Table of contents for October 30, 2024 in Autocar

ASTON MARTIN MAY have recently lowered its sales projections for 2024 but Lamborghini expects its own sales to continue soaring, despite a softening of what CEO Stephan Winkelmann has called the ‘YOLO effect’ (you only live once), where buyers decided to treat themselves post-Covid. The Italian supercar maker sold 10,112 cars in 2023 – up from 8205 in 2019 – and it expects to comfortably exceed that in 2024. Winkelmann said: “The YOLO effect was very strong from 2021 onwards and the market came back stronger than expected. This is still holding for us. The big hype is not there as before. We are reaching a plateau in terms of demand for our type of cars.” However, the company is not worried because it is finding that compared with 10-15…

UK VERDICT DACIA DUSTER Everybody’s favourite budget SUV has entered its third generation. Will it retain that status after this all-important test on British roads? INSIGHT TESLA MODEL S: A DECADE ON We reflect on how this game-changing model has evolved – and why CULTURE CARS AND COFFEE, AMERICAN STYLE We hang in an LA car park on a Sunday morning with some epic metal EVERY WEEK FIRST DRIVE HYUNDAI INSTER Funky EV aims to rival the Renault 5. But is it any good? We reveal all USED GUIDE TOYOTA GR YARIS How to bag this mighty hot hatch for less and what to watch out for…

Glance at the technical specification of this facelifted Audi RS3 and you might wonder whether the mechanical bits have even been touched. The substantial 394bhp of the five-cylinder engine is unchanged, as is the 369lb ft whack of torque it produces. Both the top speed and 0-62mph time remain unchanged too. The stylistic changes are easy to spot: larger air intakes at the front end, a bolder rear diffuser and new optional wheels, while inside there’s a new motorsportinspired steering wheel with a flat top and bottom and big red buttons to select Performance mode, plus you get a new rev counter for the digital display and optional bucket seats. And lurid green paint is a no-cost option. It’s a bit more in your-face-aggressive, albeit still in a manicured, Audi…

How time flies. It feels only last month that Porsche demonstrated to the world just how fine a dynamic proposition an EV could be, yet here we already are with the new-for-2024 Taycan, codenamed not J1 but J1 ‘II’. It’s a prosaic denomination that belies the magnitude of the changes made to update arguably the most compelling electric car money can buy, and indeed the scale of cash spent doing so. We will come to all that soon, but it’s indicative of the extraordinary rate of development car makers in the electric game are faced with that, just five years into its life, the Taycan is on the receiving end of such far-reaching updates. A taste: the available battery packs not only have greater capacity but are also now lighter…

The government may have long since sparked out grants towards private electric cars, but business owners can still make big savings on zeroemission motoring. According to tax expert Christiaan Hansen, a partner at JRW Hogg & Thorburn accountants in southern Scotland: “When you’re looking at tax savings for an owner-managed business, electric vehicles are one of the top opportunities. It’s a real winner, and we advise to make use of it especially while benefit-in-kind [BIK] rates are still relatively low.” Meanwhile, the UK’s zero-emission vehicle mandate has been in force since January. Its targets, fines, CO2 credits and intermanufacturer trading are a can of worms we needn’t hack open here, but the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders expects this year’s sales to fall short of quotas and by an…

WHY WE’RE RUNNING IT If you’re in the market for a 500bhp super-saloon, should you be thinking of going Italian? You jammy sod. Those three words flashed up on my phone from a friend barely five minutes after I posted an image to Instagram. Out of context this would perhaps seem weird. But the picture in question was of this sumptuous Etna Red Alfa Romeo Giulia Quadrifoglio. My friend is a big Alfa fan – and he says it how it is. And I would guess that some of you may be thinking similar thoughts to my friend. And you’re right, because the £78,195 Giulia QV is quite the car: 513bhp and rear-wheel drive but with seating for five and a good-sized boot. I am conscious about coming across smug…

As a graphic designer turned professional actor, Albert Kueh knows how to make an impression, hence his choice of car: an Audi A2 finished in eyepopping Papaya Orange. “It’s the only one in this colour in the UK, I believe,” he says. “I love the colour, but I also love the car. It may only be small, but it does so much and, on a technical level, is so interesting, with its aluminium body, its removable bonnet and the little flap so you can check the oil and screenwash levels.” Albert has owned his A2, which was registered in 2004, since 2018. It replaced a diesel version that, unfortunately, was damaged in a crash with a lorry: “I was stationary at the Chiswick roundabout when a truck crashed into the…

HONDA INSIGHT 2001, 120,000 miles, £4200 This lean, clean eco machine is proof you don’t need a new hybrid for 100mpg potential. This Insight has 10 months of MOT, a full Honda history and is “mechanically spot on”. It has a fairly new battery, too, and can hit 112mpg on a run, they say. BMW i3 2014, 43,000 miles, £7499 A modern-day A2? Maybe, but we can’t ignore the similarities between the two hatches, which were both ahead of their time. This i3 has plenty of appeal with just two previous owners, low miles, a solid service history and a long MOT. It should make the ideal urban runaround. MERCEDES-BENZ A-CLASS 1999, 30,000 miles, £2990 The original A-Class is a marvel of packaging, with the cabin space of a saloon.…

“The all-wheel-drive dual-motor ES90 will be offered with up to 502bhp” Volvo is gearing up to launch the ES90 as its first electric saloon early next year – and it will serve as a premium flagship for the firm’s next wave of five advanced EV models. The new BMW i5 and Mercedes-Benz EQE rival is a sibling model to the combustion-engined S90 and will be revealed next March at an event in Stockholm, Sweden. It has been developed with a focus on the Chinese market, although it will be sold worldwide. The ES90 will be closely related to the EX90 electric SUV and, much like that model, will serve as a technological figurehead rather than a driver of sales volume. It will be followed in 2026 by the new EX60,…

Electric car sales increased by 14% across Europe in September, reaching their highest level in two years amid industry concerns about declining consumer demand. Figures from industry analyst Jato Dynamics reveal that 212,197 batteryelectric vehicles (BEVs) were registered in September – up from 186,380 in the same month last year. Jato attributes the uptick in EV buying to the success of various incentives across the region – France’s EV tax reductions and Italy’s state-backed scrappage scheme, for example – but was cautious about whether the upward trend will be sustained. “It’s hard to say for certain whether BEVs will continue along this positive trajectory,” said Jato global analyst Felipe Munoz. “But the monthly increase in registrations is welcome news, especially considering that consumers still have reservations about the adoption of…

ROLLS-ROYCE HAS brought the Phantom III of James Bond nemesis Goldfinger to the modern day with a special one-off to mark 60 years since the iconic film hit cinemas. The Phantom Goldfinger gives today’s Phantom VIII a 1937-inspired makeover with “some of the most extensively engineered and hand-crafted Bespoke features ever produced”, said Rolls-Royce. The car has been built for a UK-based client and avid Bond fan as part of a three-and-a-halfyear project. As well as the famous two-tone paint, a range of Goldfinger-related features are found inside, including a Phantom-shaped 18-carat gold bar in the centre console and a gold golf putter fitted to the bootlid, referencing the key first encounter of Bond and Auric Goldfinger at Stoke Park in the film. Elsewhere, at the client’s request, the 007…

FIVE STAR CAR Your first test of Renault’s fabulous new 5 (9 October) was a great read. This car knocks spots off Mini’s increasingly hideous new Cooper. It looks like the 5 of old and the cabin is a delightful change from the awful black on black we see in 90% of electric cars. I have nowhere to charge an EV, but if I did, the 5 would be my car of choice. This car is going to be a massive hit. Vive la Renaulution. Vive le super Cinq. P Bainbridge Manchester GONE DOWN THE TUBE Matt Prior worries about the future of mainstream car entertainment following the demise of Top Gear and now The Grand Tour (Prior Conviction, 25 September). From the start, way back in 1977, Top Gear…

As October opened, then, so it closes: with another brand-new, V12-powered, front-engined exotic super-GT to get stuck into. The Aston Martin Vanquish joins the Ferrari 12Cilindri among an ever-dwindling number of 12-cylinder sports cars setting out to battle upstream, fingers in ears and screaming blood and thunder, for the next half decade or so at least. It does this against a swelling current of pressure to downsize, electrify and generally cut out the old-school combusting of hydrocarbons in one of motordom’s very grandest engine configurations. Good luck to them, I say. This, you’ll probably already have surmised, will not be a review that lampoons how power outputs have grown to ridiculous and untappable extremes, or one that laments the impact that such headline-stealing power has on cars really meant for…

Certain cars just define a genre. It’s the Golf for hatchbacks, the MX-5 for roadsters and probably the BMW M5 for supersaloons. But where a current-gen MX-5 is still a fundamentally similar car to a Mk1 from 1989, the M5 has always been a shape-shifter. At the launch for the new G90 M5, BMW put on a spread of historic M5s for us to drive. Aside from a dozen web browser tabs of E34 M5 classified ads, the first thing I took away is that the new M5 is a very, very different car from a 1986 E28. Next to the compact, understated, manually shifted and deliciously slippy original, the latest fast Five might as well have come from a different galaxy. That’s not the important thing, though. More pertinent…

Christmas Day, 2014: 15-year-old me was lucky enough to unwrap a Lego Technic 4x4 off-roader, courtesy of Father Christmas. The days between Christmas and New Year seemed to melt into one as I beavered away at the dining room table, building the model from bags of bricks to a fully functioning car, of sorts. Fast forward 10 years and, like many of you, no doubt, I still love the therapeutic assembly of a Lego set. I’d argue that Lego’s automotive sets were also among the, er, building blocks of my career writing about cars. The pre-eminent Danish toy maker has excelled itself in recent years, releasing a range of ultra-technical sets as part of its Lego Technic Ultimate Car Concept series, by which the firm brings an iconic car to…

Style and substance are a rare combination in the crossover class, but Peugeot managed to balance the two quite neatly for the second-generation 3008, which recently bowed out after seven years of production. Inside it was stylish, practical and spacious; outside it was handsome, chunky and far more good-looking than the somewhat potato-shaped first-generation car. Morphing the 3008 from a crossover-ish hatchback to a more conventional compact SUV played well commercially and boosted the car’s popularity in the UK – hence the dazzling variety of second-hand examples on offer today, priced from as little as £7000. In fact, so warm was the reception that dealers initially struggled to meet demand: over its seven-year lifespan the 3008 would become one of the world’s most popular SUVs, shifting 1.3 million units and…

Alfa Romeo recently confirmed plans to take on the Porsche Cayenne with an all-new luxury SUV (News, 23 October). It will be based on parent firm Stellantis’s largest car architecture and will prove crucial as the brand attempts to stimulate demand in the US. It’s a familiar formula – so much so that Alfa has actually been here before. At the 2003 Geneva motor show it lifted the covers off the Kamal, a stunning BMW X5 rival. It packed the most potent version of Alfa’s famed Busso V6, with 250bhp, but was due to get a punchier General Motors-sourced unit after launch. Power was sent through all four wheels via three electronically controlled Torsen differentials and it rode on height-adjustable air suspension. Its styling, overseen by Wolfgang Egger, was something…

The Porsche 911 GT3’s 503bhp naturally aspirated flat six has only around two years left on sale without being turbocharged or electrified, according to Porsche GT boss Andreas Preuninger. The 4.0-litre engine has powered the GT3 since the ‘991.2’ generation of 2018 and is also fitted in the 911 S/T, 911 GT3 RS, 718 Cayman GT4 RS and 718 Spyder RS, in different tunes. It is one of just two Porsche engines not to feature forced induction or a hybrid element. The other is the closely related 4.0-litre flat six in the 718 Cayman GTS 4.0 and 718 Boxster GTS 4.0. But Preuninger suggests the updated 911 GT3 could be the free-breathing flat six’s final outing, because it can’t be made compliant with increasingly stringent emissions regulations in its current…

HONDA’S NEW 0 Series is promising to be one of the most technologically advanced EV series we’ve seen so far. The firm revealed details of the nextgeneration technologies at its Honda 0 Tech Meeting 2024, following the unveiling of two concepts earlier this year, a saloon and the futuristic Space-Hub. The saloon will form the basis of the first production model, due to be launched in 2026. The 0 Series is so named, says Honda, because the ideas behind its tech have been generated from zero (from scratch) and are based on the slogan ‘thin, light and wise’. The new platform will feature a hot-stamped ultra-high-strength steel plate structure to create a low-height car with a thin, floor-mounted battery pack. A compact new e-axle design has an integrated inverter that…

LISA BRANKIN TOOK the top job at Ford of Britain in late 2020 just as the brand was about to execute plans to willingly give up a marketleading volume position for its car business in pursuit of the profitability that had always eluded it. Brankin observed: “Timing is everything, and I think probably my timing isn’t as good as it could have been…” That comment was largely about the industry-wide challenges being faced at the time (Covid, the chips shortage), but it also aptly describes the difficulty of the job she was taking on, relative to her predecessors, with Ford no longer being “obsessed over market leadership”. The road to “managing a profitable business overall” has led to some outwardly quite unpopular decisions. Not only has Brankin been the bearer…

I understand that European manufacturers want to highlight their legacy products in the light of serious challenges from disruptors like Tesla and those from China, but ultimately it will be their ability to innovate and stimulate with new products that will bring success. Take Renault’s ‘Renaulution’, for instance. It’s very hard not to feel seriously patronised by a catchphrase and a tenuous link through rose-tinted glasses to historical models that anyone under 40 won’t remember anyway. And what’s revolutionary about a £30k, 148bhp car that weighs 1500kg and can’t drive 250 miles? I fully appreciate that European firms have been handicapped by foolish EU legislators into making cars that people don’t want, but if they believe their marketing people can overcome inadequacy by sprinkling historical design features and badges on…

Capri or not Capri? That really is the question that has dominated the narrative around Ford’s new electric crossover since it was revealed back in July. Sacrilege or not, it is ultimately just a badge on a tailgate. Whether Ford’s decision to bring the badge back was a belief that the new car is true to the original’s lineage (the design team imagined a range of Capris over subsequent generations since the last one went out of production in 1986, to show how they got to here) or a more cynical marketing ploy to create some buzz around the launch of yet another four-point-something-metre-long electric crossover, it has at least got people’s attention and started a conversation. It’s likely both things are true at the same time. The words that…

“One of the Aceman’s strengths is that it has proper ‘big car’ manners” You rather like the Mini hatchback. And in fact, you really like the electric one. But you want five doors, and the new electric Mini Cooper hatchback doesn’t come with five doors – it’s three-door only. You also don’t want the much bigger – and costlier – electric Countryman. Nope. You’re an about-town kinda person, and you want compact but useful, with lots of style and plush, premium design goodness. Well, Mini has got you covered with the Aceman. It’s based on the same platform as the electric Mini Cooper – which is different from the platform used in the petrol Cooper hatch, don’t forget, because that can in fact be had with five doors. The Aceman…

As compound adjectives go, ‘seagull-shit-splattered’ is an unconventional one to concoct when describing the birth of an era-defining new performance car. But sometimes a bit of candour is just the ticket. In his excellent behind-the-scenes book Inside the Machine, David Twohig’s depiction of the guano-iced old Alpine competition workshops in Dieppe, and the scene that unfolds within one of them as, on a frigid winter’s morn, his team fires up an ugly A110 mule for the first time, is evocatively unvarnished and very entertaining. Just as striking is the wider chronology. This was in February 2015; only four months later, Alfa Romeo would whip the covers off a stunning new BMW M3 rival at the company’s smartly updated Arese headquarters north-west of Milan. Just four months on from that, Fiat-Chrysler…

WHY WE RAN IT To evaluate the significance to an owner of the Extended Range’s extra cruising ability, together with its more powerful motor “Of all the EVs I’ve had, this has seemed the most honest and practical” Hail and farewell to a good car. Not an excellent car in Autocar five-star-car terms, but certainly the handiest, most affordable and most practical EV I’ve yet had the pleasure to run. No need to take just my word for this car’s suitability for our market: owners have already verified it. The MG 4 was the UK’s secondbest-selling EV last year, its first full year on sale. It trailed only the Tesla Model Y, whose sales were augmented (as with all Teslas) by the existence of the Supercharger network that quells owner…

AN EXPERT’S VIEW PAUL STEANE, INDEPENDENT PEUGEOT SPECIALISTS “The 1.2 Puretech has wet belt issues, can burn oil and carbon deposits can block up the inlet manifolds. Depending on how bad the damage is, it can cost up to £800 to get the wet belt replaced in the Puretech engine, and if the belt snaps then the whole engine will need to be swapped. An oil light will be the first sign, for low oil pressure, which is the first indication that the wet belt is breaking up. Then we do an investigation to check the oil and the oil pressure.” BUYER BEWARE… ■ ENGINE The wet timing belt that runs through the engine oil in the Puretech petrol engine can be prone to failure, which will cause serious engine…