Times Five
Yet again, socks and undies were a sad substitute for a shiny new car waiting for us on Christmas morning. Damien O’Carroll has some hints for Santa next year.
Toyota GR Yaris
The undoubted motoring highlight of 2020 was Toyota’s emphatic reentry into the hot hatch segment with the superb GR Yaris.
Basically derived by Toyota’s Gazoo Racing motorsport arm from its WRC car, the GR Yaris shares little with the ‘‘normal’’ Yaris, save its headlights, door handles and interior trim, but that certainly doesn’t diminish the fact that it is a fantastically feral little corner devourer that is thoroughly addictive to drive.
The highlight, however, is the brilliantly belligerent little 1.6-litre, three-cylinder engine that pumps out a frankly silly 200kW of power and sounds amazing.
Tesla Model Y
Santa Musk is notoriously vague around production schedules for RHD versions of his cars, and even more vague around supply to a tiny market at the bottom of the world, but we just really want to get our hands on what certainly sounds like the best Tesla yet.
Sadly, it doesn’t look like we will be seeing one under our Christmas tree next year either, as predictions based on previous RHD Tesla launches currently put the Model Y down for sometime in 2022, although Elon Claus did spring a surprise with the LHD launch of the Model Y, which was slated to begin production around now, but started in March this year instead.
Ford Mustang Shelby GT350
Sadly, however, there wasn’t a Shelby GT350 parked under the tree this year, and there won’t be next year either, as Ford has stopped production of what has to be one of the best sounding V8 Mustangs ever to have turned a wheel in anger.
OK, so the competition from Dodge and Chevrolet were faster and more powerful, but the fact that the GT350’s 5.2-litre flat-plane crank Voodoo V8 sounds more Modena than Detroit and that Ford has now dropped it to concentrate on production of the more powerful (but Voodoo V8-less) GT500 just makes us want it more.
Honda e
Tiny, adorable and packing that lovely low down torque all EVs do, the Honda e is everything a slightly tragic Japanese Kei car obsessive wants in an EV. Although not technically a Kei car, the e does share the same reason for not coming to New Zealand as a new vehicle – it is prohibitively expensive for this part of the world.
Honda always warned that its tiny city EV would be high-spec and luxury-priced and it is, with even (slightly) secondhand imports landing here now at $70k plus prices.
But we really don’t care and want one anyway. Damn the cost! After all, Santa will be picking up the bill for that.
A Batmobile
Every damn year we hope for this... Anyone whose obsessively nerdy interests include ‘‘cars’’ and ‘‘movies’’ has an intersection point at ‘‘Batmobiles’’.
I mean, it’s just science.
Any Batmobile would do thanks, although I have a preference for the majestic rocket-packing one from the late-80s/early-90s Batman and Batman Returns.
That said, the Lincoln Futurabased one from the 1967 TV series would do nicely as well, although the weird phallic neon one from Joel Schumacher’s Batman Forever might be a stretch. In reality, of course, I would be rather chuffed with a sweet E9 BMW 3.0 CSL.