Table of contents for January 2026 in Wheels

THIS MONTH’S COVER CAR – the new MG7 – got me thinking about where we’re currently at in an automotive landscape that had, at one point not so long ago, threatened to get quite boring. Wheels testing protocol, and indeed expectation, has always been that any new car does what it is supposed to do, but also what the intended buyer needs it to do. The problem with that is most of us are pretty boring. The daily grind ensures that most of the million or so new vehicles sold every year in Australia spend their time averaging less than 30km/h as they grind through city traffic, covering some where between 50km and 60km per day, according to the surveys. Scintillating stuff… There was a period where, unfortunately, the automotive…

THERE HAVE BEEN PLENTY of milestone days through my career in cars. There was the time I test drove the world’s original auto-mobile – Karl Benz’s Benz Patent-Motorwagen from 1886. It wasn’t quite the real deal, just one of the identical replicas built by Benz apprentices in Germany to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the world’s first motor maker, but what a car. It was awful. And scary. And we had to jump off and push it up a slight slope during a short test drive in a tiny park in Canberra. Still, it was something special. And now I’m thinking of many other special days. There was the first time I drove a Rolls-Royce, when I was so nervous that my sweating palms were having trouble getting any sort of…

In the days when Holden was making great cars, the key engineering team included a relative youngster called Rob Trubiani. He lived and a worked through some excellent times and landmark cars under the red lion brand, and even set a lap record at the Nürburgring in a Commodore SS ute. Now he has a new challenge. So, before you ask – because we did – he doesn’t see himself as a turncoat for abandoning Holden and everything that made it Australia’s heartland brand. Trubiani reckons he’s now doing an even-more-important job for Aussie motorists by helping to create a new generation of worthy Chinese challengers. He has joined GWM as it embarks on an ambitious mission to become a top-five brand inside the next few years, burying its local…

A NEW DUAL-CAB is something pretty much guaranteed to get Aussie car buyers excited. And when it’s a new Toyota HiLux dual-cab, well, the stakes are pretty high. Fact is, it’s more or less impossible to over-estimate the importance of the HiLux to Toyota Australia. Or Australians generally. The celebrated dual-cab four-wheel-drive (yes, and its single-cab, extra-cab and two-wheel-drive siblings) are a major part of Toyota’s ability to be the country’s number one car brand for the 23rd consecutive year. In the process, the HiLux itself has been the nation’s favourite four-wheeled purchase for seven of the last nine years. More than 1.4 million of the blighters have been sold here since the first-gen version of 1968. Globally, Australia is the fifth largest consumer of HiLuxes and, of the 235,000…

THE DUAL-CAB UTE market around the world is looking more like a swinger’s club than an automotive segment right now. Sure, the concept of model-sharing is hardly new, but for a market sector to have embraced the concept of not just partner-sharing, but actual bed-hopping, seems pretty radical in the context of what are otherwise pretty conservative companies. Then again, globalisation can’t be ignored, nor can the corporate-survival instincts behind design, development and engineering cost-sharing be underestimated. Of course, it’s not just the concept of keys-in-the-bowl that’s raising eyebrows, it’s also the potential for disaster that lurks around every model-sharing corner. Everybody can recall an example of where this process has led a car maker completely up the wrong path, in the process tearing up money at every step along…

STATION WAGONS, once the domain of proudly suburban mums and dads everywhere, have been reinvented for these SUV infested times. Once considered frumpy and utile, the only reason anyone would have needed a station wagon was to lug around a growing family and still have space left in the back for all their stuff. It’s the template today’s armada of SUVs adheres to with the added benefit of high-riding seating positions and the idea – if not entirely the reality – that SUVs can go where mere cars and wagons can’t. But despite the ever-growing demand for SUVs, station wagons – or estates, tourers, sportwagons, call them what you will – remain a part of the automotive diaspora. The modern station wagon is just as likely to blend supercar-like performance…

IT MUST HAVE SEEMED UNTHINKABLE in 1996 that some 30 years later, car manufacturing would no longer exist in Australia. After all, we enjoyed decades of the might of Ford and Holden slugging it out for sales supremacy in what we believed would be a seemingly endless bout of upmanship. And when it came to Ford versus Holden, there really was only one fight that mattered – Falcon v Commodore. So it was big news whenever the Blue and Red corners released the latest firepower in their fight for muscle sedan supremacy, big enough to warrant a comparison test to find out which of the two contenders would take the crown. Wheels’ John Carey was given the thankless task in January 1996, pitting the latest EF II Falcon XR6 against the…

DESIGN ISSUE I’m all for Australian design content and engineering, (current drive: Everest Sport V6), but did Toyota Australia’s [new HiLux] design team learn nothing in their automotive history class re BMW’s ‘Bangle Butt’ and Ford’s AU Falcon Forte’s ‘Waterfall / Shark tooth’ grille (‘Australia’s Favourite Workhorse’, Dec 2025)? They couldn’t give them away. Ford’s AU II changed [the] grille and, voila, we have liftoff. I tried squinting a little – Transformers yes, ‘Cyber Sumo’, not so sure. Beekeepers could be interested though! As they say, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, or maybe, a face only a mother could love! Phil Lynch, Safety Beach, Vic HOLE HEAP O’ TROUBLE Come to South Australia see some of our bad main highways and sealed country roads – they put…

ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTEEN days, nine hours, 15 minutes and 30 seconds. On every wall, screen and set of lips at Audi’s new Formula 1 base in southern Germany is a reminder of just how little time remains until the Four Rings grace a grand prix for the first time in 87 years. But as the team hurtles towards that milestone, it faces a great many questions that remain unanswered. Not only has Audi made the decision to enter the fastest-moving motorsport category in a season in which its ruleset is being totally overhauled, but it has also decided to go it completely alone. Aside from purchasing long-established backmarker team Sauber, which will build the team’s chassis, each and every element of the new team is being developed from the…

THERE’S LITTLE DOUBT THAT MG AUSTRALIA HAS SUCCEEDED in an other wise saturated new-car market, to an extent few predicted when the brand relaunched under new ownership. How would a classic, British sports car brand succeed in a market that had drifted to SUVs and 4WDs, consigning the once traditional sports car staples to the back of the class? Sales not far off 60,000 in 2023, followed by a strong 50,592 in 2024 indicated that MG’s bullish approach to pricing, warranty, servicing, and standard inclusions was already winning a battle the manufacturer had no right to be in. It has meant that, whether it’s electric, hybrid, performance or daily-driver, MG has become a legitimate big-time player in the Australian new-car market and a start met with scepticism has quickly changed…

Thanks to Young Timers Garage and Theo George SUPERCARS TEND NOT TO HAVE MUCH IN THE WAY OF SHELF LIFE. If your currency is to shock and amaze, then it stands to reason that these attributes fatigue quickly. Problem is, nobody seemed to have informed Lamborghini. The Countach remained in production for 16 years, its introduction at the 1971 Geneva Motor Show was closer to the era of the Ford Model T than it is to today. Yet even now it has the ability to snap necks as it passes. If anything, its form factor appears even more extreme in a world of bloated, risk-averse designs. The Countach is tiny, considerably shorter than a Toyota 86, its alien blending of flat planes and muscular curves a design language that has…

RAV4 RESURRECTION Toyota’s RAV4 retakes the crown as Australia’s top seller in November 2025, while plug-in hybrids leap again; overall market dips slightly but stays on track for another record year AUSTRALIAN new vehicle sales in November 2025 revealed the Toyota RAV4 topping the table as the best-selling vehicle in the country, along with an increase in plug-in hybrid numbers. A total of 99,906 vehicles were registered in Australia in November 2025, which is 1.8 per cent less than November 2024, and there’s a strong chance that 2025 will set another sales record. The RAV4 returned to the top of the sales chart with 6390 registrations – its second-best result on record – and it outsold both the Ford Ranger (4673) and Toyota HiLux (3418) utes, not for the first…

OH, HEY! I’m just waiting for my Moller Skycar, which I understand only needs a few more dollars to overcome some unexpected, last-minute hurdles. I’m hoping that when it does eventually fly in, my new Nigerian fiancée will be on board, because I’ve been through a whole string of setbacks with her, too. In the meantime, what looks far more likely to arrive in my lifetime is the autonomous vehicle. And I’m pretty sure that driving is only the beginning of what we’ll be surrendering when that time comes. As we know, the bulk of investment in autonomous vehicle development has not come from the traditional automotive giants, but from tech companies like Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Intel and Nvidia … pretty much all of whom, based in the US,…

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IF WE COULD BE PERMITTED a statement of the obvious to start: electric cars are fast. Even a regular electric car is fast – certainly in internal combustion terms – and as a Wheels reader, you’re accustomed to the numbers on the specification sheets. So, what does it mean for Tesla to add ‘Performance’ to its model mix? Well, it needs to be even faster, for starters. And the new Model Y Performance we’re testing here certainly is. Quite simply, it’s brutally fast on any road under any conditions, such that you can’t really sample the speed on any road, under any conditions. Seems a little counter-intuitive, doesn’t it? But then by that measure, we don’t need supercars either, do we? Doesn’t mean we don’t want them, though, and evidently,…

IT’S A TOUGH TIME to be a car maker. Buyers’ tastes have been on the move, as seen by the rise and rise in popularity of SUVs and dual-cab utes, their combined domination leaving what were once the bread-and-butter of new car sales falling out of favour and struggling to find a market. Subsequently, sales of small cars have been hard hit in Australia with even the evergreen Toyota Corolla suffering major declines. As recently as 2013, Toyota shifted around 44,000 new Corollas. By 2024, that number had dwindled to just 24,000 or so as buyers continued to gravitate towards an ever-increasing range of SUVs. Thankfully, Korean car maker Kia still sees value in the small car and in early 2025, launched the new K4 sedan, replacing the popular but…

It’s hard to imagine that just 12 short years ago, Australians could buy a brand-new car for $9990 drive-away. Sure, the Chery J1 was a no-frills city-sized hatch-back with little in the way of creature comforts by today’s standards. But for a tenner under $10k, buyers scored a CD player, air conditioning, power windows, alloy wheels and two airbags. Fast forward to 2026 and the idea of what is an affordable car today has changed, and changed dramatically. Just one model sneaks in under the psychological $20k barrier – the Kia Picanto Sport, which in manual trim lists for $19,190. Add in on-road costs and that figure balloons to around $22,000, a price that redefines what it means to be ‘affordable’ in the new car market in 2026. Buyers shopping…

HYUNDAI i30 SEDAN N REPORT Price as tested: $53,595 (+ORCs) Km traveled: 2295km Fuel consumption: 10.8L/100km Running costs: $0 CIRCUIT TRAINING Time to test the N car’s track credentials… MOST MANUFACTURERS would run a mile if you wanted to regularly exercise their car on track, but Hyundai takes a different tack. It has set up a dedicated festival allowing owners to enjoy its N products on track, which has grown from humble beginnings into a massive spectacle, with 300-400 cars attending. This year’s festival at Winton was the perfect opportunity to stretch the legs of the i30 Sedan N in a safe environment. The 2024 facelift changed the character of the car quite significantly. New engine mounts, new rear damper bushings and a stiffer bodyshell allowed for more aggressive damper…

USER GUIDE PRICE Recommended retail figure at time of publication (asterisk indicates driveaway price) ENGINE TYPE L – in-line; V – vee; F – flat. Number of cylinders. T – turbo; S – supercharged; D – diesel; H – hybrid; E – electric SIZE Litres or kWh POWER kW TORQUE Nm TRANSMISSION M – manual; A – auto; D – dual-clutch; C – CVT WEIGHT Kerb, kg 0-100 km/h, acceleration in seconds (Wheels as-tested figures in italics) FUEL CONS Consumption in litres, or kWh, per 100km RON Octane of fuel required, as numbered, or D for diesel RANGE Electric driving range DRIVE A – all-wheel; F – front; R – rear. Any figure in bold is our own estimate. YELLOW HIGHLIGHT Indicates it is new this month…