The fifty best fresh cars of 2017: the top Five, Autocar
The fifty best fresh cars of 2017: the top Five
What are the fifty best fresh cars you can buy today?
That’s the question we tasked our accomplished team of road testers with answering. Yesterday, we exposed the cars that placed from 50th to 6th in our countdown. So it’s time to expose the final five.
Any car maker that can keep a vehicle concept as wonderful and anachronistic as the front-engined, 12-cylinder, Two+Two, Excellent British, grand touring coupé alive and well in this topsy-turvy 21st century is worth particular praise. But one that can update it, as Aston Martin has with the DB11 – building on almost every significant strength that Astons have traded on for decades, before adding fresh ones and making the resulting car feel both brand fresh and warmly familiar – has done more than make a car. It has preserved a species.
The indeed marvellous thing about the DB11 is that it exists at all, frankly. Aston Martin’s business has burned through the fortunes of slew of wealthy enthusiasts over its century of history and under fresh boss Andy Palmer it still has to prove that it can consistently turn a profit and pay back its creditors. But the punt was taken regardless: a acute intake of breath was made and the skill and expertise of a close-knit company in the English Midlands was backed.
The DB11 is what has been produced. And it’s superb, not to mention a ‘proper’ Aston Martin. It is rich and inviting in the way that its V12 sounds, and yet freshly vigorous in the urgency of its tempo. It is more supple-riding, comfy and long-legged than any DB car in history, and yet also capable of setting a benchmark lap around MIRA’s Dunlop circuit that’s a closer match for that of a Porsche nine hundred eleven Turbo S than a Bentley Continental GT3-R. And it is so much better appointed and better tooled than the cars built under Ford’s ownership of Aston Martin that the comparison is stark, to say the least. The DB11 is lightly the greatest single step forwards that its maker has yet taken.
In a handful of ways, the car shows room for improvement, which is why it has just made our top five rather than predominant it. But you can be sure that Aston Martin will have the time to make those improvements, what with the model lifespan of a typical DB car being about twice that of a 911. And so when Autocar does its ‘50 best cars of 2027’, don’t be astonished if this automotive blueblood is still in it.
What’s left to say about the R, a perennial fixture in this list and a repeat all-round contender for realworld money? This time around at least, broadly speaking, the car is fresh, Volkswagen having treated it to the same mild facelift as the rest of the Golf line-up. Truthfully, however, while this process tweaks the model’s appearance and infotainment and fractionally increases engine output, it remains very much as before. Which is to say brilliant on the kind of subtle and endlessly rewarding scale that most mainstream cars register on only fitfully – if at all.
Tellingly, it does not fade in recollection nor ever disappoint on re-acquaintance. The Golf R, like the Porsche nine hundred eleven or Range Rover or Mazda MX-5, is discussed often in our office because it provides the kind of benchmark we all instinctively agree on. It is the kind of endless at-a-distance flattery that ought to damn the user to frustration when ultimately returned to the acute end. But instead, the same imperturbable embrace, brawny and substantive and spot on, rises to meet you every time. Naturally, a sizeable element of this is the Golf’s broader bounty for ergonomic precision – albeit that hardly accounts for the EA888 engine’s brio or the neutral doggedness of the four-wheeldrive chassis or the unexpected compliance of the rail quality – all of which collude in the impression of a car in spectacular instruction of its dynamic faculties.
Consequently, its inclusion in the top five was never queried for a moment. In the court of public opinion, the Golf R remains Exhibit A in the case for both having your cake and eating it, and it would take only a slightly weightier onus on value for money for the car to stand triumphantly at the top of this brief list every year.
The most astounding thing about the Giulia Quadrifoglio is that it results from what could be called a standing embark. Before the Giulia, Alfa Romeo hadn’t built a rear-drive saloon for decades. It hadn’t dabbled earnestly in V8 engines, either – and its latest attempts at sportiness away from the 4C were limited to mostly awful, second-rate versions of the Mito and Giulietta. Its initial attempt at rivalling the mighty BMW M3 and Mercedes-AMG C63 ought by rights to have been an admirable failure at most, but it isn’t. It’s as far from that as you could hope to get. It is overachievement. It menaces to be a decent Alfa: fabulous, flawed and emotionally irresistible.
That it manages to be any of these things is rooted in the Giulia’s interminable development. Those repeated comebacks to the drawing board; the top-down refusal to compromise on key elements; the heavy-duty involvement of Ferrari engineers, each of them presumably immersed in Maranello’s bleedingedge treatment to all things rapid and feelsome. As palpably as a Porsche has passed through Weissach or a Renault through Dieppe or a Mercedes Affalterbach, so the Quadrifoglio feels a product of their input. The car’s steering, as ethereal as angel wings, is righteously incisive. Its weightless positivity is the counterpoint to the scrupulously severe German heft, and the Giulia’s lithe chassis has been primed to react like a tuning fork, its direction switches resonating with the same instant and emancipated vitality.
On Exmoor, limited to halfwaysane road speeds in spectacular weather, the Quadrifoglio doesn’t feel encumbered by the overt brawn of its back axle, either. In a single moment, it feels balanced, assured and animated all at once. Of course, in the same moment, it also seems insensitive to brake inputs, utterly thirsty, disappointing to the touch and very optimistically priced. Some of that is as familiar as it is unwelcome, but the Giulia’s extreme and unexpected talent is not.
It doesn’t usually pay to work with adventurous car photographers, but this was one of the uncommon occasions when it did. Snapper Luc Lacey had picked a wiggle of tarmac he liked the look of for our road test shoot on the brand-new McLaren 570S. It was somewhere none of us had been before.
Typically, it was a road cut into the side of a Welsh mountain and, on the morning we were there, it was being buffeted by some awful conditions. I recall watching the clouds and rain gargling and swirling up the valley towards us and wondering at what point Halle Berry would emerge in her X-Men get-up. I also recall thinking: “This isn’t exactly supercar weather.” Well, it depends on the supercar.
We explored the roads nearby before cracking on with the photos and discovered a narrow, rutted, potholed, partly unmarked B-road, bits of it mid-repair. It was the kind of road you might imagine would be every bit as incompatible with the enjoyment of a modern mid-engined McLaren as the weather was.
But no. What the 570S set about doing that morning was demonstrating exactly how usable it could be. How absorbent and forgiving its suspension could be when left in Normal mode. How the car’s amazingly precise, ideally weighted, consistently paced and beautifully communicative steering permitted it to treat a taut mountain lane with a lubricious surface (and a precipice just beyond the white paint) with the assured feel of a truly fine 1980s hot hatchback.
The car seemed to have all the grip and bod control it needed – even with 562bhp to transmit onto moist tarmac through Pirelli P Zero Corsa tyres – and yet not a morsel of hypersensitivity or nervousness. Amazing. And I was in awe partly because, a day previously, I’d done timed spectacle runs of the same 570S for our road test and witnessed it do things that cars at dual its price level might fight to match.
It’s one thing to be able to supply a mid-engined supercar with a carbonfibre bath for a price that many would lavish on a very specialised sports car, but fairly another to make it as broadly talented and as confidence-inspiring a supercar as the 570S is. I’d driven the P1 a duo of years earlier; I’ve driven the 570GT and 720S since; and I still think the 570S is most likely a greater bounty to the car-loving world than any of them. It feels like everything that’s brilliant about the way McLaren makes cars, diminished and distilled down to its most plain, affordable and appealing.
Regardless of appearances, the Porsche nine hundred eleven GTS has not won this contest to find our favourite car on sale. The GTS range can be thought of as a box of chocolates, total of different flavours, shapes and textures. A Targa here, a convertible there. A four-wheel-drive version stashing in the corner next to the PDK. You can pop as many in your mouth as you like but no combination will be as mouth-wateringly delicious as the simplest and best: this contest has been won by the base-spec GTS – the manual, rear-wheel-drive coupé on this page, and that alone.
For as long as the customer has had a selection of 911s to choose inbetween (which is more than half a century now), less has almost always meant more. It is as if the moment you begin to fiddle with the essential rightness of the original concept other than to add speed, some of that genius is lost and the car’s appeal is diminished.
The appeal of this GTS is the same as that of previous 911s to wear the badge, reborn on a fresh level of capability. But were it just a superb driver’s car, it would have stood no chance of topping this list. As enthusiasts, we all want a car that will turn every good drive on a deserted country road into an memorable practice. But in our hearts, we also know that those drives constitute less than 1% of our time on the road; and if the car’s not working on the 99% of occasions when we’re not flinging it at the scenery, the role of the car in your life is diminished to that of a fucktoy.
The GTS works 100% of the time. It looks fabulous with its blackened centre-lock wheels and Alcantara upholstery. It rails beautifully on standard sport springs and adaptive dampers. It’s quiet at a cruise and has superb all-round visibility, occasional rear seats, a remarkably big boot and a fresh infotainment system that even has apps on it. In brief, it slots beautifully into your life.
Then the road shows up. And the GTS becomes this other car; one so quick that it can sit on the high-heeled shoes of a 570S, because in this environment, the McLaren’s extra tempo is more than offset by the 911’s more compact dimensions. The car feels light because it is: 145kg lighter than a nine hundred eleven Turbo, if you’re interested. The wheel moves gently in your arms, the gearlever shifts around the gate with military precision and the assets control permits just enough movement to let the car breathe with the road, never so much as to permit the smallest degree of float.
Put simply, it comes down to one elementary equation: the amount of enjoyment a car can provide is defined by how joy it is to drive, multiplied by the number of times it makes you feel inclined to drive it. On this score, the nine hundred eleven GTS or, to be precise, this nine hundred eleven GTS, stands supreme.
Words by Nic Cackett, Andrew Frankel, Matt Prior and Matt Saunders
The fifty best fresh cars of 2017: the top Five, Autocar
The fifty best fresh cars of 2017: the top Five
What are the fifty best fresh cars you can buy today?
That’s the question we tasked our pro team of road testers with answering. Yesterday, we exposed the cars that placed from 50th to 6th in our countdown. So it’s time to expose the final five.
Any car maker that can keep a vehicle concept as wonderful and anachronistic as the front-engined, 12-cylinder, Two+Two, Good British, grand touring coupé alive and well in this topsy-turvy 21st century is worth particular praise. But one that can update it, as Aston Martin has with the DB11 – building on almost every significant strength that Astons have traded on for decades, before adding fresh ones and making the resulting car feel both brand fresh and warmly familiar – has done more than make a car. It has preserved a species.
The indeed marvellous thing about the DB11 is that it exists at all, frankly. Aston Martin’s business has burned through the fortunes of slew of wealthy enthusiasts over its century of history and under fresh boss Andy Palmer it still has to prove that it can consistently turn a profit and pay back its creditors. But the punt was taken regardless: a acute intake of breath was made and the skill and expertise of a close-knit company in the English Midlands was backed.
The DB11 is what has been produced. And it’s superb, not to mention a ‘proper’ Aston Martin. It is rich and inviting in the way that its V12 sounds, and yet freshly vigorous in the urgency of its tempo. It is more supple-riding, comfy and long-legged than any DB car in history, and yet also capable of setting a benchmark lap around MIRA’s Dunlop circuit that’s a closer match for that of a Porsche nine hundred eleven Turbo S than a Bentley Continental GT3-R. And it is so much better appointed and better tooled than the cars built under Ford’s ownership of Aston Martin that the comparison is stark, to say the least. The DB11 is lightly the greatest single step forwards that its maker has yet taken.
In a handful of ways, the car shows room for improvement, which is why it has just made our top five rather than predominant it. But you can be sure that Aston Martin will have the time to make those improvements, what with the model lifespan of a typical DB car being about twice that of a 911. And so when Autocar does its ‘50 best cars of 2027’, don’t be astonished if this automotive blueblood is still in it.
What’s left to say about the R, a perennial fixture in this list and a repeat all-round contender for realworld money? This time around at least, broadly speaking, the car is fresh, Volkswagen having treated it to the same mild facelift as the rest of the Golf line-up. Truthfully, however, while this process tweaks the model’s appearance and infotainment and fractionally increases engine output, it remains very much as before. Which is to say brilliant on the kind of subtle and endlessly rewarding scale that most mainstream cars register on only fitfully – if at all.
Tellingly, it does not fade in recollection nor ever disappoint on re-acquaintance. The Golf R, like the Porsche nine hundred eleven or Range Rover or Mazda MX-5, is discussed often in our office because it provides the kind of benchmark we all instinctively agree on. It is the kind of endless at-a-distance flattery that ought to damn the user to frustration when ultimately returned to the acute end. But instead, the same imperturbable embrace, brawny and substantive and spot on, rises to meet you every time. Naturally, a sizeable element of this is the Golf’s broader bounty for ergonomic precision – albeit that hardly accounts for the EA888 engine’s brio or the neutral doggedness of the four-wheeldrive chassis or the unexpected compliance of the rail quality – all of which collude in the impression of a car in spectacular instruction of its dynamic faculties.
Consequently, its inclusion in the top five was never queried for a moment. In the court of public opinion, the Golf R remains Exhibit A in the case for both having your cake and eating it, and it would take only a slightly weightier onus on value for money for the car to stand triumphantly at the top of this brief list every year.
The most astounding thing about the Giulia Quadrifoglio is that it results from what could be called a standing begin. Before the Giulia, Alfa Romeo hadn’t built a rear-drive saloon for decades. It hadn’t dabbled gravely in V8 engines, either – and its latest attempts at sportiness away from the 4C were limited to mostly awful, second-rate versions of the Mito and Giulietta. Its initial attempt at rivalling the mighty BMW M3 and Mercedes-AMG C63 ought by rights to have been an admirable failure at most, but it isn’t. It’s as far from that as you could hope to get. It is overachievement. It menaces to be a decent Alfa: fabulous, flawed and emotionally irresistible.
That it manages to be any of these things is rooted in the Giulia’s interminable development. Those repeated comebacks to the drawing board; the top-down refusal to compromise on key elements; the heavy-duty involvement of Ferrari engineers, each of them presumably immersed in Maranello’s bleedingedge treatment to all things quick and feelsome. As palpably as a Porsche has passed through Weissach or a Renault through Dieppe or a Mercedes Affalterbach, so the Quadrifoglio feels a product of their input. The car’s steering, as ethereal as angel wings, is righteously incisive. Its weightless positivity is the counterpoint to the scrupulously severe German heft, and the Giulia’s lithe chassis has been primed to react like a tuning fork, its direction switches resonating with the same instant and emancipated vitality.
On Exmoor, limited to halfwaysane road speeds in spectacular weather, the Quadrifoglio doesn’t feel encumbered by the overt brawn of its back axle, either. In a single moment, it feels balanced, assured and animated all at once. Of course, in the same moment, it also seems insensitive to brake inputs, enormously thirsty, disappointing to the touch and very optimistically priced. Some of that is as familiar as it is unwelcome, but the Giulia’s extreme and unexpected talent is not.
It doesn’t usually pay to work with adventurous car photographers, but this was one of the uncommon occasions when it did. Snapper Luc Lacey had picked a wiggle of tarmac he liked the look of for our road test shoot on the brand-new McLaren 570S. It was somewhere none of us had been before.
Typically, it was a road cut into the side of a Welsh mountain and, on the morning we were there, it was being buffeted by some awful conditions. I recall watching the clouds and rain deep-throating and swirling up the valley towards us and wondering at what point Halle Berry would show up in her X-Men get-up. I also reminisce thinking: “This isn’t exactly supercar weather.” Well, it depends on the supercar.
We explored the roads nearby before cracking on with the photos and discovered a narrow, rutted, potholed, partly unmarked B-road, bits of it mid-repair. It was the kind of road you might imagine would be every bit as incompatible with the enjoyment of a modern mid-engined McLaren as the weather was.
But no. What the 570S set about doing that morning was demonstrating exactly how usable it could be. How absorbent and forgiving its suspension could be when left in Normal mode. How the car’s amazingly precise, flawlessly weighted, consistently paced and beautifully communicative steering permitted it to treat a taut mountain lane with a lubricious surface (and a precipice just beyond the white paint) with the assured feel of a truly superb 1980s hot hatchback.
The car seemed to have all the grip and figure control it needed – even with 562bhp to transmit onto humid tarmac through Pirelli P Zero Corsa tyres – and yet not a morsel of hypersensitivity or nervousness. Amazing. And I was in awe partly because, a day previously, I’d done timed spectacle runs of the same 570S for our road test and witnessed it do things that cars at dual its price level might fight to match.
It’s one thing to be able to produce a mid-engined supercar with a carbonfibre bathtub for a price that many would lavish on a very specialised sports car, but fairly another to make it as broadly talented and as confidence-inspiring a supercar as the 570S is. I’d driven the P1 a duo of years earlier; I’ve driven the 570GT and 720S since; and I still think the 570S is most likely a greater bounty to the car-loving world than any of them. It feels like everything that’s brilliant about the way McLaren makes cars, diminished and distilled down to its most ordinary, affordable and appealing.
Regardless of appearances, the Porsche nine hundred eleven GTS has not won this contest to find our favourite car on sale. The GTS range can be thought of as a box of chocolates, utter of different flavours, shapes and textures. A Targa here, a convertible there. A four-wheel-drive version hiding in the corner next to the PDK. You can pop as many in your mouth as you like but no combination will be as mouth-wateringly delicious as the simplest and best: this contest has been won by the base-spec GTS – the manual, rear-wheel-drive coupé on this page, and that alone.
For as long as the customer has had a selection of 911s to choose inbetween (which is more than half a century now), less has almost always meant more. It is as if the moment you embark to fiddle with the essential rightness of the original concept other than to add speed, some of that genius is lost and the car’s appeal is diminished.
The appeal of this GTS is the same as that of previous 911s to wear the badge, reborn on a fresh level of capability. But were it just a good driver’s car, it would have stood no chance of topping this list. As enthusiasts, we all want a car that will turn every good drive on a deserted country road into an memorable practice. But in our hearts, we also know that those drives constitute less than 1% of our time on the road; and if the car’s not working on the 99% of occasions when we’re not flinging it at the scenery, the role of the car in your life is diminished to that of a fucktoy.
The GTS works 100% of the time. It looks fabulous with its blackened centre-lock wheels and Alcantara upholstery. It rails beautifully on standard sport springs and adaptive dampers. It’s quiet at a cruise and has superb all-round visibility, occasional rear seats, a remarkably big boot and a fresh infotainment system that even has apps on it. In brief, it slots beautifully into your life.
Then the road emerges. And the GTS becomes this other car; one so quick that it can sit on the high-heeled shoes of a 570S, because in this environment, the McLaren’s extra rhythm is more than offset by the 911’s more compact dimensions. The car feels light because it is: 145kg lighter than a nine hundred eleven Turbo, if you’re interested. The wheel moves gently in your palms, the gearlever shifts around the gate with military precision and the bod control permits just enough movement to let the car breathe with the road, never so much as to permit the smallest degree of float.
Put simply, it comes down to one ordinary equation: the amount of enjoyment a car can provide is defined by how joy it is to drive, multiplied by the number of times it makes you feel inclined to drive it. On this score, the nine hundred eleven GTS or, to be precise, this nine hundred eleven GTS, stands supreme.
Words by Nic Cackett, Andrew Frankel, Matt Prior and Matt Saunders
