Tag: topgear.com

The No 8 is a biggish electric hatch with a slightly crossover outline. It comes from DS, the slightly left-field French luxury nameplate… indeed its British sales are more left-field than it wishes. Because the No 8 isn’t as tall in the roof than most crossovers, and its tail tapers into a sleek fastback, the total…

Go on, be a bit different. Everyone and their neighbour covets a BMW X1 or Audi Q3 or Mercedes GLA. DS’s answer is this: the new No7. Not an expensive parfum, but a compact SUV that replaces the old, left-field DS 7. It’s as tall and fat as before, but “follows the market trend” by…

In October 2024, I took Honda up on an invitation to visit the future. The future of Honda, of electric cars… heck, the future of the entire car world. The epicentre was naturally Japan, which to a Westerner always feels like a portal to a world 30 years more advanced than our own. Honda is…

A bit of a mess. That’s how we described the ambitious but rough and ready Project Motor Racing at launch in our review last November, and we weren’t alone. Developer Straight4Studios has had plenty of ‘community feedback’, let’s say, in the wake of a release which felt slightly undercooked. But it’s not done yet. The team’s planning…

This is the Alpine A290, the hot – or rather, warm – version of the Renault 5 supermini, and the middle child from Renault’s Alpine performance sub brand betwixt the sublime, featherweight A110 sportscar and the intriguing, jacked-up A390… thing. It’s also Alpine’s first full EV. It comes in two versions, a lower-spec GT with…

On 1 April 2025, BMW announced an ‘M2 Dakar’ and an ‘M3 Touring GT3 Evo’, the latter described as ‘garage born, track approved and ready to race’. It was, of course, an April Fools’ joke. A BMW estate with a massive wing built to go racing? Madness! Only, the joke’s on us. Because on 16…

‘Road testing’ is a curious skill. It’s the heartland of what we do at Top Gear, because we like cars, you do too, and we want to tell you about the most interesting ones – hopefully in an amusing way. Our assessments are static and dynamic too, because fitness-for-purpose means how the seats fold in…

On 1 April 2025, BMW announced an ‘M2 Dakar’ and an ‘M3 Touring GT3 Evo’, the latter described as ‘garage born, track approved and ready to race’. It was, of course, an April Fools’ joke. A BMW estate with a massive wing built to go racing? Madness! Only, the joke’s on us. Because on 16…

They are called Svan Towers. Stark stone towers built to keep warmth in and invaders out. Located high in the remote valleys of the Upper Caucasus mountain range they were meant to be the highlight, the destination of this story. But things took a turn.  In several directions. Stalin got involved, so too did modern…

This wasn’t just a single car, more like a series of experimental fantasy/tech wedges made in the late Sixties/early Seventies. The first used Wankel rotary engines and had revolutionary aero, gullwing doors and sophisticated (for the time) multi-link suspension, but they looked more like engineering prototypes than any kind of concept.   Another Seventies canopy-bodied slice…