Passion For Cars

Our UK drive of the new Honda Civic reveals that it's an impressively well-rounded family hatchback What is it? We first drove this new entry point to the Honda Civic range in Spain at the start of the year. It was a big launch for Honda; after all, the new Civic is the product of the single largest development programme in the Japanese car maker’s 70-year history. With a new platform, a more sophisticated multi-link rear axle and a significantly stiffened unibody (which features increases of 52% in torsional rigidity and 88% in lateral stiffness), our Spanish drive was evidence that the Civic has benefited from Honda’s renewed focus on the European market during benchmarking. The Civic's engineering team wanted to get its family hatch to drive better, with greater comfort and more driver engagement than the immediate C-segment opposition. We've now driven the Honda Civic EX 1.0 Turbo on UK roads, where it needs to stack up against rivals such as the three-c...

Abarth 124 Spider review

From £28,825 Last year we saluted Fiat for the canny reasoning that resulted in the 124 Spider, its first rear-drive sports car since the original model was discontinued in the early 1980s. Although the amalgamation of Mazda MX-5 mechanicals and Italian styling was not a flawless integration by any means, it delivered the kind of desirable product that was so obviously missing from Fiat’s limited and conventional line-up. However, to Abarth, Fiat’s feisty tuning division , the 124 is of arguably much greater import . Where its parent, through minimal investment of resource, gained a useful image bump (particularly in the US) and a very decent roadster, Abarth gets the chance to apply its underused talents to an already admirably talented piece of kit – a dramatic shift from its current norm of uprating the Fiat 500’s modest abilities . The fact that there is also a manifest gap in the market for Abarth’s version ...

Audi A5 Cabriolet 2.0 TDI S tronic review

From £29,205 In epitomising Audi's usual brand strengths, the four-seat A5 Cabriolet makes for an appealing open-top option What is it? Audi has a particularly sturdy reputation when it comes to open-top four-seaters. The original B4-generation Audi Cabriolet, a roll-top bath of class and stocky heft, cemented the brand’s reputation in a life cycle which lasted for practically the entire duration of the 1990s, before being replaced by Peter Schreyer’s B6-generation A4 in 2000. Certainly, by the time Audi hived off the convertible into its current A5 format nearly ten years later, the model’s identity was well understood: reputable, elegantly understated, rock solid and a safe place for sunbed money. That each and every variant was somewhat staid to drive hardly registered as a problem for its buyers. Princess Diana drove a B4, and that, frankly, was enough. The latest version of the Cabriolet, as with the wider A5 range, moves through its standard...

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