROOKLANDS (2008) £230,000 (when new) PURE, UNAPOLOGETIC INDULGENCE. That’s why the Brooklands is so unbelievably special. Somehow it slathers the spirit of a pre-WW2 special coachbuilt for aristocracy into an austerity era runout special. A car seemingly snuck out the door while the Volkswagen Group board was busy frowning at the balance sheets. Meanwhile, the Bentley boys and girls had one of their very finest hours. All we have here, really, is an Azure with a hardtop welded onto its rump. An 18 foot long coupe with seats for four to lounge in, a cliff face veneer of dashboard peppered with dials and shrouded switchgear, and somewhere behind the polished chicken wire the torquiest engine this side of a Bugatti W16. The 6.75-litre warhorse that traces its family tree…

GO TO TOPGEAR.COM FOR EXTENDED TG GARAGE REPORTS, AND TO EXPLORE THE ARCHIVE £254,200 OTR/£XXXXX as tested/£5,077 pcm WHY IT’S HERE: What has a hybrid makeover – and Mulliner buffing – added to the world’s best grand tourer? DRIVER: OLLIE KEW “THIS IS AN EXPERIENCE RESERVED for our most special clients,” explains the man from Bentley. I’m greeted at the door to The Mews, a secluded private house Bentley maintains a couple of miles from its Crewe headquarters, once the CEO’s official residence. Hedges are set square straight. The gravel seems to have been hand washed. Inside, the drinks cabinet is fashioned from the same chocolatey veneers as Bentley dashboards. Dining chairs are covered in the same sumptuous leather as the massaging thrones aboard the cars. Anyone who buys a Bentley can…

“I’d lost touch of the fact you don’t need all those luxuries” £25,945 OTR/£26,595 as tested/£128 pcm WHY IT’S HERE: The Duster now looks funky and has gone hybrid: still a budget hero? DRIVER: CHARLIE ROSE AND JUST LIKE THAT, MY TIME with the Dacia Duster is up. After eight months and more than 4,000 miles of daily driving, video shoots, nursery drop offs and the occasional roadtrip, it’s time to hand back the key. And do you know what? I’m going to miss it. I’ll admit, when the Duster first arrived, I sensed a bit of snobbery about myself. I’d spent a lot of time in cars surrounded by soft touch materials, temperature controlled seats and mood lighting, and I’d lost touch of the fact that you just don’t need…

This month I did something which brought great shame upon my entire family, and it didn’t involve going to a Coldplay concert with some friends from work. It’s actually much worse than that. I showed interest in a car for sale, had the seller provide information, pictures and a best price for a speedy sale, only to turn round and change my mind when arranging a date to collect it. I’ve become the one thing I swore I’d never be, a car buying messer, and I feel truly awful. The only other time this happened was back in 2014 when I viewed a stock R32 GT-R Skyline for sale. It was priced at £7,500 – an utter bargain by today’s standards but a fairly normal price back then. I walked…