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44 Articles

Alfa is used to it, but being the underdog is a strange position for Mercedes, Toyota and Audi to find themselves in. And yet that is exactly what the BMW 3-series has done to those automotive giants, for generations now. Try as they might, their attempts to beat the 3-series at its own game have rarely, and even then only fleetingly, succeeded. BMW didn’t invent the compact-ish saloon, but with the 3-series it turned that potentially nothing-ish idea into an object of desire. Just what is it that makes a 3-series a 3-series? Several CAR writers make an attempt in this issue. And several car makers have tried to emulate that elusive combination of quality, simplicity, practicality and driver appeal. The failure of Alfa, Audi, Mercedes and Lexus is worth…

Renault’s Filante concept is perfectly pointless

The idea is to take the spirit of those old record cars and apply it to the challenges of 21st century EV development Slung low in a seat that’s more hammock than bucket – your feet up high and the car’s warm, hard-working battery beneath your knees like a snoozing dog – you’re comfortable enough. Cool air streams in from the twin NACA ducts in your Renault’s endless bonnet, the only blemishes on its otherwise continuous and pebble-smooth skin. Besides, with a view like this one, you could be in agony and it wouldn’t matter. Your universe has gone binary: blue above the horizon; a dazzling white beneath it. Bar some very distant hills – at this distance nothing more than dirty smudges along the bottom of the sky –…

Renault’s Filante concept is perfectly pointless

Un-boring family cars

The tyre destroyer Imagine trackdays in this. Loaded up with skis, suitcases, children, dogs… and powersliding around the hairpin at the Hockenheimring. Okay, fine, that’s probably not going to happen without fear of injury or vomit in the back seats, but an estate that will happily rate your drifts out of five is a rarity indeed. Like the saloon version, the M3 CS Touring has a smidge more power and, more importantly, various weight-saving measures and sharpened dynamics. Given the intel in our cover story, this may be your last chance to get a combustion M3 Touring – get your order in now. The retina burner GAH, MY EYES! MY EYES! Who knows? Maybe Kia’s new EV4 might look better in the real world, but these first official images of…

Un-boring family cars

Boring business + exciting cars = a profitable Aston Martin

Five months into his new job, Aston Martin CEO Adrian Hallmark has the confident air of a man who’s certain his plan is going to work. ‘How do you make a company successful? You’ve got to have a plan. That plan has got to be brawny and stable. You create excitement around it, but you don’t create excitement by ripping it up every five minutes,’ he says in a meeting room at Aston’s Gaydon HQ. ‘There’s enough excitement to the products and the design, the way we activate them in the marketplace. But in here, I want it to be quiet, calm, boring and successful. That’s the mission.’ The former Bentley boss is bullish: ‘It’s an opportunity to make it, for the first time in 112 years, sustainably profitable. The…

Boring business + exciting cars = a profitable Aston Martin

‘Drive by wire’ is the future. But there’s a catch

What do the Tesla Cybertruck, the Lexus RZ family SUV and most of Ferrari’s line-up have in common? They’re all production cars using ‘by wire’ technology – an approach to engineering that replaces mechanical systems with electronics, controlling functions that can include braking, steering and acceleration. Tesla’s beastly pick-up comes with steer-by-wire, while Lexus offers it as an option in some markets on its electric-only RZ. Bosch, meanwhile, is engineering its own proprietary by-wire technologies and is testing them on the road. Fellow German supplier ThyssenKrupp, which is also investigating by-wire controls, says the tech is ‘on the verge of a breakthrough.’ Ferrari is a whole leap further forward, using brake-by-wire tech in the Purosangue, 12Cilindri, 296 and SF90. The benefits? Lower weight and better packaging possibilities because fewer physical…

‘Drive by wire’ is the future. But there’s a catch

Sorry Brad, but I’m afraid you just can’t win

He’ll bounce back. His skin seems to be pretty thick – thick enough to cope with the bad press garnered by a big chunk of his CV, including Bullet Train and Ocean’s Thirteen. But for better or worse we’re here to break the news to Brad Pitt: your new racing-themed movie, F1, will mostly just annoy and disappoint people. We’ve not seen it. It might contain some very entertaining bits. It certainly seems to have been thoroughly researched, and a huge budget has gone into it. There’s some significant talent on board with the project. The problem is not how good or bad it is compared to other movies. The problem is that it is a movie. After more than 100 years, a process of elimination has resulted in three…

Sorry Brad, but I’m afraid you just can’t win

The only way is up… he hopes

My mental image of Audi CEO Gernot Döllner is as a 19th century German sea captain, clad in oilskins and lashed to the tiller of his cargo ship in the midst of a storm, knowing his precious cargo is wanted at his destination and that he has set the right course, but struggling grimly to hold that course as the wind howls and the rain whips and the sea boils around him. A bit much? Döllner would probably agree with that image. The perfect storm Audi finds itself in consists of a plunge in demand for European premium brands in China, once a source of huge sales and profit; flat or declining demand in Europe; a drop in European EV sales and a particularly tough home market in Germany. And…

The only way is up… he hopes

Strange but true: a Rolls-Royce with launch control

Like the mountains and the valleys, Rolls-Royce is just there, unchanging as far as the casual onlooker is concerned. However, just as those geological fixtures turn out to be in a state of constant flux upon closer examination, so too is Rolls-Royce capable of the odd innovation, just so long as you know how to interpret the cryptic messages coming out of Goodwood. First, the easy bit. The new Black Badge Spectre is the most powerful production Rolls-Royce car ever. It peaks at 650bhp and 793lb ft, up from the 664bhp and 577lb ft outputs of the regular Spectre, the super-luxury electric super-coupe that arrived in 2023 and came close to being the company’s best seller last year. Black Badge is the largely but not entirely cosmetic treatment that Rolls…

Strange but true: a Rolls-Royce with launch control

NCAP isn’t helping

Stellantis and Euro NCAP do not currently see eye to eye on the question of safety. The independent safety organisation made a jab at the automotive group last year when the Jeep Avenger scored just three stars out of five. Euro NCAP’s secretary general Michiel van Ratingen said the Avenger’s results demonstrated a ‘clear lack of ambition’ at Stellantis and that ‘safety should not be where a manufacturer makes its savings’. It’s a pretty scathing remark. Thierry Koskas, Citroën CEO, has now responded in the same spirit, telling CAR he doesn’t think there needs to be another organisation, other than governments, checking the safety of new cars. ‘The requirements put in by Europe and by the different governments are already challenging enough and we think complying with the regulation is…

NCAP isn’t helping

This year’s most important new Ferrari isn’t the electric one

This year promises to be a busy one in Maranello, with a bunch of new product launches culminating in the hotly anticipated all-electric Ferrari at the end of the year. That car is a big deal. But the hardcore, track-focused versions of the 296 GTB and 296 GTS droptop matter even more. Why? Because their reception will validate – or not – Ferrari’s hybrid R&D trajectory. Recently a friend and I were wandering the prestige showroom in which he works, only to pause next to a 458 Speciale. ‘The best car Ferrari’s ever made?’ he found himself saying out loud. I couldn’t disagree. For a long time the relationship between technology, driving experience and desirability was linear. Add a new technology and you made the car better to drive and…

This year’s most important new Ferrari isn’t the electric one

Wait. So hybrids are bad again?

Here’s what sounds like some excellent news from JLR: global sales of its plug-in hybrids soared 163 per cent in the three months ending in December 2024. In the world of legislation-driven electrification, however, a spike in growth like this coming as it does so late in the year is less a cause for celebration and more a clanging alarm. It almost certainly means an important global market decided from the start of the new year to shut the door on some loophole or incentive that, for a while, gave an electrified drivetrain a boost. And so it proved here. France, that inveterate hater of big SUVs, had widened the net for its weight-based ‘malus’ tax penalty on heavier cars to include plug-in hybrids. Car makers scrambled to push out…

Wait. So hybrids are bad again?

Sayonara to the Zen garden of the car world

To understand Lexus, start with Sony. Only people old enough to remember The Beatles’ first LP will recall that ‘Made in Japan’ was once a stigma, not a guarantee of quality and refinement. Sony changed that. Its founder, Akio Morita, had vision and guile. Just when Western Electric declared there were no commercial uses for the transistor its labs had invented, Morita found that, indeed, there were. Rather profitable ones, in fact. Additionally, he had the wit to know that Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo was difficult for Western tongues and ears, so he invented the name Sony, happily suggesting both ‘sound’ and an affectionate name for a male child. And he eradicated Japan’s reputation for shoddy products by committing to ingenious, continuously innovative technology and sophisticated design which set a world…

Sayonara to the Zen garden of the car world

The perfect storm

It was meant to be simple. Escape the UK – battered and bruised by Storm Eowyn – to the lighter and brighter Mediterranean to take full advantage of Ferrari’s new 12Cilindri Spider. But west of Lisbon, with a dense rectangular Ferrari key in my hand, I’m all too aware that the sky is full of ominous clouds being hurled about by bellowing, howling winds. It seems I’ve escaped one storm only to end up in the clutches of another: Storm Herminia. A good thing, then, that Ferrari says the 12Cilindri (a reminder for the class: dodi-chi chilin-dri) is its ‘most complete’ GT car ever – and therefore designed to cope with this outbreak of reality. It might just work. Yes, it’s wetter and windier than you’d generally want, but in…

The perfect storm

The left behind

Sound deadening has clearly been scaled back to cut the price, but it drives well Looking for a cheap new seven-seater? The Dacia Jogger is the obvious choice, but Citroën has other ideas. It doesn’t like to spell it out, but clearly Citroën’s on a mission to usurp Dacia as the European value champion with the new C3 Aircross. The car has two tricks up its sleeve. First, in its electric form it’s now the cheapest electric SUV, at £22,990. Second, it’s the only B-segment crossover you can have with seven seats. Albeit only if you choose it as a petrol or hybrid; the raised floor of the EV doesn’t allow for such space. It’s appealing on paper – the answer to many a budget-conscious family’s prayers. But the third…

The left behind

Big. Ugly. Dull. Cheap

Meet Jaecoo, another brand poised to crack the UK car market. The name is a mash-up of jaeger, the German for hunter, and coo as in cool, and it’s owned by Chery Automotive. Chery is the Chinese giant behind the also-new Omoda marque, which has made a big impact in the UK in a short time, targeting value-conscious mainstream buyers. Jaecoo is following in its slipstream, but aims to be more upmarket, and has already established a beachhead in the UK; it’s opened 71 dealerships so far, with a target of 130 by the end of the year. Chery’s masterplan for the UK is a salvo of high-value products in every shape, size and powertrain, with Omoda and Jaecoo launching cars alternately. Omoda’s 5 was first, then this, then an…

Big. Ugly. Dull. Cheap

A cut-price Ioniq 5 N? No

It’s not as entertaining as its rivals. Nor is it anything special as a family car If you were brought up on Gran Turismo in the late ’90s and early 2000s, the Nismo badge has an even greater draw than AMG or M. Tales of Mark Blundell’s Group C R90CK having its wastegates stick open at Le Mans, facilitating a still-unbeaten post-chicane top speed of 226mph on the Mulsanne straight, only fanned the flames of my admiration. Then there were the road cars. A few homologation specials sneaked out over the years, but it was Nismo’s efforts on the R33-based 400R and R34 Nismo Z-Tune that really grabbed me. Many years later, driving an R35 GT-R Nismo had me hooked. But times change, and I find myself driving an electric…

A cut-price Ioniq 5 N? No

Full of surprises

Like the rest of the car, the interior is dull but packs in some neat features BYD calls its Shenzhen design hub the Black Crystal, which sounds tremendously exciting, but the Atto 2 is more of a Green Blob. When the only noteworthy bit of design is a fake ‘knot’ effect in the rear lights, you know it’s not a classic. Darting through Madrid, we weren’t exactly turning heads. But on this mundane canvas BYD’s engineers have sprinkled some unlikely magic. The Atto 2 sits on BYD’s e-Platform 3.0, which uses lithium-ion phosphate (LFP) batteries and comes with a heat pump as standard – worth around 10 to 20 per cent more range in the winter months. The car we drove used a 45.12kWh battery paired to a motor on…

Full of surprises

Faster la vista

In mid-to high-speed corners the extra aero works its magic and is a clear upgrade from the standard MC20 As much as we like the Maserati MC20, there was always more to come. A mid-engined supercar with a carbon tub and 3.0-litre twin-turbo V6, it’s much like the first Terminator movie. Excellent, but with room to flesh things out a bit and deliver a breath-taking sequel that takes all the basic ingredients and turns them up to 11. Introducing, then, the GT2 Stradale. Named after the racing car that claimed numerous class wins in the Fanatec GT2 European Series, the Stradale is limited to 914 units (1 of 914 spells out the birth year of Maserati) and will cost from £273,510. That’s punchy pricing considering a similarly carbon-tubbed McLaren 750S…

Faster la vista

Letter of the month Happy shopper Your six months of glowing Our Cars reviews of the Renault Clio persuaded me to add it to my shortlist for a second car. After a test drive I bought a TCe 90 in Esprit Alpine trim. It’s a cracking little car, zesty with an eagerness that belies its modest power output. It’s got all the features you could wish for, with heated seats and Apple CarPlay, plus physical controls for ventilation and switching off the bings and bongs. While not strictly necessary, the Alpine spec lifts the looks and it’s had a few admiring glances from people who think it’s a hot version. It’s 20 years since we last owned a Clio, and the cars we’ve owned since have been bigger and bigger.…

GAVIN GREEN THE VOICE OF EXPERIENCE

‘Drive a new electric Renault 5 and you certainly don’t miss the original’s four-pot motor’ I have happy memories of the old Renault 5. The new electric 5 may have as much in common with it technically as a virtual-reality headset does with a beret. But here was a car I really wanted to drive, and maybe even buy. Nostalgia played a part. I fondly remember thrashing a basic-spec R5 around the Nürburgring, back in the days when you turned up, paid a few D-marks and were let loose. It rolled and pitched like a small boat in a swell. But I swear I’ve never had so much fun at the ’Ring. It provided a lifelong lesson: speed is irrelevant to driving enjoyment. (One reason I dislike most hypercars: all…

GAVIN GREEN THE VOICE OF EXPERIENCE

MARK WALTON THE INCURABLE ENTHUSIAST

‘Can’t we just give motorsport a free pass and let them burn petrol? Surely there are bigger fish to fry’ Recently I was in Venice and saw how this great medieval city is sinking into the mud. The beautiful Ca’ D’Oro – an ornate palazzo overlooking the Grand Canal – is now 70cm lower than it was when it was built in 1437. Crazy to think that Venetian noblemen used to arrive at the palace in their private gondolas and step up onto a grand stone staircase; now, the front door at the top of the steps is lapped by waves. Depressing. Literally. Anyway, then I came home and learned that Warwick University has developed an LMP3 car that runs on sewage. I have to admit, it all put me…

MARK WALTON THE INCURABLE ENTHUSIAST

OLD MASTERS MODERN ART

What’s in the clang of a door or bootlid? Everything. Like a handshake, it is the single gesture that speaks volumes; the half-second first impression that, like it or not, cannot be undone. With its push to build hatchbacks with the perceived quality of a premium saloon, Germany in particular poured a lot of years and a lot of money into battling the clang. The door of a new Golf closes with a solid, well-damped thud, as has the door of every Golf since the bank-vault Mk4. Solid and well-damped means expensive, means better, right? There is another way. The door of a Peugeot 205 GTI or a Lotus Elise closes not with a well-damped thud but with a featherweight clang that speaks to a different set of priorities: of…

OLD MASTERS MODERN ART

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For the first time, buyers of the BMW M3 will be able to choose from two fundamentally different models. While G84 denotes the direct replacement for the combustion-engined six-cylinder version, ZA0 is the internal code of the all-electric four-wheel-drive iM3 (which may end up wearing an M3i badge). There will also be an estate version of the electric M3, codenamed ZA1. It’s a massive change, and involves some collateral damage. The combustion M4 will exit the range, as will the M3 estate. Dubbed G85, the second-generation M4 was originally planned to debut in summer 2028 and run through late 2034, but it’s now been deemed insufficiently profitable. The same thinking is behind the decision to not replace the current M3 Touring when production of the current model ends in February…

RIDING IN THE ELECTRIC M3… SORT OF

As we climb into what looks like the official transport of Marty the zebra, the nice man from BMW is keen to point out that this four-door, bulked-up, high-performance saloon is not the new BMW iM3. And, fair enough, any lingering thoughts are quickly extinguished when the pilot, BMW factor driver Jens Klingman, fires up the ground-effect impeller system that creates max downforce in the blink of an eye from just 40mph. This car is a working prototype, a vehicle for trying out new and sometimes fanciful bits of tech that can provide crucial data for future BMWs. A test mule. But while we won’t be seeing a production car that uses every idea being tried out here, that doesn’t mean elements of it won’t have a strong bearing on…

RIDING IN THE ELECTRIC M3… SORT OF

THE MAGIC NUMBER

1 It’s ridiculously flexible Is there a car on the planet that’s been more things to more drivers than the BMW 3-series? It’s crammed as much into 50 years as some entire car companies have fitted into 100. A fuel-sipping diesel, a homologation special and Touring Car champ, a convertible, coupe, saloon and chic estate… The 3-series has got every T-shirt, and looked good in all of them. And somehow, despite those very different remits, there’s a common thread of character and feel that runs through every single one. The 3-series has also rolled with the punches that 50 years of legal and cultural changes bring, and thrown a few back. Today’s xDrive four-wheel-drive cars serve up extra stability without ruining the fun we have in the rear-wheeldrive models. And as…

THE MAGIC NUMBER

ALIVE AND KICKING

So much for that ‘difficult second album’ trope. BMW smashed it out of the park with the 1982-94 E30, which is so fondly remembered despite its flaws it’s bagged two of the seven slots in this 3-series celebration package. But like that tight lid you couldn’t quite undo but clearly loosened for the next person, the original and now overlooked E21 3-series did much of the graft so its successor could get the glory. Conceptually, if not visually, the E21 as launched in 1975 seems far closer to the 02-series cars it replaced than the E30 that followed. There was no sign of the fourdoor saloon, estate or convertible variants; no M3, diesel or four-wheel-drive options that the second-generation 3-series would bring. Just a small two-door coupe-cumsaloon with a choice…

ALIVE AND KICKING

At school, me and my mate Alastair were convinced we’d be front-running F1 drivers. And I don’t mean we daydreamed about it. I mean we were convinced. Weirdly, I don’t recall either of us being at all worried about the fact that, at 15, that ship had clearly already sailed. We would, we figured, end up as teammates. One of us would likely have to punt the other one off to secure the title. So be it. We were, we decided, cool with that. And it had to be F1. Sportscar racing was great but no. Ditto WRC. If there was an exception it was Group A touring cars, and that was down to one car: the E30 M3. The E30 M3 wouldn’t have existed without Group A racing, and…

1989’S M3 CS TOURING

The 325iX was my first scoop as a motoring journalist, a career now in its 50th year. Driving home from a ski trip to Austria, we spotted an undisguised pre-production model and pinned ourselves to its heels on the snow-covered Grossglockner pass, eventually catching the ferociously spinning front wheels on camera from the passenger seat of a five-cylinder Audi 80 quattro, which had pioneered permanent four-wheel drive in 1982, ahead of BMW. While quattro was only available in combination with a DIY gearbox and in a four-door saloon, Ingolstadt’s arch-rival launched a much broader tech attack by offering xDrive with a choice of manual or automatic transmission and in four different body styles: two- and four-door notchback, the rare TC4 targa convertible by coachbuilder Baur and the Touring estate, which…

1989’S M3 CS TOURING

Everyone knows BMW supplied the McLaren F1’s V12, but few know McLaren returned the favour with tweaks to BMW’s E36 3-series racecar. And in the peak of the ’90s Super Touring era no less. This car is your proof – the 320i STW Johnny Cecotto drove to victory in Germany’s 1998 Super Tourenwagen Cup. It’s the most highly evolved form of the E36 from the best touring-car era ever. The E36 didn’t enjoy the straightforward road-to-race journey of the previous 2.3-litre E30 M3. The rulebook was changing from Group A to the Super Touring 2.0-litre class and – from 1993 – a four-door category. The new 3.0-litre M3 couldn’t race, at least in Touring Cars. No matter. BMW slotted a 2.0-litre version of the old M3’s S14 engine into the…

SOMETHING IN THE AIR

You can thank Princess Di. Her rise to global mega-stardom involved countless images of her in an Audi 80 convertible and later the A4 version; images that contributed to a huge boom in sales for open-top cars, and which made it clear to a whole new bunch of people that premium European cars were not just for architects in rimless spectacles and those who like to take their holidays at the Nürburgring. It was a packed field. The Audi cabrios were up against Mercedes, Saabs, the half-size-smaller Golf, and other less impressive alternatives including the Volvo C70. (The Volvo is the one that deserves the sneering that’s unfairly applied to the species.) And of course there was the BMW 3-series convertible. This was a big seller, at a time when…

SOMETHING IN THE AIR

THE SPECIAL ONE

The E46 M3 is my generation of 3-series. It came at a time when my mates and I had all recently passed our driving tests, university was a booze-addled fug of a memory and our first pay cheques were rolling in. With no social media or even much of an internet to turn our heads, it was a time of simpler aspiration, when what seemed like 99 per cent of us drove around in old Volkswagen Golfs (TDI for those in the know, SDI for those with too much uni debt to pay off) but what we all really lusted after was the BMW M3. Even from the vantage point of a 148bhp diesel VW, the BMW felt within reach, blending a mix of blistered-arch exotica and saloon-car attainability that…

THE SPECIAL ONE

POWER FOR THE PEOPLE

It’s a picture that’s long stuck with me: we were standing in a damp car park outside a grotty hotel in Wales waiting for the latest 3-series variant to turn up for a road test. The weather was foul – drizzle and the sort of light levels that make you want to mainline vitamin D – and the location dreary. But suddenly two headlights pierced the gloom as my then boss arrived. The new BMW 335i was with us. It honestly felt like Iron Man had just turned up to save humanity, such was the way the excitement levels notched up. The contrast to everything else available at the time marked the E90 out, particularly the 335i: here was a family saloon with a twin-turbo, 302bhp engine that didn’t look…

POWER FOR THE PEOPLE

TREAD CAREFULLY

As the electric Mercedes G-Class creeps around a corner in Kielder Forest, all I can think of is the opening scene from Gladiator. We’ve been driving for two hours through pristine forest, surrounded by pine trees stood ramrod straight, only to emerge into an apocalyptic scene that feels like it should have Russell Crowe taking on the hordes of Visigoths. The swirling mist reveals carnage: massive ruts carved into the earth by the unseen forces of the harvesters and forwarders; trees toppled with their splintered trunks shouting in silent agony at the violence of the chainsaw; huge roots upended and exposed, lying naked for all the world to see; countless tree stumps littering the clearing, a mournful reminder of what once stood here. Gone are the gentle sounds of the…

TREAD CAREFULLY

The 30-year gap between when the World Rally Championship last used Kielder Forest and today might make you think there would be a huge contrast between the technology of then and now. In reality, yes and no. In fact, the Subaru Imprezas and Mitsubishi Evos of that era ran trick differentials, fully active affairs that would rival the complexity of the EQG’s electric set-up. By constantly monitoring the throttle and steering angle, the rally car’s brain could work out how open or closed the diffs needed to be, giving more or less wheel slip. The permutations were near-endless and the stakes were high: one wrong move could ruin your rally. The Merc doesn’t suffer from the WRC’s turbo restrictor plates (579bhp plays around 270bhp) and has all the torque available…

Bridging the gap

Just how much of a threat to the established order are electric cars from China? It looks as though the balance of power is tipping inexorably towards the new brands from the Far East, after decades of strategic investment. But is the rise of the Chinese EV still a work in progress, or have we already reached the tipping point? To assess the state of play, we gathered two electric saloons from the CAR long-term test fleet: our VW ID. 7 and BYD Seal – close rivals cut from similar cloth, if not precisely the same aisle of the tailor’s shop. Both have a fastback profile but, at 4.9 metres long, the VW stretches 166mm beyond the BYD, explaining the more generous 532-litre boot accessed by a tailgate, compared with…

Bridging the gap

The cost of progress

The first thing I do after starting the i5 is flick two fingers at its central screen. It’s not what you’re thinking. This shortcut hand gesture brings up the menu to deactivate the speed-limit and lane-departure warnings. It’s now second nature to me, but first-time passengers are lost for words. I can also twirl my left hand to raise or lower the volume of the excellent Bowers & Wilkins audio system. Or thumb the faceted glass roller on the centre console. Or press the buttons on the steering wheel. The costly tech used by this complex and redundant system boggles my mind. My inner cynic believes it’s there to justify a brand’s premium status – and hefty monthly repayments – rather than actually benefit the driving and ownership experience. Tell…

The cost of progress

Caught in 4K if they return

This month I’ve been running around in Britain’s second most popular EV, the Audi Q4 e-Tron. It’s perfectly fine, offering a premium interior with a feasible range, anonymous styling and decent dynamics. However, after the shot of adrenaline that was the S3, the e-Tron feels like a pint of Night Nurse. (The car that outsells it, the Tesla Model Y, is also no dynamic livewire.) While I wait to get my S3 back, I’ve secured a dashcam to ensure I’m never again the victim of a lousy hit-and-run, or at least it should help identify the offender. It’s a top-notch Nextbase iQ 4K system that records the front and rear of the car – but also uses radar to capture incidents when you’re parked. Next time they’ll be caught in…

Caught in 4K if they return

There are couple of weird situations you find yourself in, driving an MX-30. First, when you pull up kerbside to let someone out of the back seat and you realise they can’t open the back door until you’ve opened the front door first. But when they open theirs, you realise your front seatbelt is actually attached to the rear door – and it’s now pulled so tight across your face you could hang your washing on it. Then there’s the car park trap: you open your driver’s door and climb out, then you open the rear suicide door to let your kids out, then you see that you’re trapped in this little door-pen, between the Mazda and the car next to you. The tighter the parking space the worse it…

Keeping it Eco… mostly

The settings I’ve defaulted to in the Seal are normal regen (which acts just like engine braking) in combination with Eco drive mode. It’s smooth and helps discourage my lead-footed tendencies. I’ve kept it in Eco so much that even flicking to Standard for an extra burst of energy for overtaking feels hilariously fast. And this is the less powerful Seal; on full throttle my old blue one felt like I’d activated hyperdrive. These forays into Standard may explain the dip in efficiency. That and lots of long-distance drives have harmed the economy figures this month, not helped by my preference for not using cruise control. The running costs have gone up, too, because I’ve been using public chargers so much. Whoops… BYD Seal Month 5 The story so far…

Keeping it Eco… mostly

Which is the true Mini EV?

Idiotic question alert. When do you cease to notice a car no longer has an engine? I’ve spent over 20 years driving Minis, where the noise and character from the four-cylinder lump up front was part of the driving experience, supplemented nicely by the whine from the steering rack in early BMW-era cars. Contrast that with my longterm-test Cooper SE, a car that has all the stance and attitude of those cars, only this time without an engine. The BMC and BMW eras all used to gel into one neat package – the nose-on steering attitude that fed into the torque steer and a sense you were constantly operating at the edge of traction even in the lower-powered cars. This made me nervous about the electric version. But I needn’t…

Which is the true Mini EV?

Half a mill and a forged passport

The writer who made me want to be a writer, Dan Walsh, once wrote that you didn’t necessarily have to leave everything behind and ride around the world, as he did, to feel free. A motorcycle in your possession was enough. It was the potential to go – or, as Dan put it: ‘A bike is a Beretta, half a mill in cash and a forged passport hidden under the floorboards. It’s an escape route.’ All of which must make the V8 supercharged Defender 130 several mill in cash and a wad of forged passports so thick you’ll never get that floorboard back down. It oozes the potential to go, its go-anywhere versatility hitting your central nervous system and flooding your mind with impossible dreams: dreams of living out of…

Half a mill and a forged passport

Uneven performance

After six months and 10,000 trouble-free miles, it’s time to say farewell to our Suzuki Swift. I’ll admit that as a rural dad of two teenagers in the taxi-driver phase of life, I wasn’t relishing a 3.8-metre-long supermini, but the Swift proved so spacious inside that it’s mostly worked just fine. There’s enough room in the back, a boot that held four carry-on bags when we went on holiday and comfortable seats too. Some of the Swift’s plastics are hard and cheap, but a decent roster of standard equipment helped make up for that. That’s partly because ours was the Ultra model, the higher of two specs, which cost £19,799 and benefited from 16-inch alloys, auto air-con and electric folding mirrors, but even the £18,699 Motion gets a nine-inch infotainment…

Uneven performance

The Good, the Bad & the Ugly: The Top 5s

HOW DOES GBU WORK? Our road testers rank the best cars currently on sale in 12 categories, and highlight the ones to buy TOP 5 HOT HATCHES HONDA CIVIC TYPE R THE GOOD: Feel, feedback, focus: a phenomenal full-sized hot hatch THE BAD: Now £50,050 for a front-drive hatchback with barely any more power than before THE UGLY: Probably the last of its kind; good job it’s one of the best THE ONE TO BUY: There’s just the one model; £429 a month on a three-year PCP with a £10k deposit TOYOTA GR YARIS THE GOOD: A modern-day rally homologation special that’s thrilling to drive THE BAD: Road noise like a death-metal gig; joke rear seats THE UGLY: Long waiting list, even with some versions priced at £60,000, although it…

The Good, the Bad & the Ugly: The Top 5s

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