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2015 PEUGEOT 208 ACTIVE REVIEW

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When the Peugeot 208 first landed in Australia four years ago it had a big job to do. The French company had been on the slide for a while, with the weak efforts of the old 308 and 207 undoing all the hard earned reputation of the cars they superseded. The 208 had a quiet start but seems to have caught on with people looking for a credible alternative to the Japanese and German light hatches. In 2015, the Peugeot 208 range got an update in the form of a… Read more

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AUDI R8 IS BIG, POWERFUL AND AGGRESSIVE

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When a brand like Audi decides that it’s time to bring out a supercar, you know things are getting serious. There had been rumblings that the four rings were after a slice of Porsche’s action and rightly felt they were entitled to it. Audi’s motorsport heritage was a pretty good one and, with the benefit of hindsight, its assault on the Le Mans series, endurance and GT3 racing has given it a global profile DTM, the German touring car series, could only dream of doing. Almost a decade ago, the… Read more

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NEW PEUGEOT 308 GTI HAS ARRIVED

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Peugeot is finally back in the hot-hatch business after an absence of almost 20 years. Sure there have been Peugeots with ‘GT’ on their badges in the intervening years, but they were on the tame side when compared with an ever increasing number of rivals from Europe and Japan. The eagerly awaited Peugeot 308 GTi has finally arrived in Australia – and it’s a real belter. Stylish, but not overdone, ‘understated aggression’ is the phrase that comes to mind, it’s powered by an exceptional turbo-petrol engine that drives through well-controlled… Read more

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HOLDEN COMMODORE 1997 – 2015

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2011 Holden Commodore Redline SS V

Big, tough and built for Australia, the Holden Commodore is perfectly suited to our driving conditions and meets the needs of drivers who demand more than simply transport in their family sedans and wagons. Handling is impressive for a car of this size. Yet the Commodore provides comfort even when being bashed along bush roads that have seen better days, not to mention corrugated dirt roads. Surfaces that trouble very expensive German cars of the same size class as the Holden are simply shrugged off by our Aussie machines. Commodore… Read more

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SPIT AND POLISH JUST A START TO MAZDA UTILITY UPGRADE

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As fussy Nannas do with grubby grandsons, Mazda has gone to work on its BT-50’s face as if with a spit-soaked hanky, and has also cleaned up the bum of its popular ute. With the straighter front grille, a re-design of the front and rear lights and stylish new 16 and 17-inch alloy wheels Grandma Mazda now has the workhorse looking much better. With 23 variants to choose from in either diesel powered two or four-wheel drive, the BT-50 comes in single cab, freestyle cab and dual cab format in… Read more

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HYUNDAI i30 2007 – 2015

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2009 Hyundai i30 cw

Aimed at the European market rather than at buyers in South Korea the Hyundai i30 manages to combine some of the flair of a European machine with the cost advantages of an Asian car. Build quality in Korean cars has improved markedly over the years and Hyundai i30s were in the vanguard of this transformation. Aware of the likes of Australian drivers in the areas of suspension and steering, engineers from Australia and South Korea have tailored the suspension and steering to our conditions. The result is very on-road dynamics,… Read more

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GOLF RAISES HOPES OF GOLF IN THE ROUGH

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With hatchback, wagon, cabriolet, GTI and R ranges, with all their variants, the Golf is the everyman of the Volkswagen world. Now the Alltrack has been added to a seemingly ever-growing family of the best seller. With the latest VW 4Motion all-wheel drive system and a new generation Haldex coupling the Alltrack can take the small wagon on unsealed roads where two-wheel drives are not encouraged to venture. Even so, with the addition of a new 1.8-litre TSI turbocharged petrol engine coupled to a six-speed DSG automatic transmission, the Alltrack… Read more

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STRONG EVOLUTION OF PORSCHE 911

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It is almost 20 since Porsche purists raised their Pilseners all over the world and sadly declared that the Porsche 911 was dead. Killed by emissions ratings meant that cooling the flat-six engine purely by airflow was no longer possible. The finer control that water cooling offered meant that, despite attempts to the contrary by desperate engineers, water replaced air around the Porsche powerplant. Porsche engineers are smart guys and gals and switched their brains into lateral thinking mode. Realising that what the purists most wanted was the sound of… Read more

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2016 AUDI A3 SPORTBACK E-TRON REVIEW

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Hybrid cars are going to become a whole lot more common on our roads as The Great Change comes across the car industry. Sure it’s all going to take decades, but the inexorable shift away from fossil fuels is underway. Over the past two decades, carmakers have taken a well-trodden path to highlight their commitment to the coming automotive order – make something stupid-looking that drives like it’s going to fall over (Toyota, Nissan, Renault etc.) but then say it doesn’t matter because it’s green; or go all-out and do… Read more

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JAGUAR XF: A BUSINESS EXPRESS

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Automotive retro styling is a tricky business; it has worked well for BMW with the Mini, Fiat’s 500 and VW New Beetle. Yet Jaguar couldn’t make a success of the retro route in its XJ models, despite having a long tradition in styling. The Brits took the apparently correct decision to give its previous generation XJ series high-tech mechanical components under a superbly engineered aluminium skin – which was styled in the retro manner. It didn’t work, so the famed Jaguar designer, Scotsman Ian Callum gave us an all-new, almost… Read more