Evo June 2022

McLAREN’S APPOINTMENT OF MICHAEL Leiters as a replacement for former CEO Mike Flewitt should be welcomed for the significant news that it is. In the former Ferrari chief technical officer, McLaren has recruited an engineer with one of the most polished CVs in the industry, Leiters having worked with and learned from some of the best automotive executives in the business. At Porsche he played an integral role in the Cayenne’s development under the watchful eye of the company’s head of development, Wolfgang Dürheimer, and current McLaren non-executive director and acting CEO Michael Macht. Then there are the cars that left Maranello under his watch from 2014, where he answered to Sergio Marchionne and oversaw the successful transformation of Ferrari’s naturally aspirated mid-engined V8 cars to today’s award-winning turbocharged V8 and,…

IT’S CALLED THE LUCID AIR. A PURE EV from a Silicon Valley start-up with huge ambitions, motorsport pedigree (they supply batteries to Formula E) and personnel who know what it means to truly turn the world upside down. CEO and CTO Peter Rawlinson formerly served as vice president of vehicle engineering at Tesla and was chief engineer on the Model S project, the clean-sheet design that established Tesla and set it on the path to becoming the most valuable car manufacturer on the planet. In what must feel like a previous life, Rawlinson was also chief engineer at Lotus Cars and principle engineer at Jaguar. It’s quite the journey. Now, imagine if Lucid could create a car with as seismic a shift in technology as the Model S, coupled to the…

NEW RANGE ROVERS DON’T COME around very often, so when they do you can be certain Land Rover will pull out all the diff locks to ensure its flagship hits the spot. Here we are, then, with the fifth-generation car, built on a brand new platform that will also see service under the next Range Rover Sport (and, it’s safe to assume, other future Land Rovers). Like its predecessor, the new Range Rover is built around an aluminium monocoque, but in this case there’s more steel in the mix, forming transverse rings around the shell at the A-, C- and D-pillars and looping the front door openings, boosting rigidity to the benefit of suspension location and refinement. The new car is 53mm longer than the old one with an extra 75mm…

TALK PORSCHE AND EVs AND ONE NAME dominates the conversation: Taycan. For good reason: it’s one of the very best electric vehicles from a legacy auto manufacturer and more than a match for the EV startups raising billions of dollars every time someone posts about them on social media. But Porsche’s current electrification journey actually started with hybrid versions of the Cayenne and Panamera, though neither set any records for their purely electric range, double figures being cause for the sort of celebration usually reserved for an Italian win in the Six Nations. However, during ‘you know what’, Porsche went through the Panamera line-up and instigated a range of updates and mechanical changes. The updates were modest – mostly external nips and tucks, plus interior tech upgrades including Apple CarPlay. Beneath the…

ON THE FACE OF IT, A GIULIA VELOCE upgraded with the chassis and looks of the Giulia Quadrifoglio sounds like an excellent idea. Alfa Romeo in the UK certainly needs something appealing to help prop up its dismal sales figures (just 1574 cars last year), and the combination of the Quadrifoglio’s wonderful dynamics with a powertrain that’s much cheaper to buy – and then run – could expose the model’s sparkling qualities to a much broader audience. Step forward the Giulia Estrema, the first ‘global special series’ Alfa Romeo, which at first acquaintance appears to be exactly the above; a halfway house between Veloce and the big Q. How exciting! Alas, it transpires that the reality is rather different… In fact it takes quite a while to drill down into what exactly…

FIVE YEARS AGO, WE RAN A HALF-PAGE news story describing Ariel’s plans to build ‘Hipercar’, an electric supercar. Maybe you missed it, or saw it and thought it a fanciful idea. After all, where does a tiny, Somerset-based brand producing around 100 cars per year find £14million to develop an EV supercar from scratch? Or, just as pointedly, where does it find the expertise? The answer to both of those questions is via government-funded bodies designed to propagate innovative technology that will help the UK’s ambition to get to Net Zero. The Ariel Hipercar will be launched officially in just a few weeks. Hipercar stands for HIgh PERformance CArbon Reduction. We can’t show you any new images or get deep into the technical detail because although Ariel will build it and…