Innholdsfortegnelse for November 2025 i BBC Top Gear Magazine

BUGATTI HOME CHIRON DORMEUSE It's a close run thing, but we reckon the W16 engined hypercar was probably a slightly better tribute to Louis Chiron than this Bugatti branded dormeuse. And yes, we did have to look up what a dormeuse was before writing this. BENTLEY VERVE COFFEE TABLE Surely Bentley's furniture collection should be full of wingback chairs and oak dressers? This modern glass and metal creation would stick out like a sore thumb in a country cottage. And is it really a good idea to have a curved surface on a coffee table? MERCEDES-BENZ ESPRESSO CUPS Ah yes, because as soon as someone mentions an espresso, we immediately think of the Germans. No wait, that's not quite right, is it? Still, Mercedes will happily put on its best…

I don't often reference Biblical verse for many reasons. Mostly, because I don't know any. However, watching the Monterey Car Week from afar I am moved to quote Corinthians 10:14 “Therefore, my dear friends, flee from idolatry”. Now, I'm sure this whole event is great fun to attend and there's no denying the mouthwatering machinery gathered to celebrate car culture past, present and future. But these people need to calm down. I've never heard so much “one of one” fawning, “just 64 miles from new” heresy celebrated as a good thing and “significant car ready for its next custodian” bollocks in my life. Cars as deities. The holiest of holies brought together to be worshipped and revered. From afar, of course. The auctions were like a scene from a grotesque…

The world is awash in restomods, continuation cars and misty eyed tributes these days, cars that lean on stories from the past to charge exorbitant amounts in the present. Monterey Car Week is the epicentre of this feeding frenzy and this year saw an explosion of short run specials with telephone number pricetags… only one forced us to park our cynicism. Here was something based on the otherworldly V12, manual, three seat underpinnings of the GMA T.50, styled to look like a Le Mans winning McLaren F1 GTR that had tripped into a time machine and been lavished with an even more exotic mechanical menu. Only five will ever be built, costing many millions each, all sold to the same man. But this isn't Gordon Murray plundering his back catalogue…

“AUDI SAYS THIS IS 95 PER CENT THE REAL DEAL. ON SALE IN 2027” Did you notice Audi gave up on two doors? The TT wasn't replaced, we still mourn the R8 and the A5 badge is on the new A4. Even the Germans are struggling to explain their logic there. Into this sportiness vacuum, Audi's new design team has poured a pretty coupe cabrio called the Concept C. Ignore that name, they didn't have to time to come up with one, but despite our protestations it won't be called TT – too big, too expensive to carry the badge, says Audi CEO, Gernot Döllner. Boo, hiss. Audi says this is 95 per cent the real deal, though. On sale in 2027, riding on the ‘delayed more than HS2’ platform…

NISSAN 350Z (2003) £25,335 (when new) I'M WORKING FROM HOME WHEN I HEAR the 350Z arrive. The deep rumble vibrates through my house. I can't resist and run to the front window like a child, hoping to catch a glimpse as it pulls up outside. There it is, all muscular, loud and confident. A Nissan. Yep, Nissan. Not exactly the first name that comes to mind when you think sports car. The 350Z, now over 20 years old, feels so detached from the current range of wall to wall crossovers and EVs. We didn't know it at the time, but back then it was the tail end of Nissan's Z car series – a range that would die with the demise of the sixth generation coupe, the 370Z, in 2020.…

£68,500/£73,612/£855 WHY IT'S HERE: Is the basic Macan the best Macan? DRIVER: BEN PULMAN THIS MONTH I'VE BEEN understeering. Not those horror scenarios that Jethro and Ollie experienced for this month's cover story. No, my moments of understeer have been much more sedate. My excuse: the Macan we're now running doesn't have rear axle steering, whereas the Macan Turbo (on TG's fleet until last month) did have the £1,445 option. A few weeks on and parking is still comparatively hard, as are tight junctions. You're probably scoffing, but I reckon if it was an entirely different car my brain would compute the difference. Yet from behind the wheel there's little visual, so the ol’ bonce hasn't quite caught up yet. Either that or eight weeks of having the kids at…

£68,045 OTR/£71,816 as tested/£725 pcm WHY IT'S HERE: Is this souped up Buzz a top spec EV worth saving for? DRIVER: JACK RIX THE GAUNTLET HAS BEEN LAID. CAN THE ID.BUZZ GTX make it from Sussex to our holiday digs in St Denis le Gast, Normandy, on a single charge – with a little assistance from a cross channel ferry? Some numbers: from home to the Newhaven ferry port is a very gentle 22 miles. Then from Dieppe to the house is a further 172 miles, for a total of 192. Comfortably within the claimed WLTP range of 280, a mere 2.26mpkWh required. But here's the reality of roadtripping an EV, especially one with the aerodynamics of a cheese sandwich that weighs almost three tonnes… at motorway speeds (especially French…

GO TO TOPGEAR.COM FOR EXTENDED TG GARAGE REPORTS, AND TO EXPLORE THE ARCHIVE £60,835 OTR/£61,815 as tested/£813 pcm WHY IT'S HERE: Does a surfeit of sportiness compromise an otherwise perfectly good EV? DRIVER: PAUL HORRELL IN MY TIME WITH THE TAVASCAN it has covered 7,249 miles, for which I've put in 2,783kWh of electricity. A consumption of 2.6mpkWh. To stress, that's the grid-to-wheel figure. The car claimed 3.0 on average, which is fair enough because you lose about 10 per cent in charging. The 3.0mpkWh figure on a 77kWh battery equates to 230 miles range. And a bit crap. I didn't drive madly fast and much of it was summer. The tyres are too big, the body too bulky, the motors too numerous for a better result. Cost per mile? At…

£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 HORNCASTLE A JEEP WRANGLER (ESPECIALLY on chunky mud terrain tyres, in Rubicon spec) doesn't exactly shout mile munching grand tourer. Yet I've already done more than 4,000 miles in it in two and a bit months – without leaving the UK. The main reason is that it's an enabler. You don't have to worry about where you park it, whether it can get there, or what you look like. But that doesn't mean it's necessarily good at the job or even fit for purpose. In classic reverse Tardis fashion, it's cramped. I'm 6ft 2in and on the outer limits of driving…

GO TO TOPGEAR.COM FOR EXTENDED TG GARAGE REPORTS, AND TO EXPLORE THE ARCHIVE “Practical isn't dull, and nor is the purchase price” £24,995 OTR/£26,700 as tested/£114 pcm WHY IT'S HERE: Value motoring for a decently sized SUV. But is the Bigster bigster value or just cheap? DRIVER: TOM FORD ODDLY, NO ONE REALLY FOUGHT FOR the right to run the Dacia Bigster, but that worked to my advantage, because I asked for it. I do get it: the others’ reticence might be because they perceive it as a ‘cheaper’ car with less prestige than something from the usual suspects, possibly because it's got a very practical set of power and performance figures and possibly that they're all busy miming oversteer and getting all dippy about Nordschleife lap times. But it 's…

When Sukhpal Singh Ahluwalia was just 13 years old, Ugandan despot Idi Amin claimed that he had been instructed by God to expel the circa 80,000 Ugandan Asians from their country. They had 90 days to leave. As a child, Sukhpal had developed a love of cars by accompanying his father in a MkI Ford Cortina to the three Total petrol stations that the family owned in Jinja, a city 50 miles east of the Ugandan capital Kampala. Now, they arrived at RAF Greenham Common as refugees with nothing. A year later and they were finally resettled into social housing in London. “Can you imagine the cars that I saw in London at that time? That was the first thing that struck me,” he recalls. “There were Jaguar XJ6s and…

ROBOTAXIS ARE THE MOST THRILLING promise of our driverless future! Who wants to be driven home by a human who actually knows where they're going, when they could instead put their fate in a faceless automaton developed by a weird billionaire? TrustUs Laboratories is, of course, at the forefront of the robotaxi revolution. This month, we received permission to run autonomous driving trials on the public roads of our home town of Nether Kettling, allowing us to conduct our first robotaxi journey with BORIS, our Ford Mondeo based autonomous rolling test bed. Our first robotaxi customer? Me. Partly because, as chief project engineer, this would allow me to gain crucial insights into BORIS'S self cabbing capabilities. But also because no one else was prepared to ride shotgun in an autonomous…

Q: ARE THERE VIDEO GAME THEMED CARS? Normally when car manufacturers and video game developers collaborate, it's very much a one way street. The video game developers ask very nicely if they can include a manufacturer's car in their game, cut a reasonably sizeable cheque, and you get to pretend to own a 1,000bhp hypercar in Forza Horizon or similar. Occasionally though, things flow in the opposite direction and elements of video games worm their way into real world cars themselves. Take the Call of Duty Jeep Wrangler Black Ops and Modern Warfare 3 editions. Jeep leaned heavily on its military heritage in this collaboration with the most popular first person shooter series of the time. The Modern Warfare 3 edition in particular, of which only 200 were made, was…

YOU'RE PROBABLY EXPECTING THIS bit to testify that the AMG One is an absolute animal on the road, barely controllable, the kind of thing you need to drive with the caution usually reserved for interactions with angry cats and volatile teenagers. Well, you'd be right. And wrong. At the same time. Frankly, the fact that AMG has been able to make an F1 engine do road car things while retaining the essence of racecar is remarkable. The idea that the company has melded that engine with three electric motors and more than 1,000bhp, an 11,000rpm redline and an F1-ish single clutch paddlebox while retaining any semblance of road manners is witchcraft. It is, truth be told, too fast to properly unleash on the public road. Second and third deliver the…

If space equals luxury, the new Dacia Bigster should really be up against the recently updated Rolls-Royce Cullinan on these pages. The same is often said for time, and Romania's latest export would give you plenty of that back too, because while its 0–62mph sprint only just sneaks under the 10 second mark, the Bigster's complex 153bhp hybrid powertrain sips away at fuel to allow for a range of over 650 miles on a single tank. You lose more time in fuel stations than you do accelerating… Nissan's engineers also claim that ‘no compromise’ was made in the development of its new, third generation e-Power hybrid system seen here in the Qashqai. We're told that the whole platform was engineered with this setup in mind, so where rivals stick a…

£254,200 OTR/£282,000 as tested/£5,077 pcm WHY IT'S HERE: What has a hybrid makeover – and Mulliner buffing – added to the world's best GT? DRIVER: OLLIE KEW I WASN'T PLANNING TO DRAW ANY CONCLUSIONS about the Bentley's hybrid drivetrain this early, but the Continental GT had an extremely busy first month, covering 1,800 miles in its first four weeks on our Garage fleet. So let's have a sitrep. So far, it's using less fuel than the BMW M2 I ran last year. It can travel 50 miles on electric power and that headstart averages out the V8's fuel appetite very healthily – it's settled at 34 miles per gallon. The handover between EV and V8 power is utterly seamless, even when the engine and transmission are cold, which often catches…

“It looks sober but the mechanical spec suggests it's ready to let its hair down” £53,530 OTR/£58,590 as tested/£682 pcm WHY IT'S HERE: To see if the S3 finally delivers as a driver's car DRIVER: JETHRO BOVINGDON HOW DO YOU REPLACE A HONDA Civic Type R? Honestly, I don't know. But the Audi S3 is an intriguing answer. Similar performance but much more discreet and in its latest guise blessed with the trick RS3-sourced ‘Torque Splitter’ rear differential for a potentially more adjustable balance. It looks sober but the mechanical spec suggests the S3 is ready to let its hair down. There's so much good here. Power is up from the pre-facelift model to 329bhp and 310lb ft, the 7spd dual clutch gearbox is more aggressive and upshift times have…

£48,055 OTR/£50,725 as tested/£505 pcm We suspect a classic diesel estate still has its place, even against the rise of the e-SUV… DRIVER: TOM FORD THE AVERAGE YEARLY MILEAGE for a UK car is very roughly 7,000 to 7,400 miles a year. The Superb, has done 11,000 miles in six months while with us – an easy 20k a year. And that's in and around a household that has a few other cars knocking about. Sounds like a small detail, but it means that it's a vehicle that appeals on many levels when it comes to the day to day. That's a car that's hitting the brief, answering the mission statement and getting the job done. So what does it not do brilliantly? Well it's subdued when it comes to…

Dear TopGear, I've recently completed a matching set of tattoo sleeves up to the elbows on both arms and I'm ready to open a new food truck. I can't decide whether to go ironic, traditional or practical – can you suggest anything to make my new venture sizzle? Clive, Ipswich Well Clive, the catering business is something of a dog eat dog world – but sadly the dogs don't have much in the way of disposable income. There's lots of potential for an enterprising young fellow with tattoos like you, though, and once you've got an angle (mash-ups work best… doner noodles?) then obviously you want a vehicle that matches your ambition. Most options are essentially retro themed – because we all ate better in the 1960s and 1970s? Make…

THIS IS THE FERRARI 849 TESTAROSSA. It replaces the SF90 and uses a 4.0-litre V8 with two turbos, supplemented by three e-motors, one which offers support to the rear axle, the other two managing a front wheel each, giving both AWD and torque vectoring capabilities as per the SF90. There's some 50-odd horsepower more than before, all carved from the internal combustion engine – mainly because the electric horsepower is limited to the 217bhp possible from the 7.45kWh lithium ion battery. So there's bigger turbos with low friction bearings from the F80, chunkier intercoolers, new cylinder heads to go with bigger blowers, a different block, intake plenums, valvetrain and fuel rail. All that drives through the same eight speed F1-style paddleshifted box, although as ever it's purportedly faster, better and…

VEHICLE TD GRID, OR V2G TO ITS MANY fans, has been around as an idea forever even if it's only just becoming reality. In effect it time shifts and location shifts power generation. Because it saves the electricity grid money, it'll save electric car drivers money. Here's how. The grid has lots of spare capacity at night, because most homes, offices, factories and other buildings are asleep. So as with any commodity in surplus, the grid sells electricity cheaply then. Come the morning and teatime peaks, the grid has a hard job keeping up. So that pushes up prices. Another thing. There's more and more wind generation off the country's east coast and Scotland. Power lines to get it to the south and west are expensive and ugly. So we…

The finest faliures In automotive history Variety is the spice of life. If every carmaker sang from the same song sheet, the world would be a duller place. Therefore we should salute those who choose to zig where others zag. Those who swim against the current, who colour outside the lines. Companies like Mitsuoka, the small volume Japanese manufacturer that, for the past three decades, has been taking sensible JDM offerings and rebodying them to resemble old timey cars in a proudly off-kilter way. But there's swimming against the current, and then there's the distressing monstrosity that is the Galue. It's good to be unique, but maybe not… this unique? A luxury car (or possibly ‘luxury’ car, or possibly ‘luxury’ ‘car’) based on a humble Nissan Altima, the Galue is…

What's Frank up to? A trip to Vienna for a panel discussing and debating how private jet interiors can learn from automotive design. Next, a few weeks in London to focus on a project for a new European OEM, then a keynote speech at London Packaging Week 2025 GMSV S1 LM REMEMBER THE GOOD OLD DAYS? AT FIRST glance, the GMSV S1 LM plays almost like a textbook restomod – but is it just a T.50 cosplaying as an F1 LM? Whilst the T.50 brought the F1 concept into the modern age, the S1 takes the resemblance and likeness of the F1 far more seriously – in some parts, this is very literal – but that's sort of the point here. It's a reimagination of a poster car for the…

CHAOS ON WHEELS £10, PC For a brief period in the 1990s, you could barely move for car combat games. Twisted Metal, Vigilante 8 and Quarantine demonstrated that the ideal solution to your road rage wasn't deep breaths and counting to 10, but instead a roof mounted 50 Cal. With Chaos on Wheels a couple of indie developers from Croatia are attempting to revive the genre. Unfortunately, being that it is built entirely by two overstretched blockes, Chaos on Wheels is very roung around the edges. The fundamental driving and shooting controls are sound, and the maps look reasonably pretty, but missions tend to be tedious and overlong, and the chaos of title is often of the frustrating rather than entertaining sort. It's only a tenner, so those longing for…

EAR DEFENDERS. NOW WE'RE TALKING. Or perhaps not. Anyway, for the full ‘F1 team principal on the pitwall’ vibe, the Valkyrie comes equipped with a set of purposeful motorsport cans, complete with mouthpiece and trailing cables. For the full ‘no, it's honestly fine in here’ vibe the AMG One has a pair of surreptitious Sennheiser noise cancelling in-ear buds. They're engraved with the owner's name. These two facts tell you a lot about each car. That they're terrifyingly noisy, mainly. And they genuinely are. You'll have heard this about the Valk already, that while those outside enjoy pure red blooded V12 symphony, those inside endure pure white noise V12 screech. But that the AMG One suffers similarly comes as a shock. Did Merc not have enough time to sort that out?…

I UNDERSTAND THE ETIQUETTE. Build up slowly. Get a feel for the power delivery. Work through the modes gradually before pulling the pin in ‘F5’ mode. That's F5 as in the highest designation on the Fujita scale for tornadoes. It's reserved for the devastating, sweep away all before them kind with wind speeds measuring up to 318mph. The Hennessey Venom F5 Revolution Evo generates up to 2,031bhp purely from a heavily turbocharged V8 engine and so more than justifies the dramatic billing. The handle with care approach seems sensible then, but also somehow deeply inappropriate. In fact, diametrically opposed to the philosophy of a car conceived and built to push boundaries, shatter lap records, burst through 300mph and extend a Texan sized middle finger to the establishment. Not wishing to dishonour the…

It's hard to overstate the effect that Daytona USA had when it landed like a dinosaur killing meteorite in arcades in 1993. Its liquid smooth textured graphics, powered by hardware known as Model 2, set a new standard for video game visuals, but what you might not realise is that, eventually, Sega shared that technology with other companies. So in 1996 we got the lesser known Super GT 24h made by Jaleco on the same hardware foundation. Jaleco's effort did introduce some new ideas over and above the Daytona format, most notably a transition between day and night. On the game's longest course, completing sections of the lap shifted the time of day, creating the atmosphere of a round the clock enduro in the four or so minutes it would…

GO TO TOPGEAR.COM FOR EXTENDED TG GARAGE REPORTS, AND TO EXPLORE THE ARCHIVE £26,995 OTR/£27,795 as tested/£221 pcm WHY IT'S HERE: It's the toughest test for TG's 2024 Car of the Year: daily life DRIVER: GREG POTTS CRUMBS! NO, NOTHING HAS GONE wrong with our long-term Renault 5, but there are now breadcrumbs all over the recycled denim interior… I've been doing some extremely important consumer testing this month and have got my hands on the viral baguette holder accessory for the R5. It's just become available on the UK configurator along with a range of weird 3D printed stowage lids, but this is the one you want - even for a mighty £120. It comes boxed as a set with the tall woven wicker basket, a fabric inner lining that…

GO TO TOPGEAR.COM FOR EXTENDED TG GARAGE REPORTS, AND TO EXPLORE THE ARCHIVE £37,260 OTR/£39,850 as tested/£615 pcm WHY IT'S HERE: Does the EX30 deserve all the accolades? DRIVER: VIJAY PATTNI JUST THE OTHER DAY, TG‘S long-term Volvo EX30 decided it wanted to make fun of me. It looked deep into my eyes, read my mind and my emotions as they manifested in my physical appearance and demeanour, searched my soul for essence it could mine, and – because it's just a machine – made a cold, calculated judgement. “You look tired,” it said, as cold as an ice pick to the heart. “You should take a break.” Shocked. Shocked, I tell you. All I'd done was let out a little yawn and, in a heartbeat, the little yellow fun bus's…

“The RS6 gets none of the BMW's PHEV tech and yet Audi charges £8k more” £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: OLLIE MARRIAGE I'VE BEEN SPENDING A BIT OF time with the M5's opposition recently, which is always an interesting thing to do when you've been exposed to one car a lot. And potentially unsettling. What if you realise you've chosen poorly? Luckily I'm not financially exposed, I'm just here to help guide you through the pitfalls of choosing the right hyperwagon – should it be M5, Audi's RS6 or Porsche's fastest 771bhp Panamera? Let's begin by looking at what sets them apart. Best looking: Audi. Best powertrain: Porsche. Best handling: Porsche. Best…

REPORT 4 MINI COUNTRYMAN The Mini has been on a few trips of late. These have highlighted several things. 1] the Mini has excellent road holding 2] the warnings hat appear in the head-up display for “Confident driving in unfamiliar curves” stop showing up eventually 3] the Mini will has hit the heady heights of 47.2mpg. All good things. EN REPORT 5 POLESTAR 3 Polestar runs Bowers & Wilkin's premium audio as an option. With an output of 1610 watts and no fewer than 25 speakers, it's a mega setup. Now add in the OTA Abbey Road mode that saw engineers sonically map each of the world famous studios’ rooms and unique hardware. It sounds incredible. JB REPORT 4 JAECOO 7 A European roadtrip highlights an issue with the Jaecoo…

Airstream Tourer FROM £97,950 An expensive way to get your hipster smashed burger van off the ground, and you'll still have to find someone to convert it for you of course. But the OG designer caravan comes rammed with Route 66 vibes. Ford Ranger tow car not included OUR WINNER Caselani Type H From £74,628 For pity's sake let the poor vintage Citroen H-vans rest in peace - Caselani has your back with this retromodded Citroen Jumpy though, and it will get you to your music festival pitch near the toilets at speeds significantly over 35mph Volkswagen Grand California From £84,151 This ginormo camper has two gas hobs, a fridge/freezer and a little sink positioned ideally next to the sliding door, it's practically set up for business already. You can…