![]() Charging from 0 to 80 per cent with 50kW DC charger takes under an hour, or around five hours if you're using a three-pin plug. And it’s wonderfully quiet while driving on the electric motor, which it’ll do for 70 miles on the WLTP cycle (around 50 miles in reality). There's a slight step if you floor it in EV mode when the engine comes in at maximum attack, but that's forgivable. Not perfect – I noticed some driveline shunt on and off throttle – but otherwise the engine and eight-speed transmission work seamlessly together 99 per cent of the time. Having tried the most powerful P510e, it’s an excellent alternative to DERV to be fair. If you want to have the cheapest company car tax then this is the only way until the BEV arrives. That is a shame but it’s the way it is, which brings us to the plug-ins. Well, perhaps simply that it’s a diesel, I suppose. They'd make him travel sick, which apparently is quite common. Happily, it’s not something he suffers from, though. On the subject of simulators, he also mentioned that Cross used to come out "as white as a sheet" after using them. Now he's at JLR he has access to two: one that's 15-years old and another that's just been finished and is state-of-the-art. He told me he thought simulators "were a load of b*ll*cks" until he started using them for development work at Aston, and found them "extremely helpful". He's good for a few juicy quotes, too, because he's a straight talker and good-humoured type. At JLR it’s currently knocking on the door of 10,000. Becker told me that at its height, the engineering team at Aston numbered around 700. Becker was on hand to talk us through the new Sport and some of the challenges of working for a much larger operation like JLR. The ex-Lotus and Aston dynamic’s guru is a fitting replacement for Mike Cross, who retired from JLR last year. Read this article as it appears in the magazine.Another thing that’s new for this generation of Sport is Matt Becker.
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