Indice dei contenuti per July 2025 in Wheels

SENSATIONALIST HEADLINES, clickbait, AI-generated content, on-demand TV, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook news… the list goes on. What do they all have in common? They’re designed to grab your attention – regardless of the truth within. One of my key staffers recently said to me: “Websites are hungry beasts. To stay full, they have to lie.” He has a point. I mean, seriously – how many times have you clicked on an article because of the headline, only to find the story has no relevance at all? What was once the domain of the tabloid front page has now invaded almost everything we see online. Everything is being sensationalised. What’s my point? In a time when media outlets are forced to out-hype each other just to attract eyeballs, Wheels finds itself in…

ONE OF MY OLDEST MATES, with whom I started school at age five, has asked me if I’ll be guest speaker at his next car club night. Gavin’s first car was a Fiat, a 125 sedan that he and his dad bought cheap and fixed up in time for his driving licence. He’s been a member of the Fiat Car Club and has owned a variety of 124 coupes for about as long. Which is now – eek! – more than 45 years. My first thought was: well, what do I know about Fiats? I was always about Alfa Romeos, an affair that was cemented at age 12 when a family friend let me drive his Alfasud 1.2 ti around the old Catalina Park circuit. I later bought my own Sud…

THE ORIGINAL Hyundai i30, launched in Australia in 2006, was a watershed moment for the brand that changed its reputation forever. Not only did it live up to the brand’s value positioning, but it also gave competitors a run for their money in all-round ability – a feat continued with both the second and third generations of the nameplate. Fast forward to 2025, however, and the global hatchback market is not what it once was – SUVs outsell them by a significant margin and many manufacturers are pulling their development. That means that while there’s a new Kona, the i30 is reportedly not getting a fourth generation and the third generation has been around for nine years – much longer than the usual Hyundai lifecycle. Aside from the N hot hatch,…

WANT TO KNOW SOMETHING REMARKABLE? If you were to spool the clock back just eight years and were shopping for a car with over 200kW, which drove solely the rear treads, came with a manual gear-box and a price of less than six figures, you had 20 options open to you. And 17 of them were variants of a Ford Falcon or a Holden Commodore. So when these two domestic models were shuffled off into retirement, it looked like the writing was on the wall for this class of car. Your choices back then ran to a BMW M2, a Nissan 370Z or the Ford Mustang. Yet here we are 10 years later, in an era when $100k buys you a whole lot less, and there’s still three model lines…

WIND AND RAIN HIT MY FACE as we gain speed and crest the rise. I’m suspended mid-air for a split-second before hurtling downwards, my innards lagging behind momentarily. Headlights come into view below as the safety car and its train return to civilisation – the 13.6km Circuit de la Sarthe’s heavily-populated pit straight after 10km in the French countryside. Fireworks in the middle distance signify that clocks have struck midnight, the 24 Heures du Mans’ one-third mark. The place is pumping. Few have retired for the night despite the weather closing in as a classic motor race is unfolding. Plus, it’s only been dark for 90 minutes. The machine I am aboard begins to slow, completing another two laps – okay, rotations – before it’s time to disembark what the…

WILD AND FREE What’s in a name? Well, as soon as the Ford Mustang Dark Horse was announced, I had to have one… NOT SURE WHY, but the Mustang never really did it for me. Sure, I understood what it was about yet for some reason, it just wasn’t my thing. Then the Dark Horse edition was announced. It just looked right and out of nowhere, I wanted one. The stats are straightforward: 5.0L V8 engine, 350kW and 550Nm. So, three items to list from the start: • This car was ordered roughly 18 months ago, so forgive me if I say that collecting it felt a little bit anti-climactic. • I paid full RRP. No discounts or favours from Ford here. They didn’t even know I’d bought one. •…

CAR COMPANIES have always been very careful and calculating in the way they launch a new vehicle. When the original Volkswagen was unveiled in Germany in 1938 – no, I wasn’t there – the Nazi regime shut down a section of a then-new autobahn for part of the ‘people’s car’ press preview drive. They even invited British journalists along for the event. Since then, the right roads and the right approach have been crucial to the first press previews on any new car in Australia. What do they say? There’s only one chance to make a first impression. When Ford debuted the XD Falcon in 1979 – yes, I was there – there was a giant drive program that included every road and surface at the company’s You Yangs proving ground,…

THE MG ZS EV was one of the first electric small SUVs sold in Australia when it arrived back in 2020. Priced from $44,990 plus on-road costs upon its release, the ZS EV cost significantly less than its main rival, Hyundai’s Kona Electric, and sold well. The ZS EV entered run-out last year and now, its replacement has arrived with a new name and a broader range of talents. Enter the MGS5 EV. Larger, better equipped and – predictably – more expensive than the ZS EV it replaces, the MGS5 EV is based on the same platform as the popular MG4 small car and offers range of up to 430km. Pricing for the MGS5 EV starts at $40,490 drive away with two models: entry-level Excite and the top-spec Essence that…

AS WHOLE-LIFE STATEMENTS GO, ‘I’ll never be old enough to play golf’ rates pretty high on my non-existent list of mantras to live by. In the same feeble breath, ‘I’ll never be decrepit enough to covet a Camry’ carries a similar degree of weight. It must be psychological conditioning – playing golf always seemed like a pursuit best suited to the rich and/or elderly to me (unless Sega Megadrive is involved), while Camrys are the Toyota du jour once your turgid Corona has been crushed into a metal cube, and your care factor has withered to indiscernibility. Yet here we are, clubs on standby, tracing the trail of the world’s longest ‘golf course’ while driving what is still the world’s favourite sedan – in this case a ninth-generation XV80 Camry…

HINDSIGHT IS A WONDERFUL THING. Part of the joy of this Modern Classic series arrives courtesy of the luxury of time and perspective. Not every car that we showcase here was an instant hit. There were cars that, at the time, failed to live up to the promise of their predecessors, such as the second-gen Toyota MR2 or the Ferrari 575. Then there were cars like the BMW E36 M3 that diverged from a formula so far they initially confused the public. Once in a while, you get vehicles that came good at the very end of their parent model’s lifespan, by which time their equity in market was all but expended. They’re rarer beasts. For this, we present Exhibit A: the Tickford TS50. The reason for its existence was simple.…

TALK ABOUT GOING OUT AT THE TOP. The finest coupe and convertible in their respective classes are no more, despite 2024 being their biggest selling year in Australia. The Porsche 718 series, encompassing both the Cayman and the Boxster, is going out of production, largely due to an almost unfathomable botch concerning its electric successor. Porsche is far from alone in finding this electric transition hard to manage. Whether it’s governments constantly shifting legislative goalposts, Chinese rivals moving the tech game forward at pace or Porsche’s battery supplier for the 718 project going bankrupt, life hasn’t been easy in the halls of Zuffenhausen of late. Tentatively positive results for the electric Macan in the US have stopped a boardroom bloodbath, but other markets, most notably China, have been slow to…

FUTURE FUELS With the EV bandwagon now slowing after a nice dose of reality check, hopefully we (and Wheels) can talk seriously about synthetic fuels. There are billions of ICE vehicles on the planet and thinking we can replace them all with EVs is ludicrous. The resources required would devastate the planet and not in any way solve our very urgent pollution problem. Synthetic fuels, on the other hand, can transform every ICE vehicle to carbon neutral. They are designed to be 100 per cent drop-in/interchangeable, can use all existing infrastructure, and do not require mining of rare earth metals (with) associated mess of battery production. They also let people keep their cars, trucks, buses, boats, jets etc, without needing to ‘upgrade’ to an EV. Paddy Lowe, the former Formula1…

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THE BMW 2 SERIES Gran Coupe – not the two-door coupe, nor the Active Tourer MPV that used to be sold locally – has been a reasonable seller in Australia since its release in 2020. Serving as the brand’s entry level sedan and based on the 1 Series hatchback, the ‘2er’ – as it’s affectionately known – has sat underneath the 3 Series in both all-round ability and sales figures. BMW clearly wants more sales from its entry-level cars and while it’s not an all-new car, BMW has blessed it with a new ‘F74’ model code compared with the pre-update ‘F44’. The revised styling makes it appear new to most. Currently, we get three 2 Series Gran Coupe models: the base 218 ($59,900), mid-level 220 ($62,900) and top-spec performance M235…

LET’S CLEAR UP that name first. In MG-talk, ‘Super Hybrid’ is a plug-in hybrid that’s been specially tuned for the Australian market. In this instance, it’s stuck to the back of a MG HS, and will be sold alongside the non-plugin HS Hybrid+ when it arrives in September. The key takeaway? Rather than rinse its battery and then have you chugging along on internal combustion like most plug-in hybrids, this Super Hybrid system is a little smarter, by turns blending its power and harnessing energy to make the battery last a decent stretch. That’s a good thing because if there’s one thing that deters people from charging PHEVs, it’s the feeling that a whole night’s charging has been done for in half-an-hour. Because this is a pre-production car, MG was…

FOR MORE THAN 50 YEARS, FISHERMANS BEND WAS A DREAM FACTORY. The dowdy industrial suburb in the working-class Melbourne docklands was the home to Holden – the cars and the brand and the people – as it produced the vehicles that put Australia on wheels. The long honour roll at Holden began with Laurence Hartnett, who helped plan the car that would become the original 48-215, and includes managing director Chuck Chapman, legendary designer Leo Pruneau, suspension guru and then managing director Peter Hanenburger, and Tony Hyde on the engineering side. It was into this hotbed of local innovation that Peter Hughes arrived in 1990 after a personal invitation from Michael Simcoe – now the outgoing global head of design for General Motors – to come in for a chat.…

SOMETIMES IT’S HARD to establish just where a measure of healthy scepticism lapses into hard-bitten cynicism. Nobody wants to be that rube, who falls for the promises of snake oil salesmen and is hook, line and sinkered by their extraordinary claims. Take the BYD Shark 6 ute as a for-instance. It’s normally pretty good policy to ignore a company’s first stab at a new market sector because said company will learn quickly and bring along something a whole lot better in time. That was certainly my read when I first heard that Chinese manufacturer BYD was about to sell a ute into the Aussie market. After all, there’s nowhere else on Earth that knows more about utes than Australia, that lives and breathes them, and devours every last detail of their…

SHE’S BOLD IN BLACK, classic in shape, and built to be unforgettable. When she enters the room, everything else fades. There’s only her. Delilah. This genuine 80737 HT GTS Monaro has been through a baremetal resurrection, finished in a stunning Phantom Black Mica and delicately lined with Platinum GTS stripes. She’s dressed for the shadows but built to own the spotlight. Factory fluted guards, GTS bonnet, grille and badges complete her look. She rides on 15” American Racing Torque Thrusts, planted and poised with the kind of timeless stance that makes muscle car lovers stand still. Every line, curve and edge: pure Monaro presence. She’s powered by a 253ci Holden V8, paired to a M21 four-speed manual transmission, with power fed to the rears via a 3.08 ratio Banjo diff,…