Table of contents for September 2024 in Wheels

MG HAS EVOKED the spirit of the MG B GT to create a four-seat coupe version of the Cyberster – and it could be in showrooms as early as next year. Called the Cyber GTS, it made its debut on the hillclimb at Goodwood as part of MG’s starring role as the ‘celebrated marque’ of this year’s Festival of Speed. It appeared alongside the new HS (see sidebar, right), the radical EXE 181 concept and an MG-themed central sculpture topped by the Cyberster and an original MG B. The GTS is officially a concept for now but the company’s top designers, Jozef Kaban and Carl Gotham, said public reaction to the running prototype will determine whether MG takes it to the showroom. The Cyberster was engineered from the off to…

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) What the hell has happened to the price of new cars? YOU CAN file this one under ‘old man shouting at clouds’ if you like, but what the hell has happened to the price of new cars? I’m in the market for a new hatch, nothing too flash, to replace my 2013 Corolla Ascent that I paid $18,500 for, having bargained it down from a list of $19,900. I fully expected the price to have increased in the interim, but I nearly dropped my coffee when I was told that I’d need to pay $36,443 – virtually double…

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Having cut his teeth on the Nissan 350Z, it would be natural for star designer Ajay Panchal to then develop an entire portfolio of production-car entries on his resume but that doesn’t appear to be the case. In fact, it’s hard to find much trace of him after his work on the 350Z. Panchal stayed on at NDA until 2007 and then spent a two-year tenure as senior designer at Nissan Design Europe. Since 2010, he’s worked for himself as a solo designer – first in London and, for the last decade, he’s been design director at B.L.U.E. in California. No, we couldn’t find any online trace of that business either.…

THE MG 4 X-POWER needed some work. Fast? You bet your arse, with the dual-motor electric hatch dispatching the 0-100km/h sprint in just 3.8 seconds. Reviewers around the world have invariably said that it’s ballistic in its acceleration, but not many have waxed lyrical about its dynamics delivering much in the way of entertainment. But that could be set to change, if MG Australia has its way. The brand’s local arm has essentially developed its own top-secret skunkworks Down Under to address some of the critiques of the X-Power’s handling with a locally modified one-off prototype model that could point to a future of tuned-up, Aussie-ready cars to suit our tastes and conditions. Sounds familiar, right? Holden and Ford did it for decades. Japanese brands have dabbled in hardcore evaluation…

THEY SIT TOGETHER, insouciant, on the side of a hill. They are arranged in age order from first to last and the sense of occasion is palpable. Six cars, the oldest model dating from some 37 years before the newest. It’s an extraordinary sight, one that sets you blinking just to make sure it’s real. They are all ‘E’s and ‘F’s – the first M5 to bear a ‘G’ code number is still not available for testing. So that’s how I’m going to refer to them in this story. For those insufficiently sad to know the numbers already, a short aide-memoire to help you know one from the other… In order, we have: E28 – the original, in production from 1984 to 1988 with a 3.4-litre straight-six and a five-speed…

THE QUESTION NOW is a simple one: can the seventh M5 in the series, the G90, teach the F90 M5 CS anything at all? Or is it doomed to be humiliated by its immediate predecessor? We won’t know for sure until we’ve driven the new model in its final production form and on a wide variety of roads, but we can certainly tee up the contest here. In many ways it will not be a like-for-like comparison, because the CS is the most fettled and heavily optimised M5 there has ever been, while this first version of the G90 is exactly that – just the first version. More driver-focused variants may well follow in due course. The internet will tell you the latest M5 is far too heavy for its…

ELECTRIC CARS ARE are the new frontier, the opportunity to try something new. Or not. If we’re realistic, the pool of adventurous early adopters who are open to buying a radical-looking starship has been mostly exhausted by now. Many other buyers, even if they can hold their nose at the high prices of electric cars (we’ll get to that), want something more familiar. And that’s where we are today. Not only are this electric Mini and 500 two very comforting shapes that hark back to the 1950s, but they also generally seem to have been developed so that people trading up from their petrol-powered predecessors are spared from too much culture shock. Before this test, I spent some time in the three-cylinder petrol-powered Mini Cooper C, and swapping to this…

PORSCHE 911 RESTOMODS have become something of a cliche, with new firms popping up almost weekly with the promise of analogue thrills and retro-modern looks. But Lanzante – the British firm known for maintaining many of the world’s McLaren F1s, as well as making some of the world’s most iconic race cars road legal – has produced one with a genuine difference. Rather than upgrade the contemporary flat six, as is par for the course, Lanzante opted to retrofit a 911 with a genuine Formula 1 V6 from McLaren’s back catalogue. Developed by Porsche and wearing TAG branding after the team’s contemporary sponsor, Techniques d’Avant Garde, the turbocharged 1.5-litre powerplant is rumoured to have put out more than 745kW (1000bhp) in qualifying trim. It thrust McLaren to three consecutive drivers’…

I HAVEN’T EVEN put it in Sport mode yet and my palms are sweating as I attempt to pivot this 2433kg luxury SUV through corners at a pace that seems, frankly, unrealistic. A sequence of esses with a s-s-s-heer drop on one side urges me to remain calm, but I cannot fight the fact that the new Volkswagen Touareg R is seriously egging me on. But why are my hands so hot? Oh. I’ve bumped the steering-wheel heating button again. It’s one of those haptic controls that VW has since moved to dump – but unfortunately it’s still on this car. I switch it off and hang on for more as I punch the ‘Sport’ Drive Mode button and engage the 3.0-litre turbo-petrolV6 and 100kW/400Nm electric motor to help make this…

THE DIVIDING LINE between what we regard as the classic M5s and the moderns was not difficult to find. Even were it not so obvious, I guess we’d have still split them down the middle to provide two tests of equal numbers; but in the end a purely chronological separation was not needed. Because between the last of the classics, the V8-powered E39 and the first of the moderns, the V10-propelled E60, was a yawning 78kW gap. Never before, or since, has an M5 seen its engine output rise by anything like so much. In that moment the car some say was the original super-sedan (not me, I hasten to add), became something closer to a supercar in sedan form. But there were the pedals too: yes you could get…

THE TECHNICAL TERM is an Antarctic vortex; a cold front dragging air from the south onto the windward side of the Great Dividing Range. Right now it’s manifesting as intermittent rain at sea level, snow on the hills inland and is slashing sideways through the cabin of this Ferrari 296 GTS every time I crack the window open. The mercury was barely above zero when I nursed the 296 out of the garage this morning, sneaking out at an ungodly hour in full EV mode. It feels languid and long-legged running on its 7.45kWh battery pack, despite the fact that you’ll only get around 25km from a charge and enjoy acceleration that’s Golf GTI standard at best. A red Ferrari’s hardly low-key but you’ll feel reassuringly smug that you’re not…

IT TOOK A while for fun small EVs to start trickling in, but it seems that 2024 will be the year when it becomes a genre, because several more launches could start to make life hard for the electric Mini Cooper. The Alfa Romeo Junior Veloce is en route, which takes the generic Stellantis e-CMP underpinnings but adds 207kW, a proper LSD and an engaging character. As is the Stellantis way, there will also be an Abarth 600e and a Lancia version. Later this year, we look forward to the new Renault 5 and its hot Alpine derivative, the A290, which promises similar power to the Mini but 100kg less weight. If it can revive some of the old Renaultsport magic, it will be one to look out for. Then…

DARK, COLD, EARLY starts are part of the gig if you sign up to be a car photographer but even after all these years I’m still not a natural. Today I’m on dog-walking duties at, checks clock, 6:02 am. It’s not quite windscreen defrost territory, but it’s not far off and I’m setting out to meet a mate to walk my four-legged bestie, Cleo. Donning more layers than I care to load in one wash, they’re having the unfortunate effect of temporarily insulating me against the Outlander’s heated seats, even on the maximum level three setting. Fail. I prod the start button and attempt to clack the shifter back into drive and – clunk. I ought to have learned by now. One press on the starter button and the Outlander’s…

JAGUAR IS ON one heck of a cull. We recently featured the F-Type in Driven To Extinction, but the knife’s going way deeper than the coupe and roadster. Shortly after revealing its F-Pace 90th Anniversary model in May, Jaguar’s Castle Bromwich plant had already assembled the very final examples of not only the F-Type but also the XF Sportbrake and the car you see here, the pert XE sedan. JLR’s CEO, Adrian Mardell, went on to inform analysts that Jaguar would axe everything but the F-Pace SUV within the year with the withering comment: “none of those are vehicles on which we made any money.” Indeed, in the most recent quarter, 86 percent of JLR group sales were accounted for by the LR bit, Jaguar contributing a paltry 14 percent. The…

FRESH FROM its success at the Finke Desert Race, Ford has levelled up another few notches and is targeting the arduous Dakar Rally 2025 with the full-on Raptor T1+, which saw its public debut on the Earl of Richmond’s driveway at this year’s Goodwood Festival of Speed. A collaboration between Ford and M-Sport, the Raptor T1+ draws on lessons learned from the Ranger-based race truck developed by the two companies that campaigned in the 2024 edition of Dakar. This time round, Ford has unleashed everything it knows and has opened the budget accordingly. Power comes courtesy of a 5.0-litre Coyote V8, fitted with a dry-sump lubrication system and an exhaust that’s tucked away high and safe at the back of the vehicle. Ford is coy on exactly how much power the T1+ is…

As far as hackneyed sales slogans go, ‘now is the time to buy’ has to be right up there. But just as a broken watch is correct twice a day, once in a while, now is indeed the right time to put your hand in your pocket for something. When that something is a Nissan 350Z, it’s worth examining that claim in a little more detail. Most mainstream enthusiast cars follow a typical value curve. They start bullishly when they’re the fashion item du jour, before falling sharply. After around seven years, the curve levels off. They’ve fallen from favour, they’re long out of warranty, and their images have been tarnished as a result of falling into the hands of the wrong sort of owners who can afford the asking…

MINI HAS supersized the Countryman. No, really. There aren’t too many cars that have grown so much in such a short lifespan. Let’s break out the tape measure and apply some cold, hard data to that assertion. The first-gen R60 Countryman (2010-2016) measured a mere 4097mm from stem to stern. The next one, dubbed the F60 (2016-2024) grew significantly and was 4313mm long. It’s now grown again with this latest U25 version, and breaks the tape at 4433mm. While a 7.7 percent growth doesn’t seem that extreme, bear in mind that the Porsche 911 grew 5.7 percent from the ‘tiny’ 964 generation to the apparently huge 992. The Countryman is now a sizeable hunk, its 8.17m² road footprint being significantly larger than something like aVolkswagen T-Roc (7.7m²) and a gnat’s…

AT 10AM ON A Saturday I slid into the semi-sporting front passenger seat of a new Ford Capri EV, the already controversial coupe-SUV the company launched moments ago and wants to sell in healthy numbers beside its sibling, the Explorer EV. The car was extremely noticeable in the yellow hue the company has clearly chosen as its launch colour, and to my eyes it looked great. Big and tall – which is the cause of the controversy – but great. Roomy inside, too, just like the Explorer, with a minimum of showy architecture but a practical, quality feel. Very Fordish. The task was to drive as fast as possible up the Goodwood Festival of Speed hillclimb, and my driver was the kind of bloke who’s perfect for the job: well-known…

I KNOW WHAT you’re thinking and a very large part of me agrees. How can you compare two cars born almost 30 years apart and pronounce one of them the winner? I once asked John Surtees to name the greatest racing driver of all time and got fabulously short shrift in return. His point was that you simply cannot compare across eras where the terms of reference are so different. Therefore he refused to answer – leaving me, a freelancer, a few cheap words short of a story. But today it is me and not the late, great Grand Jean controlling the narrative, so you’re going to get a winner and make of it what you will. My only problem right now is that, like you, I have no idea…

FERRARI CAN BE coy about quoting absolute torsional rigidity figures, but the 296 GTS benefits from extra carbonfibre reinforcements across the lower sills and both the A and B pillars, making it fully 50 percent torsionally stiffer than its predecessor, the F8 Spider, while adding only 5kg to the weight figure of 1540kg dry. So let’s do some sleuthing to get some ballpark numbers. We can get concrete stats on the rigidity of the 360 Modena: 14,455Nm/deg. The F430 coupe was 20% stiffer, so 17,346. The 458 Italia was 20% stiffer again, which takes us to 19,948. The drop top was 30 percent less resistant to twist than the coupe, so we find ourselves back at 13,964kg/nm. The 488 Spider was 23 percent stiffer, which lifts us to 17,176Nm/deg. Ferrari…

“WHAT IS IT?” Despite having been on sale here in Australia since 2020, it’s fair to say that the Genesis GV80 still has the capacity to befuddle a good proportion of onlookers. Some have commented that Genesis is the luxury arm of Nissan, that it’s an Aston Martin, and one reckoned it was a Chinese brand. Clearly Genesis needs to work a little on its brand recognition. We’re doing our bit. We featured the ‘old’ Genesis GV80 in the Wheels garage back in 2021, so when the opportunity came to do a bit of a compare and contrast with the previous model, I was all for it. It didn’t quite do enough to merit a podium spot at that year’s COTY. Judge Byron Mathioudakis described it as dynamically confused, not…

HERE WE ARE then: crunch time for Mazda’s biggest, grandest and boldest SUV yet. After four months and 4500km, the CX-90 is heading back to company HQ, which means we now have to answer the questions we posed at the beginning: is it a worthy flagship? And more crucially, is it worth its near-$90K asking price? I wish the answers were more clear cut but unlike most farewell reports, which sign off with either a cheery “Yep, it’s a goodun’ or a cautious “maybe give this one a miss”, the CX-90’s verdict is more complex. On the one hand, there’s so much to like. Mazda’s big 7-seater has real presence in the metal thanks to its sheer size, elegant detailing, and sporty proportions that come from its long bonnet and…