Autocar

Motors open up new opportunities for making a car more agile, but its potential has yet to be realised As we enter the era of the electric driver's car, there's a lot of talk about torque vectoring - not least from me. It's nothing new, but EVs have given it new relevance, partly because car makers are desperately scratching around for ways to make their fast but silent cars exciting and partly because electric motors open up opportunities. Before jargon overload makes you tune out, let's remin

Chinese-American joint venture will build several new models at Valencia factory, securing its future A new multi-energy Ford crossover and two electric Geely SUVs will be built in Valencia, securing the future of Ford's Spanish factory. The deal, confirmed after months of speculation, will involve the creation of the new joint venture that will take over the operation of the factory, which Ford opened 50 years ago. When the deal is completed next year, Ford will own 66% of the new entity and C

Tiny, sub-450kg off-roader started life as a golf buggy but now aims to reinvent the quadricycle A Portuguese start-up is aiming to reinvent the microcar class with a tiny, sub-450kg off-roader designed by the man behind the Audi R8 and Apple Watch. Amble's debut model, the One, is a quadricycle homologated to the same L7e standard as the Isetta-inspired Microlino and the old Renault Twizy. But, unlike most microcars, it has been conceived as an off-roader for use across a wide range of climate

Japanese brand will focus on 'unique' cars that 'put smiles on faces' as it looks to carve out a market niche Honda is aiming to expand its European market footprint by producing “unique” cars that “touch the sweet spot” for customers and major on engineering supremacy. The Japanese company sold just 72,000 cars in Europe last year - down from a record 313,000 sales in the region as recently as 2007, putting it roughly level with compatriot luxury brand Lexus. Mazda and Suzuki each more than do

Lightest and fastest version of sports car so far delivers even greater driver thrills Against all odds, Lotus is still hanging in there. It feels like forever that the British brand has been teetering on the brink of oblivion, multiple owners and financial woes seemingly putting the brakes on its innumerable ‘fresh starts’. Yet this time it feels like fans of the firm (and that's most of us) genuinely have reasons to be hopeful. A company restructuring at the end of last year brought some corp

Donkervoort has fascinated enthusiasts with its Lotus Seven spin-offs – now it’s building RHD cars for UK sale If you’ve heard the 16th-century English-language idiom of ‘carrying coal to Newcastle’, apparently still used to describe any kind of pointless and fruitless act, you’re one up on me. The enticingly low, superbly outlandish-looking new Donkervoort P24 RS happens to have a 298-litre boot in which you could carry a few bags of the black stuff. It’s a bigger boot, actually, than you woul

Autocar rendering shows what the GT could look like when the wraps come off New addition to Range Rover model line will arrive as an EV, blending grand tourer style with SUV practicality JLR has unveiled the interior and name of a new fourth Range Rover model line, to be called the Range Rover GT, which will split the difference between grand tourer and luxury SUV. It will sit on JLR's own brand-new EMA platform, which has been engineered for EVs initially but will be used to underpin hybrid

The return of a true fast Vauxhall sub-brand – on an electric compact crossover With its beefy stance and punchy electric performance, the new Vauxhall Mokka GSE looks like a refreshingly old school arrival in hot hatch-loving Britain.All right, it’s more crossover than hatchback, but there are genuinely lots of ‘hot variant’ things to say about this GSE.Standing for Grand Sport Electric, this is an initialism that Opel has used before and is a mash-up of the old GSi and GTE badges previously a

Visiting his collection is like traveling through time and a must for all Citroën fans The company-owned Citroën Conservatoire in Paris has serious competition. Over the course of 40 years, French enthusiast Henri Fradet has patiently and diligently put together a spectacular collection of over 120 post-war Citroën models. They’re housed in a museum named CitroMuseum located in Castellane, a small town in southern France.  Fradet prefers low-mileage, unrestored cars and he has traveled all ove

Harrison wasn't sold on the new 849 Testarossa – until he fired up the configurator, that is I can't afford a Ferrari Testarossa, but I'll still waste hours choosing how to specify it When I was 13, my IT teacher sent a note home to my parents to tell them that I'd been caught viewing "inappropriate websites" in a lesson. They were naturally concerned - what could an innocent young teenager such as myself be looking at? The answer, to their eternal relief, was the configurator for the then ne

Automated Rapid Tape technology is helping the Woking-based brand make stiffer supercar components It might seem as though some technologies underpinning automotive engineering never evolve, but that’s not the case in reality. On the face of it, carbonfibre falls into that category. This lightweight stuff is made using fine carbon strands set in resin and is employed to create incredibly light yet massively strong components in everything from aircraft to Formula 1 cars. But, in fact, carbonfi

Well-rounded high-riding hatchback receives go-faster GT treatment The EV3 is where it starts to get serious for Kia’s performance GT subbrand. So far we have had the super-saloonish EV6 GT and the hulking EV9 GT, but these are the big-money flagships and seldom seen. GT-ifying the smaller EV3 takes Kia’s performance sub-brand into sub-£50k territory, and as the most accessible model in the snowballing GT range, this is the one that matters. So what constitutes an EV3 GT, beyond the acid-green

We get an early taste of the dual-motor EV4 GT to see if it can bring the classic hot hatch into the electric age We have had small electric hot hatchbacks such as the Alpine A290 and large ones like the Hyundai Ioniq 5 N but, as yet, not a lot in the real heartland of Volkswagen Golf GTI-sized machinery.  To be fair, the lack of traditional family-sized electric hot hatches has been due to a near total absence of donor cars. Almost all five-door, five-seat, circa 4.3m-long EVs have been homoge

Autocar recommends the future classics you should snap up before collector status sets in Predicting which cars will achieve classic status five or 10 years from now is a dark and uncertain art. What are the key factors? Scarcity, for one, and reputation for another. If a car is rare and widely reckoned to be one of the best of its type to drive, it’ll probably reach classic status. Beauty is another factor and so too is significance; a car that changed the game in its sector is bound to be h

From a frugal 1.0-litre to a mighty 3.9-litre V8, here’s a list of the overall winners of the International Engine of the Year trophy Start your engines. In 2021, Autocar picked 50 of our favourite road-going engines, including the Ford small-block V8, Lotus twin-cam and Porsche air-cooled flat-six. In truth, we could have selected twice as many, but we had to draw the line somewhere. Here, we’re looking at the best engines of the past two decades, according to the judges of the annual Interna

From a frugal 1.0-litre to a mighty 3.9-litre V8, here’s a list of the overall winners of the International Engine of the Year trophy Start your engines. In 2021, Autocar picked 50 of our favourite road-going engines, including the Ford small-block V8, Lotus twin-cam and Porsche air-cooled flat-six. In truth, we could have selected twice as many, but we had to draw the line somewhere. Here, we’re looking at the best engines of the past two decades, according to the judges of the annual Interna

The decade marking the most significant change in car design yet seen, but some undeservedly slipped our net... The ‘90s saw a sea-change in cars. Out went the straight lines and sharp edges of the ‘70s and ‘80s, in came sleeker, aerodynamic and bulbous designs. And the decade also brought in widespread use of fuel injection, which greatly boosted reliability; arguably ‘most cars became pretty good’ on that front for the first time in the decade. And some got the credit in terms of fame and s

Visiting his collection is like traveling through time and a must for all Citroën fans The company-owned Citroën Conservatoire in Paris has serious competition. Over the course of 40 years, French enthusiast Henri Fradet has patiently and diligently put together a spectacular collection of over 120 post-war Citroën models. They’re housed in a museum named CitroMuseum located in Castellane, a small town in southern France.  Fradet prefers low-mileage, unrestored cars and he has traveled all ove

Join us for a look inside Autostadt, the Volkswagen museum located next to its giant Wolfsburg factory, and one of the world's best car museums Located in the shadow of Volkswagen's Wolfsburg factory in Germany, Autostadt is essentially a theme park devoted to cars. Spread throughout the 70-acre site are pavilions devoted to each Volkswagen Group brand, along with exhibitions to learn about the history, culture and impact of cars – and with plenty of opportunities to try them out. And there’s

Autocar recommends the future classics you should snap up before collector status sets in Predicting which cars will achieve classic status five or 10 years from now is a dark and uncertain art. What are the key factors? Scarcity, for one, and reputation for another. If a car is rare and widely reckoned to be one of the best of its type to drive, it’ll probably reach classic status. Beauty is another factor and so too is significance; a car that changed the game in its sector is bound to be h