Top Gear South Africa

“The best way to predict the future is to invent it”. Alan Kay. At TopGear we’ve tried our level best for the year ahead but in retrospect some of 2019’s Most Wanted cars pursue an interest to reinvent. Take the Toyota Supra, a stalwart among the gia

Innovation throughout Porsche’s 911 history doesn’t always receive the credit owed but in the seven generations leading up to this Porsche 992 the narrative is peppered with all sorts of brilliant, albeit sometimes nuanced, triumphs. Rewind to the

Got your heart set on the facelifted 2019 Audi R8, have you? Hold fire. Its Italian cousin has also visited the Angular Bodywork Ltd. Factory, and the Huracan Evo has emerged approximately twenty-three per cent more angry-looking than before. Check o

Another motor show, another Audi Ae-tron. Audi’s been churning them out recently – not just the e-tron SUV and e-tron Sportback, but the PB18 e-tron supercar and the self-driving Aicon. The message from the carmaker is clear – it’s going hard on elec

Summer. Perfect time to unwrap a V8-engined turbo supercar. This is McLaren’s newest: the 720S Spider, and it is a 325kph convertible with a  folding hard top. It follows the 720S Coupe, using a development of that car’s Monocage II carbon-fibre cor

The first car I drove was my mum’s, when I was 17 – she never used it, so it was easy as the key was always on the desk. I just decided to grab it and go – and head straight to the Nordschleife. That was a BMW 318i. My mother wondered why the tyres w

Everyone knows where the car industry is heading. It will seem increasingly crazy to allow clumsy humans to drive polluting cars on public roads, and soon the day will come when we reluctantly go fully electric and hand the controls to our Silicon Va

Folding hard tops were invented when soft tops were too easily penetrated by the weather and vandals with Stanley knives. These days, a well-done fabric roof really is all you could want for cosiness, and the yobs are too busily engaged in social med

It doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to detect that the four-cylinder Mercedes X-Class models haven’t exactly flown off the showroom floors and the evidence is there for all to see in the form of incentives just seven months after launch. “Too much money

You won’t believe what the Jeep Grand Cherokee Trackhawk does when you engage launch mode. I couldn’t. It was bloody hilarious. Afterwards. Fairly shocking during it, if I’m honest. So you come to a halt, apply as much pressure as possible to the bra

The replacement for the 13-year-old Conti GT. About time. Same principles as before, but now 80kg lighter, 48V electrics with active anti-roll, cutting-edge tech and, as buyers demanded, a greater focus on performance. A midlife facelift for Merc’s

Take one Renault Megane RS, add all the good bits of the options list, a fruitier exhaust and power bump to 220kW (up 15kW) thanks to a new ceramic-ball-bearing turbo, and you have the Trophy. Basically a handy aggregation of RS goodness without all

Finally. You can now at last drink in the looks of the Supra. Or, to use its official full name for the first, and possibly last, time: the Toyota GR Supra. Huzzah: the real production Supra. Was ever a car more teased and trailed, hinted and hyped?

Tobias Moers isn’t like most car company bosses, with their perfectly pressed suits and highly polished rhetoric. He’s a little looser than that, a little happier to go with the flow – the kind of bloke who’d rather chat over a stein than a boardroom

Beauty and madness, Aston Martin calls it. It’s a brilliant juxtaposition, but they’re not the only ones that can push that envelope. As all four members of the latest Aston Zagato family are gently decanted, the sky above us simultaneously darkens a

Given that Land Rover’s brand DNA is largely built around the legend of the Defender, it’s incredible the company has had to plough on without it since the veteran was finally laid to rest in January 2016. Reinventing it is an unenviable task. It’s g

When I met Adrian Newey to discuss the Valkyrie back in summer 2017, something he said lodged in my brain like a fish hook: that the 12-into-one exhaust system, rather than two six-into-ones, “makes it sound like it’s revving twice as high as it actu

BACK IN 1933, A FARMER’S WIFE FROM GIPPSLAND, AUSTRALIA, WROTE TO THE HEAD OF THE FORD MOTOR COMPANY’S OUTPOST IN MELBOURNE WITH A QUANDARY. “My husband and I can’t afford a car and a truck,” she said, “so can you build a vehicle that we can use to

No camping beyond this sign, reads the least necessary warning in the history of mankind. I move in for a closer look – no quad biking or motocross either. Fortunately, neither Mark nor I fancy sleeping under canvas or breaking out the fast, flammabl

I FEEL LIKE A SECRET AGENT. After weeks of chasing and being passed from one contact to another, we’ve been given the all clear to visit the biggest private supercar collection in Bahrain. First, we’re given a general area to head to, a short drive f

They say location is everything and that’s why you pay crazy money for a small bit of the most desirable real estate. For the rest of us, waking next to the ocean (hearing the waves) or deep in the bushveld (hearing wild animals doing whatever wild a

My last month with our Megane R.S Cup. Though the car is due to leave the revolving TopGear garage in April, I’ll be handing it over to the rest of the team where I’m sure that new 5-door practicality will meld easily with Avon’s family life, the 6-s

Okay take some truth serum, the Honda HRV doesn’t exactly scream excitement, does it? If we wanted this much boredom from a car we’d call an Uber. December-January is car malarkey. Fleets close early and open late, probing a chin-scratching question

R R478 950 There are two kinds of people in this world. Car-people - and then everyone else. I’m a car-person obviously and try as I may not to influence in this direction, my three little people can add that nomenclature to their character traits.

McLaren’s meteoric rise over the past six years is well known. The MP4-12C heralded the arrival of McLaren Automotive, and while the superlative F1 and oddball Merc SLR sit on the family tree, this was a new dawn. A range of cars, made in numbers, to