Innholdsfortegnelse for April 2019 i Car and Driver

YEARS AGO, IN THE SALAD DAYS OF AUTO RACING, a well-funded race team would have run separate engines to propel it through qualifying and the race itself. But nowadays, due to regulations and cost controls, top stock and open-wheel series have jettisoned this luxury, forcing their manufacturing partners to produce engines that are as durable as they are powerful. Exactly how durable depends on the series. Toyota Racing Development Monster Energy NASCAR Cup engine — Code name: Phase 11 Specs: pushrod 16-valve 5.9-liter V-8 Output: 425–750 hp Max engine speed: 9800 rpm Durability target: 1500 miles Engines allowed per season: see regulations below Consumables: pistons, bearings, and exhaust-valve seals Regulations: There’s no engine cap, but teams must run at least 13 races with an engine that has been used in…

John Phillips // The International Motor Sports Association (IMSA) observes its 50th anniversary in 2019 and has already assembled a celebratory coffee-table book, which distracted me adequately through the fracking of an upper molar. I’d show you a picture of the book but there’s nothing to see. Just a flat-black cover with an IMSA logo, as if the anniversary were for the American Funeral Association. What ought to be on the cover is any of the Porsches driven by Peter Gregg (41 IMSA wins) and Hurley Haywood (34 wins), a duo who also happened to prevail in IMSA’s first sports-car race in 1971, driving a Porsche 914/6. The book costs $170, which is a little precious, especially since several of the photos are so out of focus that I searched around…

JUST WHEN YOU THOUGHT THERE WAS NO ROOM LEFT on the crossover carving station, here come two new two-row SUVs looking for space alongside our three assembled slabs of prime beef. We chose just three established middle grounders as foils for the Chevy Blazer and the Honda Passport because, come on—where do you stop? If we’d gathered the whole class, we’d need an extra magazine’s worth of pages to cover them all. Then we’d have to rename ourselves Tranquilizer and Apnea. So each vehicle here is either all new—though, yes, both the Blazer and the Passport share their platforms with existing models—or recently updated. Despite subtle feints toward luxury in one particular crossover’s interior, these are normal SUVs for normal people, the kind that line your block. All are all-wheel…

Israel has no native automotive industry. Aside from Autocars—a mid-20th-century experiment in fiberglass-bodied rattletraps that produced the Holy Land’s answer to the Trabant—passenger cars have never been built there in any significant numbers. And new imported cars carry a 92 percent tariff. There is no endemic vehicular culture, other than possibly tour buses. “By and large, Israelis don’t really care about cars,” says JeffJablansky, an expert on the local automotive market and a onetime contributor to Israel’s limited automotive press. Yet the small country is the birthplace of both Waze and Mobileye [see “Auto Hoon,” page 020], two of the biggest success stories in contemporary automotive tech. Waze provides real-time crowdsourced mapping and traffic data to app subscribers. It sold to Google for more than $1 billion in 2013. Mobileye…

FORGET THE MUSCLE-CAR WARS. A higher-stakes arms race is happening in the heavy-duty truck segment, and Ram just drew a 1000-lb-ft line in the sand. The latest iteration of its venerated Cummins turbo-diesel inline-six, with its impressively round four-figure torque rating, establishes the front line. But Ram was also wise enough to update the HD lineup with plush interiors and new technology to appeal to modern truck customers, many of whom missed the memo about not mixing work with pleasure. Ram restacked its HD powertrains for 2019. The 5.7-liter V-8 is gone, leaving the 6.4-liter V-8 (410 horsepower, 429 pound-feet of torque) mated to a ZF eight-speed automatic as the only gasoline option. Two versions of the 6.7-liter Cummins are on offer: The base unit is rated at 370 horsepower…

In the “Show Boats” full-size-pickup comparison [January 2019], the Ram’s payload (990 pounds) is less than 10 percent of its towing capacity (10,600 pounds). Is this correct? How can this be safe? —Aaron Voynar, Berea, KY When towing with a conventional hitch, the trailer tongue should carry between 10 and 15 percent of the total trailer weight. As Voynar alludes, placing 10 percent of the max towing weight (in this case, 1060 pounds) on the receiver will exceed this particular truck’s gross vehicle weight rating (GVWR), the maximum total mass of the vehicle, passengers, and cargo the truck is designed to carry. And that would be unsafe if you were towing with a conventional hitch. But the math changes if you use a weight-distribution hitch. By adding vertical rigidity to…

france has given the world many gifts: the guillotine, mayonnaise, the hot-air balloon, aspirin, and those blobby yellow Minion characters beloved by kids and the emotionally arrested. Here’s another tentative inclusion for the list of highlights: accessible sports cars with their engines behind the rear axle. Sure, Porsche arrived first and was already producing the 356 by the time a French garage owner with the spectacularly accented name of Jean Rédélé moved from tuning ass-engined Renaults to building his own lightweight coupes using the same mechanical parts. But in terms of silverware, Rédélé’s Alpine—like Porsche—was a hugely successful trophy-getter during its early years. He chose the brand’s name to reflect his passion for mountainous rally races, at which the French company was enormously triumphant. Alpine launched its most famous model,…

ONCE A SPUNKY UPSTART that invented the compact-crossover movement, the Toyota RAV4 had become progressively more mainstream (read: duller) over the course of its four generations. As it surpassed the Camry in sales volume—it was the best-selling non-pickup in the U.S. last year—it assumed that car’s role as a safe but prosaic choice. For the RAV4’s fifth generation, Toyota is making a valiant attempt to reverse this slide into anonymity while, of course, maintaining the model’s popularity. The new RAV4 hopes to grab your attention with a new platform offering improved driving dynamics, more variety among the trim levels, and two suspenders’ worth of visual flair. Even if it may eventually blend in purely on the basis of ubiquity, the new RAV4 is eye catching. Its chunky, squared-offshape combines with…

OF COURSE THE MERCEDES-BENZ G-WAGEN is absurd, which is precisely why you (and we) love it. It’s crazy that a decades-old, severely compromised, utilitarian military box could rise to prominence among the glitterati who don’t even know what a differential lock is, much less ever engage one of the G’s triumvirate of them. It’s one of life’s little mysteries. It’s also one that Mercedes-Benz was smart not to question, instead just continuing to crank them out at prices that could top $200,000. Now there’s an all-new model—well, all new except for the door handles, some internals of the bank-vault doors, and the spare-tire carrier that hangs offthe back, which carry over. This is the truck’s first major redesign since its inception in 1979, offered for 2019 in G550 and G63…

ESTABLISHED AUTOMAKERS ARE done treating Tesla like a brash arriviste trying to crash a country club. The newcomer’s success has turned the legacy brands’ irritation into imitation, with the Jaguar I-Pace and the Audi e-tron leading the—ahem—charge. That pair will be followed by an onslaught of EVs from around the industry. Polestar is Volvo’s take on a Tesla-style brand, one that will offer a range of electrified cars via direct sales rather than through dealerships. Following the plugin-hybrid Polestar 1, the 2 is the brand’s second offering but its first EV. ▼ EXTERIOR Like many modern designs, the Polestar 2 is an amalgam of SUV and coupe. It’s a hatchback with a fast roofline that gives it unmistakable three-box proportions, but its raised ride height and plastic lower-body cladding suggest…

Intel doesn’t claim that RSS is infallible. Crashes could still happen as a result of equipment failures, sensor malfunctions, and, of course, human error. And an RSS-equipped AV won’t avoid one accident if doing so would create another. It is, however, highly vigilant and sometimes more assertive than you’d expect a robot to be. Scenario 1: Traffic is deadlocked, and human drivers won’t let the AV merge. RSS permits the car to assert itself by creeping into the lane, pressuring the car behind to make an opening. If that car refuses to stop, though, the AV will abort this plan and move offto the side until it can safely enter the lane. Scenario 2: A bus shelter blocks the AV’s view of pedestrians waiting at a crosswalk. RSS allows the…

2019 MAZDA 3 WHILE IT MAY BE DIFFICULT TO PUT A FINGER ON WHY THE NEW MAZDA 3 IS CHARMING, EVERYTHING YOU PUT YOUR FINGERS ON CHARMS. The new 3, offered again in sedan and hatchback forms, reveals its engineers and designers to be obsessed with the little things most owners will not notice immediately. In the 3, all the switchgear feels perfectly and equally weighted. Each button, be it on the dashboard or center console, reports the same click. The HVAC, radio, and infotainment knobs (Mazda calls the last one the Commander control) have identical knurling and resistance. While the subtleties of the clicks and knurls might go unobserved on a 10-minute test drive, use the 3 every day and you will be admitted to that elevated realm of…

THE DRAWN-OUT LIFE CYCLES of big-buck, low-volume vehicles mean that supercars, like their owners, often experience midlife crises. That’s why high-end carmakers flood us with an unending tide of convertible variants, limited editions, performance specials, and facelifts such as this Lamborghini Huracán Evo. Replacing the all-wheel-drive Huracán coupe, the Evo builds on Lamborghini’s newfound knack for weight-be-damned perform ance. Rear-wheel steering helps this 3500-pounder gambol around corners, and a 29-hp injection to the 5.2-liter V-10 should trim a tenth or two from what was already wanton acceleration. Magnetorheological dampers and variable-ratio steering—optional on the outgoing Huracán—are standard on the Evo, and the old Audi-based infotainment system makes way for a Lamborghini-exclusive unit [see “Goodbye, MMI”]. And of course, there are new front and rear ends that riffon that timeless Lamborghini…

WIDEBODY 911s WITH BULGING FENDERS and steamroller tires have terrorized California’s canyon roads for decades. But rarely do such Porsches, swollen to the point of requiring an EpiPen, go down the road as well as this Gunther Werks. Gunther Werks has been restoring, rebuilding, and redoing Porsche 911s for a little over two years. So far, the small shop in Garden Grove, California, has produced just two customer cars. Each began life as a 993, the final air-cooled 911, and four more are currently in the works. They wear custom carbon-fiber-intensive bodies made and designed by Gunther Werks. The unit here is its first, a development prototype with 13,515 hard miles on its 993-based 420-hp 4.0-liter flat-six. In a show of what we’ll assume is confidence, Gunther Werks simply handed…