Autocar July 10, 2019

JAGUAR HAS HAD huge success with the I-Pace. It has helped shed the company’s old-man image and brought the brand to people it could never have reached before. By getting such an electric car to market first, Jaguar stole a march on rivals in the process. However, since its launch a year ago, Audi and Mercedes-Benz have launched their own I-Pace rivals and detailed plans for the second, third, fourth and beyond electric cars for their line-ups. Whatever advantage Jaguar had seemed to have been squandered, with the I-Pace the exception rather than the rule. But now the secret is out: as Autocar has been reporting since as far back as 2015, Jaguar is on the verge of becoming a full-blown electric car maker and replacing its existing range with pure-electric versions,…

“Prices will start from around £24,400 – less than a petrol Cooper S” Mini’s long-awaited first attempt at a mass production electric car has been revealed, mating the brand’s classic three-door hatchback with an electric powertrain offering Cooper S performance in a package claimed to be more affordable than every rival. It has been dubbed the Mini Cooper S E in markets outside the UK, but the brand has chosen to retain the Mini Electric name in Britain to avoid confusion and clearly differentiate it from the standard range. However, the Cooper S badges will remain (alongside new E badging) to denote the performance level. The biggest development, however, is the car’s relatively low price point: including the government grant for electric vehicles, it will start from around £24,400 – said to be…

It’s nearly a decade since the field trials of the Mini E prototype in the UK. Loaned to selected members of the public (as well as in other countries including the US and Germany), it was an experimental car that lost its rear seats to make way for a battery pack. Much of BMW’s interest was in tracking real-world use of an EV that had a range limited to around 100 miles in the most favourable conditions. Different countries showed different habits (US users recharged their Mini Es far more often than users in Germany, for example), but it did prove that even limited-range EVs could be used in the same way as a conventional Mini or BMW 1 Series: most journeys were of no more than 85 miles a day. A big…

BMW HAS GIVEN the green light to a heavily reworked electric-powered production version of the Rocketman – Mini’s compact urban-based concept that was first displayed in 2011 (below). Set to be launched in 2022, the three-door hatchback is planned to be an electric-powered entry-level model within a realigned Mini line-up, with production set to take place at Spotlight Automotive – a newly established joint venture run by Mini’s parent company and its partner Great Wall Motors in Jiangsu, China. “We’re advancing plans for a model along the lines of the Rocketman,” a senior BMW official revealed to Autocar. “It’s a car we have been looking at for a long time, but to build it profitably at the price point we think customers are prepared to pay, you need a joint venture partner…

M ercedes-AMG is claiming class-leading power, performance and features for its second-generation A45 S 4Matic+. The model, it says, will challenge the established mega-hatch order with up to 415bhp, a supercar-baiting 0-62mph time of 3.9sec and a new switchable Drift mode function. Revealed at the Goodwood Festival of Speed ahead of a UK on-sale date later this year, the A45 heads a quartet of rapid new compact Mercedes-AMG models equipped with the M139-designated four-cylinder petrol engine. These include the four-door CLA 45 S 4Matic+ saloon, which is confirmed to reach showrooms at the same time as its five-door sibling. The turbocharged 2.0-litre unit uses many of the technical solutions already developed for Mercedes-AMG’s twin turbocharged 4.0-litre V8 petrol engine and it will be offered in two distinct power outputs. In the new…

At what power output does a hot hatch become a mega-hatch? And when does it graduate from that into something else, if it does? And if so, what? I don’t think we’ve been here before. The new Mercedes-AMG A45 will have as much as 415bhp. That’s more than a BMW M2 Competition. More than the new Porsche Cayman GT4. I don’t know how to process it because it so blurs the lines. Four-hundred-plus horsepower isn’t hot hatch territory. It’s beyond rally replica and into serious sports saloon territory. It’s Nissan-Skyline-not-long-ago. I suppose the blurring of boundaries is to be expected from a manufacturer that used to have about four very clearly delineated models and now has – oh, I don’t know – somewhere in the region of 200 or so, it seems.…