Sommaire pour September 2025 de Wheels

WHEELS CAR OF THE YEAR has always been a broad church. In short, if it was significantly new and had four wheels, seatbelts and a steering wheel, it waseligible. But now I believe we are at a crossroads. Why? Sitting in Sydney traffic recently I had an MG 3 and a RAM 3500 sitting side-by-side in front of me. Weighing in at 3600kgs, the RAM 3500 tips the scales at three times that of the 1200kg MG 3. Looking at them adjacent to each other, I wouldn’t have been surprised if you told me the RAM 3500 weighed five times as much. It’s simply enormous. While not an exact science (remembering we are only a bit over halfway through the year), the smallest vehicle on sale in Australia that’s currently eligible…

ON A FORTUITOUSLY SUNNY SATURDAY IN JULY, I was one of an estimated 20,000 people meandering along Hastings Street, Noosa. The occasion was the third annual Noosa Concours, a laid-back, public event that curates 50 classics and supercars along the main street of the seaside town, about 90 minutes’ drive north of Brisbane. Hastings Street’s location certainly adds to the unique feel of this event. One can stroll down the main 400-metre strip, perve at Bugattis and McLarens and Paganis beyond only a thin rope, pick up a Yo-Chi and a pair of boardies from the upmarket retail outlets, and side-step all of 80 metres to spend an hour on the beach before doing it all over again. It’s also an appealing blend of a navy blazer and Panama hat concours…

LAST YEAR saw Volkswagen Golf celebrate a half-century of production, comprising eight generations and almost 40 million units. Now in recently updated Mk8.5 form, three models form the mainstream Golf range, with the performance GTI and R sitting above. Pricing starts at $38,690 plus onroad costs for the entry-level Life, right in the middle-priced heartland for the small hatch segment. At $47,990 +ORC, the top-spec R-Line (again, excluding the performance models) has increased by $5500 to make way for the new $43,690 +ORC mid-spec Style, but has also gained equipment in the process. Equipment on the R-Line includes 18-inch wheels, automatic LED exterior lighting, an illuminated front VW logo, leather trim, electric driver’s seat with memory, heated and ventilated front seats, a 10.2-inch digital driver’s screen, a 12.9-inch touchscreen with…

IN AUSTRALIA, the first small SUV that Toyota launched was not the Corolla Cross or Yaris Cross, but their more style-focused C-HR sibling back in 2017. Because it was Toyota’s only offering in the segment at the time, the C-HR sold well and has built up a loyal following of owners. Now though, the secondgeneration C-HR has arrived in Australia with arguably even more style but also with a much higher price tag – plus, with two cheaper, more practical siblings now in competition as well. Swooping lines, cool ambient lighting, big screens and soft materials describe theToyota C-HR Koba’s cabin. It doesn’t feel quite as upmarket as a Nissan Qashqai, with some cheap-feeling materials dotted about, but the dashboard and door tops are padded and soft, with the suede also…

THE HOT HATCH IS DYING. DISCUSS. Almost all of the cornerstones of the hot hatch market are gone. Ford doesn’t build one, Renaultsport has thrown in the towel and Peugeot decided a long time ago that what we needed instead were overpriced and conceptually confused crossovers. Yes, there are still holdouts. Hyundai, Toyota and Volkswagen, in particular, are still building brilliant sporting tots. Mini also offers something for the staunch hot hatch fan, and its hottest condiment is the Cooper JCW hatch, 170kW and 380Nm of attitude; yours for the princely sum of $60,990 in this Favoured trim. It’s instructive to pause for a moment and figure out where that fits into the existing hatch hierarchy. Of course we have to start with a Golf GTI, the enduring benchmark in…

I DIDN’T WANT to be that guy. You know, the one who gets a company plug-in hybrid vehicle and never plugs it in. Believe me, these people are far more common than you’d expect, lugging around a largely superfluous battery pack as they cane the corporate fuel card. In order to incentivise the whole plugging in process, some testing was therefore required. Having driven the car on electric power in its worst-use case of freeway driving last month, I tried a more suburban test route. The first attempt at fully charging the battery overnight was an abject fail. I tried to sit the Lexus on my drive and feed an extension cable to it and plug the supplied AC charger into that. This throttled the charging speed so badly that…

PICKING A WINNER from the 15 new Chinese car brands in Australia will give you an ice cream headache. It’s tough enough just to know the exact number of newbies, with ‘old timer’ MG joined by aggressive BYD and GWM, then Leapmotor and Smart and JAC arriving, and Skywell, Aio, Changan and Jetour being promised for some time in the future. Which one is best and why? It’s too early for anyone to know. Plenty of the newbies look good, a few drive well, and lots promise EV excitement and ‘all the bells and whistles’ in showrooms. Pricing is sharp, too. But who will still be here in five years? How will they cope with Australian roads and weather conditions? Will the dealers do a good job – if they even…

BETTER LATE THAN NEVER. The Renault Duster has finally made landfall here in Australia, the Dacia-badged version having been a popular fixture in Europe for 15 years. Why the long wait? It’s actually a bit boring, but the potted version is that when thirdparty business ATECO, which also manages the imports of Maserati, RAM and LDV, took over the distribution of Renault vehicles down under, it set its sights on the Duster, a car that the previous importers had dismissed as not delivering the profit margins to make it worthwhile. Now the more cynical among you might read that and, quite reasonably, expect ATECO to have padded the new Duster’s retail price with a hefty element of fat in order to justify its decision. I certainly did. When it was…

CONSTANT CHANGE in the Australian new car market means many buyers are considering brands they were previously unfamiliar with. India’s Mahindra isn’t exactly a new brand to Australia, having been sold here since 2007, but is ramping up its offering. The new XUV 3XO is its latest to hit the market. A small SUV that competes against the ToyotaYaris Cross and Mazda CX-3, the XUV 3XO is far cheaper than those two cars with pricing starting at just $23,990 drive away for the entry-level AX5L. That puts it on par with the popular Chery Tiggo 4 as the joint cheapest small SUV, but even the top-spec AX7L is just $26,990 drive away. Equipment levels are strong on both models, with highlights for the AX7L including a Harman Kardon sound system,…

Unlike its various predecessors, Lamborghini’s new ‘junior’ supercar – the Lamborghini Temerario – can’t give you 10 cylinders; but it is offering 10,000rpm instead. Being what Sant’Agata calls a ‘High Performance Electrified Vehicle’, or HPEV for short (that’s a PHEV that could also be an early-round answer on The 1% Club), it can do electric-only running, of course. Just like its bigger brother the Revuelto did, it’s taken very sizeable leaps on power and outright performance; as well as smaller ones on outright size and passenger space, all of which we’ll come to. But most of all, and despite having now hybridised the pair of them, Lamborghini wants the Temerario to have a different character than the bigger, faster, more serious Revuelto. It wants this car to be fun. Playful, rebellious,…

MG HS SUPER HYBRID REPORT Price as tested: $55,690 drive away This month: 385km Total: 705km @5.2L/100km RANGE FINDER Excellent fuel efficiency, heaps of room… there’s a lot to like so far about this new mid-size SUV MONTH TWO of ownership of Harvey, ’my’ MG HS Super Hybrid, has been great. While I’ve not put on as much distance as I’d hoped, the HS Super Hybrid continues to prove to be a comfortable, refined and efficient mid-size SUV. It’s time to delve further into its drivetrain and real-world fuel efficiency. Not to be confused with the HS Hybrid+ that’s about to go on sale, the HS Super Hybrid is a plugin hybrid using a 1.5-litre turbopetrol engine mated to an electric motor and a 24.7kWh battery. Total outputs are 220kW of power…

THIRTY-ONE YEARS. THAT’S how long the Audi A4 nameplate has been in existence, but Ingolstadt has, without much in the way of sentimentality, decided to quietly kill it. Perhaps we should have seen the writing on the wall given the fact that of the five generations of A4, the last one, the B9, had been with us for a decade, albeit with a facelift halfway through that tenure. In other words, Audi was really wringing all profits out of the last of the line. To summarise, Audi launched the original B5 generation A4 in 1994, the B6 followed in 2000, the B7 in 2004 and the B8 in 2007. This stuck around for eight years before being replaced by the B9 in 2015. In its first full calendar year on…

QUIET TIME What a prescient time to return to Wheels magazine. I used to read it religiously as a teenager and all through my twenties. Then life happened and I switched to occasional online equivalents for nearly 20 years. Pick up the July 2025 issue and O’Malley’s opening piece noting digital noise. Exactly why I picked up the magazine. I wanted uninterrupted reading time and read cover to cover, as I once did. The piece revisiting the TS50 (above) was a joy to read as a lifelong Ford Falcon fan, though I am more partial to a Barra engined model. Anthony, Perth, via email SUGGESTIONS, SUGGESTIONS It was great to see the return of the Marketplace section which you heralded proudly in the Inbox section of the July edition. But…

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“WE DO A TERRIBLE JOB with EVs.” It’s not what you expect the CEO of Hyundai Australia to be saying at the launch of a new electric vehicle but Don Romano’s not mincing his words. He’s not talking about the new IONIQ 9 specifically, but he’s acknowledging that Hyundai hasn’t made the most of their opportunities in this country, due in no small part to trying to launch EVs with a direct sales model that they had no expertise in and which alienated and bypassed their dealer network. All that has changed now, and dealers will have to be at the top of their game to get bums on IONIQ 9 seats. Without wishing to issue too much in the way of spoilers, it’s not due to any particular shortcoming…

Twenty-three hours and 59 minutes. That’s what Google Maps claims it takes to drive from where we’re sitting, overlooking the Sydney Harbour Bridge at Blues Point, to Hobart, on the Apple Isle. That factors in fuel stops, traffic at peak hour near Melbourne, the Bass Strait crossing on the Spirit of Tasmania and it also observes all speed limits. Theoretically it’s possible. Practically? That’s a whole different matter. What’s not subject to speculation is that we have a Ford Mustang Dark Horse that needs to be with its owner – and our publisher – Matt O’Malley in Hobart and the clock’s ticking. There’ll be no ‘HO Down The Hume’ style heroics here, no teasing at that point where aerodynamics rout horsepower, no eyes scanning the far horizon for police cruisers.…

THE EIGHTIES, Nineties and Noughts were a thin time for American modern classics. You can make a case for the Corvette, certain hotter Mustang and Camaro variants, and the DMC DeLorean (more for its backstory than the quality of the car) but beyond that it’s thin pickings. Look at the avalanche of hot product that came out of Japan and Europe in that era and you begin to appreciate the paucity of America’s quality output during this period. There is, however, one standout that qualifies on any measure you could choose to judge it by – the original Dodge Viper RT/10. It has a great backstory, the car itself was wild, charismatic and uncompromising, it spawned a legacy of successors, and it gave its manufacturer a massive shot in the…

LAST TIME I saw my Mustang it had 1400 fewer kilometres on it, was a lot cleaner, and it was on a different land mass to boot. Driving up to Devonport to meet Andy and photographer Ellen as they came off the Spirt of Tasmania to do this issue’s main feature, it hadn’t really occurred to me that I’d be watching someone else drive ‘my’ Dark Horse. Truth is Andy’s a safer pair of hands than anyone – but it’s still my car right? Should have I been more protective? Nah, it’s a proper driver’s car so it’s going to get proper driven, a claim I’ll stand by even if it does make me slightly uncomfortable at times. While waiting for them in a carpark opposite the Spirit’s docking point, an…