There is one very pleasant duty in the life of a motoring journalist – testing what new cars are like. In a year, each of us will test several dozen cars; the year has 52 weeks and there is one car for everyone, various new model presentations and similar events are also added. In total, this will easily add up to seventy different models and their versions.
As I drive a lot and enjoy it, I drive more than seven hundred kilometers a week with the vast majority of the cars tested, with some even well over a thousand. An estimate of my total annual mileage, if I add about 7 thousand km in my own car, will be somewhere between 45 and 55 thousand kilometers.
You regularly learn how we liked the cars from tests and first impressions on our website. However, the end of the year is an opportunity to recap – and also to remember which cars we liked best. Like my colleagues, I chose the three cars that most interested me that year.
However, I do not rank them in first, second or third place, because they are so little alike that they cannot compete with each other. Each of them has its pluses and minuses – and in these three specific cases the pluses fundamentally outweighed the minuses. I could ride all three every day and enjoy it every day.
BMW M4 Competition Cabrio
BMW M4 Competition Cabrio
“There are two things in the world that will instantly and permanently improve a person’s life when they buy them – a black leather curve and a convertible. It’s a bit of a shame that in the first one, the second one is handled somewhat inconveniently, but both have that idea in common, that feeling of ‘This is the right way’, which floods your brain already when you put on the curve, or taking down the roof,” I posted my M4 test a few months ago.
So my selection cannot miss the car in which I enjoyed almost every kilometer, including the columns and including the few meters when I tested how it drives with the roof up. The rest of the test week, during which I drove over 800 kilometers, was with open skies overhead.
Despite the ‘Competition’ designation, the M4 isn’t overly harsh and has plenty of personality – when you drive it leisurely in normal mode, it’s quiet, and the exhausts can be said to be quiet, too. And when you go out on a winding circuit, you can harden and sharpen the car to your liking with a wide range of setting options, and enjoy its incredible capabilities.
Honda Civic e:HEV
Honda Civic 2.0 e:HEV e-CVT
When, less than a year ago, as a judge of the Car of the Year 2023 in the Czech Republic, I got into a Civic and drove a few meters, it was immediately clear to me. “This is the car of the year,” I thought to myself, he helped send him to the finals and then give him that title. To this day, I stand by the fact that not only did he win, but that he deservedly received some 50% more points compared to the shared 2nd-3rd place. place.
Perhaps everything is correct here, except for the difficult-to-discover design connection between the bow and the stern. I would venture to call the ergonomics of the interior old-worldly pleasant, not only in details, such as there is a fixed knob for adjusting the brightness of the backlight, but also in the fact that I can comfortably stretch my legs on the pedals.
I also like the push-button gear selector, whose reactions are lightning fast, the new infotainment is fundamentally simpler and clearer, the physical controls for the air conditioning and the seats, both with the side guides and the fabric upholstery. The trunk may not be the biggest, but with a little effort it can fit quite a bit.
However, the biggest trumps are the perfect chassis with a nimble nose, decent resistance to understeer and plenty of adhesion, and the e:HEV powertrain. It features a premium 135kW electric motor, and the two-liter petrol engine most of the time works only as an electricity generator, directly engaging the wheels only in exceptional cases at higher speeds. This system gives the Civic excellent dynamics at lower speeds, and thanks to decent performance, it’s not miserable even under full throttle. In addition, under full throttle, the electronics “swing” with the internal combustion engine revolutions, as if the car were actually shifting gears, although nothing of the sort is happening under its hood.
Jaguar F-Pace SVR
Jaguar F-Pace SVR 5.0 Supercharged
I only spent a short time with the gray SUV from Jaguar, about 250 kilometers, but it still managed to win me over with the main thing – the incredibly characterful eight-cylinder engine under the hood. Its personality is not dampened by electrification or turbochargers, it has a supercharger instead, so you don’t wait for the turbos to breathe after stepping on the gas. The engine immediately kicks in and before you know it, you’re driving—no, you’re flying straight toward the horizon at a very obscene speed.
Equally addictive is its thunderous sound, which fills even very wide valleys, or perhaps the sputtering from the exhaust whenever you take off the gas. “I had some perverted fun with it for a while, saving the highwaymen the job of cutting grass fifteen meters on each side of the road and reminding me why a giant engine in a small car is such an attractive thing.” I wrote about him on Instagram. The only downside might be its terrifying appetite – with a sixteen-liter diameter, it is by far the most voracious car I’ve driven this year.
Biggest Disappointment: Peugeot 2008 GT 1.2 PureTech
However, we have to look at the past year a little realistically and look for not only the best cars. I was quite lucky this year – while I spent a long time choosing cars for the top three, I was immediately clear about the one that bothered me the most. It was a petrol Peugeot 2008 that I tested so recently that you can take these few lines as a small taste of the test that I am preparing for the beginning of 2024.
With the “2008”, I probably drove most of the approximately three hundred kilometers in the dark, and the whole time I had the impression that the most important goal of the developers was to build the interior in a way that would annoy the driver in as many ways as possible. I’ve kind of gotten used to the fact that I can’t see half of the instrument panel with most Peugeots; here it is mostly related to the intensity of the individual glowing things.
Peugeot 2008
In shared first place is the passenger airbag status light by the overhead light along with the turn signal in the left mirror. Many car manufacturers build mirrors in such a way that the LED blinker in them is visible from the driver’s seat, only the Stellantis concern can design them in such a way that the blinker dazzles a person at night. It bothered me already during the Jeep Avenger test, it bothers me here too. And that airbag status light, glowing white in the ceiling, is the first thing in any car that I’ve covered with a piece of paper so that this completely useless information can finally stop bothering me while driving.
Second place in annoying things is also shared. It is achieved by the brightness of the displays, which is easily adjusted in the new infotainment after pulling down the upper strip of the central display, but it is very high even at the lowest level. And also the ambient lighting lines, which, again, shine brightly even at the lowest level of brightness. Their intensity is more difficult to adjust, I have to go deep into the menu, but at least they can be turned off completely.
Peugeot 2008
Why didn’t I write all this in the electric version test? There is nothing complicated about it, I drove it in September and basically only in light or darkness, not in the dark.
Of course, the Peugeot 2008 also has its pluses; as with the electric version, the conventional one has a significantly better chassis compared to the version before the modernization, and if the interior lighting annoys you, the main headlights at least work quite well. But I’ll save all that for the test.
Who did not advance?
Why isn’t the BMW 7 series in my selection, which I tested in three different versions, including the top-of-the-line i7 M70 with more than a thousand newton meters, or perhaps the eight-cylinder X7? After the facelift, which added a mild-hybrid, it is a bit boring despite its enormous performance, and in the “seventh” – although it is extremely comfortable and handles long distances perfectly – I am very annoyed by the bars with buttons that are difficult to control and look flimsy on how much you have to pay for the car.
Similarly, we can continue. The Alpine A110 is somewhat single-purpose and its interior already looks old, although the Subaru BRZ is breathtaking when driving sharply in the districts – and it also had a place in the “top 3” closest to the Mazda 3 – but it can’t calm down on the highway. And the Mazda? It has a really great engine and chassis and, unlike the Civic, it’s also really beautiful, but it’s spoiled by the excessively long transmission and the not-so-spacious interior.
The BMW M3 CS will annoy you in daily driving, with the M2 I can only remember the beautiful and significantly lighter previous generation, the seats of the Kie EV6 GT are not much, the Ford Ranger cannot normally be bought other than as a family car with a body and a Toyota Prius, whatever really good, it has a little too many ergonomic steps in the interior.
2023-12-27 07:00:00
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