Remember the Ssangyong Actyon? Distinguished by a roofline that tapered sharply at the rear, it was arguably the first SUV-coupe in the world. The only problem? It wasn’t particularly good, which meant it never sold in significant numbers, so the Korean carmaker quietly laid it to rest in 2010 after a five-year production run.
A 585 hp rear-wheel-drive supercar and a rain-soaked Hockenheimring – venue for the German F1 Grand Prix, and a track I’ve never previously been to – are ingredients that pretty much guarantee the day ahead will be anything but dull. Throw in a man named Bernd Schneider, a hard-pedalling five-time German touring car champ, as a pacemaker and you can bet fireworks are in store.
When Volkswagen first debuted the Passat CC, it turned quite a few heads. Not only because it looked good, but also the question of “why?”, especially as the CC version was priced higher than an already-existing Passat. Lucky for us at that time, Volkswagen decided to help us understand the “why” question and offered us the VW Passat CC V6 for 5 months. If you had been following our reports back in 2011, you would probably know we bloody fell in love with that car. Power, handling, comfort and luxury in a more stylish package — it ticked all the right boxes and justified the price premium over the standard Passat.
Seven minutes 49 seconds. That’s how long it takes the Volkswagen Golf GTi Clubsport S to scoot around the daunting Nurburgring Nordschleife.
Volkswagen has done well with the Tiguan -– sales of more than 2.8 million examples globally since its 2007 launch is reflective of that –- but there’s no denying it was getting long in the tooth against a horde of fresher rivals. Consider this: there are now three times as many contenders in the compact crossover segment as there were when the first Tiguan debuted. It was clearly time for a change, and the second-gen Tiguan, which goes on sale in our market from September onwards, represents exactly that. It genuinely is an ‘all-new’ vehicle, using as its basis the hugely-flexible MQB architecture that underpins everything from the latest VW Golf to the third-gen Audi TT.
Porsche is going to rebadge their Boxster and Cayman as “718” models this year, complete with 4-cylinder turbo engines, the first of which have just been revealed. However, the GTS models will get a stay of execution from the turbo era for now. We drove the last of these naturally-aspirated mid-engined Porsches late last year in Stuttgart, Germany.
With all the controversy surrounding Volkswagen’s current woes with diesel cars, it is easy to forget that dirty diesel was never a viable environmentally-friendly alternative to petrol, ever. Diesel cars became a “thing” in certain parts of the world because they offered better mileage, which is all their buyers cared about, the environment be damned. But diesel cars have a variety of costly, heavy and inefficient add-ons to make them cleaner, just to meet tough emissions laws in Europe. If you want the cheapest form of energy for your car, there’s no better option than going electric. We tried out the all-electric VW e-Golf at Wolfsburg,