Innholdsfortegnelse for March 2025 i Wheels

A NEW BMW M3 remains a genuine event. While most of us are media-saturated these days to the extent that we barely looked up when the latest version of the 911 GT3 was announced, BMW is planning the biggest change to the M3 formula to date, and it’s something that certainly got our attention. The big news that you probably knew already is that because it’ll be built on the Neue Klasse chassis, it’s a pure battery-electric vehicle. Yet BMW, as has been their strategy to date, is hedging and has vowed to follow it up with a twin-turbo six-cylinder petrol version. BMW recently displayed the Vision Driving Experience, a prototype that acts as a mobile test bed for much of the tech that will end up in the Neue Klasse,…

THE PLUG IS being pulled on the electric car. European manufacturers are scaling back their EV ambitions in response to a collapsing market. In Germany, EV sales plunged 27.4 percent in 2024. Porsche, Lotus, Volvo, Bentley, Audi, Aston Martin have each announced some sort of delay to their EV plans and even renewed investment in combustion engines and hybridisation. Geopolitical tectonic plates are also starting to shift against the EV. While it’s still early days, a rollback of the EV rollout could amount to an apparent win for Western auto industries, a win for the combustion engine (which I personally love, just as you do) and a loss for China, where the EV continues to boom. But it would feel like another loss of other sorts – and a great…

LOOKING AT THE headline stats, it’d be a reasonable assumption that the latest version of the Mercedes-AMG GT had gone a little bit soft. It rides on the platform of the new SL, it’s now a 2+2 rather than a strict two seater, drive goes to all four wheels rather than just the rears, weight has crept up by 216kg and that extreme cab-back, long bonnet look of its predecessor has transformed into something a little more mainstream. Ask AMG and they’ll tell you that they are listening to customers and delivering what they want: something more everyday useable but which is still imbued with some old-school values. That’s why there’s still a thundering 430kW/800NmV8 under the bonnet. No downsized two-litre four-pot here. In other markets you can get a…

CABO DA ROCA is where the European mainland runs out of resolve. The westernmost point of the continent is assailed by over 5500km of North Atlantic fetch, great grey-green rollers lining up in perfect sets to beat upon the Portuguese granite. Keep heading due east and the next landfall would be a scruffy beach in Delaware, USA. Today feels very Atlantic. It’s blustery and the wind is whistling through the flagpoles that stand by the lighthouse, the lanyards balefully clanging against the poles. It’s not really convertible weather, but if you have a box-fresh Ferrari 12Cilindri Spider at your disposal, you’re going to want to let a bit of that fresh salt tang in. I’ve driven up from the fishing village of Cascais this afternoon, attempting to follow the coast…

I MANAGED TO defer its collection by a couple of weeks, but eventually there was no getting away from the fact. The Genesis GV70 was heading home. Over the last four months, it’s become a bit of a family favourite. There have been no arduous torture tests or thousand kilometre road trips. Instead it’s been subjected to the sort of daily use that is more representative of how people will use an almost $80,000 luxury SUV. Life hasn’t been completely plain sailing. The infotainment system has, like its GV80 predecessor in the Wheels garage, been noticeably fritzy. It can drop an existing wireless Android Auto connection with no provocation and then point blank refuse to recognise the handset, even when it’s plugged in with a known good USB cable. The…

CRANKING DOWN Conrod Straight towards 280km/h is something you never forget. So, too, the riotous celebrations at the end of a classic Bathurst 12-Hour race. And then there is the global unveiling of a high-performance family car – with a twist. Did I mention Valentino Rossi? Mount Panorama became more like Munich on the first weekend of February, as BMW went all-in on the first major Australian motorsport event of the year. It created a Forrest Gump event with an automotive ‘box of chocolates’ where you never knew what was coming next. It began with the global unveiling of the latest M3 CS Touring, wrapped around a two-car entry with the M4 GT3 EVO in the 12-Hour contest, and finished with a preview drive of the all-new M5V8 hybrid. The…

ACCORDING TO MY much younger, more glamorous and far wiser wife (well, except in her choice of husband), men become irredeemably grumpier as they age. While she affects to have noticed this largely in other older men, her hints that I am teetering on the edge of the Grump Canyon are not subtle. I have tried to point out to her that women would get irritable as well if hair suddenly splurged out of their noses and ears in a way that suggested their heads had been replaced by sprouted potatoes. Aside from a little occasional griping about the outrageous price of beer and how Star Wars films were better in my day, however, I believe she is wrong – at least about me – because finding the energy to be…

I WATCHED JURASSIC PARK at the cinema three times. There – I said it. While there were many boomerang game-changing moments in the 1993 Spielberg hit (including a particular highlight when a first-gen Ford Explorer gets totalled by a T-Rex), the part that drew me back to the box-office over and over was that bit with the velociraptors. Until the scene in which some kids were stalked around a kitchen by a brace of apex predators, there hadn’t been a monster in film as believably petrifying this side of Alien. Arguably, that might have had something to do with the fact I was 13 but the point still remains, raptors were at the pointy end of the food chain, and any brand that wants to reference one of the most menacing…

WHAT DO THE Subaru SVX, Holden A9X Torana, Tatra 603, Studebaker Avanti and Goggomobil Dart have in common? Absolutely nothing. Nothing, of course, apart from piquing the interest of Charlie Schwerkolt, owner and curator of Charlie’s Auto Museum. Located at Arthur’s Seat on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula, the museum houses scores of cars and motorbikes, hundreds of models and thousands of pieces of memorabilia. It’s easy to miss, half-hidden behind trees set back from Purves Road, just a couple of minutes from the lookout that’s the main tourist draw. The lookout that’s accessed by the wonderful ribbon of road, like a scaled-down Col du Turini, that has car enthusiasts flocking to this area. Car enthusiasts that would do well to make an extra stop. If you’re into Italian exotica, concours-spec British…

THIS PAST MONTH has been a busy one, not allowing much time to get away for long drives in the EX30. Not that it’s a bad thing, the tiny Volvo is excelling as a daily driver, getting around Melbourne’s inner city areas. Its diminutive size is great for finding gaps in traffic and its instant torque is a hoot for zipping around in almost complete silence. The thought of driving something the size of Enright’s F-150 around our tight and congested streets fills me with dread. There are parts of our neighbourhood which do bring to light one of its shortcomings though. One of the streets in our area that I use almost everyday runs parallel to the main drag, heading towards our central business area. Locals and people in…

SCHUMI BLACKMAIL PLOTTER BEHIND BARS Yilmaz Tozturkan, 53, has been sentenced to three years in jail by a court in Germany after being found guilty of threatening to upload over 1500 confidential documents to the dark web relating to the condition of former F1 world champion, Michael Schumacher. Tozturkan’s son, Daniel Lins, was also implicated and will serve a six-month suspended sentence. The leak of the documents was facilitated by a former Schumacher security staff member, Markus Fritsche, who offered to digitise files for the Schumacher family. He received a two-year suspended sentence. Schumacher has not been seen in public since a 2013 ski accident resulted in serious brain injuries. His family have kept news of his condition private. Of the two hard drives containing the stolen data, one has…

“How did we get so jaded about the future of the car?” WHILE deferring some essential work duties in order to brainlessly scroll my phone for a while, I came across an argument on social media where somebody asked which of the current crop of new cars we could reasonably expect to be modern classics in a few years’ time. I started mentally prepping a shortlist and came up very short. I then started scanning the online responses and many commenters thought that no contemporary cars could reach classic status, largely due to their electronics going out of date, effectively making them impossible to work on and run. How did we get so jaded about the future of the car? Paul Williams, Avalon Beach, NSW If the reward is there,…

IF THERE’S ONE thing that’s guaranteed to get Wheels readers in a froth of righteous dudgeon, it’s the very suggestion of a Chinese electric SUV. Throw in the fact that it’s from a brand most will never have heard of and here is the sweet spot to get you lot turning off in your droves. That being the case, the question I had when picking up the new Leapmotor C10 was straightforward. Just how bad could this thing be for $50k? About five kilometres down the road, I had my answer. It’s truly, laughably terrible. I was being assailed with warning chimes of varying types on a constant basis. Sixteen chimes, yes sixteen, to warn you that you’re too close to the nearside white line. You edge away from it…

WERE YOU LOOKING for the place the Autozam AZ-1 – a kei car that would only ever be sold in Japan - was born, Basildon in Essex probably wouldn’t be the first place you’d hit upon. Yet tucked away in a nondescript trading estate in the south-east of England stood the industrial unit of Hawtal Whiting, and if you peered inside in early 1991, you’d have seen a tiny mid-engined coupe being subjected to all manner of torture tests. Bodies-in-white were subjected to bending and torsion tests. Cars were pounded on a four-post road simulator and running prototypes were sneaked into covered trucks for shakedowns at Millbrook Proving Ground. Datasets were pored over, improvements to the suspension implemented and trim choices finalised. The production car might have been born in…

AS WE BID farewell to the big F-150 from the Wheels garage, I’ve been giving some thought to how well it’s been received during my tenure. It put in a solid stint at Car of the Year, where photographer Alastair Brook loved it as a mobile camera platform, and it saw duty on a 4x4 Australia comparison test, but other than that, it’s been me putting in the kilometres in it. The reaction from other road users has been interesting. I was expecting a little hostility, largely because it’s so overtly American and the USA seems about as popular right now as a funnel web in your Blundstones. Nevertheless, whenever I got to chatting about it, there was quite intense curiosity. “What do you need one of these for?” was…

THIS SADDENS US. If you tried to hazard a guess at the sales split between the Mazda6 and the Mazda CX-5 SUV last year, what do you think it’d be? Well, we know that the SUV is going to be more popular, so let’s wing in with an extreme first stab. One Mazda6 sold for every 10 CX-5s? Not even close. It’s nearer one in 17 which is why, along with new ADR regulations, Mazda has quietly deleted the 6 from its local line up. It’s all a far cry from the heady days of 2005 when Mazda couldn’t get enough cars to satisfy the demand from Australia. Nearly 15,000 cars found owners Down Under that year, helped by the fact that Mazda only sold one fairly unappetising SUV. Fast…