TUESDAY - I haven’t sat in our Range Rover Sport for several months, but due to its popularity with my colleagues, the mileage has crept up to 27,000.
Very interested to give it a whiz today, especially since I’d been driving the lightly revised model (power up 14bhp; 74lb ft more torque) hours earlier. If you want proof that things always improve in the car game, this is it. For 2016, the Sport’s creamy torque is even creamier. The slow step-off we’ve criticised is noticeably improved, if still not perfect. Best of all, the Range Rover Sport feels, as ever, to have been created personally for me.
WEDNESDAY AM - Our long-awaited Honda NSX drive story – and the conclusions it reaches about speed with usability – takes me back to the 1990s, when Autocar ran a 3.2-litre NSX as a long-termer. The car was so enjoyable, easy to use and all-round excellent (apart from being unbelievably hungry for rear tyres) that it stayed for years: one of our grands fromages made it his daily smoker until the odometer notched 90,000.
One fond memory is collecting the car at John Cooper Garages of West Sussex, then a Honda dealership and the well-spring of the traditional Mini Cooper. The Honda handover was done by the late Formula 1 constructor himself, and he applied his famous moniker to the inside of our engine bay to mark the moment.
He was a hilarious guy who was soon telling tales of his early racing days. At one summer meeting in the 1950s, he allowed himself to be seen furtively adding Ribena to his cars’ cooling systems, before confiding to a chatty paddock character that he’d discovered a new way of preventing cars from boiling on the grid. He chuckled through the rest of the afternoon as he watched rivals pouring blackcurrent concentrate into their own cars’ bubbling radiators.
WEDNESDAY PM - First trot for ages in a Mini JCW, hottest ‘brick’ you can buy from a showroom. It’s as quick and refined as you’d expect of a third-generation BMW whose parameters have hardly changed. Loved the ever-ready poke, the quick and precise steering and the bum-on-floor driving position. And if I ever get the chance to shake hands with the team that sorted the damping, I’ll be proud to do it. The latest JCW has superb body control but always stays comfortable.
Mind you, I’m not keen on the dingy interior (ditch that dinner plate, please, and give us a decent switch layout) or the way the Mini’s styling has been stretched over a new set of baby BMW underbits. But neither would be a deal-breaker.
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Honda NSX
RE: Cite your sources
And commercially unacceptable?
If diesels are the demons, then maybe commercial and public service vehicles should be targeted first in the quest to reduce NOx? Perhaps by reduced use of HGVs for distance and local transportation, freight rail movements then to increase (e.g. overnight) and development of electric "local" delivery vehicles? Should there be a major change in commercial transportation habits?
Diesel should be down and out
Cite your sources
Any sort of long term study has to be based on older engines though, so it isn't necessarily an argument for ditching the latest technology. For example NOx emissions in new diesel cars are limited to the same amount as petrol cars manufactured pre-2009.
And of course, stating something is 'ten times as bad' without giving any idea of the size of the effect doesn't help credibility. Ten times a very small amount is still a very small amount. Plus it was awfully obliging for all those molecules to be labelled as to whether they came from a petrol or diesel engine. It might be that if you looked at the size of the spend caused by emissions both had in common it would be thousands of times larger.