It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
^ Back to Top
The MI6 Community is unofficial and in no way associated or linked with EON Productions, MGM, Sony Pictures, Activision or Ian Fleming Publications. Any views expressed on this website are of the individual members and do not necessarily reflect those of the Community owners. Any video or images displayed in topics on MI6 Community are embedded by users from third party sites and as such MI6 Community and its owners take no responsibility for this material.
James Bond News • James Bond Articles • James Bond Magazine
Comments
The Clarkson People's Car of the Year: Mini John Cooper Works GP
By Jeremy Clarkson (Sunday Times, Oct. 11)
Three years ago, a possibly over-refreshed chap from BMW announced at a motor show in Germany that soon the company would make a Mini with more than 300 horsepower. Yeah, right, we all thought. And what else will it have? Space lasers? Anti-gravity thrusters? Beryllium posi-drive? Our scepticism, however, was misplaced, because earlier this year it launched the Mini John Cooper Works GP, and under the bonnet is broadly the same turbocharged engine as you find in a BMW M135i. An engine that produces 302 horsepower.
Now, obviously, if you are going to put the blood-red heart of a mutant wolf into the body of a mouse, you're going to have to make all sorts of changes to ensure the whole thing doesn't just explode in a shower of cogs and rubber and headlamps.
Which is exactly what BMW hasn't done with the JCW GP. Glance casually at this ridiculous car and you'll note the huge double-decker wing on the roof, the carbon-fibre-reinforced plastic barge boards along the flanks, the flappy-paddle gears and how the rear seat has been replaced with a beam to make the body stiffer.
But look closely and you'll realise it isn't a strengthening beam. It's just a bar to stop your luggage slamming into the front seats when you brake. You'll also notice that the flappy paddles are connected to an automatic gearbox and that the barge boards don't do anything at all.
Then there's that big wing. After you've spent a while wondering why you'd want to push the back of a front-wheel-drive car into the road, you'll do more examinations and start to wonder if, actually, the downforce comes solely from the weight of the damn thing.
Having raised and lowered your eyebrows a few times at the plainly cosmetic nature of all this flimflam, you'll come to the conclusion that the standard Mini would be capable of handling the 302bhp monster that now lives under its bonnet.
It isn't. Not by a long way. Many years ago some sensible engineers from Saab explained it would not be possible to put more than 200bhp through the front wheels, and then proved themselves to be correct by launching the wayward 220bhp Viggen.
This was the car industry's all-consuming big problem back then. Many companies, Saab included, were making front-wheel-drive cars because they're cheaper to manufacture than those with rear-wheel drive. But you simply cannot expect the front wheels to handle the steering as well as increasingly large amounts of power.
They experimented with all sorts of ideas, but there's no getting round the fact that when you open the taps in a powerful front-wheel-drive car, the front wheels will squirm this way and that, causing what's known as torque steer. Sometimes it's annoying. Sometimes it's alarming. And sometimes you've no idea what it is because you've speared head first into a tree and now you're dead.
BMW got round the problem by sticking with rear-wheel drive in its powerful hatchbacks. Mercedes and Volkswagen resorted to four-wheel drive. But the Engineers at Mini did not. Apparently the four-wheel-drive system used on the Countryman is designed for gymkhana car parks, not the Nürburgring, so they stuck with front-wheel drive — and crossed their fingers.
How best do I describe the results? Hmm. I think "Sweet mother of Jesus" covers it. You pull out to overtake a van, you put your foot down and then something with the power of Thor's hammer takes control of the steering and you're left with two choices: get off the power or have a crash.
Tidal torque steer is not the only issue either. This is a car that doesn't glide down a country road, or squirt. On its lowered suspension, it bounces. Imagine being on Tigger after he's just received news of a big premium bond win and you get the idea. But bear in mind you are also in Eeyore's eddy with no control over your direction of travel.
This is a car that will usually arrive, but not necessarily at a place where you wanted to go.
Around town there are problems too. Things are very jerky in stop-start traffic. And on the motorway, mainly because of the tyres, it is very loud. Plus, you have to pay attention constantly because all Minis have a natural cruising speed measurable with Mach numbers. You have to be especially careful in the JCW GP because it has a top speed of 164mph. That's 164mph. In a Mini.
So. It's far too powerful, far too loud, more blinged up with unnecessary nonsense than Lewis Hamilton's earlobes, annoying in traffic, a crazed dog on the motorway and less fun than a crashing airliner when you accelerate on a road with any sort of camber at all. It is also one of the best cars I've driven all year.
We are currently in what might fairly be termed the car industry's beige period. Cars are made to be ecological and safe and spacious and cheap to repair. They creep onto the market with an apology rather than a fanfare. There's no pizzazz or razzmatazz in almost any of them. And then, just when we thought it was all over, out of nowhere comes this crazy Mini.
It's as if I've been sitting in a dentist's waiting room for ten years and, all of sudden — blam — I'm at the carnival in Rio. There is colour all around me and noise, and instead of thumbing through a two-year-old copy of Country Life to the accompaniment of the tick and the tock of the dentist's old clock, I'm listening to the sounds of the samba on a float as bright as a child's imagination.
I learnt, after a while, to wait for the right bit of tarmac before mashing the throttle into the firewall, and then I'd laugh out loud, in a way I haven't for years, at the noises and the rush that resulted. I then learnt to deal with the low-speed problems by not driving slowly. This is not a serious car. The steering is not particularly crisp, and the gearbox is not that snappy. It's not designed to be a textbook lesson in how to tame physics. It's designed to make your journey a bit happier. It's not a book. It's a comic.
It is fast, though. Really fast. I also liked sitting in it. I love how, in a Mini, the windscreen is so far away and you sit so low down that you're almost peering over the dash and the bonnet. Most of all, though, I liked the certain knowledge that, among all the millions of types of Mini we've seen over the ages, I wasn't going to encounter one faster than mine.
And I've saved the best bit till last. When other firms launch a limited-run car such as this, they tend to go a bit berserk with the price tag. But this Mini is less than £35,500. That is extremely good value, principally because most of the time it's much, much more fun than cars costing 10 times the price.
If there's a bump in the road, you'll find it
The Clarkson Review: Aston Martin DBX
By Jeremy Clarkson (Sunday Times, Oct. 18)
The Aston Martin DBX is an all-new car that will compete in a sector of the market where the company has never been before. And to make that strategy even riskier, this SUV is being built in a brand new, untested factory and being launched into showrooms that have seen significantly fewer customers since the start of the coronavirus pandemic.
Other small motoring manufacturers around the world--Lamborghini, Bentley, Ferrari and so on--are owned by big car companies, so they have access to all the latest technology and are cushioned to a certain extent from any virus-related problems. Whereas Aston Martin's owners include a man who made his fortune by selling trousers.
He and a consortium of other businessmen have invested £500m in Aston, which sounds a lot, but that's roughly what Renault would spend on a new heater knob. And the money arrived, as did the new boss--poached from Mercedes-AMG--when the DBX was pretty much finished.
It was therefore designed on a shoestring by a company whose share price was wearing margarine trousers on a slide into oblivion. Plans to make the DBX all-electric were shelved early on, and the proposed fitting of a new V6 hybrid postponed, so it has ended up with a 4-litre Mercedes engine and lots of Mercedes kit that was bang up to date--about 10 years ago.
After such a difficult birth, I was not expecting it to be any good, but if I say that here you will be very angry with me, because not liking an Aston Martin in this country is illegal. It's like saying you don't like the Queen. You just do. You were born that way.
So. Here goes. The first thing that surprised me about the DBX is its size. It's like Richard Osman, who you see sitting behind his desk on Pointless in the evening. You assume that because he's a man, he must be man-sized, but he isn't. He's taller than a telegraph pole. I had the DBX for five days, and in all that time I assumed it was the same length as a Porsche Macan. But in reality it's almost 2in longer than a Range Rover.
It's much lower, though, and perhaps that's what makes it so handsome. Well, that and the pillarless doors and the huge 22in wheels. And the optional bonnet blades. And, best of all, the colour. It was very definitely black. But when the sun came out, it was a dark green. It was wonderful.
I was also taken by the seemingly endless ways of tailoring your new DBX. You can choose what colour badge you'd like and what sort of stitching you have on the seats. There's even a Pet Pack, which gives you a rear bumper protector and a partition. And a Snow Pack.
You can also have a safe under the front passenger seat and a gun cabinet in the boot. So one thing is for sure: while the price of the DBX is £158,000, by the time you've spent a week or two on the configurator it's going to be way more than that.
High prices have been a problem for Aston in recent years, because the interiors of its cars never really felt special enough. That certainly isn't the case with this SUV. It's very good, chiefly because the manufacturer has ditched a recent move towards the square steering wheel and reverted to something circular. Some may criticise the ageing Mercedes infotainment system but, actually, it's from a time before all these systems got far too clever for their own good. It works well.
What doesn't work so well is the way you use buttons to select the gears. If my memory serves, we first saw these on a Ford Fiesta concept car back in the early 1990s, and I remember thinking at the time: "Wow. These don't work at all." They still don't--they're too far away.
What also doesn't work very well is the way the leather has been stitched so the seams are visible. As one reviewer said, it looks like botched plastic surgery, and it does, but there's another problem too. One of these seams, on the centre console, digs into your arm as you drive along and is very annoying.
But it's not as annoying as the bumpiness of the ride. When I read that the DBX was fitted with 48-volt active anti-roll bars, I assumed it would glide along like a hovercraft. But it doesn't. Partly because of the big wheels, I suspect, it crashes hard into potholes, which makes it a bloody nightmare in London, and on the motorway it literally wobbles. If you try to sing in this thing to pass the time, you will get a very clear understanding of what's meant by vibrato.
I cannot understand how this has happened. Aston must know that the people who will buy this car are likely to be in their fifties and sixties, and that people in this age group are long past the time when sleeping on the floor is an acceptable end to the evening, no matter how good the party was.
Sure, the DBX is a fast and rewarding car when you are in the upper echelons of the rev range and the differentials are busy whizzing power to whichever wheel is best able to handle it. But nobody who wants an SUV wants to drive like this. They'd gladly put up with a bit more lean and a bit more understeer if it meant they could relax on the way home from work, rather than getting an idea of what it might be like to drive on a road made from corrugated iron.
Off road? I don't know, to be honest, and you never will either, because although it has all the right tech to deal with the rough stuff, it sits on fat, fast, low-profile tyres, so the instant you show it a field of wet grass you'll know you're going home on foot.
This is all very worrying because I'm heading to the point when I have to tell a nation of Aston fans that the new car is not much good.
However, I genuinely have a problem with most of the boutiquey SUVs that have come along in recent years. The Bentley Bentayga is a lot better-looking after its recent facelift, but it's still no beauty. The Rolls-Royce Cullinan is wilfully awful to behold. The Lamborghini Urus doesn't quite have the courage of its convictions. The Maserati Levante is pointless. The Jaguar F-Pace is good, but in a different, lower league, and the Alfa Romeo Stelvio serves as a constant reminder you should have bought the Giulia Quadrifoglio instead.
So, when you look at the competition, the DBX starts to make sense. And it continues to make sense right up to the moment you remember the car that started this particular ball rolling 50 years ago: the Range Rover. The first is still by far the best.
"and the Alfa Romeo Stelvio serves as a constant reminder you should have bought the Giulia Quadrifoglio instead."
says it all!
A gunbarrel, now that's cool B-)
https://www.motoring.com.au/ssc-tuatara-breaks-world-speed-record-126891/
A supercar-rivalling 0-60mph (97km/h) time of just 3.0 seconds is claimed, and the Hummer EV will reportedly have a driving range of more than 560km from its 200kWh battery.
That's one fast hummer.........
Not really, it gives space to the roof panels in, and no doubt the bottom is used to store more battaries. tbh I do like this concept. Hummer went from 1800's technology to the 21st century in one generation. Well done. Now I just hope it all works...
The crabwalk function is odd too: the example they show it in it could just steer normally through the gap. I suspect the actual intended function is for people to be able to parallel park it! :D
I think so, and that would be useful with a tank like that, most spaces won't give you room to manouvre, but it wouldn't look cool on the video. I'm not quite sure it's a very useful ute, but hey, I give them credit for trying. And Americans are not known for making practical cars. That's more for the Japanese and Koreans.
It's a typical hummer, big and brash....... :))
I used to like lexuses...
Try deepl.com for translation. At any rate, seems like a logical move since AML have been using AMG engines for some time.
https://www.spiegel.de/auto/fahrkultur/alfa-romeo-b-a-t-werden-versteigert-italiens-batmobil-a-c2393c26-d621-4877-ab8a-7214601b5af7
Ignore the language and just look at the pictures. Crazy!
I drove a Lexus a few years ago and was impressed with the amount of detail and quality of the build of the cars back when they used to look good.
Now the styling is not to my taste and also they are over valued.
AML have been in trouble for years and need better management.
The BAT were crazy designs alright.
AML had very good management when they introduced the DB9 etc. I think there were about 10 years they actually made a profit. Currently though they're doing way too many things to do one of them good.
Now now, I'm not a freak. Stylish drivers, yes. Even Bond admired the Alfa's, and these BAT's only go to show that's justified. The're stunning. Wouldn't want to park one of them in a regular carpark though.....
It looks very similar to the db10, doesn't it ?
It's almost as if they copied it ?
I would say that side-by-side the Roma's front wings look a bit high and make the wheels look smaller, and the DB avoids that problem. But it's nice that Ferrari remembered that cars can look elegant and pretty rather than just aggressive and muscular, which is what everyone else seems to be doing.
I do think Aston should have made the DB10 rather than some of their current cars.
Which one do you prefer ?
Personally I can't decide. They are both great looking cars.
Funny you should say that...my first impression when comparing the two was that the Ferrari looks slightly better because of its friendly smile.