Table of contents for June 22, 2022 in Autocar

Heading to Goodwood for the Festival of Speed this week? So are some of the loudest, quickest and most hotly anticipated new cars around. Here’s our quick-fire spotter’s guide to the event’s headline acts. BMW M4 CSL The most potent M4 yet arrives with 542bhp and 479lb ft from its beefed-up straight six, exactly 50 years after the legendary 3.0 CSL. The stripped-back monster will take pride of place on BMW’s stand. BMW CONCEPT XM BMW’s M division will display the concept that previews its first plug-in hybrid and only its second stand-alone production model: the 740bhp V8-engined XM SUV. BMW M HYBRID V8 BMW is returning to top-flight endurance racing 24 years after winning Le Mans. The boldly styled new M Hybrid V8 LMDh prototype will compete in America’s…

Urgent government action is being demanded as the price of petrol and diesel continues to rocket well past previous records, compounding the dramatic impact of the cost-of-living crisis for UK motorists. On Wednesday last week, the nationwide average price of a litre of petrol surged past 187p and diesel topped the 193p mark – each having hit a new record high every day for the preceding month. As a result, the price of filling an average family car, with a 55-litre fuel tank, now exceeds £100. Why is it happening? Even before Russia invaded Ukraine, fuel prices were climbing steadily as suppliers rushed to cope with a postpandemic surge in demand from the transport and industrial sectors, but it’s the ongoing war in eastern Europe that’s now having the greatest…

REGENERATIVE BRAKING – USING the drive motor as a generator to slow the car – is one of the main advantages of a fully electric or electrified car. The amount of energy that can be recovered is no token gesture, either. Some pure-EVs are capable of recovering a substantial amount of the energy consumed during acceleration each time they slow down. It’s a convenient truth that if electric motors are spun by an external source of power, they generate electricity. This is why engineers prefer to call them ‘electric machines’ rather than ‘motors’. When an EV is in regenerative braking mode, that external source of power is derived from a combination of the car’s weight and the speed at which it’s travelling. A quick check on the Kia EV Uvo…

It looks like the original dune buggy is due a comeback. A few more details about future models have started to filter out of Meyers Manx, the company founded in California by Bruce Meyers in 1964 and famous for making simple, Volkswagen-based, glassfibre-shelled, open-top off-roaders. You might know the Manx buggy best from the 1968 film The Thomas Crown Affair but it competed in Baja rallies, too, and spawned dozens of similar buggies. The basics were the same: the Volkswagen Beetle’s floorpan and running gear are largely flat and thus ripe for sticking a body on top of them. Running the show as something of a passion, Meyers was still operating Meyers Manx in 2020 when, aged 94, he sold it to a company called Trousdale Ventures. Even then he…

TOM INGRAM SCORED a double victory at Oulton Park, boosting his hopes for a first British Touring Car Championship title. He took his Excelr8 Hyundai team’s first pole position on Saturday, then dominated the opening race from lights to flag after seeing off Toyota’s Rory Butcher at the start. Ash Sutton and Gordon Shedden both passed the Corolla, only for Shedden to be demoted for causing Adam Morgan to crash and trigger a safety car interlude. Ingram then put in a repeat performance to win the second race, again from Ford’s Sutton, with BMW’s Colin Turkington completing the podium. But all hell broke loose in the final race of the day when Daniel Lloyd and Ricky Collard made contact, sending Lloyd hard into the barrier. His i30 N Fastback was…

The reasoning behind electrified classic cars is that many owners don’t actually care all that much for manual gearboxes and temperamental carburettors, and converting them to electric power makes them more usable. Anyway, if there’s one thing we can agree on, it’s surely that seeing more classic cars out and about is a good thing. It would be a shame to rip out a naturally aspirated V12 and turn it into a coffee table, but the BMC A-series engine in the original Mini? That was always just a tool for a job. If any EV-converted classic is going to work, it might well be this Mini Cooper from Electrogenic. All of the Oxfordshire firm’s work is bespoke, but this is about as off-the-shelf as it gets. In fact, the car…

MODEL TESTED COUPE 3LT Price £82,290 • Power 475bhp • Torque 452lb ft • 0-60mph 3.9sec • 30-70mph in fourth 6.3sec • Fuel economy 22.8mpg • CO2 emissions 277g/km • 70-0mph 45.6m When the Chevrolet brand announced its departure from the European market back in 2013, few predicted that there would one day be a bright side to all the job losses, factory closures and general doom and gloom of GM’s slow retreat from our continent. One, admittedly, only for a select few sports car enthusiasts to really appreciate, but a bright side of a sort. It is the eighth-generation Chevrolet Corvette: the first car in this American sporting icon’s seven-decade history to be offered in right-hand-drive form. If Chevrolet was still plugging away selling the Captivas, Aveos, Orlandos and other…

BMW was generous with our level of access in Garching – except for one item. Awkwardly (hastily?) hidden under a sheet in the shadow of halffinished M4 GT3 cars was BMW’s new international prototype sports car racer. They said we couldn’t quickly whip off the sheet, or even take so much as a peak beneath it, but confirmation wasn’t necessary. The bulbous haunches, the immense scope of the wing, the barely hip-high roof of the bubble cockpit, all against the relative tininess of the footprint. Pure prototype racing car. Exactly one week later, the thing was officially revealed in proper works livery as the BMW M Hybrid V8 – part of the new generation of LMDh endurance racers. Two cars will initially compete in the IMSA championship next year with…

Formed by Jochen Neerpasch in 1972, BMW’s performance arm became responsible for its most loved and admired road cars. But M stands for motorsport, and it’s on the shoulders of the company’s diverse and successful racing exploits that its famous products have been built. It therefore seems only right that we revisit BMW’s greatest competition successes. 2008 CANADIAN GRAND PRIX BMW Sauber F1.08, Robert Kubica The brittle marriage between BMW and Williams ended in 2005, whereupon BMW bought the Sauber team to do Formula 1 on its own terms. By 2008, BMW Sauber was a genuine force, and in Montreal, highly rated young Robert Kubica scored a fortuitous win after McLaren’s Lewis Hamilton rammed Ferrari’s Kimi Räikkönen in a pit-lane misjudgement. Nick Heidfeld made it a one-two as the Pole…

FEATURE Mountain rescue If you ever need to call the mountain rescue service, you can be sure they have the tools and the know-how to get you down safely REVIEW Mercedes-AMG C43 Sports saloon drops two cylinders but gets a hybrid boost to go after the Audi S4 ROAD TEST DS 4 Should you head to France for your next premium hatchback? EVERY WEEK INVESTIGATION Towing the line John Evans finds out if caravanners should give EVs a wide berth OUR CARS Alfa Romeo Stelvio QV Thumping V6 sports SUV leaves our fleet. Will we miss it? SUBSCRIBE autocar.co.uk/subscribe or see p60…

MILEAGE 11,705 WHY WE’RE RUNNING IT To keep tabs on the career of Skoda’s popular seven-seat SUV My time with our Skoda Kodiaq is almost up, but before then, I still had a schlep to Yorkshire to do in it. Long journeys like that are where this SUV is at its best, since the seats are pretty comfortable, the noise isolation is on point and the 61-litre tank means you’re never worried about range. For a big car with a powerful petrol engine, its consumption has been surprisingly acceptable. In fact, it consistently beats its official figure of 34.5mpg. It returns mid-30s on a regular basis and even hit the low-40s on one long run. That equates to a range of around 500 miles. Even so, I can’t help wondering…

It may have produced cars from 1947 to 2011, but it’s fair to say that Bristol didn’t always go in for large-scale interaction with the press or the public. If its charismatic owner, Tony Crook, took a disliking to a journalist who wanted to borrow a car, they would be told to sling their hook. If he didn’t like the look of a potential customer, he would tell them pretty much the same thing. The early cars, types 400 through 406, were idiosyncratic, innovative, beautifully made and powered by a peppery 2.0-litre straight six that was sprightly enough to power a number of highly successful racing cars. The post-1961 cars, types 407 onwards, adopted large Chrysler V8s and were proper and imperious grand tourers. They may have looked discreet, but…

GOODWOOD FESTIVAL OF SPEED The first-ever BMW M3 Touring is making its long-awaited world debut at the Goodwood Festival of Speed this week, combining supercar levels of straight-line pace with the familiar comfort and utility of the 3 Series. Arriving as part of the ongoing celebrations for M division’s 50th anniversary, it is the latest addition to the M3/M4 family and follows hot on the heels of the strippedout, track-focused M4 CSL (see overleaf) revealed last month. This is the first time that BMW has applied the full-fat M treatment to the 3 Series estate in seven generations – although it did build a one-off Touring version of the E46-gen M3 in 2000 (but kept it under wraps until 2016). The new arrival will go on sale in September,…

The 408 is an entirely new model for Peugeot that adds an innovative fastback design to its compact car range, which currently comprises the more conventional 308 hatchback and 3008 SUV. Unrelated to the Chinesemarket 408 small saloon, the fastback is intended to marry the best of SUVs, hatchbacks and saloons by combining an aerodynamic, coupé-esque silhouette with ample space and good driving dynamics in a relatively compact package. Due at the start of 2023, the 408 sits on the same EMP2 modular platform as the 308. At 4690mm long and 1480mm tall, it is a significant 440mm longer and almost 40mm higher than the 308. The final product was seven years in the making, because it was considered quite radical at its inception and apparently took some convincing at…

We spent a day with Evan Morris, a driving coach from Red Driver Training, to hear how some simple adjustments to driving style can result in significant fuel savings and help to mitigate the hike in fuel prices. Our Dacia Sandero test car had been averaging 42mpg over previous weeks, compared with a WLTP rating of 50.4mpg, but we were able to achieve 60.4mpg over a mixed 17.1-mile test route (25% up from the 48.0mpg achieved on an uncoached first lap) using his ‘Drivesave’ guidance: • Before setting off, check tyre pressures – every fifth tank of fuel used is entirely down to tyre rolling resistance, so every PSI counts – and check the engine oil is clean and the right consistency. • Remove unnecessary weight from the boot and…

Ferrari will launch 15 new cars between 2023 and 2026, among which will be its first EV, several new hybrids and pure-ICE cars and a new range-topping supercar. Giving details of Ferrari’s future, bosses detailed their plans to make the company, which is celebrating its 75th anniversary this year, carbon-neutral by 2030. They will do so by changing its construction methods and ramping up its electrified vehicle output – but they were vocal on a commitment to keeping its venerable petrol engines in the frame. LAFERRARI BORN AGAIN The long-awaited successor to the legendary LaFerrari has been confirmed for launch by 2026, sitting above the SF90 Stradale V8 plug-in hybrid and picking up where the McLaren P1 rival left off in 2015. The LaFerrari was Ferrari’s first hybrid. Given the…

The new CEO of Smart UK, David Browne, is attempting to answer a question about market positioning: what will the newly reborn brand be in every category it enters? The question requires distilling the brand to its core essence and is a way to discover if the management team has a clear idea of what Smart’s new purpose is. The new Smart #1 compact electric SUV, due in the middle of 2023 as a rival to the likes of the Volkswagen ID 3, is much bigger, at 4.3 metres long, than the Fortwo that’s being phased out over the next couple of years. This begs the question: what does Smart exist for now? Other brands are clear on this. Mercedes-Benz, Smart’s former owner and now a 50% shareholder along with…

SATURDAY Good and bad on the electric car front this week. Best news first: I did far better than expected at the wheel of a modified dual-motor Tesla Model 3 in a competitive sprint at Abingdon airfield, west of Oxford. If I tell you I posted the 13th-fastest time in a 90-car field, you might be impressed. When you hear that my car was the slowest of four competing Teslas, the achievement will probably seem less stellar. But there’s much more to tell, which I will bung into a full feature soon. One thing was well and truly proven: these Teslas are staggeringly fast cars for the short and sharp codes of motorsport. I’ve never previously driven one as fast as it would go: the experience of arriving at the…

Last week’s surprise cancellation of the UK government’s plugin car grant has left plenty of compact electric cars with prices the wrong side of £30,000, but the Citroën ë-C4 isn’t one of them. A range realignment earlier this year involved Citroën adjusting the trim levels and prices, bringing the new Sense model in a whisker under £30k, even without the £1500 grant. And for now, that’s where the cheapest version of the ë-C4 stays. We will have to wait to test that, though, because Citroën could lend us only the more popular Shine Plus range-topper for testing the couple of mechanical revisions that it has made to the ë-C4 since its arrival in 2020. Like its e-CMP platform relations from DS, Peugeot and Vauxhall, the ë-C4 now has a revised…

MIKE DUFF E90 M3 While many have lost money trying to second-guess the market for used M cars, it’s clear that the 2007 M3 is already on an upward trajectory, one driven by the fact that it is, with the exception of the ultrarare E46 M3 GTR, the only V8-powered M3. The engine is a technical marvel, closely related to the 5.0-litre V10 in the E60 M5 and with the same linear responses and love for revs. Peak power comes at a heady 8300rpm. It has some of the same weaknesses, too, including a tendency for hard-used examples to spin their rod bearings, but there’s a good infrastructure of specialists and many owners have opted for proactive, rather than reactive, replacement. But while the E60 M5 has to work with…

Safety suggestion Safety ratings are important and shouldn’t be messed around with. Does the buyer want to rely on the structural strength of the car, which will hardly vary, or rely on electronics-driven avoidance features that can be randomly unreliable? Why doesn’t Euro NCAP give two ratings, one for each, and let the buyer decide on importance? It should also add a third rating on distraction potential – listing items only available via touchscreen that require you to take your eyes off the road, rated by their frequency of use. Give us the data and let us decide. Keep the categories separate. Don’t combine them, because that hides what might be an unreliable crash avoidance system. I would prefer not to play Russian roulette, thank you. Colin Mynott Northampton Showing…

The best thing since the Mini Cooper S 1275 SO ICONIC IS the Volkswagen Golf GTI that it’s hard to imagine it being novel. So let’s head back to 1976, when we excitedly drove the hot hatch for the first time. “The extra power of the fuelinjected engine [108bhp] meant that one had to be sensible with the throttle during standing starts. “The handling on our mountain course was most impressive. It was difficult even to approach the limit in normal, sensible, fast driving. “The suspension is certainly taut but swallows minor imperfections well on main roads at speed. “On poor secondary surfaces, the ride is rather harsh, but that is the sacrifice one must pay for the virtual elimination of roll. “Once at the [Hockenheim] circuit, we were able…

MILEAGE 4130 WHY WE’RE RUNNING IT To see if Mazda has managed to inject any of its flair into a family-friendly SUV “If we had done something really fashionable and cool, it would have dated already,” said Jo Stenuit, Mazda Europe’s design boss, about the CX-5, the first car to combine the firm’s Kodo ‘soul of motion’ design language and Skyactiv technology. That might come across as a slightly odd thought process for someone who is dedicated to making something look as good as possible, but it’s an interesting jumping-off point for a discussion around the design philosophy at Mazda. Our CX-5 isn’t without its faults. For all the chatter about ‘right-sizing’ engines with Skyactiv technology, the 2.5-litre naturally aspirated fourpot and six-speed automatic gearbox do not happy bedfellows make.…

An expert’s view RICHARD HACKETT, SLJ HACKETT “The 411 is a terrific car and one of the best-selling Bristol models. There’s not much to watch out for: it comes with a very long-lasting engine and a gearbox that either works or doesn’t. The body is aluminium so can corrode and is expensive to repair when it does. The chassis is box-section steel and super-strong, but you should always inspect the car thoroughly on a ramp. The good news is that most parts are still easy to come by.” Buyer beware… ■ ENGINE Chrysler V8s can clock up huge mileages without fuss. Many will have had much refurbishment done already. It’s known to have starting issues, especially when warm. The Carter carburettor can suffer from heat soak and fuel vaporisation. It’s…

IT JUST GOT a little more expensive to switch into an EV, too, as the government axed its plug-in car grant. It introduced the grant in 2011 as a means of claiming up to £5000 off the cost of any plug-in car, including plug-in hybrids. In its final and muchdiminished form, it took £1500 off the price of any electric car costing less than £32,000, of which there were 24 on sale. The government cited a dramatic rise in EV sales as a reason for the decision and said a series of reductions to the grant have had minimal impact on demand. In its place, incentives worth £300 million will be given for plug-in taxis, motorcycles, vans, trucks and wheel-chairaccessible vehicles.…

ENDURANCE CHALLENGE In addition to electrifying its line-up, Ferrari will seek to drastically cut emissions from operations, supply chain and fleet. At least it doesn’t need to worry about the environmental impact of vehicle disposal. “Vehicle end of life isn’t taken into account,” it said, “because a Ferrari is forever.” That’s a challenge for development boss Gianmaria Fulgenzi, because it means “we have to develop a car that must be in the market forever”. VORSPRUNG DURCH TUK-TUK Audi has finally revealed an electric TT. That’s a tuk-tuk, by the way, rather than a sports car, using battery components lifted from E-tron test mules. Audibacked start-up Nunam will use three of them in a pilot scheme in India early next year, enabling street vendors to transport their goods to market cleanly.…

Smart became one of the pioneers of car sharing via then parent firm Daimler’s Car2Go scheme in 2008. While the new Smart said it hasn’t completely given up on the idea of pay-perminute urban car use, it has tempered its mobility ambitions by instead focusing on flexibility with longer-term payment. It has teamed up with French fleet leasing giant ALD (also the owner of Leaseplan as of January this year) to offer a range of finance options. Here, that will mainly mean personal contract purchase, according to Smart UK CEO David Browne. “That’s the vast majority of customer demand. We expect it to be over 80%,” he said. PCP charges a higher price for the option of buying later, compared with straight lease rental. “The UK is different from Europe,…

“A new volume of the thesaurus is needed to try to describe its pace and responses” The Ferrari SF90 Stradale claimed a number of Autocar honours when we attached our timing gear to it at MIRA for a road test – a new lap record on our dry handling circuit and a new acceleration record among them. Yet it didn’t receive a five-star verdict. Those incredible performance gains from this 1000 horsepower (986bhp) car over its mid-engined V8 stablemates came from the addition of hybrid technology for the first time on a series-produced Ferrari. It added plenty of good things (remarkable performance, mind-boggling responses) but at a cost (added weight, electronically manipulated handling). We therefore came away full of admiration for a new performance benchmark and technological showpiece but also…

The Renault-Nissan Alliance is alive and well, it seems. The upcoming Renault Austral is a sibling of the Nissan Qashqai and now Nissan is benefiting from Renault’s unusual E-Tech Hybrid powertrain to electrify the Juke. The new Juke Hybrid is thus powered by the novel combination of what’s essentially an unsynchronised four-speed dog ’box with a 48bhp electric drive motor, a 20bhp startergenerator and a 93bhp naturally aspirated 1.6-litre four-cylinder petrol engine. That equates to a system output of 141bhp. You’re usually kept at arm’s length from what the powertrain is doing. As in the Renault hybrids, there’s no tachometer or manual control of the shifts. And most of the time, the software does a decent job of keeping everything on the boil. We’ve previously observed that this system doesn’t…

Le Mans, September 1968. Not June? Not this year. This year, the 24-hour race is postponed after summer-long civil unrest in the staunchly patriarchal France of Charles de Gaulle, although that’s another story. As far as we’re concerned, the story is at Le Mans, in September. It’s the final leg of the World Sportscar Championship and the decider between Porsche and Ford. Who will prevail? The 4.9-litre GT40s are narrow favourites after wins at Spa and Watkins Glen but one unbelievably juicy and almost incomprehensible sub-plot brought about by the calendar change is that Ford’s new motorsport chief is at the wheel of the #33 works Porsche 908. Fast-forward 20 years. In another life, the same man is tasked with leading Mercedes’ return to factory motorsport operations after 33 years…

“The BMW M1 will always be the place where modern supercars truly begin” STEVE CROPLEY M1 Back at the end of the 1970s, when the BMW M1 was new and still being made at Lamborghini, I borrowed an early production version for a first drive story. With a photographer, I collected it from BMW’s famous Four-Cylinder building on the Munich ring road on a Friday afternoon and headed up-country in search of scenery and great driving roads. My cameraman had spotted a town called Rottenburg on our map and thought it might be a wheeze to go to such a place. (We were young, remember.) What we hadn’t taken into account was that this was the beginning of Germany’s Ascension Day long weekend: everyone with a car and an address…

The FIA stewards have got to stop changing the rules that apply to Formula 1. It’s bringing the sport into disrepute. It was bad enough last year, but we were led to believe that lessons had been learned, so we didn’t expect to find the stewards applying a rule differently at Monaco to all occasions in the past. The yellow line is clearly meant to keep cars that are entering the track from the pit lane from either impeding or indeed hitting cars on the track. If suddenly the stewards interpret the rule as allowing the car entering from the pits to drive onto and across the line, as long as some part of the contact patch of the tyre is still on the line, it means cars will be…

The Renault Kadjar is a stylish approach to a market segment marred by designs that some say are becoming increasingly bland. When it was launched in 2015 with a price tag of £17,995, one of the other key draws of this family SUV was its value for money. And prices are even more enticing today, as used Kadjars with fewer than 30,000 miles on the clock start at around £10,000. What exactly are you getting for the money? While the Kadjar can’t quite match its Mk2 Nissan Qashqai relation for refinement, it offers hatchback-like handling, good performance, strong standard kit and, to our eyes, a prettier design. Practicality is good too. With its two-tier boot floor lowered, the Kadjar offers a respectable 472 litres of luggage capacity (more than the…

McLAREN AUTOMOTIVE WAS in its infancy when the MP4-12C supercar came to fruition back in 2011. With the Ferrari 458 at the top of the class in almost all calculable aspects, Woking had to pull out all the stops to build something special to beat the Italians at their own game. Did it manage it? Almost. The MP4-12C (later shortened to 12C) was a near-masterpiece, and despite having surpassed a decade on the road, this supercar still stands out – now as a second-hand option that’s well worth considering. Behind the driver sits a snarling 3.8-litre V8 engine that produces 592bhp and 442lb ft of torque. That’s enough to whizz you from 0-62mph in a staggering 3.3sec and on to a top speed of 205mph. Not only did we describe…

Driving a fast car in the right conditions is one of the best experiences you can have, but there are few places where you can enjoy the full potential of a modern sports car, so driving them is often frustrating. In fact, it’s usually more fun to drive a slow car fast than a fast car slow. So join us for a look at some of the cars that defiantly argue fun isn’t linked to enormous power and grip. Citroën 2CV 1948-1990 The 2CV went on sale not long after the war with 9bhp and retired 42 years later with 29bhp. While its performance is measurable with a sundial and its acceleration is lackadaisical at best in a straight line, the 2CV is a blast to drive, thanks in part…