Indice dei contenuti per June 2019 in Wheels

YOU CAN forget just about everything you thought you knew about the Mazda 3, because this all-new model elevates itself in nearly every measure. It’s an impressive feat considering the brand’s existing, five-year-old small car recently toppled the fleet-favourite Toyota Corolla as the best-selling passenger car in Australia. However, the cost of entry has also risen, from the old Neo Sport’s competitive $20,490 to the new entry-level G20 Pure’s $24,990 plus on-road costs. But it’s a much better car. Mazda’s designers have penned an interior that leaps ahead of simpler rivals into the realm of premium. The soft roll-top gently undulates across the upper portion of the dash where a crisp infotainment system is neatly tilted toward the driver. It’s a world apart from any Mazda currently sitting on the…

ROOF CLOSED, rapid run up a hairpin-littered mountain road and already I’ve forgotten I’m driving the new 911 Carrera S Cabriolet. You know, the ‘soft’ one that purists swerve for a coupe? Last night, even product-line director Andreas Pröbstle admitted the Cabriolet is less than half as stiff as the coupe (15,000Nm plays 40,000Nm) and weighs 70kg more, but right now it feels pretty coupe-like to me. Steering with a pacy accuracy, it totally absorbs you in its adjustable dynamics. Porsche has even fitted rear-wheel steering and 10mm-lower sports suspension to our car, the latter a first for a Cabriolet (bit niggly around town, eases with speed). Then I remember the roof. I slow to 50km/h, press a button so the taut fabric motors back over my head; 331kW flat-six…

THAT A FACT? Taycan’s winter testing also focused on improving the repeatability of the car’s performance. It can now do more than a dozen 0-100km/h standing starts with no fall-off in power (earlier talk was around 10) and at least four 0-200km/h runs without degradation. It will maintain its top speed “for longer than you could drive at that speed on any public road,” says the company.…

Ford Australia has confirmed it will sell a plug-in petrol-electric hybrid version of the all-new third-gen Escape next year. Taking on the conceptually similar Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV, it will be powered by a 2.5-litre Atkinson-cycle four-pot petrol engine and electric motor, delivering a combined 165kW. A 14.4kWh lithium-ion battery will offer a pure EV range of over 50km. However, if the RAV4 Hybrid proves successful, the regular Escape Hybrid available elsewhere may also lob in Australia, using a 2.5L/electric-motor combo like Toyota’s.…

Cabin wise, the M850i feels premium and richly specced, yet doesn’t deviate too far from the template established by its SUV stablemates, the X5 and new X7. Positives include beautifully supportive front seats (trimmed in Merino perforated leather) which deliver a low, legs-ahead driving position. But the graphics of the new 12.3-inch TFT instrument panel are a bit Lamborghinishouty and out of step with the design aesthetic of the Swarovski crystal gear selector and infill of the iDrive controller.…

There are 14 DC fast-charging stations dotted along the 1800km stretch of coastline between Coolangatta and Cairns, with the distance between them ranging from 98km to 208km. There are a further three charging stations between Brisbane and Toowoomba. The chargers support the CHAdeMO and CCS Combo standards. We recharged the Kona EV at Brisbane, Childers, Rockhampton, Mackay, Townsville and Cairns, with the powerful 50kW DC fast chargers replenishing the Kona’s 64kWh lithium-ion polymer battery to 90 percent capacity in 60 to 90 minutes and delivering an effective highway range of just under 400km.…

FISH OUT OF water doesn’t quite cut it here. No, this is more deep-sea-tuna-on-topof-Uluru kind of territory. Complete with Julian Assange-in-a-crowdedsupermarket levels of discomfort. You see, I’m just not a dual-cab ute kind of guy. I can appreciate them in a detached kind of way, and understand that they’re exceedingly popular and thus exceptionally relevant to the average Aussie, yet they hold zero appeal to my rational side. They’re too heavy, too thirsty and too clumsy. Plus I don’t have anything to lug about. This does make me feel like an American trying to understand cricket, though I have tried to grasp the allure of the pick-up. This involved several attempts at hardcore off-roading, but all this managed to do was deepen my confusion. Who cares if your ute can…

PLENTY of us with a taste for fast and nasty motorcycles would argue there’s never a bad day to buy one. My partner, on the other hand, has no such affiliation, so she did mount a case that this particular day wasn’t exactly ideal to be throwing a leg over an unfamiliar 125kW crotch rocket for a 50km ride home. Sydney skies were chucking it down, and the barometer in our neighbourhood – a vast storm water drain we can see from our back balcony (“water views!” claimed the agent) – was a brimming torrent, clearly at max capacity. My partner was mouthing words that I would later learn were to do with road closures and dangerous standing water and leaving it for another day, but all I could hear…

HISTORY IS A CATALOGUE of communism’s failings, which in the automotive world have congealed in the form of the Trabant 601. It was this smoking, two-stroke, garbage-bodied small sedan that first rattled into the consciousness of many westerners with the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, bearing wide-eyed East Germans who, like their cars, had been frozen in time since the 1950s. For even getting mobile, the Trabant has the capitalist West to thank. In 1949,VEB AWZ (Volkseigenes Betrieb Automobilwerke Zwickau, or ‘Zwickau Automobile Works Company Owned by the People’) occupied the war-ravaged plant in which Audi had been founded by August Horch in 1910 and where the Auto Union grand prix cars of the 1930s were also built. The Soviet enterprise began assembling the pre-war DKW F8,…

THE IDEA OF a decade-old startup seems an oxymoron but that’s an apt description of electric vehicle manufacturer Rivian. Based in the western Detroit suburb of Plymouth, Michigan, as ferrous a location in the US rust belt as you could possibly imagine, Rivian aims to disrupt the traditional Motown mass-marketing model – but whereas Tesla was the tech company outsider, Rivian has solid car industry backing. And that expertise pool in the physical manufacture of vehicles should be enough to put Elon Musk on notice. To fund his startup, Rivian founder RJ Scaringe (see below) initially raised US$450m (A$645m) from three major investors: the Saudi investment group Abdul Latif Jameel, Japan’s Sumitomo Corporation and Britain’s Standard Chartered bank. In February an Amazon-led consortium poured in US$700m and Ford subsequently took…

TATA INSISTS that JLR isn’t for sale, but with no synergies between JLR and Tata’s Indian car business, it has never made a particularly logical owner. “There’s not many people at Tata who really know why they own JLR,” says car industry analyst Max Warburton. The mounting losses might be all the incentive Tata needs to put the operation on the market – and there would be no shortage of suitors if it did, Warburton says. “It could be PSA buying it, or any of the three Germans. And an acquisitive Asian company like Geely or another Chinese OEM would definitely look at it,” he says. A new owner would likely be less sentimental about Jaguar remaining a maker of petrol-powered sedans, and would probably rationalise Land Rover’s range to…

LETTER OF THE MONTH "HAS ANYONE COME “ UP WITH A SOLUTION TO THE MASSIVE AMOUNT OF WASTE?" INCONVENIENT TRUTHS ABOUT ELECTRIC CARS IN ALL THE ‘EXCITEMENT’ over electric cars, I think there have been some real-world problems that have been totally overlooked. Almost all people who live in apartments or have to park on the street will never be able to own an electric vehicle. I have never seen this mentioned once, yet large numbers of people, me included, are in this position. Secondly, if you regularly fast-charge any battery you will greatly reduce its longevity. So in reality, that eliminates all quick charges unless you want a worthless heap of metal a year after initial purchase. Finally, has anyone come up with a solution to the massive amount…

YOU MAY well be wondering why Mercedes-Benz needs two four-door sedans spun off the A-Class platform. On the face of it, it seems like overkill, offering both an A-Class Sedan and a CLA when both share the same wheelbase, use the same chassis, get the same engines and feature the same interior tech. So why would you opt for the CLA? The car’s footprint seems as good a place as any to start. Compared to the more upright sedan, the CLA has a 45mm wider front track and a 55mm wider rear. That might seem an esoteric statistic but it underlines how this car is positioned. Mercedes calls it the athlete of its compact-car range and there’s more to that than just niche marketing spin. Australia is set to receive…

THE Mercedes-AMG GT is not coming to Australia. The Merc marketing people from Mulgrave have put the red pen through it. Not enough demand, they say. So no 350kW 4.0-litre V8 coupe or cabriolets for us. Ample recompense comes with the fact that we’ve got the green light for the 384kW AMG GT S coupe, 410kW AMG GT C coupe and cabrio, and the ballistic 430kW AMG GT R coupe range-topper. The GT range that is set to ship here has been given a well-judged reworking for 2019, concentrating on three specific update goals: greater athleticism, more aggressive styling and a better-quality, more feature-rich interior to bring it in line with the four-door extension to the GT line. The GT now gets the AMG Dynamics system that we first saw…

“SO WHAT DO you want to do now? We could go and do some doughnuts,” said the chassis engineer with ill-disguised hope in his voice. Out here, in the frozen wastes of northern Sweden, it seemed almost obligatory to go and scribe some circles in the snow. Which is how I found myself rotating at impressive speed in a Porsche Taycan, at least until it rumbled what we were up to and started flashing rude messages at its driver. “It’s the same in all our four-wheel-drive cars,” sighed Christian Wolfried, Porsche’s handiest hand on the Taycan program. If I understand correctly, the front and rear axles have a bit of a pow-wow, figure out they’re being asked to do dramatically different things, rapidly conclude the driver’s a lunatic and shut…

THEY SAY SLOW and steady wins the race. If that’s the case, Toyota is playing a very long game. For several decades from the 1960s, the Japanese manufacturer helped improve the car as we know it (and the company’s bottom line) through better manufacturing, quality, reliability and value. But as for Ford Model T/Morris Mini/Volkswagen Golf-level game-changers? No dice. It was all about evolution rather than revolution. Then, in the space of three years, Toyota changed the way we drive forever. Twice. First up was 1994’s RAV4. Sure, like a motoring version of Madonna, inspiration from elsewhere played a role courtesy of Suzuki’s original Vitara of six years earlier. But the genius lay in the execution – similar adventurous styling to the latter, but in place of a cumbersome off-road…

FACIAL RECOGNITION TECH THAT MEMORISES INDIVIDUAL DRIVING POSITION SETTINGS ... DON’T EXPECT A BUM HEATER THOUGH New to Australia but a development of the e-FOUR hybrid system first seen in the previous-gen RAV4, the electric motor is mounted on the rear axle and powers the rear wheels as required, as well as assisting the fronts, kicking in under harder acceleration for greater traction, while quelling understeer and improving cornering stability. There’s also a Trail Mode that brakes a spinning wheel to help get the car unstuck. For (slightly) greater off-road capability there’s also the Edge model, with more cladding and a 152kW/243Nm 2.5-litre petrol engine driving all four wheels via an eight-speed torque-converter auto.…

MOTHER NATURE IS INTENT ON RECLAIMING CATALINA PARK INTO BUSHLAND In the deft hands of Jim Richards, the E24 BMW 635 CSi delivered a blend of raw speed and agility that saw it win seven out of 10 races (including six in a row) in 1985 to take the ATCC. It also won four of the five rounds of the Endurance Championship in that same year, with only Bathurst glory missing from its resume. A proper god car, and on tracks like Amaroo and Oran Park, it captivated even the most parochial Aussie race fans.…

IT’S AN UGLY getaway. All brutal jerks and harsh bursts of revs that cry then die as the demented clutch refuses to cooperate. The driver’s helmet thuds as it staccatos into the air box for the fourth time, which seems to be the final straw. Suddenly the Cosworth V8 shrieks as all abandon is thrown, the clutch is dumped and the rear Avons turn to smoke, the back of the car slewing and slipping onto the circuit. At once it is here and gone, the soft morning sun glinting off the open wheeler’s streaks of gold as it scorches up the back straight, the wind delivering a delayed delight as the noise morphs from a smooth baritone to a full-bodied scream that leaps and soars. This isn’t a Formula 1…

HAVE YOU ever found yourself in a situation, completely of your own creation, where you were desperately and hopelessly out of your depth? I have. It was during my first weekend with the Jimny, which I had pried from the hands of Wheels’ art direcotr, Felipe, while he was busy sharpening his crayons. I had decided to get some dust in the treads, and escape the urban jungle for some good ol’-fashioned off-roading, with Wheels crew member Tom Fraser along for the ride. The problem is, I have about as much off-roading experience as a toddler does with theoretical mathematics. But there I sat, looking out the windscreen, desperately trying to figure out where the road had gone. I was perched on the edge of a drastic descent, which was…

TOP THREE MADBUL FD RX-7 The inspiration for this came from the Le Mans-winning Mazda 787B which had a naturally aspirated four-rotor. I’d never seen it in person but had heard it on YouTube and we figured out how to do the four-rotor here in NZ. This car has more stamps in its passport than most humans. It’s the dream build. MAZDA RX-3 My favourite era of cars is the 1970s. The 1975-76 Savanna RX-3 is my favourite car on planet Earth. Just a genuine, unmodified Mazda RX-3. It’s also my wife’s favourite car. As a tribute, we grafted an RX-3 front onto the Madbul RX-7. We did all the retro styling on the graphics and overfenders. LAMBORGHINI HURACAN It’d have to be something very exotic with a wild exhaust,…

The 36-year-old CEO of Rivian’s love of cars began as a kid, helping build a Porsche 356 in his neighbour’s garage in Melbourne, F Florida. A doctorate in mechanical engineering from MIT’s Sloan Automotive Lab followed, the young entrepreneur harbouring a dream to build high-performance, low-emission vehicles. After funding was secured and plans to develop a coupe shelved, Scaringe assembled a dream team of talent, including Mark Vinnels, Rivian’s executive director of engineering, a man with the McLaren 720S on his resume, and Jeep design guru Jeff Hammoud. Scaringe has diverged from Tesla in tapping into the knowledge pool of car makers’ manufacturing, engineering and design experience. “He’s taken time to learn from everyone’s mistakes, and he’s going after a market that is still growing,” Tony Posawatz, an industry consultant…

IT’S THE MOST commonly asked question by potential EV buyers: how long will it take to charge, and what will it cost? Fact is, there are significant variables at play here. Times vary depending on the vehicle and the charger. On a home charger – typically 30 amps for 7.2kW of electricity – it’s a straight division by the size of the battery. For example, the 90kWh battery in the Jaguar I-Pace would take about 12.5 hours. But for higher output chargers it’s trickier, partly because it depends on the car being able to accept the charge. If the rated input of the car is lower than the maximum output of the charger, then the rate of charge will be throttled back to accommodate the car. Also, battery damage can…

DUE AUG CITROEN C5 AIRCROSS It’s relaunch time for Citroen; one that will see models culled. The Picasso has already disappeared and the C4 Cactus and Berlingo are “under review”. Heading an SUV charge is the $39,990 C5 Aircross, with a 121kW/240Nm 1.6 turbo and a focus on “comfort and design flair”. Key to that promise is a “magic carpet ride” thanks to lightweight regressive hydraulic dampers. DUE OCT RANGE ROVER It’s all change for Land Rover, ending its vast model line-up that allowed owners to pair any engine with any spec level. LR will follow the luxury norm in pairing more powerful engines with a richer spec. It is also reviving the inline six-cylinder, available in the (real) Range Rover later this year. The 3.0-litre six includes a hybrid…

one MODELS & POWER The car will be launched at the Frankfurt show in September with two power outputs: the range-topper with around 470kW; the less powerful model with 395kW. A third model, circa 345kW, will follow later. A fourth model has been engineered with a single electric motor with 225kW and rear-drive. It’s lighter, but not yet confirmed for production. two KEGS & KM/H Weight should be around 2250kg, making Taycan a touch heavier than a Jaguar I-Pace and on a par with a Tesla Model S. Acceleration to 100km/h for the top model is now informally referred to as “way below” 3.5sec. Top speed? At least 250km/h, thanks in part to the two-speed gearbox that allows prolonged use of full electric power. three RANGE & CHARGING Real-world range…

1. HYUNDAI TUCSON HIGHLANDER Familiar functionality is key to Tucson’s showroom appeal, backed by roominess, decent seating, equipment tally and build quality. The 2018 facelift brought multimedia updates, but economy-level rear plastics, driver-only auto-up/down power window, noise and fidgety ride undermine premium positioning and betray group’s oldest design. Cargo volume is 488L; braked towing capacity is 1600kg. Provides full-sized spare, and ground clearance of 172mm. 2. MAZDA CX-5 GT TURBO Driver-focused yet family-friendly packaging, especially out back, where refinement and noise suppression is way better than in earlier CX-5s. GT brings shapely, supportive seating, high-quality surrounds and luxurious detailing, but dinky central multimedia system, no integrated digital speedo (despite head-up display) and no phone charging pad date the cabin. Cargo volume is 442L, braked towing capacity 2000kg. Runs space-saver spare;…

QUITE SOME time ago, I resigned myself to an irrevocable fact: that my epitaph is unlikely to read “He changed the course of humanity”. Look, as long as it doesn’t read: “He died of loneliness; now missed by his 16 cats”, I feel I can rest easy. The way I figure it, anything must be better than the epitaph that hangs over the long-deceased racetracks that once thrived in Sydney and its perimeter. Let’s face it, words don’t get more crushingly depressing than those etched into their metaphorical headstones: “Tragically swallowed by urban sprawl”. That’s the fate that claimed Oran Park in Sydney’s southwest in 2010. The same thing saw the closure of Amaroo Park in the north-west in 1998. The list goes on. A respectful visit of reminiscence seemed…

SOMETIMES YOU just have to be careful what you wish for, I thought to myself as we touched down at Brisbane Airport in late afternoon gloom. Months earlier I’d pitched the idea to editor Inwood of a road trip on Queensland’s so-called Electric Super Highway. Now the story had suddenly been galvanised into reality by the launch of Hyundai’s Kona Highlander EV. Photographer Thomas Wielecki and I have teamed up on plenty of road-trip assignments, but this one promises to be a little different, since for the first time it’s fuelled not by the petroleum industry, but by green electricity. Queensland’s Labor Government stole a march on its southern rivals in 2018 when it announced the completion of a network of fast charging stations stretching from Coolangatta to Cairns, and…

Perhaps aware that some of its customers might have larger wallets than actual driving talent, Rodin prepares you for the FZed’s ferocity by first letting you loose in two other track cars. Guided by the expert hand of driving instructor Mark Willamson, the program starts in a McLaren 570S GT4 before multiple sessions in a wicked-up Formula 3 car. It’s an ideal progression that builds confidence and awareness.…

IT’S A road tester’s nightmare. We’re talking about those cars that initially blind you with their brilliance but which, after a few weeks, turn out to be a chore to live with. We often only get a limited amount of seat time to deliver you a reliable verdict, so we’re naturally cautious of these superficial dazzlers and prefer to give those that might be satisfying slow burners the benefit of the doubt. Winning the judges over at Car of the Year is almost certainly a good indicator that a car will shine over the long haul, but we’ve had a few years that have raised eyebrows among readers. Leyland P76 (1973), Honda CR-Z (2011) and BMW i3 (2014), I’m looking at you. I’m utterly certain, however, that the XC40 won’t…

FROM terra firma to the top of its electrochromatic glass roof, a McLaren 570GT measures a mere 120cm. Everything around you becomes a tall vehicle. You stare up at the rear of a modest Mazda 3 in highway traffic and swear that you’re looking at a hefty CX-5. That proximity to terra firma is both a blessing and a curse. Your surface-skimming fundament makes the Mac feel impossibly exotic, delivers decent headroom and keeps the centre of gravity good and low. You feel intimately connected to what each corner of the car’s doing at any point through entry, apex and exit. The primary concern for me when I took delivery of the 570GT was whether I’d even be able to get it into my garage. The Enright driveway ascends from…