Sommaire pour June 26, 2024 de Autocar

A £100,000 PERFORMANCE version of the Genesis GV60 electric SUV will go into production this year as the first car in the Korean premium brand’s Magma line, offering performance to match the Hyundai Ioniq 5 N but tuned for the “gentleman driver”. Tipped for a Goodwood Festival of Speed debut, the GV60 Magma is expected to adopt much of its Hyundai sibling’s underpinnings, such as its 89kWh battery and 641bhp twin-motor set-up. The Ioniq 5 N, which is based on the same Hyundai Group E-GMP platform, is good for 278 miles and a 3.4sec 0-62mph sprint. Asked how the hot GV60 and subsequent Magma models will be set up, Genesis vehicle development chief Tyrone Johnson, known for his work on the Ford Focus RS and Hyundai i30 N, said: “They…

GERMAN ENGINEERING FIRM HWA has revealed a homage to the legendary Mercedes-Benz 190E 2.5-16 Evo II that is entirely bespoke from the ground up and due to enter production next year. The Evo II, made from 1990-1991, was driven by a 2.5-litre four-cylinder engine tuned by Cosworth. But HWA – a storied motorsport firm started by AMG co-founder Hans Werner Aufrecht – has opted for a twin-turbocharged 3.0-litre V6 supplied by Mercedes and paired it with a six-speed manual gearbox. The Evo produces 443bhp and 405lb ft of torque in ‘standard’ guise, with a top speed of 168mph. Buyers can also opt for an Affalterbach performance package, which ups performance to 493bhp and the top speed to 185mph. HWA has stayed true to the design of the Evo II with…

THE AUDI RS Q8 has a new Performance-badged range-topper that is the brand’s most powerful combustion car yet, with 631bhp from a snarling twin-turbo V8. The 39bhp boost over the standard RS Q8 means the hot new super-SUV narrowly outpunches the 621bhp RS6 Performance and is only 10bhp shy of the closely related, pure-petrol Lamborghini Urus, which retires this year. A supercar-baiting 3.6sec 0-62mph time is the result, which is 0.2sec quicker than the standard car, and the 155mph speed limiter has been removed to allow the Performance to surge on to 190mph. Audi has teased out the Performance’s extra power with a freer-flowing exhaust system, which as well as reducing back pressure creates a “sportier, more evocative sound”. The Performance variant arrives as part of an update for the…

THE BOOM-AND-bust nature of the car industry can seem like a rollercoaster ride for employees. One year, the company has cash to burn, because there are favourable exchange rates, high demand and weak competition. You get new corporate polo shirts and see invites to ‘team-building days’ in your inbox. Then suddenly the directors spill out of a meeting looking ashen-faced and cancel everything fun. In one of these lean periods, a company dictated that employees should save costs by car sharing on longer trips. Two managers followed the rules and agreed to meet at a service station for a trip to Scotland. A security guard saw one of the managers, who was running late, ‘abandon’ his car and hurry away. On closer inspection, he saw a bag on the back…

By the time you read this, you should already have seen the new BMW M5 uncamouflaged (if you haven’t, turn to p18). And boy oh boy, is there a lot of it to see. The G90-generation M5 is the first M5 to stretch beyond five metres in length. And in terms of width? Compared with the already expansive 5 Series on which BMW’s latest super-saloon is based, the wheel arches are swollen by 75mm at the front and 48mm at the back. Had such a car been released three years ago, it wouldn’t have been an M5 but an M7 – the one product M division has never even attempted. As for weight, we will get to that topic in a moment, but it’s the most eye-widening statistic of them…

Car makers are increasingly trying to tempt younger buyers with left-field family cars. Forget traditional boxy SUVs: we now have everything from the Volvo EX30 to the Toyota C-HR – and not forgetting the Cupra Formentor, which has just been revised. Because Cupra certainly has an interest in this type of customer, judging by how much it talks about video games and being “futurefacing”. To a point, the cars do live up to the spiel. They are all available with powerful engines and feature sharp, angular designs punctuated by a signature bronze trim. The Formentor set the Spanish brand on this path in 2020, being its first model that wasn’t based on a Seat and a very strong seller: more than 120,000 were delivered worldwide last year. Now it has…

In a stellar career that he insists has “years to run”, Aston Martin design chief Marek Reichman has led the creation of more than 50 Aston Martin and Lagonda models in 19 years. It’s an achievement like no other in the marque’s 111-year history, yet while unique, it is just one of a suite of compelling reasons why Autocar is delighted to present Reichman with the 2024 Sturmey Award for innovation. Perhaps the most obvious and striking reason is the unfailingly progressive nature of Reichman’s work, especially since he has maintained this upward trajectory under no fewer than five Aston Martin CEOs, all diverse in style, emphasis and character. Starting at a point where the company was selling two decent but slightly steady sports models (DB9 and V8 Vantage), Reichman…

“I grew up in Wolfsburg and have it in my blood. I know exactly what to do with Volkswagen” In June 1993, Autocar asked a group of students at Coventry University’s School of Transport Design to imagine a modern reinterpretation of the Caterham Seven. Exactly 31 years later, one of the students featured – a German, then on exchange from the Pforzheim University School of Design – is back in the pages of Autocar for his efforts at reinvigorating a long-running car brand. Except this time it isn’t a hypothetical exercise: Andreas Mindt is now head of design at Volkswagen, and he has been tasked with helping spark fresh life into one of the world’s biggest car marques. On his return to Wolfsburg in February last year, he had just…

Lamborghinis don’t win this magazine’s annual Britain’s Best Driver’s Car (BBDC) contest. It isn’t that they lack feel-good factor, or that they aren’t rapid enough against the clock when we time the cars for their hot lap of what in recent years has been Anglesey Circuit. Anyone lucky enough to have really uncorked, say, a Huracán STO knows that not for one millisecond does it feel anything less than laugh-out-loud special, and so quick is it that even the act of laughter comes with the risk of swallowing your tongue. No, the reason why Lamborghinis don’t win BBDC is because they tend to lack that final 10% of chassis feedback and, for want of a better phrase, three-dimensionality in their handling. Then along came a Sant’Agata supercar less likely than…

It is, we will admit, strange to have a box-fresh, six-cylinder 5 Series among our award winners and yet see the gong for the best saloon going to an electric Volkswagen. No, this isn’t a mistake. It’s just that the famous hatchback specialist of Wolfsburg, which has by its own admission had an especially shaky start in the EV era, has recently turned out an immensely well-rounded executive car that would slot into almost anyone’s life with ease. This big electric Volkswagen begs to be underestimated. It presents as a comparatively nondescript four-door fastback and dispenses with the aggressive front-end styling that’s now commonplace in every class of car. It’s subtle, restrained…dare we say it, classy. Elsewhere, the ID 7 isn’t especially quick or light by the standards of its…

MODEL TESTED ICONIC LONG RANGE • Price £45,440 • Power 215bhp • Torque 221lb ft • 0-60mph 8.1sec • 30-70mph 6.3sec • Economy 3.6mpkWh • DC Max charging speed 144kW • 70-0mph 46.9m We’ll delve into the various strengths, weaknesses and quirks of the new Renault Scenic in just a moment, but perhaps the biggest story here is one comprehended merely by looking at the car. You’ll notice that the fifth-generation Scenic on test here has a two-box design in the crossover style that’s now completely commonplace. This marks a seismic change in the Scenic philosophy, which for the previous four generations had been expressed with a one-box silhouette that the French call ‘monospace’. The earliest Scenic of the mid-1990s was the brainchild of Renault’s visionary chief designer, Patrick Le…

MILEAGE 12,478 WHY WE’RE RUNNING IT It took Nissan 11 years to give us a second EV. Has it been worth the wait? To my friends Steph and Thomas, I’m sorry. My Ariya did in fact have enough charge to take you to your destination and then on to mine. It’s just that I couldn’t be bothered with a 40-minute detour. That little incident was a postwedding Sunday morning when I just wanted to get home – and the Ariya offered the perfect excuse. This wedding, though. It turned out that I had accidentally concocted a truly brilliant test of an electric family SUV. The venue was about 150 miles away, for a start, meaning the return journey was theoretically right on the cusp of the Ariya’s claimed 300-mile range.…

DRIVEN Lotus Emeya First Lotus saloon since the Carlton is a 905bhp Chinese EV that will take on the Porsche Taycan. We put it to the test COMPARISON Ahead of their time We celebrate the Audi A2 and Honda Insight: sales flops that moved technology forward REVEALED Land Rover Defender Octa New V8 beast will be the fastest and most capable Defender yet EVERY WEEK FIRST DRIVE MG Cyberster Roadster is proof that not all Chinese EVs are dull SUVs, but is it any good? ROAD TEST Porsche 911 S/T We raved about ‘ultimate’ 911 after a first drive. Now for deeper scrutiny SUBSCRIBE autocar.co.uk/subscribe or see p20…

Editor-at-large Matt Prior recently commented on the growing number of cars that look rather annoyed (Tester’s Notes, 8 May). Humans are programmed to see faces in anything, so it doesn’t take much for us to feel threatened. And while we could fill this page with modern-day SUVs, we’ve cast the net wide to include cars that have been around for decades and some surprisingly small packages. VLF Force 1 2016 For sheer automotive malevolence, it’s hard to beat this sports coupé from obscure American firm VLF (which was led by industry superstar Bob Lutz). It being based on the already generously bonneted and brutish Dodge Viper, Henrik Fisker was perhaps duty-bound to make the car look ferocious. The huge rear arches and violent flick in the window line give it…

Bugatti’s new era begins with the arrival of the long-awaited Tourbillon hyper-GT, which replaces the Chiron with a dramatic new look, a radical, 1775bhp hybridised V16 engine, a preliminary top speed of 276mph and a target to become the world’s fastest road car. Named after the tiny mechanism that maintains accuracy in high-end watches, the Tourbillon arrives exactly 20 years after the launch of the Veyron, which was the most powerful road car of its time. That car’s successor, the Chiron, made its debut in 2016 and has now ended production at Bugatti’s Molsheim factory in France, in preparation for the new car to be built from 2026. Just 250 units will be produced and the starting price of £3.2 million makes this the most expensive new car in ‘series’…

VOLVO IS BRINGING its estate cars back to the UK, having taken them off sale last year to focus on SUVs. New UK-bound variants of the 4.8m-long V60 and 4.9m-long V90 are due back on sale in July, thanks to a resurgence in demand for estate cars. Their saloon equivalents, the S60 and S90, aren’t scheduled to make a return, however. The V60 will be offered with the choice of a 2.0-litre mild-hybrid petrol engine, producing 197bhp and capable of 0-62mph in 7.6sec, and a pair of petrol plug-in hybrid powertrains with 350bhp and 455bhp. The larger V90 returns exclusively with plug-in hybrid powertrains. It is capable of 0-62mph in just 5.5sec in its most potent form and has an electric-only range of up to 50 miles. Prices for all…

JLR WILL RESURRECT the Freelander name for a new line of electrified cars in China – and it plans to eventually export them worldwide. The new cars will be based on an architecture supplied by the company’s Chinese joint-venture partner, Chery, which currently builds various Jaguar and Land Rover models for the world’s largest new car market. They will be “independent from both Chery’s existing portfolio and JLR’s modern luxury House of Brands”. JLR will still launch electric Land Rover models for other global markets using its MLA and EMA modular platforms, and Jaguar will introduce a new line of luxury EVs using the bespoke JEA platform. Freelander models will be designed and engineered for the “mainstream”, and while they will be sold exclusively in China initially, JLR said they…

WHEN THE STEERING wheel airbag was invented, it made a massive contribution to saving lives but, at the same time, it must have given interior designers a hard time. Driver airbags restricted their freedom and ushered in an era of relatively bulky steering wheels to accommodate the bag and gas generator that inflates it in milliseconds. ZF Lifetec (formerly ZF’s passive safety division, renamed in March 2024) has come up with an alternative to locating the airbag in the centre of the steering wheel, where it has been positioned since the 1980s. The new design deploys from the top of the steering wheel hub, rather than front centre, and inflates through the gap beneath the upper rim of the wheel towards the driver. Once it is inflated, it covers the…

The reinvented BMW M5 is headed to UK dealers later this year with a thumping, 717bhp V8-engined plug-in hybrid powertrain and a starting price of £110,500. The seventh-generation version of the ’bahnstorming super-saloon makes the landmark switch from pure-petrol power to an electrified system with total outputs of 717bhp and 738lb ft – far above those of any previous iteration. That’s enough punch for 0-62mph in 3.5sec and a top speed of 189mph in derestricted Driver’s Package guise. The M5 uses a new high-revving (7200rpm), 577bhp twin-turbocharged 4.4-litre V8 and a 196bhp electric motor inside an eight-speed automatic gearbox, in a set-up familiar from the M division’s first PHEV, the XM SUV. The M5’s outrageous pace comes in spite of a dramatic increase in bulk to around 2400kg. The chunky…

SUNDAY On the basis that anything they do at Bicester Heritage will probably float my boat, I blagged my way into an event called Pistons & Pretzels, an impressive gathering of car designers organised by Munich-based (but internationally focused) consultancy Konzepthaus. As well as managing your design project, Konzepthaus will help you find the right people to bring it to life and make sure they’re up to speed with the best design software, which, I kept hearing, is vital. CEO Martin Groschwald ensured the mood of the event was light – many of the 120 or so designers present exercised their own cars on Heritage’s handling course – but some chose to do business by displaying concept cars in the hangar. This led to my own first sighting of Ian…

A GT badge can mean different things. In its purest form, it stands for gran turismo, a car that has a sporting edge but mainly takes the strain out of long distances. Find it on the back of a Porsche and accompanied by a number, however, and you’re looking at the most hardcore thing out of Zuffenhausen. Which category does the new Alpina B3 GT fall into? The 34bhp power bump over the ‘standard’ B3, the canards on the front bumper, the limited production run of 75 and the fact that the press launch took place exclusively on a track would lead you to believe this is Buchloe’s take on the BMW M3 CS. But that’s not really the Alpina way. It did the track-special thing once with the E92-generation…

It feels perverse to be writing what amounts to an obituary for a car that only weeks ago won the wildest race in grownup motorsport: the Nürburgring 24 Hours. When the motorsport variant of your wailing supercar puts manners on the best from Porsche, BMW, Mercedes-AMG and Ferrari (the solitary 296 GT3 won last year’s race), it’s not begging to be put out to pasture. And yet as far as Audi is concerned, the R8 programme is now history. In March, an R8 Performance Quattro in Vegas Yellow burbled off the line at the Böllinger Höfe plant near Stuttgart. It marked the end of Audi’s 18-year stint as an unexpected but capable maker of mid-engined machines. With the Porsche 911 beginning to go hybrid and the replacement for the R8’s…

When a second career in Formula 1 started for Martin Brundle back in 1997, the ITV co-commentary gig was very much not his first choice for that season – because he thought he still had a race seat with Jordan. “When I found out I wasn’t racing, I very reluctantly went into the commentary box with Murray [Walker],” he recalls. “I remember being in the box in Melbourne for the first race, the cars came to the grid and I felt a sense of panic because I wasn’t ready to start the race: they can’t start without me! I’d been hanging around F1 for 12 years at that point… But it went down quite well.” Some understatement there from the always-modest Brundle, winner of the Autocar Editor’s Award for 2024.…

The Hyundai Ioniq 5 N is a real gamechanger. For electric performance cars, for electric cars in general, but especially for performance cars. Anyone worried that an electric future might spell the end of fun on four wheels can rest easy, because the Ioniq 5 N is a car that’s huge fun to drive on road and track and also happens to be electric. No matter which way you approach it, it’s a brilliant performance car. This feels like the first EV to take all the opportunities that electric propulsion offers and put them to use to create something laughout-loud entertaining. The silent and violent acceleration thing has been done to death by now. While the Ioniq 5 N can do all that, it also offers a more layered experience…

Abrass tacks focus is starting to appear in the electric car market – and it’s welcome because it has arguably been missing from the sector for the past decade. It has been easier for car makers to play in niches and around the fringes of the car market with their debutant EVs so far – electric sports saloons, hypercars, large SUVs, fashion crossovers, designer superminis and ‘streamliner’ saloons – than to aim right at the market’s core. Selling an electric car to someone who habitually runs a three-or four-car garage, and has both a specific use in mind for it and plenty of back-up for when it doesn’t suit their particular needs on any given day of the year, is the easier thing to do when you think about it.…

Act of desperation After the EU placed heavy import tariffs on Chinese EVs (News, 19 June), I wonder what China will do to European cars. They’re already losing market share, but they still form a sizeable proportion of sales. Is this because the EU sees their demise in China as inevitable and wants to protect them in the European market? It’s the consumers who are paying the price. We just love being ripped off in Europe! Can’t compete. Can’t lower costs. Blame China. Tariff their goods. I can see legacy cars losing their sales not only in China but the rest of the world outside the West too. While the world is enjoying affordable EVs, we in the West are paying high prices to buy cars from legacy manufacturers that…

The sixth-generation (or 997) Porsche 911 is every bit as outrageously competent and delicate to drive as you would imagine. Even the basic versions are just fabulous sports cars. And let’s not mess about: the basic version is the one to go for. When it was launched in 2004, the Carrera produced 321bhp, 272lb ft of torque and, when fitted with the six-speed manual gearbox, a 0-62mph time of 4.8sec – fast even by today’s standards. Of course, this being a 911, there was a variant for every taste and market. These included the 4, S, GTS, 4S, 4 GTS, GT3, GT3 RS, Turbo, Turbo S and GT2. A Sport Classic variant was introduced in 2012 on the facelifted ‘997.2’ car, which itself was introduced in 2009. There isn’t enough…

THE AUTOCAR AWARDS have existed in one way or another for a long time: 35 years, to be exact. And from the start, they have been different from the others in the car industry, as we first explained in November 1989: “Rather than highlighting a single car, they focus on key areas and people involved in conceiving, designing, developing and producing cars.” The idea arose after Autocar’s merger with its great rival of 85 years, The Motor, meant that “nowhere [was] there a motoring magazine matching [our] combination of weekly newsiness, authority and quality”. For our inaugural awards, we gave readers and industry people a month to submit nominations in eight categories, each to be judged by a special panel of independent experts and senior Autocar staff. More than 300…

The facelifted Volkswagen Golf R has been unveiled as the German brand’s most potent hot hatch yet, with its turbocharged 2.0-litre four uprated from 316bhp to 329bhp. That extra 13bhp helps to cut the hatch’s 0-62mph time by 0.1sec to 4.6sec, while the heavier Golf R Estate completes the sprint in 4.8sec. In addition to more power, the reworked EA888 petrol engine is said to provide sharper responses. The software underpinning the powertrain has also been tweaked: the Comfort drive profile now delivers gearshifts 100rpm later and the engine is said to produce exhaust pops and crackles from around 2500rpm. One of the most significant upgrades comes inside, the interior having received a near-total digital overhaul. It gets a slicker and sharper 12.9in infotainment touchscreen as standard, with top and…

The new Continental GT Speed is the first car to use Bentley’s Ultra Performance Hybrid powertrain and ushers in a bold new design language for the electrified era. Evolved from the outgoing car, the new Continental GT has a substantial carryover of bodywork and interior technology but it has been refreshed significantly enough to be homologated as a new car, Bentley claims, with 68% of the parts replaced. Headlining the update is the addition of a new V8-engined PHEV powertrain that replaces the British firm’s retired W12 unit. The new set-up more than makes up for the four-cylinder deficit, with the petrol and electric motors combining to put out 771bhp – making this Bentley’s most powerful road car yet. Due to be introduced to the Flying Spur saloon and Bentayga…

Reinstating EV incentives, bringing back the 2030 ICE car sales ban, fixing potholes and scrapping ULEZs are just some of the headline automotive policies being put forward by the UK’s political parties as the country gears up to head to the polls next Thursday. The Conservatives, Labour, Liberal Democrats and other parties have each positioned the automotive industry and the future of motoring as key parts of their manifestos. This is in recognition that changes in this sphere have huge implications for voters’ personal freedoms and the health of the British industrial economy. Parties also know that policies focused on electric cars could be a vote winner, as could pledges to repair roads and tackle rising fuel prices. But what are each of the UK-wide parties promising ahead of the…

Who is to blame for crashes? A study by the US’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration suggested the “critical reason” was “the driver” in 94% of cases – a statistic that has been misused by various advocates and enthusiasts of driver assistance, autonomous vehicles and LinkedIn over the years to the point that the NHTSA today goes to great lengths to qualify its findings. The survey was big: it sampled 5470 crashes between 2005 and 2007. In its results, the NHTSA defined the ‘critical reason’ as ‘the last event in the crash causal chain’. Ergo driver actions weren’t necessarily the root cause but were the last significant event before impact. Yet nearly two decades on, people will tell you that if you automate driving or remove ‘human error’, you will…

The E63 was a brash, loud, powerful super-saloon of a kind that isn’t easily forgotten and that only AMG could make, so its demise as part of Mercedes-Benz’s all-encompassing electrification scheme caused much dismay among performance car enthusiasts – and the head of the new E-Class family will have a tough time winning them over, being a straight-six plug-in hybrid. Not that the E53 Hybrid wants for performance. In fact, if you add the optional AMG Dynamic Plus package, it offers exactly the same 603bhp as the old E63. Its drivetrain centres on the 3.0-litre turbo petrol engine from the old mild-hybrid E53 but with a larger turbo, dynamic mounts, better cooling and other detail changes to produce 443bhp. Then there’s a 161bhp synchronous electric motor, fed by a 21.2kWh…

Not often do you find yourself, twice in a few months, talking at length and one-to-one with a man as serially busy as Renault Group CEO Luca de Meo. This is a man with no spare time at all, someone who powwows with the French prime minister and leaders of Europe. His diary fills at a year’s notice. Yet the reason for this meeting is special. We are seeking time with de Meo to offer him our magazine’s highest accolade, the 2024 Issigonis Trophy, largely on the strength of the series of dazzling achievements he listed in our previous interview (Autocar, 23 October 2023): record profits in his company’s 126-year history, posted less than three years after sustaining ruinous losses running at €140 million a day. It has been one…

There’s a wide, picture-lined corridor inside Nissan’s European technical HQ at Cranfield, Bedfordshire, that connects the front offices with a much larger complex of technical installations to the rear, where all of the serious car creation takes place: engine cells, laboratories, sound chambers and rigs for many different forms of durability testing can be found there. One of the pictures, faded with the years, shows six or seven freshfaced young men, Nissan’s intake of graduate engineers for 1990 in their second week of employment. Today, amazingly, four of them are still on Nissan’s payroll and all are now highly placed in an organisation that has always put company loyalty on the same high plane as ability. The most accomplished of them has the widest smile: he is David Moss, for…

Few guardianships of brands have been as successful as that of Mini under BMW. We say guardianship because it is so much more than ownership, given Mini’s unique place in British culture, the wealth of personal stories involving its cars and, as a result, the emotional investment that people place in the brand and its development. The person tasked with directing this guardianship recently is Stefanie Wurst, who took over as head of the Mini brand in early 2022, having previously led the BMW Group in the Netherlands. She joined at a time when the marque was heading towards something of an identity crisis. In the words of BMW board member Jochen Goller, Mini had become “a little bit too generic”. The standard hatchback’s proportions looked bloated and the brand…

When BMW introduced a 545e version of the previous-generation 5 Series, it was a real ‘have your cake, eat it and lose weight’ kind of car: a plug-in hybrid that ticked all the sensible company car boxes while also a decent sports saloon with a wonderful straight-six engine. Now that the 5 Series has entered a new generation, BMW has naturally repeated the trick. Compared with its predecessor, the 550e has more power and more electric-only range, and it retains a pliant ride and a good dose of dynamism. There are other PHEV saloons and there are other PHEVs with six-cylinder engines, but none that offer it all at once, let alone execute the formula so well. The ‘G60’ 5 Series hasn’t had the easiest time here at Autocar, having…

Us Europeans don’t tend to think of Kia as a player in the large car market, which might be one of the reasons why the EV9 has made such a splash since its introduction to our shores at the beginning of this year. Elsewhere in the world, that’s exactly what it is. North American Kia buyers know all about the Sorento-topping Telluride sevenseat SUV and the Carnival MPV. In Korea and elsewhere, there’s the K9/K900 full-size executive saloon as well. And the firm is about to introduce a full-size pick-up truck, the Tasman. Kia’s designers aren’t afraid of sheer scale, in other words. When it came to penning the EV9, how could they have been? There’s a wonderful, totally prepossessing, take-me-as-you-find-me confidence about this electric seven-seat SUV. It’s here to…

In some dark and stupid corners of the internet, you will find people calling Toyota an outdated legacy car maker, daft in being slow to full electrification, foolish to pursue hydrogen avenues and having left its best days behind it. (Now check out my Tesla referral code!) It won’t come as a surprise to the sensible, though, that Toyota at the start of May recorded full-year operating profits of ¥5.35 trillion (£26 billion) – the first time ever that a Japanese company had banked more than ¥5tn. In 2023, it sold more than 10 million cars worldwide for the first time. Couldn’t we all do with a crisis like that? In truth, harder times are ahead. Chinese car makers operating in core sectors will threaten every mass-market car maker, with…

Rachel Burgess’s final Volvo V90 report in the 5 June issue really hit home with me. I almost felt like crying when I got to the end – but then had to chuckle as I excitedly read Will Rimell’s comment out to my wife after saying: “Look, someone else had pictures of V70s on their wall as a teenager too!” Now she thinks we’re both odd – sorry, Will. Over the past 25 years or so, I’ve owned many Volvo estates, buying nothing else since I could afford them. I even managed to snag one of the final new V60s from stock after a frantic runaround on discovering my order for a newly built one didn’t go through on the Volvo website (it was that fateful weekend). But what do…

An owner’s view PETE OSBORNE I own a 2010 ‘997.2’ Carrera. I was keen to stick to the narrow body, rear-wheel drive and manual gearbox, and frankly even the ‘base’ 3.6-litre model is more than fast enough, hence me not even looking for the 3.8-litre Carrera S. It took a while to find mine, but having owned it for two years, I’ve clocked up 5000 miles. Apart from the road roar, I love everything about it: the looks, the gearbox, the steering, the seats and seating position, the practicality and most of all the noise.” Buyer beware… ENGINE Bore scoring happens when the piston ring rubs against the wall of the cylinder. It’s an often-mentioned issue with the 997, but it isn’t as wide-reaching as online scare stories would have…

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…