First Drive

In just about every respect, the Land Rover Defender 75th Limited Edition could not be further removed in concept from the vehicle whose birthday it has been conceived to celebrate. 

Arriving to mark the anniversary of the first Land Rover (which would later evolve into the Series I - and several decades later the Defender) being revealed, it builds on the top-link Defender HSE - leaving very few options boxes unticked and donning a commemorative shade of Grasmere Green, modelled on that worn by the first wave of 4x4s to chug out of Solihull. 

For that paint, which noticeably also coats the 20in alloys for extra hits of both kerb appeal and kerb aversion, you'll pay a premium of nearly £18,000 over the equivalent 110 HSE. Oh, that does include a small 75th Edition decal on the boot lid and a colour-matched dash panel, but otherwise this is very much a case of, erm... green-washing. 

That said, the top-spec, middle-engined variant of the mid-sized Defender (I think that's right) still seems to be the sweet spot in the line-up. Of course, the unreasonable demands of today's premium car buyers (being kept warm, dry and intact, for example) mean this was always going to be more of a spiritual than literal reinterpretation of its 1940s forebear, whose open sides, sparsely furnished cabin and, shall we say, lackadaisical approach to occupant safety would not a £90,000 car make. 

Compared to, say, its Range Rover sibling, the Defender more closely apes the bare-bones ethos of the original Land Rover, in so far as it features a partly exposed dashboard and is decorated throughout with exposed screwheads (you'll either think this is the best thing ever, or slightly naff), but make no mistake: this is a pure-bred luxury car, and nowhere better represented as such than by this top-speccer.

We've got 14-way electrically adjustable, heated and cooled front seats, a refrigerated centre console, a top-flight Meridian sound system and – this being fundamentally an HSE – the electronic air suspension that gives pricier Defender models the edge over entry cars in the refinement stakes. Such decadence is sacrilege, you might say, considering what this special edition is supposed to commemorate - but consider also that even despite its overt focus on on-road opulence, this remains one of the world's most capable off-roaders.

Our test car was fitted with the rag-top roof, rather than the sliding panoramic option, which did make the black cabin feel a bit darker when closed, but was a nice toy to play with when the sun came out and, together with the decorative checker plates on the front wings, felt like a more tangible nod back to the dune-bashing Land Rovers of old. 

The 75th Anniversary edition is also available in short-wheelbase 90 guise, and in addition to the D300 diesel tested here, the 110 can be specced with the P400e plug-in hybrid powertrain. But special edition or not, my vote goes to this indefatigably torquey, oil-burning straight-six, which pairs more-than-agreeable performance with downright impressive economy (0-62mph in 7.0secs and 30.7mpg), and emits barely a whimper at cruising speeds. 

Worth the premium, then? Those who bemoan what the very concept of the Defender has become should look elsewhere. So too, those who want a faster example (the snarling V8 isn't much more pricey) or a more utilitarian one (you can get a steel-wheeled Hard Top for sub-£60k).

As a quick, comfortable and maybe even collectable family hauler, though, there's no denying this special edition’s appeal - even if it is coated in the world's most expensive paint. 

A high general rate of inflation seems like a handy smokescreen for car makers looking to make extra profit out of every new performance model, doesn’t it? And yet here we are. The original BMW M2 that arrived in the UK in 2016 came with an opening showroom sticker price of less than £45k – and, over the full course of its lifecycle, it outsold every other M car on the books.

Correcting that price for seven years of UK inflation, it might be reasonable to expect this new second-gen M2’s price to start well below £60,000. But because it’s a more powerful, more mature and more technical M car than any of its predecessors, it actually opens for business at a whisker under £65,000. More still if you want that mechanical highlight denied on any other current M car: a manual gearbox to go with your ‘standard’ rear-wheel drive.

Can it be worth that? You know what? When a six-cylinder Porsche 718 Cayman GTS with three pedals and a stick costs north of £70k, perhaps. An opening blast on UK roads has given us plenty of very promising signs.

Now closely related to the M3 and M4, and having swollen quite a bit on overall length and kerb weight, this car was at risk of losing its dynamic identity. But BMW M appears to have managed and mitigated that risk very well - with the M2’s chassis tuning, at least, if not quite so well with the car’s more divisive styling. 

A bit of the threadable compactness and spring-heeled handling agility of the first-gen BMW M2 seems to have been given up, along with some of its slightly bouncy, terrierish charm. But more sophisticated B-road body control comes by way of the trade - with no shortage of tautness and bite about the car’s primary ride when you dial up the new adaptive dampers. 

Moreover, this car still manages to make its own impression - to conjure its own shtick. It’s significantly shorter of wheelbase than an M4 and, thanks to the M division’s special suspension, steering and active diff tuning, it does have an accessible handling vivacity that an M4 Coupé, as good as it undoubtedly is, narrowly misses. 

It doesn’t quite goad you into chucking it around. There’s more of the maturity and precision of the modern M car here than that. It doesn’t quite dart into bends, either. But nonetheless, the M2 wants to rotate and move around underneath you that little bit more than an M4 would - to take a second directional bite at a corner as you feed power to its rear axle. Thuggish it isn’t, but fun it most definitely is.

The straight six’s wonderfully even supply of torque, its excellent response and outright range, and its tuneful, rasping audible character make it a big draw in itself. £65k certainly isn’t over the top for it, not by today’s standards.

But in order to really drink in all that engine offers, to tap synaptically into the chassis’s indulgently balanced throttle-on handling, and to have the most meaningful relationship you can with its driven rear axle, the M2’s manual gearbox is a transformative factor. You’ve simply got to have it – for the way it draws you into the driving experience both physically and mentally, if not for the M2’s slightly springy shift quality and very marginally squeezed-feeling three-pedal footwell layout.

With the manual, the M2’s driving experience is fully absorbing. It gets your brain going in thinking your way down the road ahead, where an auto might invite you to switch off. Having picked the gear for the bend you're approaching in advance yourself, you're also given supreme confidence over how much torque is going to hit that outside rear wheel - and precisely when. Because that's precisely what a manual driveline that you're fully in control of yourself does.

The M2’s manual gearbox costs £454 on its own, but because it nudges the car's CO2 emissions up slightly, you get clobbered for nearly £700 of extra first-year UK VED showroom tax. Even so, I absolutely would.

There’s an affecting blend of the old and the new in the make-up of this latest compact M car, as well as of usability, wieldiness, performance and value. It's pricey, sure - but it offers plenty more than old compact M cars used to, and in numerous ways.

If BMW intended to make an entry-level sports car with an evocative flavour of what has made its performance icons so special over the decades, as well as a greater helping of what’s exceptional about them today, I'd say it’s done a bang-up job.

The Renault Austral is a new C-segment SUV, 4.5 metres long, replacing the Kadjar and arriving in British showrooms imminently. 

Renault says it has learnt from the latest Mégane that its customers like simplicity, and this is a market overflowing with rivals, including the big-selling (and related) Nissan Qashqai, so there are only three variants, all with the same powertrain, priced from £34,695 to £39,495. Our test car is a top-end Iconic Esprit Alpine.

The powertrain is pretty complex and, unlike the platform (the Renault-Nissan-Mistubishi Alliance CMF-C/D that underpins loads of things) is bespoke to Renault in general and, at the moment, this Renault in particular. 

It’s a hybrid (the first time I’ve seen Renault use the phrase ‘self-charging hybrid’ that Toyota coined) comprising a 1.2-litre three-cylinder turbo petrol engine and two electric motors, with a combined maximum of 197bhp. The way it operates isn’t unlike the latest Honda Civic, in that most of the time the main motor is doing the driving. 

The main motor has 67bhp and two gear ratios and sits between the engine’s transmission and the wheels. The engine makes 129bhp and has an integrated starter-generator attached to it that makes 20bhp. Its transmission has five forward speeds via a dog clutch.

These are really efficient (teeth mechanically lock shafts together rather than slipping into position like friction clutches) but can be very unrefined, so the ISG helps the engine spin to a precise rpm to exactly match the speed of the road wheels and thus smooth things out. 

When not coupled to the wheels, the engine can act effectively as a range-extending generator to power the 2kWh battery and main motor.

Renault estimates that in town, the engine can be kept off up to 80% of the time.

On the WLTP combined test cycle, the Austral gets 60.1mpg and 105g/km of CO2 in base form, but that falls to 57.7mpg and 110g/km at the top end.

The Iconic Esprit Alpine gets multi-link rear suspension and active rear-steering, plus 20in wheels. The middle-spec Techno Esprit Alpine also sits on 20s, but both it and the Techno base model have a torsion beam at the back and no rear-steer.

Every Austral, though, has a large number of screens inside: a digital instrument cluster plus an upright 12.0in infotainment touchscreen (from which the climate controls are thankfully left separate). This runs Google’s Android Automotive software, which is probably the easiest around to use (and also supports Apple CarPlay).

The upper cabin materials are good (on this top model, at least) and the lower plastics less good – which is relatively normal.

The rear seats slide, giving either great leg room or a large (555-litre boot).

The powertrain is impressive. In town, the engine indeed often shuts off completely, once in a while firing up to noticeably thrum along and add power to the battery rather than driving the wheels. (Given there’s no friction clutch, the engine can’t physically engage below its idle speed, which I’m told is geared at about 12mph.)

The engine is obviously more involved at higher speeds, but it’s always smooth.

Across a relatively short route, I saw easily more than 60mpg. I think you would hover around that as an average. Around town, it was more like 70mpg.

Less clever are the dynamics. Depite the badging, nothing about this car is Alpine.

The steering is remote and variably responsive, depending on whether the rear wheels are turning against you (to tighten the turning circle) or with you (to improve stability at higher speeds), but I got used to that.

What I found harder to live with was the poor ride quality. Body pitch and roll are well contained, but that comes with a lumpenness to the secondary ride, shifting all of apiece with head-toss and thumping along over bad roads, of which there are many in Britain.

That's a shame, really, because it lets down an otherwise interesting and not unappealing package.

As night follows day, GT3 follows Porsche 911 and CS follows BMW M3. As great as those standard cars are, it makes sense that there’s also a focused, track-honed version with more aero, carbonfibre panels and sticky tyres for those who want to go chasing lap times. It helps that in the case of the 911 GT3, you get a really special engine thrown in.

For the Alpine A110, that kind of progression isn’t as obvious, because it’s almost an anti-track car. With its relatively soft suspension, compact dimensions, light weight and fairly modest power output, it’s a car ostensibly and singularly designed to have fun on the road. That it will actually entertain you on a track day seems by the by.

The result is that the R makeover sits a little uneasily – literally in the case of the visible additions. The carbonfibre bits aren’t quite as natural a fit as they are on say, the 911. They’re hard to miss, too, as they include not only a bonnet, a diffuser, various skirts, winglets and a swan-neck rear spoiler but also the wheels and, most contentiously of all, a rear windscreen. Carbonfibre not being known for its transparent properties, this means you can’t see out the back of the Alpine A110 R.

It all adds up to an extra 29kg of downforce at top speed, and together with the surprisingly comfy carbonfibre-shell Sabelt seats inside, these measures reduce the weight by 34kg over the A110 S. Curious then, that our test car had a Focal hi-fi system, complete with subwoofer behind the seats.

At 296bhp, the A110 R has no more power than the A110 S, so the main dynamic alterations are the fitting of Michelin Pilot Sport Cup 2 tyres, unique anti-roll bars that are 10% stiffer in the front and 25% stiffer in the rear and a set of unique coilovers by ZF.

Those lower the ride height by 10mm and allow a further 10mm reduction, and they’re adjustable for compression and rebound over 20 clicks.

In other words, it’s A110 with more grip and more seriousness – things the A110 was never about, making it seem a strange recipe.

Whether the driving experience of the A110 R sits uneasy with the Alpine’s fundamental character will depend on your perspective.

If you’re enthralled by the unique dynamic character of the standard A110, you will keenly feel that about 20% of the delicate sweetness has been traded for grip. The A110 R probably isn’t for you.

If on the other hand you buy into the Alpine brand and design but want more precision, endurance and cornering speed on track, a tool to help you work on your lines, the A110 R will be oddly compelling.

Our Matt Saunders drove it on track earlier this year and found that it offers “massive track-day speed and giant-killing intent”; that it’s genuinely next-level.

Now that we’ve driven it in the UK, it’s clear that the real story here isn’t that it loses 20% of its sweetness on the road. It’s that it maintains 80% while massively increasing its on-track ability.

It’s stiffer but better damped than before, and it’s still nothing like the Porsche 718 Cayman GT4 RS: while that occasionally makes you slow down on the bumpiest roads, the A110 R takes them in its stride. While it doesn’t exactly glide, a lot of the fluency of the regular A110 remains, as equally does the hyper-agile, almost rear-engined feel. You have to go looking for it a bit harder, but it’s there for the finding.

Even on the road, there’s something quite enthralling about such a light car with so much grip. Traction in the dry is absolutely unassailable, and it feels as if it’s capable of changing direction by 90deg instantly, with no inertia.

Push harder in longer bends and the weightier steering will eventually signal that some understeer is coming, at which point it’s high time to take it a little easier.

As a road car, the A110 R is still compromised in other ways. The lack of a rear windscreen is plain annoying, particularly as you don’t even get a digital rear-view mirror, and the harnesses are a faff, despite having only two buckles to do up. It’s fine for a Sunday blast or driving to a track day but not much more.

The A110 R is a different kind of A110. It isn’t the obvious one, and some might say it strays from what made it great and that £94,990 is too much for what’s now an even more niche proposition. But it turns out the basic formula adapts to this more serious role remarkably well.

With the Lotus Exige gone and the GT4 RS winding down, a dual-purpose, one-tonne, mid-engined sports car is something to celebrate.

Jazz music has endured in popularity as many of its contemporaneous genres have dropped into history, and so too has its Honda namesake, which has just been updated while a supermini cull is occuring.

Essential to its ongoing viability are its relatively high price – £27,000 is the minimum you will pay – and the low impact on Honda’s fleet emissions made by its innovative e:HEV powertrain. 

‘Update’ is far more accurate than ‘facelift’ in this instance, because said hybrid system has been the primary target of Honda’s attention, while the external design changes are limited to a refreshed front grille design, restyled bumpers and a change to the headlight surrounds.

That applies to both the vaguely 4x4-mimicking Jazz Crosstar driven here and the regular Jazz models – which now include one with revised chassis settings to offer “a more engaging experience for Jazz owners looking for sportier performance”. Wait, those exist!?

The e:HEV system combines two electric motors, a battery and a 1.5-litre four-cylinder petrol engine with a variable-ratio transmission, which we’ve always found in any Honda to operate at an efficiency close to its impressive official figures. In the Crosstar, that was previously 58.9mpg and 109g/km of CO2 – and it still is, despite output having risen from 108bhp to 120bhp. Impressive stuff, resulting from upgrades to both the motors and the engine.

Undoubtedly the accelerative potential will take you by surprise if your only experience of it is getting stuck behind the average Jazz buyer – who has probably been one since it came on 78s. It’s satisfactorily quick whether from stationary or when already rolling.

It puts you in mind of a fully electric car at times, through the smoothness and linearity of its performance, not to mention the lack of combustion noise. That’s because the Jazz often runs as an EV in low-speed driving, and if not then it’s operating in hybrid mode, with the engine effectively working as a generator to charge the battery that feeds the motor. On the motorway, the engine will clutch onto the front wheels itself, but still it’s at times assisted by the electrical componentry, and still I saw EV mode activate at above 50mph on occasion.

It all sounds overly complicated, but in practice it feels anything but. You simply drive as you wish while the powertrain instantaneously works out which is the optimum operating mode; you needn’t press anything or adapt. And unless you really floor it, engine revs don’t intrude like they do in some hybrids.

The effect is that often the only way you can tell which mode the powertrain is using is by a little symbol in the digital instrument display. Honda claims it to be “seamless” and we're not arguing. 

The other result is fuel economy: even on a mixed-roads test route that included some enthusiastic usage, our Jazz returned 56mpg. This is good when compared with most superminis, although the only other hybrid one, the Toyota Yaris, claims up to 68.9mpg.

Like the Yaris, the Jazz rides flatly and perhaps more firmly than you would expect – even in the case of the Crosstar, which sits 37mm higher than usual, due to some extra suspension travel. It's generally comfortable enough but still lacking some sophistication, particularly in the way it shares shocks from broken surfaces. 

The Jazz leans more than most if you challenge it through corners, but you can still keep up a good pace through the countryside – not, I hasten to add, that there’s any suggestion whatsoever of the new Jazz Advance Sport being engaging.

With its unusual one-box shape (the upright driving position and forward-leaning windscreen make it feel like a shrunken MPV from inside), the Jazz inflicts a touch more wind noise upon you at high speeds, but rolling refinement otherwise impresses. ‘That bit’ of the M25 was notable for the opposite of the usual reason.

Another benefit is the spaciousness of the interior: tall drivers will be happy and the rear is equally adult-appropriate, which is never a given in a supermini, while the boot is big and, as ever, the rear seats flip up cinema-style, so you can get that dracanea home undamaged. 

Only some materials colours have been changed inside – to our delight, as Honda’s interior designers are in their best era right now. ‘Yo no bi’ translates from Japanese as “recognising the beauty in everyday items refined over time to make them even more beautiful and ergonomically satisfying for their specific purpose”, and absolutely all the materials in here look swish and feel nice (Toyota take note), you can control the climate almost subconsciously, thanks to buttons and dials (almost everyone take note), and the touchscreen infotainment looks at home on the dashboard, has a succinct software layout and doesn’t glitch (Volkswagen Group take note).

Jazz drivers want comfort, practicality, ease of use, affordable running and reliability, and that’s what they will continue to get, even if it does come at a considerable expense.

As for Crosstar spec? It still feels like the equivalent of someone sticking a modern synthesised bassline under a classic Miles Davis trumpet solo: jazz expanded but not enhanced.