BMW vs Winter: how to beat the freeze

By Phil McNamara First Official Pictures 17 December 2013 09:00 Winter: the long nights, slippery roads and punishing weather can turn driving from a pleasure into a chore. But to ensure you get home safely this winter – or merely to entertain you with our antics – we’ve created some stories and videos of us tackling wintry conditions in cars. • WINTER TYRES: we took an M3 on summer tyres and a 435i coupe on ADD LINK winter tyres to Pirelli’s Milanese test track, to pit the two cars in a wintry drag race, brake test and timed laps of the circuit • xDRIVE: Ben Barry drove an all-wheel drive 330d Touring to Sölden in the Austrian Alps, home of the inaugural round of this winter’s Alpine Skiing giant slalom.

Mini Clubman concept (2014) first official pictures

By Damion Smy First Official Pictures 26 February 2014 09:00 This is the new Mini Clubman Concept and, your eyes aren’t playing tricks on you – it has more doors than ever. The new four-door (well, six if you could the two-piece rear opening) is the first Mini to have two sets of cabin doors, and will offer the same range of three- and four-cylinder engines as the rest of the range. Just as the Fiat 500 range is expanding in terms of size, doors and oddity, the Mini family is growing too.  While officially it’s a concept, given the brand’s history of production ready showcars, you won’t have to squint too hard – or at all – for the road-going version.

New Land Rover Freelander will actually be a Discovery

It seems – as we expected – that Land Rover are looking to make more sense of their range of off-roaders as new models are launched, and are going to concentrate on three core brands – Range Rover, Discovery and Defender – instead of the current mish-mash where many models really overlap with others (the top end Discoverys are really a cheaper Range Rover). So the next Freelander will become an entry-level Discovery with underpinnings borrowed from the Evoque (which is itself based on the current Freelander platform, a development of the Ford Galaxy’s platform), and arrive in both 5-seat and 7-seat guise, with the new Discovery ’5′ getting a platform based on the new Range Rover and perhaps spawning two models. The new Discovery range will be targeted as a ‘Lifestyle’ core range for Land Rover (much as the original Disco was) and the Range Rover range will be both sporty and luxurious, with a 7-seat Grand Evoque XL joining the current Evoque, Range Rover Sport and Range Rover.