LIFE IS FULL OF contrasts, and contrasts don’t get much bigger than walking away from six months of RS6 Performance custodianship and into a BMW i8. From 605hp, 4 litres, eight cylinders and two turbos to 15 litres, three cylinders, 265hp and one 96hp electric motor Drive s till goes to all f our wheel … [Read more…]
It’s going to take a while for us to get used to this new breed of AMG-lite. We’ve come to expect that cars from Affalterbach will be slightly unhinged, wild, tyre-smoking hooligans.
Winton Motor Raceway outside of Benalla in Victoria’s Ned Kelly country, is the race track that time forgot. It still hosts a round of the Supercar championship, but the most recent piece of racing memorabilia hanging in the time-warp canteen dates from 1995. Brock, Johnson, Seton, Bowe and Perkins are still the heroes of Winton.
Hardly been a year for forgone conclusions, has it? Brexit… Trump… Kimye’s wedding vows holding fast longer than 20 minutes… you’d be a brave soul to call almost any head-to-head early these days.
£ 43,835 Seth Davey was a farmer near where I grew up. His son was called Seth Davey. So was his father, and his grandson. Four living souls in the same family, all Seths. Seven generations of this car have been called BMW 5-Series, so you’ll forgive me if I use manufacturer’s code. Here’s the … [Read more…]
What it is: The next generation of the quintessential compact sports sedan. BMW has traditionally offered a four-door sedan and a station wagon, but we hope the misleadingly named “Gran Turismo” hunchback will remain without a successor.
What it is: A rebodied derivative of the BMW X1, slightly less practical and more sporty-looking. Sort of what the X4 is to the X3, the X6 is to the X5, and blonde Rihanna is to natural Rihanna. It’ll have a low-slung shooting-brake roofline, a windswept shape, and, down the road, there might even be … [Read more…]
IS IT ANY SURPRISE THAT THE BMW 1-series M Coupe is fast approaching modern-classic status? After all, it ticks every box. It was the first proper M-car to use turbocharging, it had a manual six-speed gearbox and looked so pumped that the World Anti-Doping Agency had serious questions to ask of BMW’s design office. It … [Read more…]
HERE ARE SOME CARS that you can assess in a reasonably short amount of time while other take a little longer. The latter applies to the car tested here namely because diesel-powered cars never seem to run out of fuel. Typically, local motoring journalists only have a day with a test car in this period, … [Read more…]
WITHIN FIVE MINUTES OF getting behind its wheel, the new BMW 5-series Is driving itself. This has the simultaneous effect of being impressive to the point of slack-jawed bewilderment and also crushingly depressing. Soon cars will no longer need us; people, like you and me, will be superfluous.