Wheels digital subscription
Current Issue: May 2024
Single Issue
Price: $6.59
you save up to 30%
Earn up to 140 isubscribe Rewards Points, that's 5 points per $1 spent.
This is a digital subscription supplied by Zinio, who will deliver the digital editions direct to your inbox - you can access them directly through your web browser or download the Zinio app on your mobile device. Which devices can I read on?
Australia’s original motoring magazine.
Wheels is Australia’s original motoring magazine. Launched in 1953, we’ve been trusted by generations of Australians to provide entertaining and forthright opinions on the good, the bad and the ugly of new and used cars. A world-class car mag with a formidable international reputation, Wheels covers the full gamut of cars – from sports cars to four-wheel-drives, economy to family cars – but it also covers the people, personalities and the power plays behind one of the world’s most dynamic industries.
Be the first!
& get $5 off your next purchase
Be the first person to tell us what you think about Wheels and you'll save $5 on your next purchase!
In This Issue:
Upfront
FINANCE EXPERTS ARE everywhere. You can’t move for genius advice. I was trawling the internet the other day in time-honoured work deferment mode and came across the 1/10th rule for car buying: “It’s simple: Spend no more than 10 percent of your gross annual income on the purchase price of a car.”
Straight away you can probably see the problem with this one. Only seven percent of Australians would be able to afford a base Kia Picanto and you’d need to be in the top one percent of wage earners to be able to splash out on exotica like Toyota Corolla ZR hatch. Go on, you deserve it.
Okay, so I’m being deliberately obtuse, but I’m guessing that we’ve all pulled up in the traffic next to someone in, say, a Porsche…
30 days
The wrap
THIS MONTH IN BRIEF
LOTUS BREAKS SALES RECORD, BUT…
On the face of it, Lotus Technology making revenues of $1.014bn in 2023 is an incredible achievement. It also smashed existing records in having delivered 6790 cars in the calendar year. At no point in Lotus’s 76-year history has it come close to that. There is a catch though. The company posted a net loss of $1.132bn. Still, the company believes its Vision80 strategy, which is targeting sales of 150,000 cars a year by 2028, is still on track. Fully 63 percent of its deliveries were battery-electric models, and China is expected to account for around 40 percent of all output by 2025.
BROCK ON THE BLOCK
It might have sold for $1 million only a few years ago, but Peter Brock’s HDT Group…
Hybrid stars in new 911 range
AS PORSCHE reveals its most powerful EV yet, the firm is preparing to electrifyits longest-standing model line, the 911, with a hybrid due to join the line-up as part of a heavily updated 2025 car.
Nearing the end of its two-year development program, the 992.2-generation 911 receives a host of mid-life revisions, including subtly altered exterior styling, a reworked interior and updated six-cylinder petrol engines.
The changes are intended to sustain the 911’s appeal through to 2027, when an all-new ninth-generation A 48V model will join the increasingly electrified Porsche line-up.
The most significant change to the 911 in its sixth decade of production, however, is the adoption of a unique petrol-electric hybrid system.
Set to appear in a new four-wheeldrive model being revealed mid-year, it combines a tuned version of Porsche’s turbocharged six-cylinder…
The NVES meteor is inbound
So you’re across NVES – the Federal Government’s New Vehicle Efficiency Standard – and the debate, how Australia is the only country in the developed world besides Russia without a fuel efficiency mandate, and how the final proposed legislation was ultimately watered down at the behest of Australia’s new vehicle importers.
But now that it’s set to be enshrined in law, how might NVES change the local new-car market in real terms? Will the cars you know and love disappear? What might replace them?
From the outset, NVES as it stands will hit the local new-car market like a meteor. In just five short years, by 2029, the government has told new vehicle importers that the combined annual emissions of their new vehicle fleets must not exceed 58g CO2/km for passenger cars…
Inbox
Keep it tight (no more than 200 words) and do include your suburb if via email: wheels@wheelsmag.com.au You can also have your say on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter (search for Wheels Australia)
“The vehicle I hanker for is probably built around the turn of the century…”
I RECENTLY had the misfortune to lose the keys to my car. It cost me nearly $2000 to get the key replaced and reprogrammed, during which time my car was a deadweight for two weeks. When I did start driving it again, I found myself increasingly disillusioned by its chorus of chimes, the touchscreen that is three years’ old and already out of date, and the constant chiding from the safety systems on the dashboard. Plus, I can’t even approach it with a spanner because it’s…
Flat Chat
IF SOMEONE proposed burning a known toxic substance and letting the resultant gases waft down our most densely populated streets, I reckon you’d be quietly shuffling them into a padded room. Yet not only did that happen for decades, but once we knew there was a problem, there was a perplexing resistance to stopping it.
“It took two years to put lead into gasoline and 60 years to take it out,” said the late Herbert Needleman, a leading researcher of lead poisoning. And the parallels between the disbanding of leaded petrol in Australia, and the Federal Government’s NewVehicle Efficiency Standard, or NVES, are too humorous to ignore.
NVES, as we’ve explained elsewhere in this issue, is about grabbing first gear on the road towards phasing out fossil-fuelled engines, a very sad event…
Squeaky Wheel
IF YOU HADN’T noticed, electric cars are a thing. Three out of the five cover cars last month were electric. Editor Enright wrote about one of the greatest EVs to date in Upfront. So did Law in his monthly piece – as did I – while more than 40 additional pages of the magazine featured electric vehicles.
Over the next 12 months, Australia will double the number of public EV chargers. Nearly 10 percent of all new vehicles sold in March were electric, with supply constraints preventing an even bigger number. The term ‘inevitable’ has never been better applied to the advent of EVs, yet the dawn of the electric era can be thanked for a wonderful irony that will delight petrolheads in the most literal sense.
The arrival of mass-market electric…
SUBSCRIBE TO wheels
SAVE on the cover price
FREE delivery to your doorstep
PLUS free digital access to the Wheels archive
DIGITAL ACCESS INCLUDES: Browse every issue of Wheels dating back to 1953 – that’s over 800 issues
Early access to the latest issue before it goes on sale
Browse from any device
SELECT A PACKAGE:
3 ISSUES
$29 SAVE 25%
12 ISSUES
$99 SAVE 36%
24 ISSUES
$179 SAVE 42%
Scan the code or phone our new Australian-based call centre on (02) 8315 2092 or visit secure.whichcar.com.au/wheels
Offer valid until 30 June 2024. Prices shown are in AUD and available for Australian delivery only. Discounts represent the percentage saving on the cover price. Digital only access valued at $59 p/a. Offer valid for new subscriptions and renewals of existing subscriptions. If you have a current print subscription, you are entitled to free digital access. Please email…
What happened to the Apple Car?
IT ENDED WITH a whimper, not a bang. On February 27th, Apple’s Chief Operating Officer, Jeff Williams, told the 2000 employees engaged in Project Titan, Apple’s EV venture, that the entire project was being cancelled. The 12-minute video conference dropped the axe on the Apple Car.
Perhaps it wasn’t a total surprise, as earlier this year there had been rumours that the Apple Car project was to be re-scoped again – this time abandoning ambitious full-autonomous technology in favour of the Level 2 autonomous functionality that EVs today routinely offer. It was clear that this wasn’t going to be enough.
Many project staff have been reassigned to Apple’s generative AI development teams, while others who worked on the hardware of the vehicle have been laid off. It’s certainly a long way removed…
MERCEDES-BENZ R129 SL
The aesthetics of a product can never hope to make up for poor-quality technology.” You may well think that these words were spoken by an electronics engineer, but you’d be wrong. They were spoken by a car designer. Not just any car designer, but hall-of-famer Bruno Sacco – the head of Mercedes Styling Department who oversaw virtually every Mercedes-Benz shape over the last quarter of the 20th Century.
If you know your Mercedes history, you’ll know that this covered classics like the W201 190, the W126 S-Class, and the W124 E-Class. It also included the car that we feature here, the R129-generation Mercedes-Benz SL. Sacco had no comprehension of form following function. Even in an era of technological upheaval, he knew that “there is no primacy of technology over design or…
Prev
Next
https://www.isubscribe.com.au/wheels-digital-subscription.cfm
39959
Wheels
https://www.isubscribe.com.au/images/covers/au/5254/39959/square/Wheels55202425110.jpg
6.59
AUD
InStock
/Digital/Motor Vehicles/Cars
Australia’s original motoring magazine.
6.59