Tag: cool cars

The Concept C Is the All-Electric Sports Car Kickstarting Audi’s Design Future

Car companies love a mission statement. With the arrival of the Concept C, Audi’s new one is crystal clear: “radical simplicity”. An all-electric two-seater with a retractable folding hard-top, the Concept C is a “progressive interpretation” of the company’s legacy, says Audi—and it’s not hard to see the TT has factored pretty heavily in that.

But as you pick your way through the messaging—key words here are precision and clarity, as well as a re-emphasis on our old friend, “Vorsprung durch Technik”—this feels like a substantial reset after a period of aesthetic drift. This isn’t just a piece of conceptual eye candy, then: it’s Audi engaging combat mode in an industry currently beset with challenges.

“Our vision is a call to action for the whole company—and is essential for making our brand truly distinctive once again,” Audi’s Chief Creative Officer Massimo Frascella explains. “It is the philosophy behind every decision we make, and we aim to apply its principles across the entire organization. We call it ‘The Radical Next’.”

Let’s start with the car itself. Although the e-tron GT set the bar high, Audi’s model range has been light on coherence and drama. The Concept C isn’t quite a first-principles machine, but it definitely strips things back and seeks to stoke some good old-fashioned flames of desire. It’s a terrific looking thing in the flesh: stocky, solid, and charismatic. Audi CEO Gernot Döllner, in charge for exactly two years, personally pushed for a new sports car; Frascella used it to push the boundaries in terms of design creativity and manufacturing technique.

Courtesy of Audi

It’s also one for marque historians: although there’s nothing explicitly retro here, the Thirties Auto Union Type C Grand Prix car, the early Noughties Rosemeyer concept and more pertinently the original TT are all in the mix, as is Bauhaus and German modernism.

Frascella, it should be noted, is an Italian who rose to prominence as Head of Design at Jaguar Land Rover, and is credited with the current Range Rover, a universally admired vehicle (though he also worked on the rather more polarising Jaguar Type 00.) A lack of adornment and commitment to what car designers are wont to call “monolithic” surfaces are evidently two of his trademarks.

That much is certainly apparent here. The Concept C’s taut, machined look suggests something carved from a giant billet of aluminium, and there’s a strong new vertical front grille shape with a slim but powerful light signature that echoes the four-ring logo. We reckon it’s best appreciated from an elevated position above the rear three-quarters, though. There’s no rear window, minimal decoration and slender LED tail-lights, with three slats in the rear deck to suggest a more emotionally charged, mid-engined configuration. We’re told the window-less, slatted look will make production, the new car slated to arrive in 2027.

Courtesy of Audi

Jason Barlow

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September 2, 2025
Richard Mille’s New McLaren Watch Has a ‘Jump Start’ Button

Such is the world of luxury products, that customers for McLaren Automotive’s newly announced $2.6 million W1 hypercar can now order a watch to match.

The fourth watch produced as a result of the long-term partnership between McLaren and luxury watchmaker Richard Mille, the RM 65-01 “McLaren W1 Edition” was announced this week in a press conference at the carmaker’s Woking headquarters.

Billed as something approaching a hypercar for the wrist, the watch, which will cost 320,000 Swiss francs plus taxes ($373,300) is a tribute to the design language of the car, which was revealed to the world last Sunday. With a split-second chronograph movement and a couple of other tricks up its sleeve, it houses what Richard Mille says is the most complicated automatic movement it has ever produced.

The movement, which comprises 480 components, beats at a frequency of 5 Hz, enabling measurement of intervals to the nearest tenth of a second. The split-seconds function allows the wearer to time two concurrent events, so you’ll know with pinpoint accuracy just how much faster you are than just about every other car on the road (or racetrack.) The pushers at 2, 4, and 10 o’clock, shaped to mimic the W1’s exhausts, control the chronograph, with their roles spelled out in McLaren’s “papaya orange” and a high-contrast shade of baby blue, but it’s the fourth pusher in pure orange that will catch your eye.

Start Me Up

This controls a very different function, unique to the RM 65 line. You could call it a “jump start” button—something hopefully the W1 will never require. It’s an instant winding mechanism, designed so that in the rare occurrence that the watch runs out of power, you can fire it up again with a few presses of your thumb.

It activates a rack-and-pinion mechanism that winds the mainspring without taking the watch off your wrist. Richard Mille says that 125 pushes would fully wind the watch, but it’s intended to provide a quick boost rather than be a substitute for the automatic winding system—which itself is highly complex, with a variable rotor that can be adjusted to suit the lifestyle of the wearer, according to the brand. Essentially, if you’re an active sort it’ll be set up to deliver less energy per rotation, and vice versa if you’re more sedentary.

Chris Hall

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October 11, 2024
Bugatti’s $4 Million Hybrid Hypercar Has the Craziest Steering Wheel We’ve Ever Seen

The resurrection of Bugatti is one of the 21st century’s most notable automotive stories. Aristocratic, artistic, and more than a little arcane, Bugatti was a prewar marque that mastered luxury, design, and motorsport, the creator of Grand Prix winners, and arguably the most lavish motorcar ever made, in the shape of the early 1930s Type 41 Royale. Then it faded away.

It was the late Ferdinand Piëch, the monomaniacal kingpin of the Volkswagen Group, who bought the rights to the name and returned the brand to glory with 2005’s Veyron and its successor, the Chiron. The Super Sport version of the latter remains the world’s fastest production car, having achieved a top speed of 304.773 mph in the hands of racing driver Andy Wallace at a German test track in 2019.

How do you follow that—especially in a world in which 2,000-horsepower electric hypercars have comprehensively rearranged expectations?

As fate would have it, Bugatti is now controlled by Croatian EV powerhouse Rimac, as a result of a complex 2021 contra-deal with VW and Porsche. So you’d be right to wonder what kind of encore wunderkind Mate Rimac would devise for the 114-year-old French legend.

The result is the Tourbillon, an imperious super-coupé hybrid that sees Bugatti looking a hundred years ahead as much as it’s invoking its storied past—but not in the ways you’d expect.

The Tourbillon is Bugatti’s latest hybrid hypercar, the first to reveal Rimac’s influence on the manufacturer.

VIDEO: Bugatti

“Icons like the Type 57SC Atlantic, renowned as the most beautiful car in the world, the Type 35, the most successful racing car ever, and the Type 41 Royale, one of the most ambitious luxury cars of all time, provide our three pillars of inspiration,” Rimac says. “Beauty, performance, and luxury formed the blueprint for the Tourbillon; a car that was more elegant, more emotive, and more luxurious than anything before it. And just like those icons of the past, it wouldn’t be simply for the present, or even for the future, but pour l’éternité–for eternity.”

Yep, it’s safe to say Bugatti is pretty excited about it’s new creation and has an eye on the pristine lawns of the Pebble Beach or Villa d’Este concours events a century hence, positioning its new hypercar as both head-spinningly high-tech and as an artful riposte to built-in obsolescence.

Reskinning Rimac’s own brilliant and fully electric Nevera hypercar was surely one option, but Rimac is respectful enough of Bugatti’s history to know that would never fly. “So I came up with a proposal to make a completely new car,” he says. He’s come an awfully long way since being the sole employee of Rimac back in 2009.

Instruments of Success

The name Tourbillon will be familiar to adherents of haute horologie. Rather than honor a former Bugatti racing driver—as in Pierre Veyron and Louis Chiron—the new car references the most elaborate mechanism in watchmaking, a machine for the wrist whose complexity counteracts the effects of gravity in order to maintain the most accurate possible timekeeping.

The steering wheel of the new Bugatti Tourbillon spins around the central fixed instrument cluster.

VIDEO: Bugatti

Bugatti’s designers and engineers were seduced by the idea of mechanical timelessness when they were conceiving the new car, and thus the Tourbillon largely rejects large digital touchscreens in its interior in favor of machined components and a fully analogue skeletonized (another watch world reference) instrument cluster—though a small screen does slide into view if you want it, for Apple CarPlay or Android Auto.

The cluster consists of more than 600 parts, uses titanium, sapphire, and ruby in its construction, and remains fixed in place allowing the steering wheel to rotate around it. Two needles on the center dial display the engine’s revs and speed. On the left are analogue readouts for battery and oil temperature; on the right there’s a display showing the power drawn from the e-motors and engine.

Jason Barlow

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June 20, 2024
McLaren’s Artura Spider Hybrid Is All Performance, and All Party

While the world awaits Ferrari’s first all-electric car—due next year—archrival McLaren insists that the technology doesn’t yet exist to deliver an EV worthy of its name.

Power clearly isn’t the problem, but weight is the enemy in Woking, McLaren’s UK headquarters, and batteries aren’t getting lighter fast enough. Going fully electric results in unacceptable compromises to a car’s dynamics, McLaren says.

Light weight isn’t just a philosophy to these guys, it’s dogma, and, like all such things, that doesn’t suggest much in the way of progressive thinking. Until you arrive at a corner at, shall we say, a committed velocity in the new Artura Spider.

Few cars are as fluid, balanced, and rewarding as this, a lissome-looking machine, which soon has you thinking like a racing driver: Plotting entry, apex, and exit, dallying with a trailing throttle or trying to dial out understeer. It gets right under your skin.

McLaren doesn’t even rate fully electric steering as pure enough, and the Artura’s precision feel is undoubtedly helped by an old-school hydraulic setup. Apparently, it’s almost identical to the steering configuration in the 600 LT, which is nothing less than one of the greatest-handling cars ever made.

Pimped P1 Power

Photograph: McLaren Automotive

Yet it would be a grave error to mistake McLaren for a tech refusenik. Far from it. Core to the Artura’s astonishing athleticism is its carbon-composite chassis (MCLA for short), which delivers both tremendous structural integrity and impressive lateral bending stiffness.

It’s made in the company’s dedicated UK facility in Sheffield, and McLaren’s use of carbon fiber throughout its model range puts one over on Ferrari, Lamborghini and Porsche, all of whom reserve this costly material for their most expensive hypercars.

The Artura is also a hybrid, deepening the company’s expertise in an area it first explored on 2013’s ground-breaking P1. The combustion engine is a 3.0-liter twin turbo V6, harnessed here to an axial flux e-motor, which is integrated into the gearbox’s bell housing.

Improvements in the engine mapping have increased the overall power output to 690 brake horsepower, a rise of 20 bhp over Artura v1.0. Rather than a 90-degree V, the cylinders sit at a 120-degree angle, which reduces pressure losses in the exhaust. The twin turbos sit within in a “hot vee” configuration, which means they can spin faster with helpful consequences for throttle response.

Jason Barlow

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June 16, 2024