Tabla de contenidos para December 2024 en Wheels

IT SEEMS RIDICULOUS NOW. Back in late 1999, I was sitting in pit lane at Road Atlanta, wondering why the hell BMW had brought us to a racetrack to test a 4x4. To the naïve minds of the assembled press corps, this was like being summoned to the Canning Stock Route to drive the latest Ferrari supercar. It could only end in embarrassing failure. This was no noddy-spec circuit either. Home of Petit Le Mans, Road Atlanta was the place where Yannick Dalmas had infamously backflipped a Porsche 911 GT1 the year previously. What’s more, the downhill snaking Esses were exactly the sort of corner sequence that would trip up a high-riding 4x4. The new BMW X5 looked great. A dozen were lined up in pit row, the 4.4-litre V8s adding…

NEVER READ THE comments. That’s what we’d advise Ferrari because the reaction to the launch of the F80, successor to the LaFerrari and the sixth in Ferrari’s line of hypercars that also includes legends such as the 288 GTO, F40, F50 and Enzo, has been savage. To whit, few seems to rate the slab-sided styling and, having seen footage of the car on track at Mugello for Ferrari’s Finali Mondiali event, the rain hiss from the tyres sounded louder than the engine. Our response would be to give the car a chance because the technology behind it is a dizzying whirlwind of genius. Of course, the whole discussion is rendered moot by the fact that the car is sold out. All 799 units – virtually double the build run of…

IT’S A TOUGH task, trying to guess at the winner of Wheels Car of the Year ahead of time. Of course, were you given to betting, the pre-event favourite could well be the Kia EV9, with the Hyundai Ioniq 5 N as a decent each-way, but I’ve tried many times before at predicting the result and I’m currently standing at a solid 100 percent failure rate. With 25 cars on the starting grid for COTY 2024, the 58th running of Australia’s premier award looks set to be a ripper of an event. Some things continue as before. We’ll be decamping to Lang Lang proving ground for the first section of the week, with the finalists being sorted on the tried and trusted Wheels test route in South Gippsland. At the…

IN ALL MY many years as a licensed driver, I have only ever sold three cars but the number of vehicles I’ve actually owned totals about four times that. So right now you’ll be speculating on a reason for the discrepancy. There are several. Firstly, some of my cars succumbed to the age-old confidence/talent imbalance and I was destined to be their final owner. You might call it crashing but I prefer to describe it as ‘using a vehicle beyond the point of saleable condition’. Thanks to my saintly generosity, a couple were given away, including the second-generation Vauxhall Astra three-door which was so riddled with corrosion it would leave small piles of brown powder on the road each time a door was slammed. Little did the recipient know, this car…

IF YOU’VE EVER been lucky to drive a supercar, you’ll know that when you slide behind the wheel the world seems to smile upon you. Birds sing in the trees, your ears tingle with pops and crackles from a raspy sports exhaust, and fellow drivers tend to (but not always) greet you warmly with metaphorical hugs and literal thumbs up. But here’s the thing: in news sure to please those of us who worry about real-life problems like the price of petrol and olive oil, I’ve discovered you don’t need to sell a kidney or max out the mortgage to buy a supercar if you want to receive such positive vibes. No, you can get largely the same experience in the new Hyundai Santa Fe. Slip inside the strikingly boxy…

THE SUCCESSOR TO the McLaren P1 mixes Formula 1 aerodynamics with a mighty newV8 hybrid drivetrain that sends all of its 938kW to the rear wheels. The W1 breaks all records for the company in terms of power and performance. It laps circuits quicker than the aero-focused Senna and accelerates faster than the speed-focused Speedtail, all in a package that weighs 1399kg thanks to a forensic approach to weight-saving for every component, from the engine to the sunvisors. At the heart of the W1 is an in-house-engineered twin-turbocharged 4.0-litre flat-plane-crank V8 engine. McLaren says the engine is new from the ground up. It uses both direct injection and port fuel injection, produces 683kW on its own to give the highest output per litre of any McLaren engine yet. It works…

Keep it tight (no more than 200 words) and do include your suburb if via email: wheels@wheelsmag.com.au You can also have your say on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter (search for Wheels Australia) “The Ultra variant is supposed to hit 300km/h in 15.07seconds. That’s almost 1.5 seconds quicker than a Ferrari SF90.” ONCE IN A while you read a news story that sits you on your arse. For me it was the news that the Xiaomi SU7 Ultra prototype, a Chinese electric car that I’d never even heard of, had set a lap record for an EV sedan around the Nürburgring, beating Tesla, Porsche and everybody else in the process. Before you cry that its 6m46.847s was set using a prototype, with a roll cage and semi-slick tyres, that;’s how most…

THERE’S A FUNDAMENTAL issue with creating a smaller car that looks like a shrunken version of a successful larger one. They never quite drive the same. Truth is, automotive history is replete with examples of manufacturers trying and failing to replicate a winning formula in miniature. This is the issue that Kia faces with its EV5, a five-seat medium SUV that looks for all the world like a hot-washed version of its lauded seven-seat EV9. It has a job on its hands too, squaring up to Australia’s runaway best seller in the EV sector, the Tesla Model Y. Kia’s cheapest electric offering finds itself tilting at some heady targets. We’ve spent some time behind the wheel in order to find out how it shapes up. It leverages an instant advantage…

FIVE MONTHS AFTER arriving at the Wheels office, it’s time to bid farewell to the Genesis GV80. It’s been eventful, not always for the right reasons. Almost as soon as it arrived, it was shunted in the rear while in stationary traffic and, ever since that occurred, it’s been waiting for the parts to repair the rear valance, parts which have, as yet, failed to appear. It’s also required an entirely new head unit after a software update bricked the original, so life with the Genesis has included a fair few trips back and forth to both dealers and crash repairers, a spell in two different temporary replacement vehicles and lots of wondering what might have been. It’s that last point that gnaws at me, because aside from these two…

THERE IT WAS, buried in the bowels of an otherwise upbeat Peugeot 3008 SUV press release. Just one line that you might well have skipped over as you glazed over reading about hybrid powertrains. “In response to changing consumer preferences in the segment, Peugeot Australia has confirmed the 508 will be retired from the local range, with limited stock remaining in the network,” the company said, at a stroke killing off probably the most delightful car it had built in recent years. Regular readers of this page will know that this is the fate of most cars: a huge fanfare upon entry to market and then the most perfunctory announcement of their end, or worse, the ignominy of none at all. Only a handful of cars get the razzle-dazzle press…

CATL’S ‘MIRACLE’ PHEV BATTERY Chinese tech firm Contemporary Amprex Technology Limited (CATL) has unveiled its first battery pack specifically designed for plug-in hybrid vehicles, promising a range of up to 400km and a ‘BEV-like driving experience’. Perhaps that figure should be qualified. CATL gave no details on what vehicle this figure was derived from, or even how large the pack was. Then there’s the fact that it was achieved on the notoriously lenient China Light Duty Test Cycle. A maximum recharge rate of 280km in 10 minutes looks more than promising. We’re keeping an eye on this Freevoy sodium-lithium pack with interest. VW SET TO CLOSE GERMAN FACTORIES In an unprecedented move, Volkswagen is set to shutter as many as three of its German plants as a cost-saving measure, says…

TESLA’S NEW CYBERCAB is quite the curious thing. I don’t mind how it looks; its sloping coupe roofline channels a little Volkswagen XL1, while the swan-wing doors are a bit McLaren. The clean, minimalist exterior has a steampunk, Blade Runner vibe, while the aerodynamic, 21-inch disc wheels remind me of a salt flat racer. It looks like it would be a laugh to drive down Chapel Street in Melbourne – or a similar look-at-me supercar strip in whatever city or town – or to take to a Cars & Coffee. Except, there’s a problem. A few, actually. First, you can’t drive it, which is kind of the point. But second, and more crucially, nobody I know would want to be seen dead in it. For the longest time, the humble…

The first job was to go back to basics and identify the ingredients that made a Porsche, a vision that had become blurred in years prior “THIS WAS A CAR to decide whether or not Porsche had a future.” It’s a stark quote, and the man who uttered those words should probably know because he was Porsche’s former CEO, Wendelin Wiedeking. It’s tempting to look back at certain points in a car manufacturer’s history and point to those make or break moments, but it’s hard to underestimate exactly how much trouble Porsche was in when the 993 version of the iconic 911 was launched in October 1993. The 1992/93 financial year yielded some figures that were manifestly unsustainable. Porsche had sold a mere 12,500 cars worldwide, recording losses of $228m.…

01 Toyota Hilux DUE Q4 2025 PRICE From c.$50K WE KNOW A new Toyota Hilux is coming in 2025. The smart money is on a reveal at March’s Bangkok Motor Show in Thailand, where the Hilux is manufactured, ahead of a local arrival towards the end of the year. The big question is: how far will Toyota go with it? Since the turn of the millennium, Toyota’s product strategy has largely been one of continual but mild evolution, resulting in very popular vehicles that were rarely class leading. In recent years the company has made greater strides, not just rediscovering its performance mojo but making mainstream models like the RAV4 and Camry genuinely enjoyable to drive. For years the Hilux could rest on its laurels as Australia’s number one-selling vehicle,…

WHY DO I have the overwhelming urge to go out an buy a bowling ball? And why am I wondering what fried squirrel tastes like, whether buckshot or grapeshot is better against lawn varmints, and how many pounds-feet of torque it’d take to drag a tree stump out of my front yard? Yes, it’s because I’ve just taken delivery of a Ford F-150 Lariat. Yee and indeed haw. See, this thing is as true-blue Yankee as it gets, coming straight out of the factory in, er, Mickleham in the north of Melbourne. That’s where the left-hook imports go to be stripped back to virtual componentry and reassembled with the steering wheel on the correct side and a whole host of Australian Design Rules ticked and certified. RMA Automotive is responsible…

PRICE Recommended retail figure at time of publication (asterisk indicates driveaway price) ENGINE TYPE L, in-line; V, vee; F, flat. Number of cylinders. T, turbo; S, supercharged; D, diesel; H, hybrid; E, electric SIZE Litres or kWh POWER kW TORQUE Nm TRANSMISSION M, manual; A, auto; D, dual-clutch; C, CVT WEIGHT Kerb, kg 0-100 km/h, acceleration in seconds (Wheels as-tested figures in italics) FUEL CONS Consumption in litres, or kWh, per 100km RON Octane of fuel required, as numbered, or D for diesel RESALE percent, 3-year resale in Glass’s ISSUE TESTED month/year DRIVE A, all-wheel; F, front; R, rear. Any figure in bold is our own estimate.…