Wheels magazine subscription

FRESH FACTS THINGS WE LEARNED IN THE CAR WORLD THIS MONTH 1. How did Charles Leclerc greet the new Ferrari F80? He was delighted, looking at its cabin and exclaiming: “We’ve finally done a car with a normal driving position.” The F80’s front aero structures lift the driver’s feet up, hence the F1 ‘feet on the bath taps’ driving position. 2. “You can’t cut your way to growth, no way,” said GM’s boss Mark Reuss, in a backhanded dig at Stellantis. This comes on the back of the United Auto Workers union saying: “the evidence is clear that CEO Carlos Tavares is steering Stellantis on a crash course that will cause our members tremendous harm.” 3. It’s started already. Private speculators are already marking up Toyota LandCruiser Prados to ridiculous…

FORGET THE FURORE. Remove from your mind, if you can, the past two weeks’ noise about Living Vivid and Breaking Moulds. Concentrate instead on the Jaguar Type 00 (Zero Zero), the long-promised concept coupé that introduces a radically new design style to the 90-year-old marque and sets the tone for its all-EV range that will hit showrooms from 2026. The concept car is a two-door, fixed-head coupé, a body type we’re told will not be built. But it has perhaps been chosen because it loosely echoes the layout of the 1961 Jaguar E-Type, the car nearly everyone cites as the leader of a previous great leap forward in Jaguar design. Company insiders say the concept coupé’s size, proportions and, above all, its design style are all “very close” to the…

THE HAND-WRINGERS WOULD have you believe that the driver’s car is dead, a casualty of the battery-electric age. That the future of loving driving and performance vehicles lies in the existing classic market. Well, I refuse to believe it. I accept we are heading into a Dark Age for the driver’s car. A winter. We are seeing the worst of combustion performance vehicles at the same time as we are seeing the worst of electric ones, because the latter’s technology is still too new. Many existing combustion models are not expected to be replaced, hot hatch numbers have withered while those performance models still extant are getting heavier, burdened by fuel-saving and emissions equipment. The ones that still run on explosions are quieter, choked in their exhaust streams by heavier…

IT IS CHASTENING to the point of painful to discover, or be forced to accept, that you are doing it all wrong. And by “it” I don’t mean something unimportant like managing your finances, preparing a puffer fish or parenting. I mean doing your job, which in my case is hugely consequential because I review cars for a living and millions of people make the second largest purchasing decision of their lives based on my advice. Many moons ago, just over a decade of them, my job was being Editor of Wheels magazine. I well remember being appointed to the position, which felt a little like I’d been elected to quasi-religious standing, perhaps by a conclave. I carried the gravitas of previous editors, the seriousness and tireless energy of Peter Robinson,…

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: 6 ISSUES $59 SAVE 25% 12 ISSUES $109 SAVE 30% 24 ISSUES $199 SAVE 36% 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 31 January 2025. 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,…

WHAT DO YOU need to know about the new Toyota LandCruiser Prado? We can get the key points covered first and then dig a little deeper. At first glance, it looks as if not too much has changed. The engine’s still a 2.8-litre turbo-diesel, it still makes 150kW/500Nm, and the basic formula and target market aren’t particularly different. Look closer and it’s clear that the Prado has adopted many of the good bits of the full-fat LandCruiser 300. It gets a version of that car’s TNGA-F chassis and a lot of its electronic smarts. Indeed, it’s now being billed as a junior sibling rather than a distant cousin. Braked towing capacity has risen from 3000 to 3500kg, it’s longer and wider than the old Prado, and it features a much…

AUSTRALIA IS THE only major market in Mazda’s world that gets the CX-60, the CX-70, the CX-80 and the CX-90 SUVs. I have no shame in admitting that, prior to driving the CX-70, I genuinely had very little idea as to how they all meshed together. Even now that I do understand it, I’m still a little leery of the logic behind it and can see how the average buyer might be flummoxed. Put simply, a CX-60 is a medium-sized SUV for a CX-5 customer with deeper pockets. If they want something yet more imposing and more premium, they can step up to the bigger CX-70, Mazda’s flagship two-row SUV. That leaves the CX-80 and CX-90 to accommodate those buyers who need three rows of seats. Of these, the CX-80…

FORGET WHAT you’ve heard about Porsche walking back its promises around electric vehicles. This Macan is never going to have an internal combustion engine, and if that doesn’t sit well with you, then you have until Q2 of 2025 to snap up the last of the old model from dealer stock because no more are coming Down Under. It’s one heck of a roll of the dice. Ballsy, even. But ask Porsche’s engineers whether they would want to return to petrol or diesel and the answer is unequivocal. “Why would we? Our goal was to do everything better than the combustion Macan.” The new Macan range opens at $128,400 which buys you the entry-level, rear-wheel-drive version. This is no makeweight, delivering a 265kW punch with overboost. Curiously, this Macan can…

Brought to you by YOU CAN THANK Matt O’Malley for this Wheels Car of the Year. Without him, it would never have happened. He’s the new CEO of Wheels Media and, when he acquired the business in the second half of the year, he was absolutely adamant that COTY had to happen. That was music to my ears. I’d envisaged that, given the traditional planning horizons for COTY, it might be a slimmed down version of the event, maybe not quite as spare as the 10-contender field at the pandemic-affected COTY 2021, but still somewhat select. After consulting our readers, it was clear that what you wanted was a proper and properly exhaustive COTY. Mission creep is usually a bad thing, an insidious blowout of scope that usually ends in…