Table of contents for April 20, 2022 in Autocar

UK drivers are paying millions of pounds more for their motor insurance because of inflated compensation claims for damage to roads by contractors hired to repair them, according to a leading insurance adjuster. The charge follows a successful appeal by CMA, a claims management and investigations company, on behalf of a motor insurer that had a £440,000 repair bill reduced by £309,000 after a review by government lawyers. In December 2016, an accident involving a Mercedes-Benz E-Class resulted in a section of the Higham Road Bridge on the A45 in Northamptonshire being damaged. National Highways, the government-owned organisation responsible for building and maintaining motorways and major roads in England, commissioned Amey, a contractor, to repair the bridge. As part of the work, Amey installed temporary traffic lights and a barrier…

NEW AUSTRIAN COMPANY Deus has revealed its first EV, the Vayanne hypercar, which is set to become one of the most powerful road cars on the market when it arrives in 2025. Developed in partnership with Italdesign and Williams Advanced Engineering (WAE), the 99-off Vayanne produces more than 2169bhp and 1475lb ft, according to computer simulations. That makes it notably more powerful than the 1877bhp Pininfarina Battista, 1923bhp Lotus Evija and 1888bhp Rimac Nevera. The 0-62mph time is put at just 1.99sec and the top speed is a McLaren Speedtailrivalling 248mph. Despite the Vayanne’s pace and 120mm ride height, Deus says it will offer a “comfortable and luxurious ride” and “maximum daily usability in the hypercar class”. The Vayanne is thought to be underpinned by a ‘turnkey’ package EV architecture…

Asked whether Dacia could usher in a new city car, Miles Nurnberger said: “They’ve become very difficult to do, but it’s an interesting challenge. We could look at it. There’s definitely still a place for those cars, even though government policy isn’t really for lightweight hatchbacks with efficient engines at the moment.” The urban-focused Spring Electric, currently Europe’s cheapest EV, is based on the Chinese-market Renault City K-ZE, and it will be replaced entirely in 2024. It will continue to use the group’s smallest platform, CMF-A (and thus be smaller than Renault’s CMF-B-based 5), but is due to be brought closer into line with other Dacias, given it will no longer be a rebadged Renault.…

Alfa Romeo CEO Jean-Philippe Imparato was on fighting form when we met him at the new facility that’s ramping up to full-scale production of the Tonale crossover. “It’s worldclass everything: a premium plant for premium products,” he pithily summarised. Imparato was extremely keen to deliver his message that the Tonale is unlike any past Alfa, thanks to hitherto unseen levels of deeply rooted quality and precision assembly. The Giambattista Vico plant – part of the Pomigliano d’Arco facility near Naples that makes the Fiat Panda – is effectively all new, with only “the shape of building remaining”. Alfa’s historic reputational issues were clearly at the front of Imparato’s mind during our tour of the plant, which was in its final day of pre-production mode, carefully assembling just 15 Tonales per…

Heidi Myrene parks her 2015 Tesla Model S in the last available slot in a Supercharger station in Lier, 23 miles south-west of Oslo. She’s off to the family lakeside cabin, where the charging is slower than in their main home. It’s a hassle stopping to charge and she rarely needs to, but this ensures the battery will be full enough for the return journey. It’s all so normal that she seems surprised to be asked questions about her EV life. Welcome to Norway, a country where the electriccar future has already arrived. The country will ban sales of new ICE cars in 2025, the earliest in the world, but so generously has it incentivised the transition to EVs that it’s nearly already there. In the first two months of…

JAGUAR HAS HAD its moments since joining Formula E in 2016 but always fallen short in its title aspirations. Might that be about to change at the sixth time of asking? Kiwi Mitch Evans, who has driven for Jaguar from the start of its FE campaign, jumped into title contention after a double victory in the Rome ePrix. The 27-year-old came from ninth on the grid to comfortably beat Robin Frijns of Envision in the Saturday race, then the next day pulled off a repeat in more stressful circumstances. A strategy to use his mandatory Attack Mode power boost late in the race almost backfired when the safety car was scrambled. But Formula E’s new ‘overtime’ regulations, adding minutes to interrupted races, allowed him to still use his full allocation.…

Mercedes-AMG’s chosen method of electrifying its twin-turbocharged 4.0-litre V8 petrol engine lays the foundation for its other upcoming plug-in hybrid models. The so-called P3 set-up in the GT 63 S E Performance sites an electric motor at the rear, where it provides drive directly to the rear wheels via a two-speed gearbox, rather than channelling it through the nine-speed automatic and four-wheel drive system used by the V8. As a result, its reserves aren’t restricted by the power and torque limits of the regular gearbox and four-wheel drive, as in the P2 set-up of regular Mercedes PHEVs, which site their motor at the front, within the forward section of the gearbox housing. Other models planned to adopt the P3 system include the next-generation C63 S, on a reworked version of…

In its pomp, the Ford Focus was a giant of the European car market worth more than 500,000 sales, but to find a year in which it hit even half of that tally, now you have to look back more than a decade. Good car or not, its fortunes are dwindling, and that helps to explain quite a lot about its latest overhaul. It brings a refreshed look, a new cabin layout and plenty of new infotainment and active safety features, but it disguises plenty of cuts, too. Where a couple of years ago there was a range of three-and four-cylinder engines, now only the originally entry-level Ecoblue options remain on the diesel side, while the upper-level 1.5-litre petrols are gone. Ford is using its 48V mild-hybrid technology to bring…

You may know Andy Wallace for a few different things. If not for recently taking a Bugatti Chiron Super Sport to 300mph, it will be for taking a McLaren F1 to 240mph, winning at Le Mans on his first try or winning the Daytona 24 Hours three times. Bugatti’s ‘pilote officiel’ has enjoyed – and is still enjoying – quite the career. These days, many weeks it involves climbing into his own Volkswagen ID 3 in Buckinghamshire and driving to the Bugatti factory in Molsheim, a town in Alsace, north-eastern France, taking less than an hour to charge. So perhaps it feels like he hasn’t entirely stopped endurance racing, where the less time you spend stationary the better. The Molsheim gaff is cool. It’s the original home of the Bugatti…

There’s a new ownership structure at Bugatti, but it shouldn’t make a difference to the customer experience. Rimac owns 55% and Porsche 45% of Bugatti Rimac. Rimac itself, meanwhile, is owned 35% by its founder Mate Rimac, 22% by Porsche, 11% by Hyundai and 32% by others. What comes after the Chiron is down to 615 people: 300 in Croatia, 180 in Wolfsburg and 135 in Molsheim, Bugatti’s original and enduring home. It’s here where cars are assembled, taking six weeks at a time and at a rate of around 70 per year. About 40 more Chirons were left to make when I visited, so production will stop in 2022. There are old buildings and new. The service facility and assembly plant make up the new. Founder Ettore Bugatti never…

“It’s all about preparation, the technical side, data analytics and having the best drivers” If you were looking for a team that embodies the pomp and excess that Formula 1 is known for, you would likely pick McLaren Racing. Think of the incredible Norman Fosterdesigned McLaren Technical Centre, the grandiose Brand Centre, the hospitality unit that began a ‘mine’s bigger than yours’ building race and the meticulous level of preparation and cleanliness. Things have changed since Ron Dennis stepped down as the boss in 2016, and under Zak Brown, the team has strived to create a more open, relaxed image. Even so, it’s quite the culture shock to see a McLaren Racing team operating out of a no-nonsense tent in the middle of a dusty, dirty Saudi Arabian desert. But…

Remembering Quick Vic Damien Smith’s Motorsport Greats piece on the late, great Vic Elford (23 March) brought back happy memories of my fledgling amateur rallying career on the restricted calendars of the late 1950s and early 1960s. As a member of the then Bexley Light Car Club, I was privileged to have competed in some of the same rallies as the burgeoning young Elford, albeit at the opposite end of the results table! In 1960, Vic, partnered by the intrepid David Seigle-Morris, won Bexley’s prestige Witsend Rally. To see, hear and experience that pair thrashing across the narrow winding roads of the Romney Marsh on a foggy November night was an experience to behold. So much so that when the buzz in the clubroom bar was that Vic had entered…

MILEAGE 6727 WHY WE’RE RUNNING IT Can it appeal everywhere from disaster zone to congestion charge zone? You might recall that I introduced the Defender as the car that Matt Prior built, our esteemed editor-at-large getting himself all excited speccing it to perfection and then watching in (polite, restrained) frustration as production delays meant he had another car lined up. I didn’t, and so it was that I became the lucky custodian of one of the most in-demand cars in the country. And sure enough, in demand it has been, the aforementioned Prior not unreasonably wasting little time in securing his position at the front of the queue. First up was a trip to Wales for some off-roading. Says Prior: “It was light stuff, but what stood out was that…

An expert’s view DANNY KAYE, REVOLUTION PORSCHE “I’m a big fan of the 944. With the engine in the front and the gearbox in the rear, it has brilliant balance and is an amazing track car, if that floats your boat. There are pitfalls, though. You could buy one that has been partially restored by someone who hasn’t done it correctly, and within a year of ownership, corrosion starts to rear its head. It’s also important to check the timing belt, water pump and balanced belts. So whenever you buy one of these cars, definitely get a pre-purchase inspection before you hand your money over.” Buyer beware… ■ ENGINE Check for oil changes at 6000 miles on pre-1986 cars and Turbos or at 12,000 miles on later cars. It needs…

A road test in any other magazine might well be a short, subjective summary of a new car produced under almost any circumstances, but the Autocar road test is different. Specific, rigorous and detailed, it’s the closest examination we can give of any new model. It appears over at least eight pages and is close to 50 man-hours in the making every week. Most of what the road test process entails is designed to be strictly repeatable and fair. We benchmark standing-start and in-gear acceleration at a purpose-built test facility every week. We carry out both subjective and objective handling tests on both road and track, on the latter up to and beyond the limit of grip, so as to fully assess stability, drivability and limit handling appeal. And while…

Porsche and Audi are putting the final touches to a pair of co-developed high-performance electric SUVs, each of which will serve as a spearhead for a new family of premium-orientated and tech-rich electric cars built on an all-new architecture. The new Porsche Macan EV and Audi Q6 E-tron – each technically unrelated to any existing models in their respective manufacturers’ portfolios – represent the next step in the rapid electrification plans laid out by the two German marques. Each will serve as an electric alternative to their respective most popular combustion-engined models and should rapidly accelerate both Audi’s and Porsche’s transition to allout electrification. PORSCHE MACAN EV Porsche will look to build on the huge success of its debut EV, the Taycan, with a new electric take on the Macan…

The Urbansphere is the final entry in a trio of radical Audi concept cars developed to showcase a range of future autonomous EVs atop the PPE architecture. At 5510mm long, 2010mm wide and 1780mm tall and with a wheelbase of 3400mm, it’s significantly larger than any EV created by the Volkswagen Group so far, including the Volkswagen ID Buzz MPV. Despite its size, the Urbansphere has been conceived with megacities in mind, specifically those in China. It was created in partnership with Audi’s design studios in Beijing, taking into account the “human needs” of real customers in the capital. The Urbansphere features counter-hinged doors at both the front and the rear, with no B-pillar. The seats swivel outwards for ease of access and a red “carpet of light” is projected…

‘SWARM DATA’ IS a term that has been cropping up more frequently in the past year or two. It refers to data collected from multiple sources (the swarm) and shared via the cloud with all the individuals of the swarm. It can be used for all kinds of things, including, for example, warning drivers of upcoming hazards and adverse road-surface conditions. Last month, Volkswagen announced the latest version of its Travel Assist with Swarm Data. The technology is part of the Volkswagen Group’s ADAS suite, and while its announcement was relatively low-key, the technology behind it is intended to underpin new navigation standards for autonomous driving. Back in 2017, Volkswagen signed an agreement with Israeli tech firm Mobileye to develop the feature, which is based on Mobileye’s Road Experience Management…

WAGON WANT WANES Mercedes-Benz has long been candid about the uncertain future of estate cars. Speaking about the flexibility of the next-gen EVA2 platform ahead of the EQS SUV’s unveiling, EV drivetrain and architecture boss Christoph Starzynski said: “I always get the same question about station wagons. Of course it’s possible. The question is: is there demand to do another body variant?” END OF THE ALLROAD? In other electric German estate car news, Audi has hinted its Allroad models could get an EV reprieve. Asked if the A6 Avant E-tron concept will be offered in jacked-up guise with protective body trim, product marketing boss Niko Martens said: “Never say never.” But would it go on sale here? The A4 and A6 Allroads were taken off UK sale earlier this year…

Bjarn Haug In his sixth month of driving an Audi E-tron 55 courtesy car, waiting for his delayed Audi Q4 E-tron to arrive. “The power is ridiculous. You don’t need it. It’s fun for the first weeks, but if you go flat out all the time, then your range is halved. It’s fantastic compared with my old Audi A4 Avant diesel, but charging is a hassle.” Lalnazar Khan A taxi driver in Oslo in his four-day-old Tesla Model Y, which has replaced a Mercedes-Benz A-Class diesel. “The timing is now for electric. They’re going to close the city to diesel by 2024. I don’t have a charger at home, but we have many places to charge. I charge for just half an hour per day, so it’s good for me.”…

SATURDAY AM Serious elation this morning as we headed into the Goodwood Members’ Meeting, first and most intimate of the great Sussex estate’s three big car events this year. Not only had the organisers lucked into a perfect crisp, sunny day but our transport was remarkable, too: WO Bentley’s personal 1930 Mulliner-bodied 8 Litre ‘company car’. In 10 miles was an experience that said much about the direction of motoring progress. On one hand, the giant in-line six belched and blew back like a draught horse until warm and you needed a blacksmith’s forearms to turn the steering wheel. It wasn’t possible to effect a smooth gearchange (even if you’re handy with crash gearboxes; I’m not) until the oil was well and truly warm. On the other hand, the 8…

It has been an eventful time for Twisted. When last we checked in on the Yorkshire-based Land Rover Defender modifier, in 2018, it had not long launched its first Chevrolet V8-powered model. It has since been sued by Land Rover – twice – over trademark infringement and won both times. But neither that nor the wider business challenges of the last few years has held up the firm’s expansion much. There are now Twisted Defenders being sold under licence in the UAE and the US, and the firm has new UK dealerships in Kensington (London) and Salcombe (Devon) to go with its headquarters in Thirsk. Of the 240 last-off-the-line Defender Commercials that Twisted founder Charles Fawcett bought up back in 2016 (and if Land Rover had a problem with his…

Toyota has a knack for keeping alive types of car that other manufacturers have given up on. Not in a behind-the-times way; rather it manages to make things work that others can’t. Affordable sports cars, rally-refugee hatches and city cars are no longer viable, due to emissions and rising costs; the GR86, GR Yaris and Aygo X beg to differ. The Allroad or Cross Country look went from big to forgotten in the past two decades, but now we have the RAV4 Adventure, with black plastic trim, beefier skidplates, redesigned bumpers and four-wheel drive. Along with the Adventure grade, the updated SUV gains redesigned LED projector headlights, electric adjustment for the passenger seat on some trims and – drum roll – four USB-C ports in the interior. All good things,…

As well as cars, Ettore Bugatti was big into diverse new technology. There’s a surprising amount of archive video footage available from the time, because he thought it was important. And a company derived from his original one (unrelated to the car stuff) still makes aircraft componentry locally. In 1927, Ettore Bugatti made his first EV, the Type 56. He designed it for running around his estate without disturbing his horses or wildlife and so he could surprise staff, but some people wanted one, so he made more – reputedly six. Ten years ago, Bugatti bought one, made for the Queen of Luxembourg, at an auction in the US to display in the factory’s small museum. The two-seater drives. It has new batteries, of course. Eight of them, powering a…

Supercar: it’s a name that we’re all familiar with, arguably coined S for the Lamborghini Miura 57 years ago. The Miura’s 174mph top speed was back then the highest achieved by any production road car. Proving that envelope-pushing V-maxes have never gone out of fashion, we’ve decided to chart their steady progress, decade by decade, ending in excess of 300mph. It would be easy to dismiss each as a seldom-attained irrelevance, but the cars that achieved them were technological flag-bearers that improved the breed overall. They also serve as a potent epitaph to the mighty internal combustion engine, which might never again be allowed to raise the bar any higher. 1960s LAMBORGHINI MIURA P400 174MPH Inspired by the competition success of the Ford GT40, Lamborghini was persuaded to steal a…

CAN-AM McLaren was a dominant force early in the rules-light Canadian-American Challenge Cup sports car series. Although it missed the inaugural 1966 title, the squad won the next five with drivers Bruce McLaren, Denny Hulme and Peter Revson. The Chevrolet V8-powered M6A that it used to win the 1967 crown was the first to feature the team’s now-trademark papaya livery. INDYCAR With backing from tyre supplier Goodyear, which was eager to break rival Firestone’s dominance of the race, McLaren regularly contested the Indianapolis 500 and USAC Champ Car series in the 1970s. With the rapid M16B, it notched up several wins and showed incredible pace before Johnny Rutherford scored its first Indy 500 win in 1974 (although Mark Donohue had won in 1972 in a Penske-run M16B). LE MANS When…

NEWS BMW 7 Series reborn Luxury limo returns to take on Mercedes-Benz’s S-Class with a new look, upgraded tech and, for the first time, an EV option DRIVEN Gunther Werks 993 Easy on the eye, if not the wallet. Is 425bhp Porsche restomod a fitting tribute? FEATURE Used car special Why wait for a new car? Here are 80 used gems from £5000-£500,000 EVERY WEEK ROAD TEST Ford Mustang Mach-E GT Quickest version of Ford’s first electric car meets our timing gear OUR CARS McLaren GT Five months with a snarling supercar sounded great. Was it? SUBSCRIBE autocar.co.uk/subscribe or see p20…

MILEAGE 12594 WHY WE’RE RUNNING IT To see if an electric car fits into a high-mileage life The update has landed. Yup, the £1000 optional extra – the Performance software upgrade – that adds 67bhp to the Polestar 2, which we agreed we should test on this car, announced via the touchscreen that it was available to me and that I should download it. So I did. I mean, it didn’t say exactly that 67bhp was ready to arrive. It said that a software update was ready to download (of which I knew the power rise was a part) and that I should pick a moment when I could leave the car locked and not in use while an overair update came down. It included a few bug fixes and…

Peugeot has been on a roll recently. After several years of visually underwhelming models, the French firm has well and truly recovered its position as a style icon for the everyday driver. The Peugeot 508, offered in both Fastback and SW estate bodystyles and introduced in 2018, is a fine case in point. Not only is it a looker, but it’s also practical, good to drive and a capable rival for the segment-leading Volkswagen Passat and Skoda Octavia. With several powertrain variants available, the 508 can cover a wide spectrum of duties. Diesel options are the cheapest on the used market and the range opens with a 1.5-litre BlueHDi, which produces 128bhp for a 0-62mph time of 10sec. A more powerful 2.0-litre diesel, also available since launch but removed from…

The PPE architecture will underpin a varied range of Audi EVs across different segments, ranging from an electric follow-up to the A4 to the large ‘Landjet’ limousine that will succeed the A8 and the production version of the 5.5m-long Urbansphere MPV concept (see p7). Initial details released by the brand reveal that PPE allows for ride heights ranging between 152mm and 217mm, a wheelbase of between 2890mm and 3080mm and a track width of 1641mm and 1714mm, giving a high degree of carryover between several core models and in turn cutting development and production costs. Porsche has been less forthcoming about its plans for the new platform, but the details already given by its sibling brand suggest that will be well placed to underpin EVs both underneath and above the…

The Mercedes-Benz EQS SUV, revealed here as an all-new luxury flagship for the German marque’s fastgrowing line of EVs, will rival the Audi E-tron and BMW iX when it arrives at the end of this year. As with the EQS and EQE saloons, the US-built EQS SUV is based on the dedicated electric vehicle architecture (EVA) platform, which supports both single-motor, rear-wheel-drive and dual-motor, four-wheel-drive layouts. Power for all launch models is provided by a 107.8kWh battery – the same one used by the EQS saloon – packaged within the floorpan to give the luxury SUV a largely flat floor and what Mercedes says is the lowest centre of gravity of any of its SUV models. DESIGN At 5125mm long, 1959mm wide and 1718mm tall, the EQS SUV is 82mm…

The Honda NSX will return as a supercar flagship for a 30-strong line-up of electric vehicles that Honda will launch as part of an ambitious £31 billion electrification strategy. The Japanese company has pledged to achieve annual EV production volumes of more than two million by 2030, usher in solid-state battery technology and launch a pair of all-electric sports car flagships, all on the way to ending ICE car sales globally by 2040. Honda aims to achieve net carbon-neutrality by 2050 but says “a multi-faceted and multi-dimensional approach” to electrification is needed, “not a mere replacing of engines with batteries”. To this end, it will allocate a portion of an ¥8 trillion (£49bn) R&D budget to developing hydrogen powertrains and battery-swapping hardware as a means of facilitating the phase-out of…

Ex-Aston Martin designer Miles Nurnberger’s arrival at Dacia coincided with the unveiling of the new Jogger (road test, p34) and came shortly after a radical transformation plan for the marque was detailed as part of parent company the Renault Group’s Renaulution strategy. Nurnberger gave Autocar the first clues of what to expect as Dacia embraces its new identity and electrifies. When will we see your influence on Dacia’s cars? “The majority of my job is spent worrying about cars coming four years down the line, or even as long as a decade. But I have been able to have some influence on the next big model programmes we’ve got coming before that – more about the execution of them, rather than conception. Just being able to ‘squeeze the lemon’ on…

It takes me a good few miles to get used to the Harley-Davidson Street Glide. I squeak nervily into San Francisco traffic and try not to think too hard about its 375kg weight – or what would happen if I drop it. I have a few days with a long way to go to drive some cars, and I had wondered: what’s the status of the all-American road trip? Can you head out onto the open road, wind in your armpits, into a country in love with the automobile and just drive easy and free for mile after mile? Or, better still (sorry, but at times it is), ride? The good people of Harley-Davidson said I could test one of their bikes, which they rent out through the Eaglerider chain…

The fearsome emphasis on quality is being overseen by PSA Group veteran Sandrine Gredelu, who worked at the Rennes and Poissy plants, latterly overseeing the Citroën C5 Aircross and Peugeot 5008 models. She acknowledged to Autocar that the Tonale approach is something of an experiment within Stellantis, as the attention to detail goes further than it would for a mainstream brand, but that comes at a significant cost, and such an investment needs to be paid back. One of the new mantras of the plan is to “never receive, produce or receive a defect”. The three-pronged approach comprises the suppliers not sending defective parts, the Alfa factory not introducing defects and the buyer not receiving a defective car. Perhaps the biggest realworld test for any aspiring premium brand is to…

SMART IS EMBARKING on a wide-reaching revamp of its branding, product portfolio and retail network as it brings its new #1 electric SUV to global markets and will implement a new direct sales model that caters to both digital and physical buying channels. It will centre around the implementation of a buying process that aims to enable customers to choose their Smart EV and sign for it in just six steps and 15 minutes. Saskia Oboril-Klein, the EV brand’s European head of business development, explained that the priority was to offer “a consistent customer experience and stable and transparent pricing” and vowed that “no matter through which channel a customer interacts with us, they will always find the same vehicle at the same price”. Importantly, a build-to-stock production model in…

Long promised, the electrification of Mercedes-AMG’s engines begins here. The new GT 63 S E Performance 4-Door Coupé is the first plug-in hybrid (PHEV) by Mercedes-Benz’s performance car division, and with 831bhp (a significant 111bhp more than the raucous GT Black Series two-door), it also holds the distinction of being the most potent AMG yet. The luxurious liftback builds on the GT 63 S 4-Door Coupé that was launched in 2018. Its brawny twinturbocharged 4.0-litre V8 petrol engine has been combined with an electric motor integrated into the rear axle in an electrification process that AMG’s chief technical officer, Jochen Hermann, says we will see a lot more of in the not too distant future. Operating at 400V, the motor adds 201bhp to the 630bhp of the engine, lifting power…

This is, perhaps, the Toyota GR Yaris of your dreams: a strippedout competition version of the hot hatch of the moment, with rally-spec suspension and gravel or dirt tyres, plus some driveline tweaks but no uplift in power or complexity, so it’s still very approachable. The Toyota Gazoo Racing Iberian Cup is a joint venture between Toyota Spain, the Madrid-based Motor and Sport Institute (MSi) and Caetano, Portugal’s long-time Toyota importer. It will form the basis of a one-make series consisting of nine mostly gravel rallies around the Iberian peninsula. MSi has developed the car. It has made some obvious changes to the road-legal GR Yaris (shell seats, a roll cage, a fire-retardant interior stripped almost bare) and some more clandestine ones. The regular GR Yaris with Circuit Pack uses…

MODEL TESTED 1.0 TCe 110 COMFORT Price £16,595 Power 109bhp Torque 148lb ft 0-60mph 11.0sec 30-70mph in fourth 12.1sec Fuel economy 43.8mpg CO2 emissions 130-131g/km 70-0mph 47.4m Stories of rising commercial success have been hard to find in car-industry circles these past couple of years, but there have been a few among budget brands – and none more significant than that of the Renault Group’s Romanian value marque, Dacia. After its acquisition by Renault in 1999, this firm’s modern story began in 2004 with the launch of the first-generation, Renault-backed Logan saloon. Steady initial sales growth quickly accelerated and Dacia consolidated its position as a 500,000-units-a-year car maker (not counting commercial vehicles) in 2021. It now has one of Europe’s top-three most popular cars, in the form of the Sandero hatchback,…

Just as we turn off the M1 at junction 14, our car’s range indicator clicks around to 875 miles. That’s nearly 100 miles more than its WLTP figures predict and, in theory, means we could now schlep to Dundee and back without troubling a credit card. You see, the Skoda Superb Estate we’re in is powered by an ultra-frugal diesel engine, aka the much-maligned, pilloried-by-the-tabloid-press, filthy, NOx-belching oil-burner that nearly brought this car’s parent company to its knees seven years ago as a result of the Dieselgate emissions scandal. People have taken the bad press to heart, too. According to the Society of Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT), diesel engines powered 50.8% of all cars bought in the UK a decade ago, thanks in part to government incentives based on CO2…

All that Jazz Your article about the Kia Proceed and Kia EV6 driving from Brighton to Glasgow (‘The proclaimer’, 9 March) was excellent. I’ve just completed a similar trip from Dunbar, East Lothian, to Worthing, West Sussex, in my 2021 Honda Jazz hybrid. It took just under nine hours, including stops for breakfast, coffee and a quick lunch. So we weren’t driving very slowly (it was the bottom of the M1 and the M25 that slowed us down; we’re usually home an hour earlier). The total distance was 444 miles, using 29.7 litres of petrol at a cost of £47.49. This makes both the petrol and electric Kias rather expensive, at £99 and £82 over about 500 miles (but yes, I know they’re a bit bigger). We’re just off to…

SS 1 draws the blueprint COVENTRY FIRM SWALLOW achieved much in its first decade, crafting sidecars and specials, so it decided to make a car of its own (under the brand name SS); and the 1 arrived to an Autocar rave review. Naturally the 62bhp 2.5-litre version was even more appealing to us than the 40bhp 2.0-litre, so we got hold of one post-haste. “A really fierce performance is possible on second gear to 40mph, and third is also very useful, while even on top the acceleration is still very rapid, which is not always the case with a sports car,” we swooned. “The keen driver will find it a car after his own heart, for the gear change is of the type which allows rapid alterations to be made…

MILEAGE 5661 WHY WE’RE RUNNING IT To find out if Alfa’s flagship is a practical, SUV-shaped supercar or a niche too far Reading through past Autocar tests of the Stelvio, it’s clear that we’ve always enjoyed the way the big Alfa Romeo drives. Where it has tended to fall down, however, has been in its usability as a family SUV – in particular the way that rather focused character can make it a bit of a chore to live with as a daily driver. So what better way to test that criticism than a weekend away – complete with kids and dogs – to visit relatives in the West Country? The first challenge was overcome pretty easily: packing. For all its high-performance potential, the Stelvio is, at its heart, a…

The 944 isn’t a traditional Porsche sports car. In fact, it’s a far cry from that iconic flat-six, rearengined coupé you’re thinking of. Little does that matter, however. In its heyday, this masterpiece was the most successful sports car in the manufacturer’s history, with more than 163,000 examples produced. Introduced in 1982, the 944 built on the platform its 924 predecessor had established. It features a frontengined, rear-wheel-drive layout and a range of in-line fours. Initially offered with a 161bhp 2.5-litre unit under the bonnet, the standard car – called Lux – is no slouch, although it’s no rocket either. The 217bhp Turbo offers more fiery performance, with a 0-60mph time of 5.9sec. It arrived in 1986. Next to be introduced was the S, with a 187bhp 2.5-litre atmo engine.…

YOU DON’T HAVE to break the bank for a satisfying dose of speed these days. For proof, look no further than the Nissan 350Z – one of the Japanese firm’s most alluring junior performance packages that, even in its heyday, had an attainable price and bags of kerb appeal. Propelled by a naturally aspirated 3.5-litre V6, the early 350Z offered 276bhp. It was initially available as a coupé and all cars were rear-wheel drive with a six-speed manual gearbox. Power was uprated in 2005 to a lusty 296bhp and a roadster was added to the line-up. Straight-line speed was quick enough to get your attention: with 296bhp, the model completed 0-62mph in 5.8sec in the coupé and 6.2sec in the roadster. If that’s not enough poke, look for the HR…