Innehållsförteckning för Awards 2019 från BBC Top Gear Magazine

Editor-in-chief @TopGearEditor editor@bbctopgearmagazine.com Welcome to the TopGear Awards 2019, a celebration of the very best cars of the year. At TG we always like to do things differently, so unlike most other automotive awards we don’t have set categories that get repeated every year. We award cars on their merits, not because we need to find a winner of the Compact Hybrid SUV Coupe by a Korean Manufacturer of the Year. In short, only the best of the best ever collect a TG Cog. Sitting down to discuss a long list that – after a few frank exchanges of views – will be distilled to the pure essence of brilliance in this mag, makes for a particularly good audit of the past 12 months. And what a year it’s been:…

The Toyota E-Racer is a horse of the future, at least according to Toyota boss Akio Toyoda at this year’s Tokyo motor show. Why horses? Because when cars replaced horses as a form of mass transit, racehorses were still used because people… just really liked riding racehorses. The point Toyota is trying to stress is that in our shiny new future where cars become white goods, there’s still room for a little fun. A car that thinks along with you – like, let’s say for argument’s sake, a horse. So like we said, a semi-autonomous e-horse. A horse-e, in fact. File this under ‘nice idea, needs more work’.…

Tesla boss Elon Musk has claimed that, by the end of 2020, software updates will allow Model 3s to function as fully self-driving taxis. The autonomous e-cabs, said Musk, could earn up to 30 thousand dollars (around £20,000) every year by ferrying fares as their owners sleep, or work, or do any of the other things car owners do for the 90 per cent of the day they’re not driving. The end of 2020! That’s next year! Or, if you’re a slow reader, that’s this year! Or, if you’re reading this magazine in a dentist’s waiting room, that’s six years ago! Now, Musk’s claim should be taken with a large pinch of salt, and possibly a double shot of tequila for good measure. Most commentators agree Elon may have been…

£30,490 SMALL, ‘PREMIUM’, VAGUELY SUV-SHAPED things are very popular. EVs are very popular. The DS 3 Crossback E-Tense is both of these things, so logic dictates it ought to be, well… very popular. It’s the first of PSA’s little EVs to go on sale in the UK, some months before the Peugeot e-208 and Vauxhall Corsa-e. Same platform – but as the DS 3 is a bit bigger, it has 11 miles less range. That’s 200 miles from a 50kWh battery. Not bad, but a bit short of the much cheaper Renault Zoe. First problem is the ride. A DS should be soft and pillowy, but the E-Tense is brittle at low speeds and a bit messy at higher ones. Next come the brakes. They stop the car just fine,…

In the past 12 months Renault has delivered a record-breaking £72k hot hatch with six-point harnesses, carbon-fibre wheels and ceramic brakes; an even better version of the beautifully light, delicate Alpine A110 that’s arguably more desirable than the equivalent Porsche; and a sub-£20k EV that claims well over 200 miles of range. That’s three stand-out cars in less than a year – all wildly different from one another, and yet all undoubtedly the very best of their ilk. It’s the variety that’s key to Renault’s ascension to TG award-winning excellence. Its mainstream cars are fine, but give it a brief to nail, a set of very specific parameters to fulfil, and it chases perfection quite unlike any other car manufacturer. Whether that brief is for the world’s most hardcore hot…

Supercars are essentially hopeless. Exquisite pieces of cutting-edge engineering so hampered by their value and impracticality that most end up buried in a car collection and are rarely let into the wild for anything more than an Instagram-fuelling, slow-speed show-off. The Sterrato is the antithesis to that static supercar culture, a car designed to be used, and used hard. Developed as a skunkworks project that shows Lamborghini still knows how to have fun, the recipe is relatively simple. Take one AWD V10 Huracán, raise the ride height, add some cladding, beef up the air filters, fiddle with the ECUs to add a bit of rally DNA into its thinking, talk to Pirelli to get some special ‘balloon’ tyres and what you have is an RC car made real. A childhood…

Divorce yourself from the hype machine all you want, abdicate interest in Land Rover’s protracted drip feed of bit-by-bit teasing completely, but, let’s face it, we all want to have a go in the New Defender. Because that’s when we’ll actually get some answers, form solid views, get some meat on the internet opinion bone. We’ve now seen the car in various formats, pored over the technical details, asked endless rhetorical questions about whether this is a ‘real’ Defender, but without actually getting behind the wheel, it’s just so much hyperbole. Looking at the specs, this will be a car that can outperform 99 per cent of potential owners’ egos off-road – LR just wouldn’t launch a car that couldn’t – but what is of more interest is how it…

HELLO £18,499 OTR/£20,797 as tested/£252pcm WHY IT’S HERE Can it possibly be as charming to live with as it is to look at? DRIVER Stephen Dobie YOU’VE NEVER SEEN A MELEE LIKE IT. EVERY DAY, AT 5:27PM ON THE dot, there’s a scrap to see who takes the Jimny home. It’s unprecedented demand in an office that frequently has a Porsche, Aston or Tesla in its car park. And all for a car whose mph figure can’t scrape into three figures. But there’s a mystique surrounding the wee Suzuki that’s seen it accrue an 18-month waiting list, with price premiums greeting anyone wanting to skip the line via the used market. It’s been snapped up by speculators like it’s a 458 Speciale. Bonkers. While the Jimny starts at £15,999, with…

Jack Rix: Ah, the Zenos E10. Memories, memories… so few of them fond. Here’s a tip, if you find yourself without a long term test car and your first child arriving in a few month times, do not, even in jest, suggest that this might be your last opportunity to drive ‘something sporty’. Walked into that one. Don’t get me wrong, there was a frisson of excitement before it arrived, that I’d be driving around in a Focus RS-engined lightweight, that I’d be able to swallow the compromise for those Sunday afternoons when I really cut loose. Alas, living with the Zenos was too much of a pain in the arse, and the dynamics not sparkling enough to justify it. I’ll forever remember wrestling with the temporary roof as the heaven’s…

REPORT 4 £24,595/£25,385/£237pcm WHY IT’S HERE Is there life beyond the VW Golf? DRIVER Tom Harrison WHAT’S THE POINT OF TYRE pressure sensors if every time the ambient temperature dips below 10ºC (it’s November – that’s EVERY day), they insist that one or more of your tyres is punctured? Yep – much in the same way it thought it was averaging 31mpg, the Mazda thinks I’m driving around on several flats. I’ve spent all of this month searching out the reset button, only to discover there isn’t one. On my travels around the infotainment system, though, I did discover something rather interesting buried deep in a settings menu: the option to turn off the bong if you depress the brake and accelerator pedals at the same time. Most ordinary cars…

Ollie Marriage: Tell me, how much did it bother you? Ollie Kew: You’re talking about the tyre pressure warning, aren’t you? OM: Of course I am. You can’t have missed the little yellow light or the warning squeak? OK: But then I checked and the on-board monitor said pressure was only 1psi down. OM: Precisely! Maddening, isn’t it? 1psi is nothing – surely within tolerance for any forecourt air hose – but the Conti just won’t let you forget. The other day it insisted it had a puncture before I’d even left the pump. OK: But in the grand scheme of things… OM: A niggle. I know that. But everything else in Bentley-shire is seamless, so this bugs me. OK: Seamless? What about the seam where door meets dash? They…

REPORT 3 £58,335/£74,755/£613 WHY IT’S HERE Is this the thinking family’s Bentley Bentayga? DRIVER Adam Waddell THE LAST TIME I SPENT A DECENT amount of time in a Touareg was when I ran a second-gen model for six months in 2012. I liked it, but secretly hankered after a Range Rover Sport. Since then, thanks to the demise of the Phaeton, the Touareg has acquired the position of flagship for the world’s largest carmaker, so it carries a certain weight of expectation. The current third-gen model is super-comfortable, laden with gadgets and tech, and has a far more premium feel than the previous model. Prices start at £49,645, but ours came in at a whopping £74,755. However, compared to its stablemates the Bentley Bentayga and Lamborghini Urus, it’s the deal…

Charlie Turner “Driving an RS has been a dream since childhood – to get to do so on the Palms to Pines Highway with the Taycan in the mirrors was bucket-list stuff” Rowan Horncastle “Mammoth Mountain is a long way from LA. It’s even further from Mexico. Which is the drive I had to do to make it work. Totally worth it, though” Jonny Fleetwood “You may only get one take at this… don’t mess it up. Right. Has anyone else ever tried a panning shot of a car travelling at 400+mph?”…

Putting on some pre-Christmas timber A secret feeder at TGHQ has appeared, determined to fatten us up. We hate this. We love this. We ate this. Cars: Accelerating the Modern World This exhibition at the V&A has ‘Team Day Out’ written all over it. Reckon we could learn a thing or 10 from this one. Starts 23 November. NB joke – we know it all. Winter Wonderland: Hyde Park It’s cold. Let’s go to the middle of a park and queue for hours! Bah humbug. Actually, it’s great fun, worth the cold:) California playlist In tribute to folks heading to the LA Autoshow, office listening included Bran Van 3000, Warren G and The Beach Boys. Ken Block’s Climbkhana TWO A nail-biting 7mins of epicness from our Ken, to reach the…

Industry & Supply prints You know that weird painting of cats or flowers that was hanging on the wall when you moved in and is still there years later because you’ve become inexplicably attached to it? Yeah, everyone’s got one, but now it’s time to buck up and move on, people. Enter 2020 with some proper wall art by grabbing one of these automotive prints from the extremely cool Industry & Supply store. This isn’t nearly the full selection. In addition to the ones you can see here, there’s also much other classic metal, even Spitfires. It’s like the designers reached into our minds, had a rummage around and then transformed all of our childhood obsessions into pop-art style eye-candy. Lovely stuff. industryandsupply.com; from £24.99 ON THE RECORD “I remember…

UNBELIEVABLE TEKKERS FORMULA ONE’S RADICAL NEW REGS FOR 2021 SHOULD I CARE? If you’ve snoozed on the sofa most Sundays watching a procession of F1 cars unable to overtake one another, you will. SHOULD I BE SCARED? Nah, the intentions are honourable: to create closer racing, better-looking cars and more balanced spending between teams. Currently, a car loses up to 50 per cent downforce when running a length behind a rival. With the rendered car you see above and new regs, that would reduce to 15 per cent. SHOULD I TELL MY FRIENDS? Yep, mainly because it looks the business. We were worried about 18in wheels and low-profile tyres, but matched with that flowing bodywork and the less flimsy wings, they add serious drama. SHOULD I SPEND MY MONEY? Yes,…

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Cars are an environmental catastrophe, and it’s perfectly justified that governments act to quell their impact, especially (but not solely) for their effects on the climate emergency. But making cars sustainable will in no way secure the future of our home planet. Not on its own. Other industries have huge impacts and seem to be getting away with it. It’s our job as citizens to hold those industries to account, by voting for regulation and if necessary by withdrawing our custom. In short, buy less stuff that does bad things. We’re endlessly reminded, and rightly, about single-use plastic and fast fashion. Other offenders are more hidden. IT is one. Data, and its transmission and the server farms in which it resides, has a colossal impact. Add up the global total,…

£56,810 FOR An already joyous car gets another layer of focus and a keener engine AGAINST A regular (and £10k cheaper) A110 will do just as good a job on the road The Alpine A110 snared so many awards last year because it was different. The slower, softer performance car we’d all secretly been crying out for, one that was slinky enough to thread down the smallest of lanes and modestly powered enough that you could rev out several of its gears without throwing your morals out of the window. There’s potential for this new A110S to completely scupper the wondrous balance it struck. It’s unscuppered visually, at least: there’s no wing suddenly glued to the back and the alloys haven’t swelled to teeth-shattering size. The A110’s subtly retro vibe…

Speed, a binary metric easily derided as irrelevant, is currency for some. Having the fastest production car has been driving the hypercar market forever. But being the first to break 300mph – that’s different. That only happens once; people like and remember round numbers. On 2 August, after exiting the Ehra-Lessien banking at 160mph and keeping the throttle pinned for 57secs, Andy Wallace and Bugatti broke that barrier, hitting 304.77mph. But the number fails spectacularly to adequately articulate the achievement. Some figures: at 300mph you’re travelling one mile every 12 seconds and a football pitch every 0.68secs, the Chiron was gulping 15 litres of fuel and 60,000 litres of air a minute. As a warm-up act, I popped over to Ehra-Lessien to vmax the ‘cooking’ version of the Chiron, and…

FERDINAND PIËCH (1937–2019) HIS LIFE WAS ALSO THE STORY OF THE car industry itself. As the grandson of Ferdinand Porsche, he was automotive royalty. Still only 31, he commanded the development of the Porsche 917 in a manner that set the template for what would follow: an extraordinary vision, executed with ruthless commitment, with astonishing results. At Audi, he oversaw the quattro. Then to VW, in 1993, when the company was in a parlous state; you can thank Piëch for the platform-sharing strategy that transformed its fortunes. His personal passion project, the Bugatti Veyron, gave the automotive world its Concorde moment. His near despotic management style sowed the seeds for VW’s darkest hour – the Dieselgate scandal was surely the product of a culture wherein failure was not an option…

If 2019 taught us anything, it’s that the rise of the EV has created a car market that has never been more vibrant, diverse or creative. The fact that the challenge of shifting four people around our planet can deliver such diametrically opposed creations as the Tesla Model 3 and the Ford GT500, makes Planet Car a truly captivating place to be. To be clear from the outset, this isn’t a twin test – it’s a celebration of two award-winning cars. Lazy automotive stereotypes dictate if you like one of them, you can’t possibly admire the other, so, on behalf of the whole TopGear team, I’d like to call bullshit on that feudal mentality right now. You can drive a Tesla and love muscle cars; you can have a garage…

It takes all of about three minutes driving a Taycan to realise that Porsche has permanently altered what people who love conventional cars will think of electric cars. The distinction is important, because anyone who thinks the Taycan completely rewrites the book on voltage-based driving will be disappointed. To people who don’t care about cars and driving, a Tesla Model 3 does pretty much everything the Porsche will do, for a fraction of the price. But, for those who do care, the Taycan will be mind-bending in the way it trashes what we thought was possible. The Turbo S model is uncomfortably accelerative on UK roads, its suspension is far more comfortable than any Porsche I’ve driven before and yet, despite its vast kerbweight, it feels no less agile than…

On steel-rimmed horse-drawn carriages and steam-powered cars. Killed by the rubber tyre Renault is widely credited for this, though Maybach and Daimler use crude examples first Malcolm Loughead patents a hydraulic system which uses fluid to transfer pressure to the brakes Disc brakes were first patented in 1902, but it’s 50 years until an effective system wins the big one The W116 S-Class is the first production car to have an electronic four-wheel, antilock braking system Porsche is the first manufacturer to offer carbon-ceramics as an option on a production car – the 911 GT2…

Price now £4,995 Harris says A retro car before retro was the thing, this Mini Cooper S was a proper ball of fun, s’charger whine and all. Plenty sit below £2k. Spend a bit more and you’ll get the 210bhp Works upgrade. Price now £8,995 Harris says From a time when Jaguar sports saloons weren’t two-seat track specials. But much like the Project 8, however, this XJR uses a s’charged V8. So much smoother and classier than modern turbos. Price now £12,495 Harris says Disdain for tyres? Don’t want German badges or turbos? You need a big, loud Aussie coupe. This one’s advertised as “low road tax pre-2006 model”. Hah. Your annual bills won’t be small.…

REPORT 3 £159,900 OTR/£200,345 as tested/£3,000pcm WHY IT’S HERE Is living with lux all it’s cracked up to be? DRIVER Ollie Marriage I KNOW WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE ALREADY, OF COURSE. I’D PORED OVER the spec for hours when choosing it, followed it through the factory from bare pistons to final sign-off, seen parts that’ll never ever see daylight again. I literally know it inside out. Yet I’m nervous. It’s the colour, you see. Verdant Green. I still worry about it: too dark, too trad? I’m not a trad person, yet a green-over-red Conti GT is basically reincarnating the Speed Sixes of the Bentley Boys 90 years on. So I arrive at Bentley Berkshire in Pangbourne conflicted. A Conti GT-shaped shroud occupies pride of place in the showroom. Sales manager…

REPORT 4 £69,995/£78,490/£785pcm WHY IT’S HERE Can this new breed of Jaguar tackle the dominance of Tesla? DRIVER Charlie Turner WHILE DARK MORNINGS AND DAMP leaf-strewn roads are for most people mildly depressing, the I-Pace and I are bonding over its slippery road performance. The combination of the incredibly low centre of gravity (thanks to the battery pack skateboard layout), AWD and thousands of man hours making sure the I-Pace has Jaguar driving DNA oozing from its pores, makes for a car that is genuinely addictive to drive in dank, slippery autumn conditions. While there is a significant mass to deal with, few things could keep pace with the instant power delivery of the I-Pace and the AWD that catapults it out of corners. It’s a hugely rapid and enjoyable…

Paul Horrell You can switch the Aircross’s instrument screen to show 3D navigation. Or a big graphic of the road lanes and the car ahead, to reassure you the driver assist is working properly. But when you don’t want those, it’s hopeless. Opt for the rev-counter and it’s just a tiny white-on-grey bar, surrounded by blank space. Why not bigger and round? Y’know, legible? The ‘media’ option can’t show your CarPlay song. And switching modes – say you call up the nav as a tricky junction approaches – brings up agonisingly slow abstract transition animations. Pretty the first time, irritating for ever after.…

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“I COULD AFFORD THE TOYS, NO MATTER HOW OUTRAGEOUS” My area of Austria was occupied by the British after WWII. They drove by our farmhouse in tanks and big army trucks, so that’s how I grew up. The soldiers would invite us into the trucks and they’d give us candies – it was very sweet. Maybe that stayed with me, and that’s why when I was 18 I wanted to become a tank driver. But, of course, I was too tall. My first car was an old Opel Kadett which I bought when living in Munich. It had huge rust holes in it, but it only cost me like 1,300 Deutschmarks. It was junk! It didn’t take long for the seat to collapse – I had to grab myself up…

EVs are still a tiny part of new-car sales – about one in 50. Their owners have an early-adopter mindset. Who are the next lot of EV buyers? A big new survey of 1,000-odd car buyers gives some clues. “Who do you think is best positioned to make electric cars?” Unsurprisingly, 29 per cent said Tesla. Another 25 per cent said low-to-mid-range car companies, likely because they are willing to pay only the price of an existing car. High-end and luxury conventional-car companies (Audi, Jag and Porsche were examples) scored 19 per cent. On the other hand 12 per cent said big tech companies – Apple, Amazon. Another eight per cent said electricity suppliers. Yup, a total of 20 per cent, or one-fifth, of all the survey respondents thought the…

Time to clarify some thoughts on the subject of the SUV. The vehicle that will probably hasten the demise of the internal combustion engine. From 2010 to 2018, the global market share of SUVs has risen from 17 to 39 per cent. According to the International Energy Agency, this means that the SUV is the second biggest contributor to global CO2 increases after power generation – a statistic that should leave anyone who supports these machines with the phrase ‘I like the fact you sit a bit higher’ feeling pretty sheepish. I am not a prudish environmentalist, and most green folk will deride me for the cars that I drive and the way that I earn a living, but, for me, the SUV is both unjustifiable and a public relations…

RENAULT ZOE City car of the year Internal combustion engines make no sense in big cities, so a half-decent city car probably shouldn’t have one. Nor should it be too big, too firm or too expensive. It should be easy to see out of, easy to operate and live with. It should, therefore, be the Renault Zoe. TG’s City Car of the Year. Little EVs like the Zoe are about to become a big thing – with the imminent arrival of the Peugeot e-208, Mini Electric, Honda e and so on. In the face of stiff new competition, Renault could have gone back to the drawing board and tried to rewrite the formula. But it didn’t – instead of an all-new Zoe, it’s simply revised the existing one. Chamfered the…

Aston Martin grabbed headlines by unveiling multiple concept cars at Geneva in March, and pledging in June to take the Valkyrie for the win at Le Mans in 2021. Aston’s vaulting audacity also takes in plans for the Valhalla hypercar, the Vanquish mid-engined supercar, the Lagonda electric EV, plus the still-growing line-up of front-engined cars and the DBX. We do love ambition. But beneath it all is a continuing slide in profits and investor confidence, and sky-high debt cost. The Valhalla isn’t being snapped up as eagerly as required, nor’s the Vantage. The DBX doesn’t start buttering bread till spring; at the moment, the company stays in the black largely through its hyper-priced historical replicas. Still, as I write, people are going to work at the new factory in Wales.…

There are lines in the desert. “Tell me what you see,” says Andy Green. I see a tall triangle, wheel tracks converging on the horizon, as pure a vanishing point as it’s possible to see. I know this isn’t what Andy is referring to because his brain doesn’t work like that. “You see how the two lines on the right are closer together than those on the left? What does that tell you?” Realisation dawns slowly. The wider rear wheels are out of line with the fronts. “Bloody hell, Bloodhound is oversteering,” I reply. “Well, carrying about two degrees of yaw” is Andy’s comeback, because that’s how his brain works. Never let anyone tell you that land-speed records are a doddle. That you just point the damn thing straight and nail…

Heel and toe. Ring any bells? Don’t worry if it doesn’t, because the Ford Focus ST isn’t very well set up for it. It’s just me, being old, that cares the brake and throttle are too far apart. And why do I care when thumbing the S-for-Sport button on the steering wheel means the car blips the downshifts better than I ever could? Maybe I’m just upset about that. But no, I’ll tell you what the real issue is: I’ve got nothing else to be upset about. The Ford Focus ST has no vices. No weaknesses. No chinks in its armour. The 2.3-litre four-cylinder engine is strong and tuneful, the manual gearbox’s shift is swift, slick and sweet, it brakes hard, grips well, has a brilliantly integrated diff and well…

PLUS Harris’s s’charged bargains Secondhand car dealers around the world use all kind of zany bait to try to lure potential buyers in. In the US, those giant inflatable men having a disco seizure are common. Over here in the UK, we tend to park an old Freelander haphazardly on some rockery. But, as we found out recently, in Japan they go the extra mile – using a rotting (and completely genuine) late Nineties Toyota Supra GT500 JGTC racecar as a marketing magnet. First things first. We’re not going to tell you where it is. Apart from that it’s in an inconspicuous pocket of rural Japan. Not because we’re selfish, but because we want to protect the shop where it resides from being harassed by an army of attention-seeking selfieists…

REPORT 6 £28,330/£29,400/£290 WHY IT’S HERE Do crossovers work best when they’re determinedly anti-sporty? DRIVER Paul Horrell WHEN I WERE A LAD AND LIVED on a farm, my folks liked white cars. Because they didn’t show the dirt. No, really. The light-brown of dried-on mud actually does disappear better onto a white background than a dark paint. I haven’t been cleaning the C5 very often. The white is good at disguising the general dusty murk that falls out of London skies, as well as the grey stuff swirling up from a wet motorway. The black roof less so. Black wheels are OK – they simply lose their gloss, but stay roughly the same colour, as tyre and brake dust migrates to their surface. Strangest bit are the dimples near the…

REPORT 2 VW T-ROC Interesting thing about little VW 1.5-litre four-pots with loads of techno-trickery and cylinder deactivation: if you drive them like a sedated great-grandmother, you can manage upwards of 50mpg (a best of 54.8 so far). An uninteresting thing about the same engine is that it has very little character. Effect, yes. Idiosyncratic charm… not so much. Practicality over personality here. REPORT 4 SEAT LEON CUPRA ABT Tough month for the Cupra. First a mystery flat battery, resulting in me locked in my own car having to escape through the boot via the kidnap catch. Then, Simon Bond borrowed it and had a fight with a pothole. Pothole won. Pump and goo didn’t work so full recovery, two new rear wheels and tyres later (at Seat’s insistence –…