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UK analysis of Mercedes-Benz GLA 220d 2020

What is it?
This is the replacement for a car that embodied the style-over-substance phenomenon of crossovers within the half of the 2010s.

When the Mercedes-Benz GLA landed on the scene in 2014, it wasn’t exactly mould-breaking. Here was a tall hatchback deemed different enough from its A-Class reference to warrant a replacement name in line with the brand's fully fledged SUVs. actually , though, it had been effectively an A-Class with a rugged styling pack and a touch more room between the wheels and arches.


by Lawrence Allan
18 June 2020
What is it?
This is the replacement for a car that embodied the style-over-substance phenomenon of crossovers within the half of the 2010s.

When the Mercedes-Benz GLA landed on the scene in 2014, it wasn’t exactly mould-breaking. Here was a tall hatchback deemed different enough from its A-Class reference to warrant a replacement name in line with the brand's fully fledged SUVs. actually , though, it had been effectively an A-Class with a rugged styling pack and a touch more room between the wheels and arches.


It was a billboard hit regardless. But at that point , the premium competition was either mediocre or notable for its absence. Jaguar, Lexus and Volvo weren’t really within the market then, while the primary Audi Q3 and BMW X1 are unlikely to be looked back on with wistful nostalgia in years to return .

This time around, however, there’s no room for a half-hearted effort. Those cynical bulked-up German hatchbacks are replaced by fully fledged small SUVs, while all three of the aforementioned no-show brands now have competitive entrants of their own. Mercedes has doubled its compact sector offerings in response, with the boxier, retro-inspired GLB muscling in alongside the more straight-laced GLA.

As before, the elemental mechanical relationship between A-Class and GLA may be a strong one. Both share an equivalent platform, technology and engines, including the range-topping 220d diesel we’re driving here

Formula Offroad: Near the most extreme motorsport in Iceland

It could cost you £2800 and two years inside, because tyre tracks dig the country’s delicate, lightly grassed volcanic tundra take decades to heal. Unlike, say, the moon or Hollywood Boulevard, nobody will hail you for leaving your imprint here.
This article was originally published on 30 July 2016. We're revisiting a number of Autocar's hottest features to supply engaging content in these challenging times.



But, wonderfully, there's an exception, and it’s called Formula Offroad.

In this sport, mad machines driven by even madder men battle it out over land and water – yes, over water – to compete for the Icelandic Formula Offroad title.

It could cost you £2800 and two years inside, because tyre tracks dig the country’s delicate, lightly grassed volcanic tundra take decades to heal. Unlike, say, the moon or Hollywood Boulevard, nobody will hail you for leaving your imprint here.


It could cost you £2800 and two years inside, because tyre tracks dig the country’s delicate, lightly grassed volcanic tundra take decades to heal. Unlike, say, the moon or Hollywood Boulevard, nobody will hail you for leaving your imprint here.


This article was originally published on 30 July 2016. We're revisiting a number of Autocar's hottest features to supply engaging content in these challenging times.

But, wonderfully, there's an exception, and it’s called Formula Offroad.

In this sport, mad machines driven by even madder men battle it out over land and water – yes, over water – to compete for the Icelandic Formula Offroad title.



In a stark white Land Rover Defender 110, we’re heading for a sunken pit at Hella, an hour east of Reykjavik, for the primary of the 2016 season’s five rounds. We’ll be following the exploits of 25-year-old defending champion Snorri Thor Árnason and his V8-powered beast, christened Choirboy.

I heard Choirboy sing at Árnason’s workshop earlier and immediately grasped the severity of the misnomer. It’s a demonic chainsaw of a noise that might give Aled Jones a moment nosebleed. It’s so loud, fierce and guttural that it'd have caused that bothersome ash cloud in 2010. The engine may be a GM LS3 stroked from 6.2 to 7.0 litres and enriched with an attempt of nitrous that triggers when the throttle is mashed. It can structure to 1000bhp and, at 1100kg, Choirboy may be a flyweight by Formula Offroad standards, with more power per tonne than a Bugatti Chiron.

Lively chief mechanic Gummi Gustafsson explains that there’s a high-pressure pump to defend against bouts of adverse gravity, and therefore the air intake has been relocated to avoid gravel and mud – although he still scoops masonry out by hand between stages.


This article was originally published on 30 July 2016. We're revisiting a number of Autocar's hottest features to supply engaging content in these challenging times.

But, wonderfully, there's an exception, and it’s called Formula Offroad.

In this sport, mad machines driven by even madder men battle it out over land and water – yes, over water – to compete for the Icelandic Formula Offroad title.



In a stark white Land Rover Defender 110, we’re heading for a sunken pit at Hella, an hour east of Reykjavik, for the primary of the 2016 season’s five rounds. We’ll be following the exploits of 25-year-old defending champion Snorri Thor Árnason and his V8-powered beast, christened Choirboy.

I heard Choirboy sing at Árnason’s workshop earlier and immediately grasped the severity of the misnomer. It’s a demonic chainsaw of a noise that might give Aled Jones a moment nosebleed. It’s so loud, fierce and guttural that it'd have caused that bothersome ash cloud in 2010. The engine may be a GM LS3 stroked from 6.2 to 7.0 litres and enriched with an attempt of nitrous that triggers when the throttle is mashed. It can structure to 1000bhp and, at 1100kg, Choirboy may be a flyweight by Formula Offroad standards, with more power per tonne than a Bugatti Chiron.

Retwind road test: Ferrari 488 GTB

2016 saw Ferrari's latest reach the Autocar test track. Here's how it performed:

We may have entered the fifth decade of the mid-engined V8 Ferrari, but the buildup to the 488 GTB’s launch was dominated by one key technical change: a twin-turbo 3.9-litre V8, which makes for sizeable gains in peak power and torque relative to the V8 of its predecessor, the 458 Italia, which had a naturally aspirated V8 like every model during this model line stretching back to the 1975 308 GTB.


The 488 GTB continues with an aluminium tub made from various alloys and deployed in various thicknesses. It’s a choice that costs the car little on claimed dry weight versus its all- or part-carbonfibre peers. The 458 Italia’s dry weight was 1380kg and therefore the 488 GTB’s is 1370kg if you choose weight-saving options. A McLaren 650S betters it by only 40kg.

Which brings us to the most event: Ferrari’s ‘F154 CB’ 3.9-litre V8, with its 90deg bank angle, flat-plane crankshaft, oversquare cylinder design and two IHI twin-scroll turbochargers, one for every cylinder bank. The engine produces 661bhp from 6200rpm to 8000rpm, with up to 561lb ft at as little as 3000rpm (depending on which gear is chosen within the Getrag seven-speed dual clutch automatic gearbox).



Two things impress about the 488’s performance: its ferocity and therefore the nature of its delivery. to urge a turbocharged engine to travel fast is one thing, and Ferrari has: the 488 dashes off the 0-60mph sprint in 3.0sec dead and reaches 150mph in just 13.3sec. A 650S is usually a minimum of a few of tenths adrift.

But Ferrari’s greater achievement is to form the 488 GTB the best turbocharged engine in production. Several manufacturers have moved from natural aspiration to turbocharging recently, but among them, the 488’s engine is remarkable for a way little lag there's and the way convincingly speed builds towards the highest end, because it rattles into the 8000rpm limiter, when it seems like it’s barely out of the mid-range.
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The 488’s handling feels serious without losing friendliness and it's a scarcity of intimidation that’s remarkable during a 661bhp supercar. Its limits are as approachable as a Toyota GT86’s. This Ferrari has a very good chassis.

Ferrari’s greatest achievement with the 488 GTB isn't simply how briskly it goes, nor how it's integrated turbos or given the car all the power of the 458 Speciale that went before it. It’s how all of the above are melded into today’s greatest supercar. Ferrari has done it again.

Mercedes-Benz AMG Geschichte

Sometimes excellent news comes in curious forms. For Hans-Werner Aufrecht, the choice by Mercedes-Benz to withdraw from all sorts of racing for 1965 must have seemed a disaster.

As an adolescent , he’d dreamt of building Mercedes race engines and now, soon after finding employment doing exactly that, the dream was close to be shattered.


A lesser person would have just accepted the inevitable and gone back to putting together road car engines. But not Aufrecht. With a like-minded colleague called Erhard Melcher, he managed to accumulate a 300SE, strip it, raise the facility of its engine from 170bhp to 238bhp and, with Manfred Schiek driving, win ten rounds of the 1965 German phaeton Championship.

News travelled fast and, by the top of the subsequent year, Aufrecht and Melcher were deluged with orders for faster Mercedes, to be used on road or track. So in 1967, they decided to offer up their jobs at Mercedes and found out shop on their own in nearby Burgstall. And within the moment when Aufrecht, Melcher and Aufrecht's hometown of Großaspach came together, AMG was born.

Business came thick and fast. Even Mercedes seemed to realise that it had missed a trick and began releasing more highly tuned versions of its road cars, the 1968 6.3-litre 300SEL to call the foremost obvious example. But what AMG could have interpreted as an effort to tug the rug out from under its feet was instead considered a singular opportunity: however fast and powerful a Mercedes super-saloon could be , AMG backed itself to form it even faster and more powerful.

It took three years, but by the time of the 1971 Spa 24 Hours, a 6.3-litre 300SEL road car with 247bhp had become a 6.8-litre racer with 428bhp. Despite the gasps of crowd and competitors alike at the looks of an outsized red cathedral on the grid, the SEL rumbled around to second place and a category win, outright victory being denied only by a rather frantic pitstop schedule needed to satisfy its appetite for fuel and tyres.

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Business boomed, boosted by a requirement for custom-made interiors also as engines, and by 1976 it had outgrown the Großaspach premises, prompting a move to Affalterbach, where the corporate remains to the present day.

By the mid-1980s, AMG was well into its stride and able not only to tune pre-existing product but to try to to so to such an extent that the resulting cars deserved to be thought of as models in their title . The AMG 500SEC of 1984 had four-valve cylinder heads long before any purely Mercedes product, but it might be 1986 before AMG smashed its way into the worldwide automotive psyche with a car that, appropriately enough, would become referred to as ‘The Hammer’.

This was a mid-sized W124 saloon into which AMG had squeezed Mercedes’ largest engine (5.6 litres), but only after fitting its own four-valve heads. One-time Autocar trial editor David Vivian described it thus: “Rapid enough to face down a Ferrari 288 GTO, it might be driven by your granny.” some time past , a rear-drive saloon with a four-speed auto ’box that would nevertheless hit 60mph in 5.0sec flat on its thanks to 183mph was an unprecedented, preposterous achievement.


By 1990, the connection between Mercedes and AMG – which had existed on a much more harmonious basis than many tuning companies and therefore the makers of their donor vehicles – became formalised. This led not only to providing Mercedes with AMG’s credibility but also to enabling AMG to sell its cars through Mercedes dealers with Mercedes-backed warranties. most importantly , however, Mercedes and AMG began to work together on product design.

The very first fruit of those labours was the W202-based C36 AMG of 1993. Today, once you can purchase an AMG C-class with 503bhp, the 276bhp of the C36 won't appear to be much, but some time past it had been enough to place it on near enough equal terms with the E36-generation BMW M3, even if, with softer springs, a better kerb weight and therefore the retention of a four-speed automatic drive , its character was distinctly different. This was an important car, because it set the tone for a whole generation of AMG models to return .

2021 The version of the Skoda Kodiaq vRS previews concept modifications

Skoda is about to update its Kodiaq large SUV after nearly three years on sale, and a camouflaged prototype of the top-rung vRS variant appears to possess been spotted testing before an anticipated reveal later this year.

The mule wears similar camouflage to a prototype of the quality Kodiaq seen last year, but its red brake calipers, larger brake discs, twin exhaust outlets and sports alloy wheels provides it away as a member of Skoda's vRS performance line-up.

Following within the footsteps of the updated Superb flagship, the Kodiaq is about to receive similarly subtle styling tweaks and an indoor technology upgrade.

Heavy camouflaging to the front and rear ends suggests the foremost obvious visual changes will are available the shape of redesigned bumpers and lightweight units, with Skoda’s trademark grille design carried over from the outgoing model.
New features for the 2020 Kodiaq are likely to incorporate the matrix LED headlights already seen on the new Superb, along side advanced driver aids like predictive control .

Both prototypes spotted thus far are towing what appears to be a dynamometer, suggesting the planned introduction of a replacement powertrain. The refreshed Superb was revealed last year and is out there for the primary time with a plug-in hybrid option. That system is additionally expected to form its way into the Kodiaq in due course.

With a 154bhp 1.4-litre turbocharged petrol engine mated to a 114bhp motor , PHEV variants of the new Superb are capable of 34 miles of pure stove and a possible 7.4sec 0-62mph time. The Kodiaq wouldn't be ready to match these figures thanks to its extra weight, but it shouldn’t be too faraway .

More likely during this prototype’s instance, and given the shortage of a grille-mounted charging port, is that it's running the revised 2.0 TDI Evo diesel first seen fitted to the new Volkswagen Passat.

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This new unit offers improved fuel economy courtesy of a high-efficiency crank, steel pistons and reduced friction throughout.

Honda resumes production at cyberattacked plants

Honda Motor Co. has resumed production at automobile and motorcycle plants within the us and other countries after they were hit by a suspected cyber attack in the week , a spokesman said on Friday.

The suspected attack comes but a month after Honda reopened its North American vehicle assembly plants following closures in late March to suits coronavirus-related, shelter-at-home rules within the us and Canada.

The spokesman said the automaker had resumed vehicle output by Thursday at its large factory in Ohio, which produces models like the CR-V crossover and therefore the Accord sedan.

"It appears that our customers' personal information has not been affected," the spokesman said by telephone, but declined to discuss any production impact.

Another vehicle plant in Turkey and motorcycle plants in India and Brazil were copy and running by Wednesday, he said, while some North American call centers and online financial services continued to experience disruptions.

The suspected attack was the second on Honda's global network after the WannaCry virus forced it to halt production for each day at a domestic plant in 2017. It comes because the company continues to reel from the impact of the coronavirus.

Separately, Honda said on Friday it might halt some production shifts at three domestic vehicle plants in July, citing a scarcity of demand and issues with procuring vehicle parts.

In a website statement, the automaker said it might shut its Yorii plant in Saitama prefecture over four staggered days next month, and halt output at the nearby Sayama plant for each day , with a three-day closure at the Suzuka plant in Mie prefecture.

Letter

2020 Honda Pilot Black Edition debuts as the most expensive Pilot yet

The Honda Pilot isn’t a shouty SUV, however this 2020 Pilot Black Edition is progressing to amendment your mind. All black everything is that the theme here, and that we suppose Honda has captured the design with success with this Pilot.

Honda is positioning the Black Edition because the absolute peak of luxury for the Pilot lineup, with the MSRP being even above the Elite. With the $1,095 destination charge superimposed in, you’ll be paying $50,715. So yes, there’s finally a Pilot for over $50,000. That’s pricy, however even a fully-loaded human is concerning $60,000.



For your hard-earned bucks, Honda provides blackout treatments to the grille, light source trim, side trim, door handles, window trim and fog lightweight trim. The 20-inch alloy wheels also are painted in black. Basically, if it may be drained black, Honda has done it. There’s a putting surprise waiting on the inside, though. rather than a bland black interior, Honda is sprinkling in red accents throughout. You get red handicraft on the front and second-row seats, door panels and also the handwheel. Red accent lighting will be found on the doors, cupholders and dash. Then, you get a sweet, red center console lid that appears shockingly cool. Black Edition logos will be found on the grille, tailgate, front seats and floor mats. perhaps it will all be cool enough to wrangle people into a dearer Pilot over a Passport.

The rest of the 2020 Honda Pilot lineup will increase in worth ever slightly. Front-wheel-drive models see a rise of $100 in MSRP, whereas all-wheel-drive Pilots area unit $200 dearer than constant 2019 Pilot. this suggests the most cost effective Pilot LX with front-wheel drive currently prices $32,645. Honda says the 2020 model year Pilot can begin to arrive in dealerships tomorrow.