Innholdsfortegnelse for January 2019 i Car and Driver

Mirrorless Mirrors The auto-show trope of replacing side mirrors with cameras is no longer just a concept-car fantasy. Outside the United States, the 1035-hp McLaren Speedtail and the Lexus ES will provide drivers with video streams of their blind spots. Compared with mirrors, cameras offer wider views, lower aerodynamic drag (the Speedtail’s can retract into the body in Velocity mode to achieve the car’s claimed 250-mph top speed), and digital image enhancement to compensate for poor visibility. Regulatory hurdles will keep this technology from U.S. drivers for now, but as with laser headlights, it’s only a matter of time before America catches up with the rest of the world. Put It on the Glass Supersizing the head-up display (HUD), Japan’s Sekisui Chemical can laminate windshields with a film that includes…

COMMIT TO DRIVING A CAR AND YOU STAND FIRM AGAINST THE GREAT TEEMING TIDE OF CONFORMITY. Basic transportation? A monthly payment? We see a personality—a statement about our identity, our desires, our priorities. Traditional cars are no longer the mainstream choice, having lost ground to a growing field of higher-riding vehicles. But whereas trucks, crossovers, and SUVs once expressed something special about their owners—that they were rugged, adventurous, or dog-owning—cars are increasingly powerful statements about the person behind the wheel. Most people would be better off in a crossover. But commit to driving a car and you stand firm against the great teeming tide of conformity. Park one of our 10Best cars in your driveway, however, and you plant both feet in the enthusiast camp. Your id will applaud, but…

Chevrolet Corvette Grand Sport/Z06 The aging C7 Corvette goes down swinging, and making a most furious noise. “EVERY YEAR, I RESOLVE TO NOT PUT IT ON THE LIST BECAUSE OF ITS FLAWS. AND THEN I DRIVE ONE AND THINK, “DAMMIT. OF COURSE I’M PUTTING THIS THING ON MY LIST.—J.Gall” If you’ve ever tried pushing a cart through a Los Angeles Costco on a Saturday, you might have some idea of what it’s like to drive a Corvette in the real world. Throngs of lookie-loos make walking around a challenge, and there’s no space for pushing one of those eleven-tenths-scale shopping carts. Every sample station is packed three-deep with people waiting for face time with the person wearing a hairnet and passing out puff pastry. Everyone is inattentive. No one moves.…

Genesis G70 As the saying goes, sometimes you have to fake it till you make it. But you usually don’t make it quite this quickly. WHEN GENESIS MUMBLED ABOUT A 3-SERIES FIGHTER, I SMILED. I’M STILL SMILING, BUT FOR A DIFFERENT REASON.—J.Phillips It is no coincidence that the Genesis G70, the infant brand’s third sedan offering, reminds you of other vehicles. Longitudinally mounting the engine in a rear-drive four-door with an all-wheel-drive option is simply what you do to be taken seriously in this class. But at 111.6 inches, the G70’s wheelbase is within an inch of everything generally considered a direct competitor in the luxury-sports-sedan segment, including entries from BMW, Infiniti, and Mercedes. And the Genesis’s styling is a pastiche of elements seen in other competitors, notably the Alfa…

THE CIVIC TYPE R LOOKS LIKE DARTH VADER’S SEX FACE, BUT IT’S AN ALMIGHTY THING.—M.Duff Honda Civic Sport/Si/Type R Are these Hondas making up for their aesthetic shortcomings with exceptional physical prowess? Discuss in small groups. ever has there been a brake pedal less concerned with the thermal mayhem playing out inside a car’s wheels. Time after time, it hauls us down from nearly 130 mph to less than 50 for Virginia International Raceway’s Turn 1, where we open the throttle early, aim the car down the track, and take full advantage of this chassis’s neutral-cornering brilliance. Watch a cornering sequence closely, in slow motion, and you’ll witness the drive wheels leaving rubber on the tarmac at corner exit, the rear tires taking a slightly wider radius and pointing the…

JUST A BEAUTIFULLY EXECUTED LUXURY SEDAN AND A GREAT ALL-AROUNDER. I GET IN THIS CAR AND IMMEDIATELY WANT TO DRIVE IT ACROSS THE COUNTRY.—J.Capparella Mercedes-Benz E450/Mercedes-AMG E53 This mid-size German presents an alluring array of competencies, while displaying an equally beguiling set of forms. Some people who think about thinking say that intelligence is a singular trait. Either you have it or you don’t, or, like most of us, you land somewhere between those poles. But we’ve all met a walking encyclopedia of World War II aircraft-wing cross sections who can’t calculate a 20 percent tip or an Ivy League PhD with the spatial awareness of a houseplant. Those kinds of characters give credence to the idea that intelligence is more than one-dimensional. The theory of multiple intelligences suggests that…

[+] Storming performance from the M40i, sounds better than a Boxster, great to drive. [-] Some awkward styling details. SOME SPORTS CARS ARE BOUGHT to be driven and, let’s be honest, some are bought to be flaunted. The last-generation Z4 always felt more suited to catwalk duties, compromised by a cumbersome retractable hardtop that operated in a mesmerizing mechanized ballet but added mass and bulk in what were almost exactly the wrong places for a sports car. As such, it always struggled to make a convincing case to buyers asking the toughest question in this part of the market: Why shouldn’t I buy a Boxster instead? But the new Z4 is a far sharper driver than its predecessor, and it will acquit itself better in the face of the inevitable…

[+] Exceptional refinement and effortless performance. [-] Too big and heavy to be considered a true sports car. DON’T LET THE INFLATED BADGE FOOL YOU. Despite carrying a heftier integer, the new 8-series is a replacement for the 6. The M850i coupe is the first member of what will be a big clan: As with the 6-series it supersedes, the new 8 will come in cabriolet and Gran Coupe body styles, with a sportier M8 set to follow. In terms of pure dimensions, though, the Bimmer actually shrank slightly in its transformation from 6-series to 8. At 191.2 inches long, the M850i coupe is 1.6 inches shorter than the 6, while its 111.1-inch wheelbase is down 1.3. Despite that, the 8er manages to be heavier than the 6. It sits…

HUMANS DON’T NEED DATA TO FORM OPINIONS. If you need proof, just ask a toddler where clouds come from. But isn’t it our duty, as the thinking species, to seek truth wherever it can be found? It is in that spirit that we have gathered this array of automotive data. Because, yeah, we all thought the Ford EcoSport was pretty slow. But doesn’t it feel good to know that it’s the slowest car that has graced these pages all year?…

IN 2011, when President Obama announced a plan to raise the fleet-average fuel-economy standards to 54.5 mpg by 2025, automakers signed on largely without complaint. In 2018, President Trump rolled back those targets and introduced a rash of drastic trade policies intended to help the American manufacturing sector, and now industry executives are balking. What gives? In a word: uncertainty. Trump has been eager to create or overturn policies by executive order, which Congress has little ability to limit. But his decisions [and indecisions—see “A Tariffic Time to Be Alive”] have rattled the auto industry. Tariffs on imported steel and aluminum, tariffs on Chinese imports, and possibly even more tariffs on imported cars have turned executives into squawk boxes. Ford yowled that metal tariffs had cost the company $1 billion…

PORSCHE SELLS SO FEW OF THESE CARS THAT I FEEL LIKE WE OUGHT TO WRITE EACH OF THOSE BUYERS A THANKYOU NOTE FOR DOING THEIR PART TO KEEP THE MODEL ALIVE.—J.Sabatini Porsche 718 Boxster/Cayman Do we fool ourselves into seeing the 718 as the platonic ideal of a sports car? Or is it that good? Eminent psychologists, of the sort we are not, have long debated the difference between lust and love. Several of them have even conducted practical experiments on the subject with attractive young grad students. Between such exertions, one of the concepts they have postulated for the process of attachment, and the move from primal physical attraction to the stage of a relationship that gets people measuring for drapes, is that of parataxic distortion. This being, in…

WHEN THEY COME FOR OUR CARS,” IMAGINED THE FOUNDING FATHERS OF THIS MAGAZINE, “BIG GOVERNMENT WILL BE BEHIND IT.” THIS STOOD TO REASON, AS THAT WAS THE CASE WITH SAFETY MANDATES, EMISSIONS REGULATIONS, AND THE DOUBLE-NICKEL ERA, THE POLICY TRIUMVIRATE THAT SO RILED THE LIBERTARIAN SPIRIT OF THIS INSTITUTION IN YEARS PAST. Short of an outright ban, the feds, aided and abetted by the bureaucracies of certain states, would most certainly continue their overreach, eventually all but proscribing the car via requirements too onerous to meet. Uncle Sam’s safety nannies, fuel-economy standards, and untenable restrictions on the very act of driving itself would make new cars so dull, slow, and expensive that we would welcome riding the bus. Or so we thought. This is not how the war on cars…

IN 2017, AMERICANS BOUGHT MORE FULL-SIZE PICKUPS THAN PEOPLE DID NEW VEHICLES, PERIOD, IN ALL BUT THE THREE LARGEST MARKETS IN THE EU. WE BUY AN OUTRAGEOUS NUMBER OF THESE THINGS—ABOUT 2.3 MILLION THAT YEAR ALONE. BUT HERE’S A THEORY: WE DON’T BUY PICKUPS IN THESE QUANTITIES BECAUSE WE ARE MORE PRODUCTIVE THAN OUR BERET-WEARING BROTHERS ACROSS THE ATLANTIC. It’s not that we have so many more contractors, farmers, and tradespeople who need pickups. It’s that Americans have more toys. It’s estimated that 50 to 60 percent of the world’s pleasure craft are sold here, as are more than 40 percent of the world’s snowmobiles. Boats need to get to the lake, and snowmobiles to the trail. And few of the cars that race at the country’s 1339 drag strips,…

[+] Tech heaped on luxury, a back seat worthy of Barry White, active suspension works eerily well. [-] Still a little dull for folks who regularly squeal their tires. FOR THOSE WHO HAVEN’T given any thought to Mercedes’ midsize SUV lately, you are forgiven. We haven’t really given it much thought ourselves since the last one launched in 2011. There was nothing particularly wrong with the outgoing GLE—it’s one of Benz’s best-selling vehicles, after all—but it was easy to ignore in a world of sexier small crossovers and larger three-row elephants. It didn’t look like much. It wasn’t quite ugly, but it bore a frumpiness that kept us from getting too interested. Calling it the ML- or M-class and then changing the name to GLE didn’t help, either. A comprehensive…

BMW M2 Competition Munich’s revised but still diminutive sports coupe enters the year with a sizable chip on its pumped-up shoulder. MAYBE IT SHOULD BE CALLED THE M2 COMMITMENT. IF YOU’RE ONE OF THOSE HAIR-ON-FIRE-ALL-THE-TIME KINDS OF DRIVERS, MUNICH’S GOT YOUR NUMBER HERE.—K.Wilson If you’ve ever spent time in a gym, you’ve seen the type. There’s always that one guy huffing and puffing to draw attention to himself while doing his best impression of Magnús Ver Magnússon. If the all-steroid automotive Olympics were a thing, the 2019 BMW M2 Competition would be heavily favored in the flyweight class. Munich’s smallest and highest-strung speed freak bulges and bristles like Little Hercules. Its rear fenders are swole, it hunkers down over its wheels like they’re gallon jugs of creatine it’s trying to…

Ford Mustang GT/Bullitt Driving Ford’s new, up-powered Bullitt won’t transform you into Steve McQueen, but it will allow you to indulge the fantasy. The difference between human minds and lizard brains is that humans think symbolically. Not just in our use of language to represent concepts and reality, but in our instinctive embrace of the myth and fantasy found in objects. We see meaning in things that help us collectively explain and share the world. Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, a French philosopher who shaped the study of the primitive human mind and who has never before been mentioned in a car magazine, described this as “participation mystique.” Cue the 2019 Mustang Bullitt, a collection of sights, sounds, and sensations that drills into your psyche and leverages all the insecurities and aspirations it…

THE ACCORD IS SUPER-SPACIOUS, EVEN UNDER THE FASHIONABLY SLOPING ROOFLINE.—J.Lorio Honda Accord If you like to listen to Steely Dan on 180-gram vinyl through homemade speakers, have we got the car for you. As the Honda Accord has appeared on our 10Best Cars list a record 33 times, we’ve praised the virtues of this humble family sedan (and occasional coupe) for more years than many of our staffers have been alive. Such an achievement is no accident; it’s the culmination of Honda’s fastidious fine-tuning and dogged attention to detail. The current-generation Accord, now in its sophomore year on this list, exhibits Honda’s obsessive-compulsive approach to mass-market carmaking. At a time when sedans account for fewer and fewer sales in the marketplace, the Accord might seem, to the casual observer, like…

IT’S STUNNING HOW SUCH A (RELATIVELY) SLOW CAR CAN TRIGGER ALL THE EMOTIONS THAT MAKE ME LOVE QUICK ONES.—J.Jacquot Mazda MX-5 Miata/RF In falling back on established patterns, the Miata persists in a state of arrested advancement. This should be celebrated. It’s hard to find tutelage behind the wheel of a car. A few sessions with a former cop—or the high-school gym teacher—riding shotgun, foot poised above an auxiliary brake pedal, are about as close as most of us get. After that, there’s really nothing stopping a new driver from getting out over his skis and ending up in a guardrail. What new drivers really need is to spend time behind the wheel of a car where mistakes are small and feedback is clear. And by feedback, we don’t mean…

Volkswagen Golf Family The Mascot, the Hero, the Scapegoat, the Prime Enabler, and the SportWagen. Good parents say they love all their children equally. It’s less hurtful than admitting the truth. As the Volkswagen Golf lineup has expanded, we have hidden behind a similar façade, granting a growing group of variants a spot on our 10Best list. This year is no different, as the Golf, Golf Sport Wagen, Golf Alltrack, Golf GTI, e-Golf, and Golf R all share the award. So technically, they’re all our favorites. We love all Golfs. And how could we not when the basic package is this good? The lineup’s broadening range of talents brings the basic car’s inherent goodness into clear relief. Without its brilliant packaging, chassis integrity, and clarity of purpose, none of the…

[+] Exactly the streetbound hypercar you’d expect from a Formula 1 team. [-] Huh? Come again? Look up “jolie laide.” IT SEEMS LIKE CONVERSATIONS in restaurants and bars are becoming impossible. Unless the person across the table speaks with the forcefulness of a stage actor, it’s hopeless. It seems rude to repeatedly ask someone to repeat themselves, so a polite nod replaces actual interaction. Did she just say that she once got so high, she signed up for LifeLock? Maybe she said she’s ordering the gravlax. They have gravlax here? There’s zero problem hearing the McLaren Senna, which may explain our encroaching deafness. Floor it to 70 mph and your ears are overwhelmed by a cacophony of tire thrum, wind rush, engine roar, and gearbox whine. We measured 102 decibels’…