Wheels

JAGUAR LAND ROVER’S boss, Thierry Bolloré, has walked away from the company, ostensibly “for personal reasons”. Hmm. With him goes his Reimagine plan to reinvent Jaguar as a Bentley-rivalling EV marque, lifting the brand sharply upmarket in the process. It’s always somewhat disorientating when a brand stretches either radically up or downmarket, but the public perception of these two strategies is markedly different. Ford’s second-gen Mondeo was hailed as one of the landmark cars in its class, but when Jaguar rebodied the Mondeo’s bones to create the more affordable X-Type, it was widely derided. It wasn’t that the X-Type was a bad car. Far from it. It just didn’t mesh with what buyers expected from Jaguar. People tend to remember failed down-market brand stretches and associate them with naked opportunism, cynicism and…

FRESH FACTS 05 THINGS IN THE CAR WORLD WE LEARNED THIS MONTH 1. That’s fast! The McMurtry Speirling has been performance tested and it has recorded 0-97km/h in 1.4 seconds and a quarter mile time of 7.97 seconds. Berserk. 2. El and back. Shelby has won a case against Denice Shakarian Helicki, widow of Gone in 60 Seconds director E.B. Halicki over trademark rights to the name Eleanor. 3. Puro-pause. Ferrari has put the brakes on sales of its $728K Purosangue SUV in Australia, as local demand threatens to blow out the order bank. 4. Ouch. One speed camera in a 30km/h zone in Liverpool, NSW raked in $2.5m in 7 months. 5. 4-star general. Honda’s HR-V has scored a mere four stars in its ANCAP rating. It scored below the five star pass marks in…

DARK MATTERS FORD’S MUSTANG Dark Horse has been the target of much rumour, but Dearborn has finally released power figures for its V8 atmo hero and they’re, well, they’re there. The breathed-on Coyote V8 is good for 500 horsepower in the old money, which equates to 373kW with a side order of 567Nm. That makes it the most powerful Mustang without forced induction or a Shelby badge. “Mustang has always pushed the envelope. From Mustang GT to Dark Horse, this is our best 5.0-litre V8 yet. It’s naturally aspirated awesomeness,” said Ed Krenz, the Mustang chief engineer, somewhat immodestly. THIS IS GETTING A BIT SILLY IT DOESN’T seem too long ago that the E36 M3 was the M3 that BMW liked to forget about, much like a cousin who lives locally who has…

FOLLOWING YEARS of speculation, it appears General Motors will spin off the Corvette nameplate into a dedicated sub-brand. Car and Driver reports that the current C8 Corvette sports car will be joined by a four-door coupe and a performance SUV – both all-electric – due in 2025. GM has already confirmed plans to launch electrified versions of the C8, with an all-wheel-drive hybrid set to be revealed later this year. The move will see General Motors compete with Porsche, providing models to take on the likes of the Taycan and upcoming Macan EV in a bid to improve the profitability of the world-famous Corvette nameplate. An electric SUV with a well-known sports car nameplate is also the formula for the Ford Mustang Mach-E; however, the Corvette SUV will be a far more premium proposition…

NINE LAPS OF the Aussie map. That’s 135,000km, which is the distance Ford Australia reckons it put on its locally converted right-hand-drive F-150s that have undergone durability testing at the You Yangs proving ground in Victoria in preparation for the large 4x4 ute’s local launch later this year. Ford says the F-150 has been punished with extreme temperatures, trailer towing, water crossings, ultra-fine sand, mud and corrosion tests. “When F-150 hits Australian showrooms, customers can rest assured it has been put through the same local durability program as the Ranger and Everest which, of course, is the same program the left-hand-drive F-150 went through in the States,” says Dave Burn, Performance and Customisation Chief Program Engineer for Ford Australia. “We’ve torture-tested, tuned and re-worked the right-hand-drive F-150 so that Aussie customers know they’re…

THE HIGH-PERFORMANCE flagship of Ford’s F-150 line-up is the Raptor R, a ute with a seriously sharp set of talons and a sub-five-second 0-100km/h time. It’s powered by a 5.2-litre supercharged V8 borrowed from the Mustang Shelby GT500, retuned for less peak power but more torque to better suit the 4x4 application. Fitted to the Raptor R it makes 522kW and 867Nm, figures which put it near enough to line-ball with the 523kW/882Nm Ram 1500 TRX sold here for just under $200,000. So could the Raptor R join the two confirmed F-150 variants in Australia? Ali Jammoul, global vehicle program director for Ford Performance, had this to say on the possibility of a locally converted F-150 Raptor: “If the opportunity is there; if we can make financial sense out of it, and it’s…