CAR UK

Alfa is used to it, but being the underdog is a strange position for Mercedes, Toyota and Audi to find themselves in. And yet that is exactly what the BMW 3-series has done to those automotive giants, for generations now. Try as they might, their attempts to beat the 3-series at its own game have rarely, and even then only fleetingly, succeeded. BMW didn’t invent the compact-ish saloon, but with the 3-series it turned that potentially nothing-ish idea into an object of desire. Just what is it that makes a 3-series a 3-series? Several CAR writers make an attempt in this issue. And several car makers have tried to emulate that elusive combination of quality, simplicity, practicality and driver appeal. The failure of Alfa, Audi, Mercedes and Lexus is worth…

The idea is to take the spirit of those old record cars and apply it to the challenges of 21st century EV development Slung low in a seat that’s more hammock than bucket – your feet up high and the car’s warm, hard-working battery beneath your knees like a snoozing dog – you’re comfortable enough. Cool air streams in from the twin NACA ducts in your Renault’s endless bonnet, the only blemishes on its otherwise continuous and pebble-smooth skin. Besides, with a view like this one, you could be in agony and it wouldn’t matter. Your universe has gone binary: blue above the horizon; a dazzling white beneath it. Bar some very distant hills – at this distance nothing more than dirty smudges along the bottom of the sky –…

The tyre destroyer Imagine trackdays in this. Loaded up with skis, suitcases, children, dogs… and powersliding around the hairpin at the Hockenheimring. Okay, fine, that’s probably not going to happen without fear of injury or vomit in the back seats, but an estate that will happily rate your drifts out of five is a rarity indeed. Like the saloon version, the M3 CS Touring has a smidge more power and, more importantly, various weight-saving measures and sharpened dynamics. Given the intel in our cover story, this may be your last chance to get a combustion M3 Touring – get your order in now. The retina burner GAH, MY EYES! MY EYES! Who knows? Maybe Kia’s new EV4 might look better in the real world, but these first official images of…

Five months into his new job, Aston Martin CEO Adrian Hallmark has the confident air of a man who’s certain his plan is going to work. ‘How do you make a company successful? You’ve got to have a plan. That plan has got to be brawny and stable. You create excitement around it, but you don’t create excitement by ripping it up every five minutes,’ he says in a meeting room at Aston’s Gaydon HQ. ‘There’s enough excitement to the products and the design, the way we activate them in the marketplace. But in here, I want it to be quiet, calm, boring and successful. That’s the mission.’ The former Bentley boss is bullish: ‘It’s an opportunity to make it, for the first time in 112 years, sustainably profitable. The…

What do the Tesla Cybertruck, the Lexus RZ family SUV and most of Ferrari’s line-up have in common? They’re all production cars using ‘by wire’ technology – an approach to engineering that replaces mechanical systems with electronics, controlling functions that can include braking, steering and acceleration. Tesla’s beastly pick-up comes with steer-by-wire, while Lexus offers it as an option in some markets on its electric-only RZ. Bosch, meanwhile, is engineering its own proprietary by-wire technologies and is testing them on the road. Fellow German supplier ThyssenKrupp, which is also investigating by-wire controls, says the tech is ‘on the verge of a breakthrough.’ Ferrari is a whole leap further forward, using brake-by-wire tech in the Purosangue, 12Cilindri, 296 and SF90. The benefits? Lower weight and better packaging possibilities because fewer physical…

He’ll bounce back. His skin seems to be pretty thick – thick enough to cope with the bad press garnered by a big chunk of his CV, including Bullet Train and Ocean’s Thirteen. But for better or worse we’re here to break the news to Brad Pitt: your new racing-themed movie, F1, will mostly just annoy and disappoint people. We’ve not seen it. It might contain some very entertaining bits. It certainly seems to have been thoroughly researched, and a huge budget has gone into it. There’s some significant talent on board with the project. The problem is not how good or bad it is compared to other movies. The problem is that it is a movie. After more than 100 years, a process of elimination has resulted in three…