Inhaltsverzeichnis für November 2025 in Evo

THAT POPPING SOUND YOU CAN hear is the automotive industry’s very own dot-com bubble bursting moment. Its race to electrification running out of charge. The fuses blowing, the batteries running on empty and, most alarmingly, profits free-falling. Regardless of your opinion on the push to electrify the cars we drive, the situation every manufacturer finds itself in is an alarming one for us all. Porsche is in the headlines because it is the marque so many strive to emulate. From brand loyalty to profit per unit sold, it’s the gold standard. Now it’s facing a €1.8bn loss and halting the launch of its upsized Cayenne EV and fitting a petrol engine in it instead. This was not in the strategy. But neither was it in BYD’s plans for Warren Buffett…

IT HASN’T TAKEN LONG FOR ASTON Martin’s current CEO, Adrian Hallmark (the fourth since Lawrence Stroll took a controlling interest in the company), to implement his plan for broadening the brand’s product portfolio. Already announced for 2026 are the Vantage S and DB12 S, and ahead of their arrival comes the DBX S. It’s based on the 707 but is not a replacement for it nor the original 540bhp DBX, which launched in 2020 and drifted from the price list at the tail end in 2024 Hallmark wants to offer Aston Martin’s customers more choice, providing a line-up on a par with those of its rivals. Therefore, just as Bentley and Lamborghini customers have a choice of three flavours of Bentayga or Urus, Aston Martin has joined the party by…

A PAIR OF THRILLING, LIGHTWEIGHT SPORTS CARS ON a scenic, undulating road. What should be a party is in danger of becoming a wake. Lord knows what the latest news from Hethel will be by the time you read this, but Lotus’s denial of the plant’s rumoured closure felt a touch thinner when it announced 550 redundancies at the home of Emira production. We already know that Alpine will soon lay the A110 to rest in its current form: we’re in the final year of production as things stand, with an electric replacement to come. The same goes for our duo’s Porsche 718 rival, for which the order books recently closed – albeit quickly followed by Porsche confirming ICE will still be offered in the next-gen car. So let’s smile…

ON AVERAGE, PALM SPRINGS GETS AS little as five inches of rainfall per year, but today all of it seems to have arrived at once. Hours earlier we were being baked by intense 40-degree heat, but thick grey clouds have rolled over the Coachella valley, lightning is flashing in the distance and rain is pummelling the ground and flooding the Thermal Club circuit. It’s not looking good. The Ford PR manager walks back into the pits flush-faced after a sighting lap, having unintentionally spun the wheels up through standing water at over 70mph. Behind him there’s a pickup truck trundling around with a giant hairdryer hanging off it to try to clear the moisture. We won’t be allowed out unless there’s a clear dry line, but most of the surface…

‘AND SO THE REAL REASON THAT THE TSAR WAS overthrown was…? Smith…? SMITH?!?!’ But Smith isn’t thinking about a chilly Petrograd and the fate of Nicholas II in 1917. There is a window open in the classroom and carrying on the warm breeze is another voice, an Italian-British one, that is instead transporting Smith to the Mulsanne circa 2003. A distant shriek is rising above the usual lazy summer sounds of a Tuesday morning in Surrey. At this remove of several miles, the side-exit-symphony is little more than the volume of a sleepy summer wasp, but it’s intoxicating. Smith’s attention has as much resistance as Odysseus to the sirens. ‘IT REALLY IS INCREDIBLY LOUD. OLD F1 CAR LOUD. UTTERLY, SPINE-T INGLINGLY GLORIOUS’ Thirty years ago it was me in that…

PORSCHE’S RECENTLY RETIRED 911 Turbo S is one of the fastest point-to-point road cars ever built. Ruthlessly quick with a steely, cold-blooded character, the delivery is all about immense torque and fierce propulsive force, with a dynamic emphasis on traction, stability and effortlessly deployable speed. But where most (including us) see a complete, highly evolved, daily-driveable supercar, Northamptonshire-based RML Bespoke saw raw potential. To prove the point, it set about augmenting a Turbo S with a suite of changes encompassing styling, aerodynamics, chassis and powertrain. The result – referred to internally as ‘P39’ but now officially named RML GT Hypercar – is a bewinged monster promising road and track performance to outstrip anything available from Porsche itself. The most obvious aspect of this transformation is the wild-looking full-carbon bodywork. Drawing…

SPECTRAFLAIR. OTHER CAR COMPANIES MIGHT HAVE used DuPont’s wild iridescent paint system, but none employed it to better effect than TVR. It’s a point being proved to us in spectacular style by this glorious T350C, rainbow-like bursts of diffracted light dancing across its bodywork as it basks in the autumn sunshine. It might have temporarily stolen the show, but the T350C has some impressive company in our gathering of modern classic sports coupes. Joining it from the ’00s is the Z4 M Coupé, while the ’10s are represented by the Evora Sport 410 and 981 Cayman GT4. Four more different characters you couldn’t wish to meet. It’s a magnificent if rather melancholy group. TVR is gone. Lotus is on life support. BMW has no plans to replace the current Z4…

‘THE FIRST FAT, HEAVY DROPS FALL LAZILY FROM the sky and drum on the roof of the Porsche like dried peas on a biscuit tin; clearly, there’s no sound deadening behind the roof lining.’ Not my words but John Barker’s in issue 12 of evo back in 1999. The Porsche 911 GT3 was a brand-new model-line then, a water-cooled replacement for the last air-cooled 911 Carrera RS, and the car world was still getting to know it. What exactly was this lower, lairier 911 with an unfamiliar badge? JB dashed from Britain into France in the original 996-generation GT3 to get to know it better and glimpse a total eclipse of the sun in the process, dodging crowds doing the same in Cornwall. (‘It was a deeply moving experience, never to…

SIXTEEN THOUSAND MILES TICKED over on the RS6’s digital odometer this month, quickly followed by 17,000, and this was followed by an alert to add two litres of oil. A couple of hundred miles later the ‘oil change in 2000 miles’ message popped up, which will mean a visit to a dealer. Which is handy, because they can also investigate the intermittent central locking fault that’s materialised that, on occasion, prevents the driver’s door from opening and therefore requires some contortion to lean through one of the three functioning apertures to open it from the inside. The swearing would make Logan Roy and Malcolm Tucker blush. While it’s having its lubricants replenished the brakes will get a cautionary inspection too. Their general performance remains absolute, with a consistent pedal from…

THE CURRENT M5 HAS DIVIDED OPINION not just on the internet but across the evo office too. And one question that almost inevitably crops up every time our M5 Touring is being discussed is this: would you be better off with an M3 Touring instead? So this month we brought our G99 M5 together with a G81 M3 to find the answer. Being from different classes, these two aren’t direct rivals. Their basic prices are quite some distance apart too, £91,865 for the M3 playing £113,605 for the M5. But if you’re looking for a practical, genuinely fast estate, they both rank among the most compelling options on sale. The M3 is hardly a small car – that much was made very clear when I parked it next to my…

TO THOSE NOT IN THE KNOW, THIS CAR appears to be nothing less than an out-and-out super-GT, with enough V8-fuelled performance to bother a supercar, and a six-figure price tag to put it out of reach for most. In fact, only the last of those is true about the AMG GT43, for while it costs from £105,435, it borrows its powertrain from a hot hatch. Of course, it’s not unheard of for engines to be shared between models at various price points, but there’s no power increase here to help justify the £40,000 price difference between the GT43 and its A45 S relative. Output from its 2-litre turbocharged four-cylinder stands at an identical 415bhp to the hot hatch, and with power going to the rear wheels alone there’s a significant…

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AS THE SUN SETS AND THE NORTH SEA waves crash against the rocks and stone of the east coast beach, the products of two of the automotive world’s most storied companies sit silently having their picture taken. Their roofs are down, their jewel-like head and tail lamps twinkle in the dusk, their turbocharged motors are long cooled and all tick, tick, ticked out. After a full day shooting and several more days behind their respective wheels, the time has come to nail my colours: Aston Martin DB12 Volante or Maserati GranCabrio Trofeo? The Maserati is your purer GT car, less frenetic than the DB12, which we’ve always felt a little hyperactive for a classic GT, if not quite sharpe nough to be a super-sports car. The GranCabrio has a softer…

YOU MIGHT REMEMBER THAT IN 2024’sevo Car of the Year test (issue 329), Mazda’s plucky little two-seater put in an astonishing performance. Nearly ten years after first going on sale, the latest development of the NDgeneration MX-5 came within 0.2 points of winning the whole damn thing. On a podium of £200k+ supercars, it was the people’s champion. So we’re excited to welcome a near-identically specced car to Fast Fleet, to see what it’s like to live with over a full six months. This isn’t our first long-term ND-gen MX-5; aside from Peter Tomalin’s subtly modded 2016 example that also graces these pages, we last ran a soft-top 2.0 GT Sport Tech model between issues 303 and 317. What separates this new car, and what took it so close to…