Welcome at BBC Top Gear UK Magazine July 2021 Issue

Here’s a fun project. All you need is 787,372 Ford F-Series trucks – the number sold in the US in 2020, a relatively lean year by all accounts – placed nose to tail and then to follow the line in a Eurofighter Typhoon at its top speed of Mach 1.8. Do so and it’ll take 1hr 57mins before you clear them all. My point is: Ford F-150s… there’s a lot of them.
There are two electric cars in this issue that have the power to change the car industry profoundly, but we’ll start with the truck – America’s bestselling vehicle for 44 years in a row, and now there’s an EV version: the F-150 Lightning. Thing is, your average F-150 customer probably isn’t too concerned by the plight of the polar bears. Ford knows this, so without imminent climate catastrophe as a motivating factor to go electric, it simply needed to build a better truck. And assuming your commute roundtrip is sub-300 miles, and you have access to a charger, the evidence is pretty overwhelming. From the mahoosive frunk that preserves the F-150’s barn-door front end styling – but fills it with nothing but sweet storage space – to the battery’s ability to power your home during a blackout (or your tools, or a cooler while you’re funnelling Bud Light at a tailgate party), and its supersized torque figure and towing capacity, it’s obvious why Ford’s scooped up 70,000 reservations already.
By the time you read this, probably more. Tesla Cybertruck, Rivian R1T, Hummer or one of these? Who’d have thought America’s next great battleground would be the plug-in pickup.
Meanwhile in Croatia, the Rimac Nevera. Sounds like a Nissan, is actually the first production ready electric hypercar we’ve been exposed to. A car, like Gordon Murray’s T.50, which is the expression of one man’s enormous brain. That it is mind-scramblingly fast, that it can distribute its torque to each wheel unlike anything else before, that it is built with the utmost care was all to be expected. What we care about more is whether it has soul. Something that lingers, something that raises the hairs on your neck just thinking about it, and… well, I won’t steal Jason’s thunder, but the answer is, it does. It’s spectacular, room for improvement in a few areas, but transformative in others… and the clearest sign yet that, while the Nevera is wildly expensive, fast electric cars are on the right track. Just ask Harris, who’s still perplexed by what the Audi RS e-tron GT did when he took it for a day out in Llandow…
Enjoy the issue,

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