Articles by Stephen Corby

You might think Richard Hammond's jet-car crash at 460km/h last year was the most death-defying and deeply deranged stunt the Top Gear team had ever pulled, but, amazingly, you'd be wrong.The series that has been described, quite accurately, as the best TV show of all time, has returned to SBS with, quite simply, the best episode ever - The Polar Special, to kick start the new year.Sparked by a typical bit of Jeremy Clarkson posh postulating, along the lines that arctic exploration can't be that hard, and that surely you could just drive to the North Pole if you really wanted to, the boys set off on a race to the top of the world.Hammond - who always seems to get the short end of the stick, as well as the short end of short jokes - must go the traditional way, by dog sled, while Clarkson and a highly uninterested and unwilling James May, attempt to do what's never even been attempted before and drive there.When you consider the temperature regularly drops to the ugly side of minus 30 degrees celsius and that 80 per cent of the world's polar bears occupy the area they're exploring, you can see this is not the usual thing to do in a motor vehicle.Hammond quickly discovers that sled huskies produce an uncommonly large amount of doggie waste and that being a sledder means catching a lot of said waste between your chattering teeth.At least, that's what happens when things are going well - that is he's actually standing up behind the sled, rather than falling off it spectacularly. To say the race is harder on Hammond than his car-bound co-hosts is to engage in outrageous understatement.At one stage Hammond is so emotionally and physically beaten he can't even bring himself to do a piece to camera. He just stares, speechless. Of course, the other two are doing it slightly easier in their very specially prepared Toyota Hilux, but they are also putting their lives closer to the line.Taking a massive vehicle like that across ice that could break and plunge them into deep-freeze-deathly water at any moment, does put them slightly on edge with each other, as May recalled."After a few days we were arguing for hours about the significance of just-in-time manufacturing versus the importance of interchangeability of parts," he said."By day four we had been reduced to food fantasises involving sandwich spread and sausages. Don't imagine we were nice and warm in the car. We weren't allowed to have the heating on because it would interfere with our special misery-spec Arctic onboard cameras."In fact, while Clarkson found the whole thing exciting, May was decidedly less keen."I didn't actually want to go at all," he said. "I hate snow, extreme cold and dressing up. I knew it would involve a lot of camping, since there are no hotels around there. I hardly dare remind myself of the camping. The real problem was having to share a tent with Clarkson who was incapable of helping to put the thing up. I'm not a great camper, but Clarkson is a worse one."In short, it's an outstanding journey, filled not just with the usual humour and boy-banter, but cinematography worthy of Attenborough. The punishment the hosts put themselves through makes for startling TV. And the good news is The Polar Special marks the start of a new series of Top Gear on SBS. Good news for the network, too, as it's the highest rating show in its history.It also has a global audience of more than 500 million, in 120 countries. Next episode you'll get to see the famous Hammond crash in the first episode of the ninth series. His return to the show from what looked like certain death is emotionally and hilariously handled.Later this year we'll also get to see the first episodes of the new Australian Top Gear. Our country's car love has seen us become the first place in the world to be licensed to make our own version of this fabulous format. It remains to be seen whether the Aussie version will attempt to match the Brits by trying to drive to the South Pole. 

The WRX is a legend, of sorts, in car world, but it's never, ever been bought, or stolen, because of its visual features.  From the very first, it's been about as attractive as the offspring of an anteater and a Tonka truck.  And yet young men of a thrusting temperament, older blokes who still favour No Fear t-shirts and criminals who enjoy driving into shop windows have chosen these cars in their droves.It would be fair to say that each successive WRX has been slightly uglier than the last, which makes the original something of a collector's item, but this time Subaru's designers have really outdone themselves.The new Impreza is perhaps the most diversely derivative car ever. The fact that it's now a hatch and no longer a sedan is a fairly rude shock to start with, but it also looks like part BMW 1 Series, part Daewoo, part Seat Ibiza with a large sprinkling of Mazda 3. In fact, just about the only car it doesn't look like is a Subaru. While being ugly is nothing new for a Rex, the new one is kind of plain as well. At least the old ones had presence as well as pugilist features.The feeling of massive changes being afoot continues inside, where the front seats no longer look like they've been stolen from a rally car. Sure, they're still buckets and still sportily supportive, but the people in the back seat can actually see the windscreen, for the first time ever.Before even turning the key, the feeling that this WRX was no longer a Rex was niggling. Then I fired it up and waited for the fireworks. I have to say that for the first few days, pootling around town, I was deeply disappointed.Imprezas of old always gave you the feeling that they wanted to rip your arms off and use them to punch a police officer, but this new car felt polite and refined. It wasn't slow, exactly, but it wasn't a balltearer below 3000rpm, and there's not much room in Sydney traffic to explore beyond there.Then there was the sound, or lack of it. While 98 per cent of Rexes you see on the road have aftermarket pipes that make them sound like a fat man blowing raspberries into a megaphone, even the standard one always had a bit of oomph to it. But the sounds of the new WRX were so distant and decorous that they seemed to be coming from another car.All was not going well, so we headed out of town for the real test — could this super Sooob still tear up a bit of country road and put a smile on your dial? Fortunately the answer was a resounding, surprising yes.Given its head, the WRX is still a seriously quick, slick sportscar, it just makes a lot less fuss about what it's doing. Grip-and-go cornering has always been this car's forte and the way it can hang on through, and launch out of, turns is still a highlight.What is different is the slightly softer feel to the way it does this.The suspension set-up feels a little more gentle and this means the driver is a little less involved with the road than before. Even the steering feels a bit lighter, which is a shame.The 2.5-litre boxer four-cylinder still boasts the same power figures as the previous model — 169kW and 320Nm — but the engine has been retuned to deliver its grunt lower in the rev range.This means less turbo lag and more instantaneous acceleration.While the new car is certainly more grunty from lower down, it still doesn't get exciting until about 4000rpm. On the plus side, it does continue to be exciting all the way up to 6500rpm. Mind you, even at that pace, the noise you'd expect seems to be missing. And despite being lighter, the new car certainly doesn't feel quicker - although apparently it is, 0.1 of a second faster to 100km/h at 5.8 seconds.The five-speed gearbox is a slick and faultless little unit, but it's still missing a gear, no matter how you look at it, and not having sixth on long freeway runs could get wearing.Over all, though, as motoring scribes have been bleating for years, it's hard to think of another car that delivers as much for the money as a WRX. This latest impressive Impreza is still $39,990, the same price the Rex was 10 years ago. What you don't get for your money these days, though, is the hard, harried edge of old. And that's a shame, for purists at least.So, the new WRX is a lighter, more refined, quieter, more roomy and (very slightly) faster car than before, yet I'd still take an old one, every time. Perhaps looks do count for something after all.PS: After handing back the WRX, I took an RS Impreza for a week, but I can't tell you anything about it, because the automatic transmission it was fitted with rendered it too boring for words.It also had a “Sport” feature, the only function of which seemed to be to illuminate a dash light that says “Sport”. Stick with the WRX.

It lurks on the roof of the new Mini Cooper S and if it wasn’t designed by a woman, or perhaps a committee of women, I’ll eat a beach towel.Amazingly, I very nearly missed out on finding this simpering switch altogether.I had merely made a mental note to moan endlessly about the fact that the interior lighting was far too bright, and an annoying shade of blue to boot.But then I went on a stupidly long drive to the snow from Sydney, entirely in the dark. By the time I got to Goulburn I was so annoyed at being bathed in the sort of light you normally only find in tanning salons that I decided there had to be adjustment available to me.After playing with all the available – and beautifully funky feeling – toggles and buttons I found the right one, flicked it and nearly crashed the car.Far from dimming this blithering blue light, the switch merely changed it to a pinky hue I can only describe as “dawn at the beach”.Intrigued, yet revolted, I kept flicking and found that the car’s mood lighting can be changed to vermillion, purple, a Midori green, a yellow-and-brown Austin Powers kind of motif and, thankfully, orange.I say thankfully because at least the orange choice blends in with the rest of the dash lighting, although the combined effect is so bright you feel like you’re driving around in a ’70s kitchen.Of course a little bit of kitsch is to be expected when an idea like the Mini is recooked, as this one was recently, gaining a turbocharged 1.6-litre engine and exterior tweaks so subtle that they’re like the effect of ageing on Elle McPherson’s body.You know they must be there, but they’re not really noticeable, and the overall effect is still so darn pretty.The shame about this shameful mood-lighting switch (surely it would make more sense in a 7 Series, where you can stretch out a bit) is that it taints what is otherwise an excellent, and much-improved, interior.The last Cooper S had a grey plastic finish that looked like it had been set upon by a whole childcare centre full of greasy fingered little fiends. It was supposed to look like brushed aluminium, I think, but it just looked liked rushed ab-libbing by the designers.Our test vehicle was all red leather and funky fake-wood plastic, but it all felt pleasant and of BMW build quality.And the dash just might be the coolest in the whole car world.The centrally mounted speedo has an indicator arrow whizzing around the outside, like one of those old-style weighing scales you used to find outside chemists, leaving space in the middle for a groovy little screen.This screen displays functions that can be selected with a very simple but still slightly iDrive- like controller, or the satellite navigation map.On the steering binnacle in front of you is a rev counter which can, if you like, also display a digital readout of your speed.When the Mini was first launched here, they couldn’t get away with that arrangement, due to ADRs, and we were the only country in the world with the speedo stuck to the steering wheel, but this time they’ve got around it.Looking at your speed on the massive central dial is totally impractical and no one likes having that information displayed where your passenger can see it so clearly anyway, but you put up with it because, as I say, the dash just looks so cool (even in vermillion-bathed light).While the old Cooper S was supercharged, and had a wondrous whine to go with that, the new engine – shared with the PSA Peugeot-Citroen group – is an award-winning turbo unit and offers more lowdown punch and usable torque than before.You get 128kW of power at a joyous 5500rpm and 240Nm of torque from 1600rpm to 5000rpm, which blips up to 260Nm via an overboost function when you really boot it.The result is a lot more fun than 128 kilowatts should be, and a 0 to 100km/h time of 7.1 seconds.The turbo doesn’t sound as good as the engine it replaces, but the performance more than makes up for that.Not many people can engineer fun into a car as cleverly as BMW/Mini and, much like its parent company’s cars, the best thing about the new Cooper is the steering.It really is go-kart like in that it needs so little lock wound on and it responds so pointedly.The great thing about the Mini is that it can make even the boredom of the urban commute fun – the bends on and off the Anzac Bridge every day were a particular joy.The ride isn’t too bad, for a car with such a short wheelbase, until you hit an expansion joint and it feels like you’ve run over a sequoia trunk. Not only do your teeth rattle, your ribs do.In short, and sweet, form, there’s a lot to love about the new Mini Cooper S, even with its stupid interior lighting system.It is, of course, entirely impractical if you’re ever going to carry more than one friend. And it is, undeniably, very expensive for a small car – prices start at $39,900 in standard trim and rise to very nearly $50k.But it’s not meant to be a practical car, it’s mean to be a fun one and on that basis it’s worth every cent.

It's not every day you drive along a dark, winding road at night, actually willing a kangaroo to hop out in front of you. But where else could we fully test BMW's freaky, futuristic Night Vision system?We had to discount taking it onto a battlefield against similarly equipped tanks, because we don't have the Top Gear TV show's budget.Hunting a group of C-grade actors pretending to be commandos through a jungle, Predator-style, was discounted for similar reasons.The system, a $4000 option on the 5, 6 and 7 Series, uses a thermal-imaging camera to beam hot and steamy footage of the road ahead, some 300m ahead, in fact, to the display screen in the middle of the dash.It works stunningly well, but can also be supremely distracting if you keep it on while driving around town.The really fascinating stuff is all the useless information Night Vision provides you with.Like how much heat comes out of the diff on a four-wheel drive, the fact that some people are, literally, hotter than others, and some have really hot legs, and that you can see the exhaust system glowing on every car in front of you.In fact, every vehicle looks like it's had one of those hoony blue downlights installed.You can also determine, among the parked cars, which ones have been driven most recently.It really does make you feel like the Predator, if the Predator got a job in a bank, started wearing a suit and bought a posh car.The information you're presented with verges on overload, and watching the screen did make two passengers feel physically ill.The fact that, being a bit of a geek, I couldn't take my eyes off the screen was also bordering on dangerous. But the Night Vision system really comes into its own when you get out of town and there's suddenly a lot less heat to see on the screen, allowing you to look at the road, like you're supposed to.This means your eyes are drawn to the Night Vision screen only when something,  a cyclist, a kangaroo, a particularly keen hitch-hiker poping up in the distance.The advantage in this setting is obvious, as the thermal-imaging camera picks up these hot items before the naked eye can.As BMW helpfully points out, about 45 per cent of fatal road accidents occur at night, even though more than two-thirds of all driving is done during the day.And it's a fair bet that our headlight-loving fauna is involved in a disturbing number of those night-time incidents.With that in mind, $4000 doesn't seem like a lotto spend. Even if it saves you only once, it'sa great investment.What is a slight concern is that, until the technology becomes as common as satnav, you're going to have a lot of rich toy boys driving around showing off their Night Vision to their mates, barely having their eyes on the road.The system we tested was installed in a 550i that was so heavily laden with gadgetry it made the space shuttle look like the Wright Brothers' little plane.When we weren't oohing and aahing over the infra-red images, we did notice that it was a fine executive express with plenty of grunt, sweet steering and a smooth ride.If I could just find that $163,900 I lost down the back of the couch (plus $4000 for Night Vision), I'd think about buying one. 

It has been a long and painfully infuriating search, but I have finally, blessedly found it, it's the world’s most pointless button. It lurks on the roof of the new Mini Cooper S and if it wasn’t designed by a woman, or perhaps a committee of women, I’ll eat a beach towel. Amazingly, I very nearly missed out on finding this simpering switch altogether. I had merely made a mental note to moan endlessly about the fact that the interior lighting was far too bright, and an annoying shade of blue to boot. But then I went on a stupidly long drive to the snow from Sydney, entirely in the dark. By the time I got to Goulburn I was so annoyed at being bathed in the sort of light you normally only find in tanning salons that I decided there had to be adjustment available to me. After playing with all the available and beautifully funky feeling toggles and buttons I found the right one, flicked it and nearly crashed the car. Far from dimming this blithering blue light, the switch merely changed it to a pinky hue I can only describe as “dawn at the beach”. Intrigued, yet revolted, I kept flicking and found that the car’s mood lighting can be changed to vermillion, purple, a Midori green, a yellow-and-brown Austin Powers kind of motif and, thankfully, orange. I say thankfully because at least the orange choice blends in with the rest of the dash lighting, although the combined effect is so bright you feel like you’re driving around in a ’70s kitchen. Of course a little bit of kitsch is to be expected when an idea like the Mini is recooked, as this one was recently, gaining a turbocharged 1.6-litre engine and exterior tweaks so subtle that they’re like the effect of ageing on Elle McPherson’s body. You know they must be there, but they’re not really noticeable, and the overall effect is still so darn pretty. The shame about this shameful mood-lighting switch (surely it would make more sense in a 7 Series, where you can stretch out a bit) is that it taints what is otherwise an excellent, and much-improved, interior. The last Cooper S had a grey plastic finish that looked like it had been set upon by a whole childcare centre full of greasy fingered little fiends. It was supposed to look like brushed aluminium, I think, but it just looked liked rushed ab-libbing by the designers. Our test vehicle was all red leather and funky fake-wood plastic, but it all felt pleasant and of BMW build quality. And the dash just might be the coolest in the whole car world. The centrally mounted speedo has an indicator arrow whizzing around the outside, like one of those old-style weighing scales you used to find outside chemists, leaving space in the middle for a groovy little screen. This screen displays functions that can be selected with a very simple but still slightly iDrive- like controller, or the satellite navigation map. On the steering binnacle in front of you is a rev counter which can, if you like, also display a digital readout of your speed. When the Mini was first launched here, they couldn’t get away with that arrangement, due to ADRs, and we were the only country in the world with the speedo stuck to the steering wheel, but this time they’ve got around it. Looking at your speed on the massive central dial is totally impractical and no one likes having that information displayed where your passenger can see it so clearly anyway, but you put up with it because, as I say, the dash just looks so cool (even in vermillion-bathed light). While the old Cooper S was supercharged, and had a wondrous whine to go with that, the new engine, shared with the PSA Peugeot-Citroen group, is an award-winning turbo unit and offers more lowdown punch and usable torque than before. You get 128kW of power at a joyous 5500rpm and 240Nm of torque from 1600rpm to 5000rpm, which blips up to 260Nm via an overboost function when you really boot it. The result is a lot more fun than 128 kilowatts should be, and a 0 to 100km/h time of 7.1 seconds. The turbo doesn’t sound as good as the engine it replaces, but the performance more than makes up for that. Not many people can engineer fun into a car as cleverly as BMW/Mini and, much like its parent company’s cars, the best thing about the new Cooper is the steering. It really is go-kart like in that it needs so little lock wound on and it responds so pointedly. The great thing about the Mini is that it can make even the boredom of the urban commute fun, the bends on and off the Anzac Bridge every day were a particular joy. The ride isn’t too bad, for a car with such a short wheelbase, until you hit an expansion joint and it feels like you’ve run over a sequoia trunk. Not only do your teeth rattle, your ribs do. In short, and sweet, form, there’s a lot to love about the new Mini Cooper S, even with its stupid interior lighting system. It is, of course, entirely impractical if you’re ever going to carry more than one friend. And it is, undeniably, very expensive for a small car, prices start at $39,900 in standard trim and rise to very nearly $50k. But it’s not meant to be a practical car, it’s meant to be a fun one and on that basis it’s worth every cent.  

Generally, I’m in favour of trying the local delicacies in a foreign country, but a plate of hair-rings (sometimes spelled “herrings”) or some briney kippers is enough to turn anyone’s gills the colour of mushy peas.The Swedes are also very Green people, as in so environmentally aware that if they ruled the world we’d all live in flatpacked houses made out of recycled Ikea packaging and there’d be so little global warming we’d all have to wear black skivvies.Of course, we’d all have to drive Volvos or, for the slightly luckier, Saabs.Fortunately, you don’t have to wait for the meek Swedes to inherit the earth before you can use their know-how to do your bit for the planet.The Saab 9-5 BioPower is the company’s current future vision, and the best news about it is that, finally, someone has delivered a clean, green machine that doesn’t accelerate like a snail with chronic fatigue.In fact, the BioPowered 9-5 has more power and torque when it runs on ethanol than it does when chewing nasty old petrol, which pretty much makes it the great leap forward those of us who love driving and trees equally have been waiting for.The 2.0-litre turbocharged engine produces 132 kW and 280 Nm when running on E85, (a mix of 85 per cent ethanol and 15 per cent petrol). That’s up from 110 kW and 240 Nm, or a 20 per cent increase in maximum power and a 16 per cent increase in torque over the equivalent petrol model.To put that in terms teenage boys will understand, the Bio version will do 0 to 100km/h in 8.5 seconds, compared to 9.8 seconds on petrol.It should come as no surprise that the Swedes have been snapping up BioPower vehicles the way they normally Hoover up salted fish, with 12,000 sold since they were launched in July, 2005 – accounting for 80 per cent of all 9-5 sales in Saab’s home country.Obviously, it helps having ethanol widely available, but the struggle to find the stuff shouldn’t put off Australian buyers because, ingeniously, the car’s “flex-fuel’’ system means it can run - without any LPG-style flicking of switches - on any combination of E85 fuel and/or petrol.Of course, if you have to fill it up on normal unleaded, you’ll notice the lack of zip. The 9-5 we tested had the words BioPower written in 30-foot-high letters down both sides of the car (and if I had a dollar for every time someone asked me whether it ran on laundry powder, I could have bought one) so I was too embarrassed to drive it very far.But, late at night, I did do enough kilometres to note that it really did have considerable, tweaky-turbo-style get up and go.Unlike some Saabs, though, it had plenty of off-the-line grunt to match the top-end turbo rush.It’s not a sports car, by any means, but for a family sized vehicle it was a more than honest performer, with plenty of overtaking ability.The steering and dynamics didn’t seem too poor, either, but the 9-5 does fall down slightly on the interior front – which used to be a Saab strong point.Some of the fit and finish didn’t seem to be as good as we used to expect from the Swedes, and a cynic would point to the fact that the company is owned by GM these days and thus not quite master of its own destiny.The car also feels a little dated, but this could be because I can vaguely remember going to the launch of the original 9-5 in 1997 (and being forced to starve because there were only 53 types of herring on the menu), and things don’t seem to have changed much.The exterior design has at least been tweaked a little, though, and it’s undeniably a classy looking vehicle, with plenty of prestige presence and a svelte nose.So, alternative fuel issues aside, it’s not a bad car, but is turning to ethanol a worthwhile investment, or just a worthy one?The bad news is that, because it has less energy than petrol, you need to burn more ethanol to go the same distance – about 30 per cent more, according to Saab.We were seeing slightly scary figures – like 22 litres per 100km – on the trip computer. So, that loss of economy is going to take out any price advantage.On the plus side – and anyone whose seen An Inconvenient Truth will appreciate this – ethanol is a renewable and carbon-neutral fuel.This is because emissions from the exhaust pipe are balanced by the amount of CO2 that is removed from the atmosphere, through photosynthesis, when the crops that the ethanol is harvested from are grown.Saab Australia estimates that you can cut your carbon emissions by 80 per cent with a BioPower vehicle.And ethanol really can work as a fuel source. Nearly all of Brazil’s domestic road transport needs are met by bioethanol, which is produced from sugar cane.The bad news is that E85 is not readily commercially available in Australia yet, but a company called Manildra owns a number of service stations which have ethanol pumps.Despite this fact, Saab is taking orders for the BioPower vehicles, and expects to have them on sale here by June.Unlike some alternativeish cars (think the Toyota Pious), the price premium won’t be huge, with Saab Australia tipping just a $1000 to $1500 sting on top of a base 9-5, which sells for $57,900.The company is determined to take the moral high ground, with a pledge to become the country’s first carbon-neutral marque.Saab is buying a one-year ‘offset’ from Greenfleet for every one of its vehicles purchased.Under the agreement, Greenfleet will plant 17 native trees for each car sold, which will absorb the greenhouse gas emissions produced by those vehicles in one year.

The trident logo on the grille and the hefty proportions – five metres from tip to curvaceous tail – give it the look of some sleek speedboat that’s grown wheels.Inside, it’s a lush millionaire’s playground, with more black and red leather than a bordello and enough carbon fibre to make an F1 geek weep.Beneath the prow – sorry, the bonnet - lies a loquacious 4.2-litre V8, good for 294kW and 451Nm of torque.The sheer size and 1863kg weight of the thing – not to mention the weight of the $258,000 pricetag – initially put you off having a genuine go.But the way the car’s superlative Skyhook suspension dismisses bumps and keeps you in touch with the road, the way it turns in, the Ferrari-like feel of the steering and the willingness of the engine eventually tempt you.It is then that you discover that not only is the rich band of torque available low down in the rev rage – for easy cruising – it provides a real shove through the top end as well. There’s even a big, fat pocket of power that waits in the shrieking 5000-7000rpm redline rush.Of course, if you’re exploring that part of the engine’s abilities, you’re probably breaking several laws at once. Then again, you’ll probably still have a massive smile plastered across your face by the time the police catch up with you.Get to know it, and the Quattroporte can provide some serious thrills – yet all the while your passengers, including the two in the back – are lounging around in louche luxury. The massive brake pedal has plenty of feel, but it seems like you need to really squeeze the stoppers at times. Of course, pulling up nearly two tonnes of expensive metal is a lot of work.If you leave the gearbox in D, it is smooth enough – although still not as seamless as a conventional six-speed auto (luckily Maserati has one of these on its way here soon). If you put it in Sport mode, however, the D-option really starts to feel shunty, and not very executive class at all.The best option, obviously, is to change the gears yourself, using the Rolex-feeling paddles behind the steering wheel. The bits where your fingers touch the back of the flappy bits is even lined with soft material. Nice. The DuoSelect transmission’s changes are fabulously quick and effortless, but the whole effect was spoiled for me by the fact that the paddles don’t turn with the wheel, so if you want to change a cog mid-corner, you have to take one hand off the tiller.Other car-makers fix this problem by having the paddles attached to the wheel, so they’re always near your fingers.Of course, it’s the kind of thing you’d only really notice if you’re pressing on. And most buyers of the Quattroporte don’t want to drive it like it’s a Ferrari. If they wanted a Ferrari, they’d buy one of those, too.The Maserati is a magnificent boulevarde cruiser and it eats up freeway miles with the kind of effortlessness a cheetah displays at a slow jog.But this super saloon has so much sporting heart that it seems a shame many owners will only ever trundle from yacht club to golf club in them.Every time there’s a Maserati sold to someone like that, there’s a group of engineers in Italy who go down to the café and cry quietly into their coffees.Then they go out, get drunk and be sick on their shoes.

Sure, he might admit he’d made her a little overstuffed in the lip department the first time around and tone that area down to something more recognisably human, but otherwise there wouldn’t be a lot of tweaking required.Improving on perfection isn’t easy, even for God, so spare a thought for the poor pencil pushers at Audi who were asked to redesign the TT.This car was groundbreaking when it arrived, back in 1998, was then awarded the highest form of praise by other companies as they tried to copy it (check out the roofline on a Nissan 350Z, for example) and still – today – looks futuristically cool.In fact, it looks like some oversized rollerskate from that excellent movie, Tron.I imagine a series of meetings with the red-eyed designers turning up time after time with a car that looked pretty much exactly like the old TT.“Seriously, we changed the colour of the indicator reflectors – it’s a totally new car,” they would plead.Actually hacking into those fluid lines to come up with something quite markedly different must have felt like sacrilege.The first few times I saw the new shape I got angry. Why on earth would anyone mess with a one-off like the TT? Why didn’t they just start again and call it something else? But after a week of intimate time with one, I must admit I’ve done a backflip of Olympic, or even Politician standard.The new TT isn’t as attractive as the old one, but viewed in isolation, it’s still a pretty sharp, hawk-beaked looking vehicle. My neighbour even described it as being “a bit too porn star” for her taste, so it’s not exactly a sleeper.It’s derivative without being damaging to the original concept and it grows on you. It may yet be seen as a classic in its own right, but that will have more to do with the way it drives than how it looks.The one area where the designers definitely got it wrong, however, is the interior. As good as the old TT looked from the outside, my favourite feature was always the cockpit, which just felt – and looked – special.It was the shiny, garage-door style cover for the stereo that topped it off, but generally there was a sense that the interior had been designed to reflect the exterior. And it worked.The new car is merely another Audi inside, with plenty of nice-feeling plastics but no character or pizzazz – with the obvious exception of the flat-bottomed steering wheel, which is a thing of boy-racer beauty.Luckily the TT has so much character elsewhere that you’re entirely willing to overlook the innards.Because, while we can debate over whether the look of the new car has matched the old one, the new TT is a far, far better thing to drive.It is one of those cars where you just know, in the first five minutes in a heavily trafficked 60km/h zone, it’s going to be special.It has a taut, on-its-toes feel for the road. Muscular, meaty steering – at last – and an exhaust note that is as different from its forebear as Kylie Minogue is from Ozzy Osbourne.The old TT had a pleasant enough rasp to it, while the new one blows raspberries at rasping and gives out an angry, howling growl, which is at its best on the over-run and when running from the horizon.On a favourite bit of road, the new TT put on a display of corner-biting, scenery blurring genuine sports-car behaviour.It handled and went and stopped like, well, almost like certain other brands that Audi just never competed with before, in such a serious way.The old TT was fun enough, but it always felt like swinging a slick, aluminium baseball bat compared with a fine piece of willow, or a sword.Driving the new one gets your pulse racing the way looking at the old one did. Impressively, the model we were driving was merely the base model, powered by a 2.0-litre turbo FSI engine with 147kW, good for a 0 to 100km/h time of 6.4 seconds.Even the fact that the engine only drove the front wheels wasn’t as annoying as it should be.And I just have to mention the steering again. Not usually an Audi strong point – they more favour the light approach than the premium lager – it really does the business here, connecting you with the road at broadband speeds.So, with the inherited looks of the old TT, but a good 30 per cent more fun, this new Audi is one of the company’s best efforts ever.Even a pricetag of $68,900 starts to look like reasonable value.Most people will spend $72,500 instead and get the S-tronic flappy paddle auto box. The fools.I’ll admit I’m keen to try the top-line V6 quattro version, for $88,900, not so much for the 3.2-litre V6 engine (reportedly it weighs the nose down too much and takes some of the free spirit away), but for the all-wheel-drive gripfest – and the 0 to 100km/h time of 5.7 seconds sounds like fun, too.

This monster of a small car attempts the engineering no mean feat of putting 190kW and 380Nm through the front wheels only, and most of the time it gets away with it.

The station wagon is dead. Which is a bit sad, really. Like many of my era, I have fond memories of the ubiquitous family wagon, packed to the gills with going-away gear or fitted out in what we thought of at the time as luxurious style — a mattress in the back.I have spent some of the more fevered, least comfortable and most dangerously dehydrating nights of my life in the back of station wagons.But the wagon has gone the way of the panel van, the digital watch and the one-cent lolly. No one seems to buy, or even make, them any more.Its place has been taken, sadly, by the omnipresent, omni-functional SUV.Sales of these American-lifestyle vehicles were meant to be in decline, yet it seems like every week we're putting on rugged shoes and heading off somewhere remote to drive a new one.The only concession to the downsizing fashion, and the passion for economy, is that they're being launched with smaller, more frugal engines these days.This seems like a fine idea, until you picture a cruise ship being powered by the outboard engine off a tinny.The latest example is Mitsubishi's Outlander, which the company tells us fills the gap between the family wagon that parents used to buy and the Pajero they would get if they were slightly more fond of breathing dust and fighting ants for their dinner.If you haven't heard of the Outlander (and that's no crime), you probably have heard of its closest competitor, Toyota's RAV4. And you'll be impressed to hear that, in Japan, the Mitsubishi outsells the beloved-by-women RAV.No doubt buyers are impressed by the Outlander's styling — which, if you cover up the badge, doesn't look a million sketch pads away from the Mercedes-Benz M-Class.Mitsubishi's ability to build the brilliant, all-wheel-drive Lancer Evolution series also means people are willing to trust its technical know-how, which provides the Outlander's All Wheel Control system.AWC combines the car's stability-control software with its electronically controlled four-wheel drive system to make it grip like the fingernails of a man hanging over a cliff.An Active Select system also means the driver can also switch between front-wheel drive, an active all-wheel drive setting and locked-in four-wheel drive — all "on the fly".The Outlander's interior is reasonable, choosing function over form, but it feels well made and nothing rattles. It's also got nine cupholders. Nine.Unfortunately, the lumbar support in the front seats is a bit too enthusiastic. It feels as though you've just got in the car after a really short woman who sits on a cushion, and she has quickly cross-stitched it into the seat back.It was also made clear that Outlander buyers will be doing an incredible amount of shopping. Large parts of the car have been designed around this fact.It has a drop-down rear tray, which can hold up to 200kg of groceries. To make all this load-carrying even easier, it has one-touch "roll and tumble" seats.That makes it sound like they've got tiny Russian gymnasts in the back who obediently let you sit on them, then, at the press of a button, perform a forward roll out of the way, so you can fit in your arm-breaking 200 kilos of shopping.An optional third row of seats is not recommended for people who don't like caving, or playing hide and seek.When it comes to the drive, the Outlander's steering is reasonably communicative, the brakes are fine and the ride is rather clever, managing to stay smooth even on Tasmanian dirt roads that resembled a clay pan covered in marbles the size of tennis balls.But it's underpowered — at least with the 2.4-litre, four-cylinder engine in the base model, priced from an attractive $31,990. This produces 125kW and 226Nm, which isn't that much when you're hauling 1560kg.Hills aren't the Outlander's friends. Keep the willing but struggling engine up and buzzing, and it will maintain a reasonable lick of pace, but forget to get a good run-up at a slope and you can find yourself sliding back down it.The three-litre V6 in the top-spec model, which begins at $37,890, has 162kW and 276Nm — that's more like it. Prices top out at $47,990 for the VRX.Of course, the one thing an Outlander, or any other SUV, can't offer that station wagons could is a cornering-friendly low centre of gravity.But moving the family unit is not about driving pleasure, apparently, it's about sitting tall and feeling (at least potentially) rugged. And the Outlander does all that with aplomb.