Motoring News
Today, 05 August 2016Aston Martin DB11: Review
New turbo engine, new platform, new look - is the DB11 a truly game-changing Aston Martin?
read moreOpinion: is the Ford Focus RS's Drift mode dangerous?
Drift mode is for track use only, but could reckless road users use it to put pedestrians lives at risk?
Let’s call him John, because that’s his name. He’s Australian and he defines himself as an ‘auto expert’.
That’s enough to know about him, except that he also has a bee in his bonnet. A massive bee, pretty grumpy, causing considerable consternation within his primly brimmed hat.
His beef is with Ford. Ford has fitted the Focus RS with a Drift mode and he doesn’t like that. All it does is make it a bit more rear-driven, but he says it’s dangerous. In fact, he says, Ford is positively encouraging hooning, and somebody will probably use Drift mode on the road, they’ll be rubbish at drifting and they’ll crash. Somebody will get hurt and Ford, as well as the numpty driving, will be culpable, for encouraging dangerous behaviour.
Ford says – although not in response to John’s rant, directly – that Drift mode is for use only on a circuit. In a video explaining the RS’s various drive modes – there are four – it explicitly shows the most extreme two, Track and Drift (forgive me if I’m indulging in Unnecessary Capitals), enabled only on circuit. When you select the drive modes, the car tells you a track is the only place those should be used.
That’s not good enough for John, although his argument falls short here: he has looked at the Focus RS handbook and it turns out that, on p16, it says the warranty will be invalidated if the car is used for motorsport. If you take it on a track at all
read more2016 Aston Martin DB11 review
The Aston Martin DB11 spearheads a completely new model range explosion by Aston. And it's brilliant.
The Aston Martin DB11 begins Aston’s ‘second century plan’. A DB car, the natural successor to all the DBs before it, a grand tourer in the most conventional, but most important, Aston Martin tradition. “The DB11 is the most important car,” Aston’s CEO Andy Palmer says, “in Aston Martin’s history.”In its history? Big claim, Palmer. But, then, Palmer has been given a big job: to make Aston Martin make money. Not a lot of Aston bosses have managed that before, but this time it’s crucial.It’s crucial because of the plans Palmer has put forward. They’re of the scale that would have seen Danny Bahar, former Lotus CEO, throwing them on a motorshow stand accompanied by a bemused looking Brian May, Naomi Campbell and Random Baldwin.Aston intends this: seven new models, one a year, between now and 2022, until the range revision starts over again. They’re ambitious plans, but apparently put forward with enough sense that Aston has secured £700m to make the first four – DB11, Vantage, Vanquish and DBX SUV – come to life. Beyond that, incoming revenue funds the rest.So to the DB11. It’s new. Really new. Recently, Aston Martins have been revised with the glacial pace of somebody looking after a stately home: a new boiler here, replacement glazing in the orangery next year. But the DB11 is something else.The architecture is different. Still aluminium, but where there were loads of extrusions before, there are more pressings now, so if you see a chassis in the bare metal there are more curved surfaces, which allows for greater interior room within a body that’s only marginally larg
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