Innehållsförteckning för May 2025 från BBC Top Gear Magazine

@jack_rix @rixjack jack.rix@bbctopgearmagazine.com In this issue we drive a £4m track only Bugatti. Be honest, did you even flinch when you read £4m? It’s a preposterous amount of money – enough to buy 13 average UK houses or, more sensibly, 667,779 copies of your favourite car magazine – but my point is we’re being desensitised to the prices of rare and exclusive cars because they’ve long since detached from reality, and appear to be calculated based on a random phone number then adding four zeros. As a snotty faced kid in the early 1990s, I used to drive past the McLaren F1 in the Park Lane dealership and roll that asking price (£600k – £1.3m adjusted for today’s prices) around my head in disbelief. Then came the Veyron that smashed…

THE RENAULT 5 TURBO 3E APPEARS TO be getting angrier, and… actually we quite like it when it’s angry. Because since it first burst onto the scene in a haze of tyre smoke and EV squeal, it’s grown from 500bhp to 536bhp. More than that, it’s able to pump out a whopping 3,540lb ft of torque, which is a) enough to give it a blistering 0–62mph time of under 3.5 seconds, but mostly b) downright terrifying. So, welcome again to the future of Renault hot hatchery. The reincarnation of its 1980s hero gets 268bhp motors hiding in each back wheel, and a 70kWh battery in the floor. It’s built around a bespoke aluminium platform developed by Alpine, developed specifically to be rear wheel drive, and swaddled in carbon fibre panels.…

IN WHEEL MOTORS ARE ON THE VERGE of real applications. That’s a terrible pun: the Verge motorcycle has one. It looks dramatic, with no central hub or axle. Verge is part of Donut Lab, a Finnish builder of motors in the shape of donuts. The idea is wonderfully simple. A normal motor’s rotor, the spinning bit, is inside, with its output shaft emerging from the centre. The stator, the coil windings that don’t turn, is fixed to the outer casing. A wheel motor flips that layout inside out. The rotor is on the outside diameter, in unit with the wheel rim and so driving it. The stator is fixed to the suspension. The large diameter means much more torque than usual, so there’s no need for the reduction gears that…

The problem with F1 cars today is, they’re so ugly. All those slats and fins and petrochemical sponsor logos: it’s not like the good old days, when every Grand Prix racer was a sleek, sinuous slice of pure (tobacco branded) beauty. Only, they weren’t, were they? Sure, the good old days did contain some very pretty F1 cars – when Epic Fail is sad, Epic Fail spends a while looking at photos of the Lotus 72, which tends to help matters – but they also contained a whole bunch of utter horror shows. Such as Ligier’s JS5, the 1976 F1 entrant that sported an airbox so bulbous it was christened ‘The Teapot’. Consider it an automotive Rorschach test: what do you see in that curvaceous funnel? Smurf hat? Squid Game…

Who is Frank? A car designer with more hits than the Beatles – including the Escort RS Cossie, first BMW Mini, Maser MC12, numerous Ferraris and the McLaren P1. These days he runs his own consultancy – Frank Stephenson Design Alfa Romeo 33 Stradale IT TAKES A LOT OF COURAGE TO GO OUT and redesign a true icon of automotive design. The original 33 Stradale is widely considered the Mona Lisa, so any attempt to reinterpret the iconic shape into a modern package is no mean feat. But my goodness, the team at Alfa’s Centro Stile have made a heck of a job of it. It’s easily one of the most stunning releases of the past few years, but still not perfect. I feel it misses the ultimate mark because…

EXOcars £16, PlayStation, VR 2 The PlayStation VR2 was worth several hundred pounds just for the opportunity to press our faces up against those detailed Gran Turismo 7 cockpits. Two years after the headset launched, though, you might reasonably expect another decent racer to arrive, and EXOcars is hoping to be it. As a budget priced game, EXOcars is as bareboned as the off-road buggies it features. There are a handful of tracks of wildly differing visual quality - 'Beacon' is a spectacular cliffside blast, while 'Forest' looks like a level ripped from the PlayStation 2 era. Fortunately the arcade handling is fundamentally satisfying, with even lift off oversteer convincingly modelled. It’s good that the primary focus is on beating ghost times and multiplayer races because the Al drivers are…

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Were we nervous when Mate Rimac took control of Bugatti back in late 2021? No, because we knew that above all else, Mate was a car guy. He may have made his name with electrical engineering, but the Tourbillon is evidence of his passion for mechanical engineering. Petrol, as well as the odd electron, courses through his veins. Take the latest Tourbillon option announcement. Équipe Pur Sang is a pack likely to cost around €240,000. It features a reprofiled front splitter, little fins on the rear wing, an altered diffuser, different wheels, carbon engine cover inlays, plus a few other little trinkets such as embroidery on the dash and headrests and an upgraded performance seat. But mainly the small matter of eight exhaust pipes. Eight exhausts. It’s such a childish…

Veyron Fbg par Hermès 2008 Four were made in collaboration with Hermés, all featuring bull calfskin interiors Veyron 16.4 Grand Sport L’Or Blanc 2011 The ‘white gold’ in the name refers to the porcelain trim bits and wacky paintjob Divo Lady Bug 2021 A paintjob so intricate, it took Bugatti two years and a whole lot of head scratching to get right La Voiture Noire 2019 A tribute to one of four Type 57 SC Atlantics lost when the Nazis seized factory in 1940. Cost £12m…

Of course it’s a Disco. It’s always a Disco. First call out of the day and I’m first on the scene. That was the plan of course, and it’s worked a treat. Now, what had Dominic told me it was likely to be? Ah, that’s right, it’s a Land Rover, therefore… almost anything: blown turbo, glitchy electrics, belts, water pump, front diff, front wheel hubs, air suspension, cracked engine block… I open up the MC20’s toolkit. It contains a towing eye. Nothing else. Hmm. Hang about, Dominic shoved a chunky battery starter pack in the Maserati’s footwell earlier, seeing as battery issues account for about 20 per cent of callouts. I connect it up. Much clicking, no life. And that’s me done, out of ideas. All I’m good for right…

£27,500 (when new) 2.0T 4cyl 204 bhp 6.4 secs 34 mpg 1,380 kg HERO Gorgeous looks, great engine ZERO Handling could be better, uninspiring dash SHALL I COMPARE THEE TO A SUMMER’S day? Probably not, because my old 16V Calibra never really liked summer days. Overheated, y’see, and warm coolant’s uniquely terrifying perfume has left a permanent mental scar. Though while it was parked up waiting to cool off, mine eye would instead be enthralled by the shape of… a Calibra Turbo 4x4. The daddy of all Calibras, it has remained a permanent fixture on my ‘must buy’ list, partly through sentiment and the circumstance of location, but mostly through shape and power. The first and second intertwined, for I was raised in Luton, worked at Vauxhall, and came of…

AUDI RS7 PERFORMANCE £116,200 OTR/£122,250 as tested/£1,490 pcm WHY IT’S HERE: Why is our new Audi RS7 Performance such a hit with the public? DRIVER: rowan horncastle IF YOU READ LAST MONTH’S MAG, you would have seen that Ollie Marriage and I tagged onto Team GB’s slalom Kitzbühel effort in an Audi A6 e-tron. Well, for that shoot we needed a support car. So I thought I’d fulfil that role, then do a bit of skiing off the back of it before heading to the wonderfully eclectic FAT ice race the following weekend in Zell am See. A 2,000 mile tour that would show what the RS7 is like as a cross continent cruise missile. So I filled the RS7 with bags, many Head skis, a SeaSucker rack and posted…

£115,435/£117,375/£1,784 WHY IT’S HERE: Is the biggest Defender the best? DRIVER: JACK RIX I FIND MYSELF IN A QUANDARY with the Defender 130, because as we all know Defenders (and off roaders in general) always look better with a bit of dirt. They just do. This plays perfectly into my inherent laziness – less car washing, cooler looking car. Which is why, and I’m slightly disgusted with myself for saying this, I’ve not washed the Defender since it arrived. I’ve hoovered and wiped down the interior several times, I’m not an animal, but a full scrub? Nope. There’s method to my bone idleness though, because washing our particular Defender 130 V8 fundamentally changes its character. Covered in dirt it blends seamlessly into country life, clean and shiny with its black on…

£79,355 OTR/£93,395 as tested/£1,274 pcm WHY IT’S HERE: Is an XXL dad wagon still a versatility king when it’s electric? DRIVER: andy franklin WELL PLAYED BMW, YOU GOT ME thinking EVs might just work! Regular readers will know I’m not the biggest EV fan in the world, but I’m surprised to say the i5 was not disappointing. It’s not perfect but shows great promise. BMW claims up to 327 miles on a full charge but in the real world it was 250–300 in the summer, in winter about 200–250 depending on the journey. The best thing was I never experienced range anxiety. If the dial says 234 miles, you’ll know you’ll do 234 miles. For me, that’s pivotal for EV running. Less good was the length – five metres! You…

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JEEP CHEROKEE (XJ) What is it? If you’re liking the look of the square bodied Land Cruiser 250, then how about the 1983–2001 Jeep Cherokee? Same look, different price. Why are we interested? Because it’s the same look and capability, but where the LC rocks in at £75k, you can pick up a decent XJ for about five. So… it’s the same but not? Same idea, except the Jeep has a unibody with a boxed in frame. So it’s more advanced. Technically. Which one should I buy? It came with either a 4.0l straight six, or a 2.5l four pot turbodiesel. Use the saved cash on petrol goodness.…

We are obsessed with luxury. We crave luxury hotels with goose down pillows. If we’re lucky perhaps we can splash out on a luxury watch. Our face wash is luxury. We can barely survive without quilted and luxurious toilet roll. Car manufacturers are similarly afficted. Many of them aren’t car manufacturers at all, they say, but ‘luxury brands’. A loose concept that nobody can really explain without descending into pretentious expressions that string together a load of alluring sounding words but don’t actually mean anything. I’ve lost count of the number of presentations I’ve sat through telling me about target customers who all wear Gucci loafers and spend their days sipping cocktails while planning their next philanthropic endeavour. Yet the sad reality is that car manufacturers are now ill equipped…

This little car has a big, big task. From 2027 the production version should reinvent Volkswagen, literally from the bottom up. To you and me it’s just a car – a smart one and, at £18,000, a cheap one. To Volkswagen it’s much more: redemption. VW’s electric story so far has very much had its ups and downs, and the downs have been painful and self-inflicted. The story arc begins when Dieselgate broke, back in 2015. VW was already planning bespoke electric cars, even if we saw no evidence until the ID concept in autumn 2016. Since the first Golf, VW – despite dark beginnings under the Nazis – always thought of itself as a force for good, a big employer making sound people’s cars, boosting the economy. The diesel…

“THE SEATING ARRANGEMENT IS 2+2+3, WITH AIRLINE STYLE CAPTAIN’S CHAIRS IN THE MIDDLE” Incarnate zeitgeist is all the rage until it isn’t, and everyone shifts the schtick to something else. It happens relatively quickly, and sometimes… not for the better. Take the MPV. The genuine multipurpose vehicle, the minivan shape, has fallen foul of fashion. The exact rules of these transitions can be hard to follow, gently dictated by car companies and buyer insecurity, but the MPV satisfies a need. Just because the shape has been usurped by the faux by four, it doesn’t mean that need has ceased to exist. People still need to move larger groups in comfort in car form. Of course you can do that in an SUV, but a boxy MPV will always win the…

Close run battle, this. And that’s not a surprise, is it? For all recorded time, comparing big German bizniz barges has been like agonising over shades of off-white in the paint aisle. The BMW 530d M Sport Almond Ivory… or the Audi A6 S line Elephant’s Breath? Sorry love, better grab a tester pot to be sure we don’t prefer Mercedes E-Class AMG Line Waiting Room Beige. But it is incredible how equal the latest evolutions of A6 and 5-Series are, because here we have the two polar opposite views the car industry is currently arguing over – how to build an EV. Option one: BMW’s one size fits all masterplan. Build a car to accept every powertrain choice going. Into this immense, awkwardly angular bodyshell, BMW stuffs petrol and…

ASTON MARTIN DB12 £185,000 OTR/£240,000 as tested/£1,849 pcm WHY IT’S HERE: Aston’s GTs are increasingly sporty: too much for the daily grind? DRIVER: rowan horncastle WELCOME TO TG GARAGE’S LATEST addition, an Aston Martin Racing Green over Oxford Tan DB12. This is the model that replaced the DB11, which was only around for seven years, but things move fast nowadays. Including this DB12, thanks to a twin turbo 4.0-litre AMG derived V8 that develops 671bhp (a 150bhp uplift!) and 590lb ft, good for a 3.6 second 0–62mph sprint before going on to 202mph. But what spec are we dealing with? A gorgeous one, that’s what. We’ve obviously got green over tan, paired with 21in multispoke forged wheels finished in Satin Black. Behind the wheels are optional carbon brakes. There are carbon…

£25,945 OTR/£26,595 as tested/£128 pcm WHY IT’S HERE: The Duster now looks funky and has gone hybrid: still a budget hero? DRIVER: CHARLIE ROSE IF THERE’S ONE THING I APPRECIATE IN A CAR, IT’S A bit of clever design. The Dacia Duster isn’t overloaded with fancy tech, but it does have a smart, practical feature called YouClip – a modular mounting system around the car designed to hold various accessories. Dacia offers a few attachments, like a phone holder and a cupholder, but I had some ideas to take it even further. This is where 3D printing comes into play. To test things out, I downloaded the plans for a drinks can holder from Thingiverse (thanks to the designer, ‘_Maxime_’) and set about printing it. Blast, it didn’t quite reach…

BMW M5 £111,405 OTR/£131,950 as tested/£1,587 pcm WHY IT’S HERE: Furiously complex, huge and heavy – is the M5 headed in the right direction? DRIVER: OLLIE marriage DID YOU TUNE IN FOR THE TWIN test? The M5 losing to the Audi RS7? Bit of an upset that. I don’t think a BMW M car has lost to an RS Audi since the B7 RS4 proved to be, well, Audi hasn’t done it better than that in the last 20 years. And BMW hasn’t done it worse? That’s what we’re going to find out. But before I go any further, introductions are in order. This is the new BMW G90 M5. It’s painted Fire Red, factually inaccurate name but a great colour (and free), and fitted with £20,625 of options which,…

£43,740 OTR/£54,050 as tested/£602 pcm WHY IT’S HERE: It’s about time BMW had a hot hatch worthy of the M badge again DRIVER: jethro bovingdon THE M135 FEELS PROPERLY QUICK WHEN YOU wring it out, but the pure performance isn’t delivered with much drama or excitement. In fact, the four cylinder engine sounds strained and tuneless. A million miles from the silken, cultured straight six in the early generations of rear drive 1-Series. It comes to define it in a round about way, too. Not because it sparkles, but because it’s highly effective but lacks polish and a real sense of urgency. The same conclusion could be applied to the car as a whole. There’s grip and response but very little adjustability and the one dimensional balance is so determined…

Nic Mann hands me a turbine blade. This, he says with a gleam in his eye, was originally part of the Rolls-Royce Olympus 593 turbojet that powered Concorde. Nic worked on that fearsome engine during his time at the aerospace giant in the 1970s, and remains transfixed by turbines. So much so that he’s used one to circumvent the lag in his hillclimb special, the Mannic Beattie. Except that ‘special’ doesn’t even get close to describing this thing. Nic is supremely modest but his creation is close in spirit and execution to an F1 car. The kicker is, he designed, engineered and built it in his Berkshire garage for about £20k. “You’ll detect a whooshing sound, that’s the turbine spinning at 90,000rpm” A beloved statesman of the hillclimb scene, Nic…

THE GOOD It’s new, but then it isn’t. Love the looks Frank Baeyens Stunning. A proper sports car Daniel Harris Well done Morgan. Great looking thing Yarbles IT LOOKS ABSOLUTELY AMAZING Peterson THE BAD Why would anyone design a rear end like that? Really disappointing Disappointed Looks like a badly rendered concept for a restomod Morgan Still nobody STILL AN AUTO. GO AWAY HANS EFDÉ It’s 30 grand too expensive Oscar Sanchez Fernandez Looks like an old Morgan with a Citroen DS boot stuck on it Khunwilko THE UGLY The styling department must have taken all of 20mins to come up with that… Jerry Myer WHAT A HORRIFIC COLOUR Alan Scott Dreadful pastiche Adam Howard It’s about as cool as Clarkson in a leopard skin jumpsuit Jerry Myer THIS IS…

Q: WHAT’S NEXT FOR GRAND THEFT AUTO ONLINE? It’s easy to forget that Grand Theft Auto is a game ostensibly about cars. That the ‘auto’ in the title is short for ‘automobile’, rather than ‘automatic weaponry’. Or perhaps ‘autopsy backlog’. Or even ‘auto-erotic hand gesture’. I’ve seen that one a few times after losing a round of Team Deathmatch in GTA Online. Back when the concept for the original Grand Theft Auto was percolating inside the massive brains of some 1990s video game developers, it had the extremely twee working title of Race’n’Chase, which suggested even greater emphasis on driving and less on unloading an entire magazine of ammunition on a group of mobsters. Grand Theft Auto these days is basically unrecognisable when compared to its humble automotive origins, telling…

The Rembrandt A GT with the W16 stuffed up front. Quite a few visual similarities to one-off La Voiture Noir. This with a V16 in the nose? Yes please The Atlantic Based on the Taycan platform, but with a petrol-electric powertrain. A modern take on the 1936 Type 57 Atlantic with a clamshell boot and butterfly doors The Veyron Barchetta This 2008 concept, based on the Veyron 16.4 Grand Sport, predated the flurry of speedsters from Ferrari (Monza), McLaren (Elva) and Aston (Speedster)…

Only one man has blasted past the magical 300mph barrier in a production car, lived to tell the tale and kept his lunch down. Andy Wallace is a titan of top speed runs, a vanquisher of vmax and one of the nicest blokes you’ll ever meet. Here’s everything he’s taught us. 1. Jump to it Suppose you could call this bit ‘expect the unexpected’ because Ehra-Lessien (the venue for the Chiron Super Sport’s 304.8mph record run) was “repaved halfway round the bit where you do vmax, and there’s a join between the new surface and the old bit”, Andy explains. “I was coming back and saying to the engineers ‘Oh, the car’s quite stable over the jump’ and they were getting quite annoyed, saying ‘What jump are you on about?…

A cosmic sea lapping against the shores of our atmosphere, that’s the why I think of the aurora boreails. I’ve seen the northern lights in full force before, and it really was a gently gobsmacking moment, waves of greens, yellows and reds blushed across the night sky in watercolour washes, wonder reflected in the backs of eyes. At the spring equinox, some 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle and 12 miles from the Russian border with Finland, camped on an ice lake as far from artificial light pollution as I could reasonably get, I thought I had a chance of a repeat performance. Nope. There’s nothing. Nada. Zilch. It’s-20ºC, I can’t be bothered to put on enough clothes to go outside and it wouldn’t matter if I did –…

£51,550/£52,030 / £478 WHY IT’S HERE: To discover if VW has actually mastered electrification DRIVER: Jason barlow VW’S TRANSITION TO electrification has been bumpy. There’s no question the ID.3 was a rush job, and it sounds like I’m damning the ID.7 with faint praise to say it’s better than any of the other IDs. But it unquestionably is. It’s also on a par with a few other cars you might not expect it to be. I’m talking about you, Mercedes-Benz EQS 450+ and Polestar 4. A slightly odd three-car comparison, but useful in working out the state of play circa early 2025. Driving both of those made me appreciate the ID.7 all the more. It’s obviously nothing like as plush as the Merc, but it’s on a par in terms of…

Welcome everyone to round 57 of Ricci’s Garage bingo, and for those first time players this might be a little different to the bingo you’re familiar with. You won’t find any Dryrobe garms here nor will you be listening to Jess Glynne on repeat for three hours. Instead, you’ll witness a man trying to justify his automotive related horrors, repeating the same mistakes in the hope the end result is slightly different. Plot twist: the end result is always the same. If you look at this month’s card you’ll see Ricci’s Garage bingo is littered with many familiar topics. Top left, we have ‘the GT-R needs another engine’ followed by ‘the M6 refresh is about to bankrupt me’. In the top right, you’ll see ‘more off road wheels purchased’ with…

£54,995 OTR/£55,540 as tested/£970 pcm WHY IT’S HERE: Because it’s quite simply the only purely electric sports car in the world (for now…) DRIVER: OLLIE KEW WELL, THIS REALLY OUGHT TO BE fascinating. The MG Cyberster is like no other car on sale. And we’ve been lent one, to daily drive, for at least half a year. There are so many threads to pull on here. The Chinese backed resurrection of a beleaguered but admired British brand, topping a range of sensible hatchbacks and crossovers with a £55k droptop. Is anyone going to take it seriously? This is MG’s first new sports car since the 1990s. It’s the only two seater EV cabrio in production today – and only the second ever, after the original Lotus based Tesla Roadster. Is…