Nicol Louw

Lithium-ion batteries attract all the headlines, but the humble lead-acid type still has an important role to play today… and tomorrow. Two thousand. According to Kelvin Naidoo, group technical executive at AutoX, that’s how many times a vehicle engine is started every minute in South Africa. ...

LOS ANGELES – Want to see a group of motoring journalists act like a bunch of excited school kids? Just lead them into an underground garage crammed full of Shelby Mustangs... While we were in LA for the launch of the electric version of the storied nameplate (called the Mach-E), Ford saw fit ...

Almost 4 000 km is a tough initiation stint for any vehicle. But that's exactly what the Kia Sportage faced only two days after arrived at the CAR offices. The reason? My midyear family holiday trip, this time to the picturesque Drakensberg region. The Sportage range was updated in 2018, which saw ...

PORT ELIZABETH – Do you feel like you're always just missing the cut? Trying to reach the points goal on some reward programme, earning enough to qualify for that mortgage on your dream home, or being able to afford that special edition double cab bakkie? Now, thanks to some clever marketing from ...

Traffic congestion and convenience considerations heavily favour an automatic transmission when shopping for a new vehicle. Modern autos are a far cry from those sluggish units of yesteryear and, in most cases, outperform manual transmissions in terms of performance and fuel consumption. Therefore, a ...

Vehicle technology is advancing at a staggering pace and identifying the root cause of an intermittent technical issue can be complex. Although on-board diagnostic (OBD) fault codes help point technicians in the right direction, the sheer depth of system knowledge needed to solve intricate problems is ...

“Power is how fast your car hits a wall at full throttle; torque is how far it moves the wall after impact,” is one description of the two units I recently heard. Unfortunately, this explanation is not entirely accurate, but it is a way of making sense of the concepts in simple terms. Although ...

An all-electric Porsche? I have to pinch myself as I climb into the Porsche Taycan for my shotgun ride around the carmaker’s Düsseldorf test track. Is this a sign the electric-vehicle (EV) revolution has truly started? There is not much time to philosophise before the Porsche test driver mashes ...

GEORGE, Western Cape – It's no longer an ugly duckling, is it? Beauty is, of course, in the eye of the beholder but the previous-generation Audi Q3 (although popular) was hardly the most visually appealing vehicle in the Ingolstadt-based firm's range. The tortoise-shell shape looked awkward from ...