Autocar August 31, 2022

LONG-STANDING readers will know our admiration for Ariel’s examples of excellent engineering, no better demonstrated than by the Atom 4, winner of our annual Britain’s Best Driver’s Car contest in both 2020 and 2021. We first reported on the next step in Ariel’s evolution in 2017, when it revealed images and plans for what we described as the “fastest-accelerating and most advanced supercar in history, a 1200bhp, four-wheel-drive electric two-seater with a revolutionary turbine range extender powertrain”. That very car, known for now as Hipercar, is at the advanced prototype stage and in this week’s issue road tester editor Matt Saunders gets an exclusive go in it (p42). The project, largely funded through various government channels over the years, has seen all partners benefit: electric motor maker Equipmake, for example, has five times…

LONG-STANDING readers will know our admiration for Ariel’s examples of excellent engineering, no better demonstrated than by the Atom 4, winner of our annual Britain’s Best Driver’s Car contest in both 2020 and 2021. We first reported on the next step in Ariel’s evolution in 2017, when it revealed images and plans for what we described as the “fastest-accelerating and most advanced supercar in history, a 1200bhp, four-wheel-drive electric two-seater with a revolutionary turbine range extender powertrain”. That very car, known for now as Hipercar, is at the advanced prototype stage and in this week’s issue road tester editor Matt Saunders gets an exclusive go in it (p42). The project, largely funded through various government channels over the years, has seen all partners benefit: electric motor maker Equipmake, for example,…

Audi is readying an R8 successor for a middecade launch, which will reinvent the marque’s famous halo model while also helping to reposition the brand as an electric forerunner. The supercar has not yet been officially signed off but is very much under way, according to insiders. It won’t be called the R8 and will take an entirely new design direction, so it won’t resemble the long-standing model. However, it will stay true to a pure sports car concept, with two doors and more power than anything else in the Audi range, albeit coming from an electric set-up. The current R8 remains in production and a run-out model, expected to be a RWD GT, will be revealed later this year before all variants of the car stop being made at…

Audi is readying an R8 successor for a middecade launch, which will reinvent the marque’s famous halo model while also helping to reposition the brand as an electric forerunner. The supercar has not yet been officially signed off but is very much under way, according to insiders. It won’t be called the R8 and will take an entirely new design direction, so it won’t resemble the long-standing model. However, it will stay true to a pure sports car concept, with two doors and more power than anything else in the Audi range, albeit coming from an electric set-up. The current R8 remains in production and a run-out model, expected to be a RWD GT, will be revealed later this year before all variants of the car stop being made at the end of…

The inherent modularity and universal applicability of EV architecture is a boon for cash-savvy car manufacturers, which can slash development and manufacturing costs by building, say, a seven-seat SUV on fundamentally the same platform as an urban supermini. But some argue that this makes it harder for more exclusive and performanceoriented range-toppers to stand out from their technically similar, volumegeared range-mates. Certainly, the similarities in EV performance across the board don’t help here. So the successor to the Audi R8 faces a much tougher task than did its predecessor, whose bellowing, mid-mounted V10 engine and low-slung supercar silhouette immediately put it at arm’s length from the rest of the Audi Sport line-up. If an electric version is to carve out a similarly distinct niche, it will need to be measurably…

The inherent modularity and universal applicability of EV architecture is a boon for cash-savvy car manufacturers, which can slash development and manufacturing costs by building, say, a seven-seat SUV on fundamentally the same platform as an urban supermini. But some argue that this makes it harder for more exclusive and performanceoriented range-toppers to stand out from their technically similar, volumegeared range-mates. Certainly, the similarities in EV performance across the board don’t help here. So the successor to the Audi R8 faces a much tougher task than did its predecessor, whose bellowing, mid-mounted V10 engine and low-slung supercar silhouette immediately put it at arm’s length from the rest of the Audi Sport line-up. If an electric version is to carve out a similarly distinct niche, it will need to be measurably different –…