Indholdsfortegnelse for November/December 2024 i Car and Driver

THE PAST FEW YEARS, Infiniti has seemed about as industrious as a rudderless summer-house guest who spends extended periods floating in the pool. The brand has been largely unbothered by new-model introductions, save for a redesign of the three-row QX60 for 2022. And while, on a personal level, we can admire such a relaxed attitude, it’s probably not the best strategy for a car company. Evidently, Infiniti has awakened to that reality and is wiping the sleep from its eyes. We’ve seen a string of concept cars, but the effort really begins here, at the top of its lineup, with the redesigned QX80—arguably the brand’s most significant new vehicle since the original Q45. The design was previewed by the QX Monograph concept, but a better descriptor for the production model might…

The star of the T.50 show is the naturally aspirated 4.0-liter 12-cylinder. The 392-pound V-12 winds up to 12,100 rpm, producing 661 horsepower at 11,000 rpm, 353 pound-feet of torque at 8000 rpm, and 251 pound-feet at 2500 rpm. Interestingly, GMA approved engine supplier Cosworth to build a 65-degree V-12 rather than use the perfectly balanced 60-degree layout. Why? Strictly for optimizing the packaging of the 12 port injectors in the valley of the V. With an 81.5-mm bore and a 63.8-mm stroke, the aluminum block houses a delicate-looking polished crankshaft. “With a 65-degree angle, you don’t have the vibrations that require large counterweights,” Gordon Murray says. The crank, which is cut from a steel billet, weighs just 29 pounds and sits 3.3 inches from the lower crankcase, keeping the…

MUCH LIKE Daryl Hall and John Oates, Ram trucks and Hemi engines will go down as one of the all-time great duos. While the musical pair’s split involved legal battles and a restraining order, it was tightening emission regulations that forced the breakup of Ram’s group. Fare thee well, 5.7-liter V-8. Now the top engine in Ram’s half-ton pickup is Stellantis’s twin-turbo 3.0-liter inline-six dubbed the Hurricane. Despite changing its lead vocalist, the refreshed 2025 Ram 1500 doesn’t miss a beat. We’d argue that the new aluminum-block, doubleoverhead-cam Hurricane is more in harmony with the truck’s luxury persona than the old iron-block, pushrod Hemi. Of course, Ram must convince V-8 fans it has a worthy replacement for displacement. The only remedy for Hemihead grief is horsepower, and the new engine…

WRITING ABOUT ANY TESLA feels like wandering into Dr. Nightmare’s Malfunctioning Loaded-Shotgun and Land-Mine Emporium. Say something nice? Buckshot in the face. Criticize the product? Kaboom. Thankfully, we stocked up on tourniquets before a bright-red Tesla Model 3 Performance landed at our Ann Arbor office. Not that we needed to—the g-forces from this pocket rocket are more than capable of cutting blood flow to the extremities. Unholy acceleration has always been a mainstay of Tesla’s sport-minded models, and the new Performance is no different. A pair of motors motivates all four wheels to the tune of 510 horsepower and 554 pound-feet of torque. Thanks in part to a relatively svelte 4046-pound curb weight, the Model 3 Performance blasts to 60 mph in a supercar-adjacent 2.8 seconds and continues through the…

SURPRISES CAN BE GOOD, like finding a stray onion ring in your fries. But when it comes to evaluating a car over the course of 40,000 miles, you don’t want anything unexpected to happen. No amount of deep-fried goodness can make up for a hair in your salad, and encountering a problem in a long-term test often spoils the experience. That’s why the 19 months we spent with our 2023 Subaru BRZ Limited were so satisfying: As an affordable, small, rear-wheel-drive sports coupe, it delivered reliable behind-the-wheel joy with minimal headaches. “I’m having trouble finding something to dislike about this car,” noted technical editor Austin Irwin in an oft-repeated sentiment in our BRZ’s logbook. Associate news editor Jack Fitzgerald elaborated: “Each time I go a few weeks without driving the…

Not all of us are fans of the fake engine noise the BRZ pumps into the cabin through its audio speakers, which resulted in 91 decibels of flat-four din at full throttle when new. Though a Subaru dealer can silence the system upon request (there’s no off switch), a quick internet search revealed we could deactivate the feature by unplugging the control module via an access panel on the side of the dashboard. Doing so makes the car far more livable day to day, despite the sound enhancement kicking in only at higher revs. When retesting the car at 40,000 miles, the sound level inside at full chat dropped from 90 decibels with the system active to 81 decibels with it off. That’s a big improvement in a car that…

THERE ARE FEW CERTAINTIES IN LIFE. But if you own a 1988 or ’89 Buick Reatta, one thing is assured: Its dash-mounted touchscreen, one of the first installed in a passenger vehicle, will break. “They all fail,” says Jon Morlan of the cathode-ray-tube (CRT) units. “It’s just a matter of time.” Morlan is an independent electronic technician who works exclusively with East Coast Reatta Parts in Durham, North Carolina. Shop owner Marck Barker contracts Morlan to diagnose, repair, and rebuild the touchscreens, as replacement examples are otherwise nonexistent. The ghosts in these Zenith-built machines are electrolytic capacitors. “If you’ve ever looked on an old circuit board, they’re the bits that look like a tiny pop can,” Morlan says. These capacitors contain liquid that eventually leaks out or evaporates, denying the…

The ID.Buzz debuted in 2022 in Europe, but Europeans have different expectations for passenger vans. Over there, “cargo box with seats” is the standard, so the Buzz required a litany of changes for the U.S. market. Significantly, our Buzz got a 9.8-inch stretch for a third row, which is mandatory for a minivan. The rear seats got HVAC vents—again, mandatory. Our rear-drive version uses a more powerful motor that makes 282 horsepower versus the Euro model’s 201-horse unit. We also get a 335-hp dual-motor, all-wheel-drive version (sold in Europe with a GTX badge), and our van’s battery is upsized from 77.0 kilowatt-hours to 86.0. The U.S. ID.Buzz also settles a thorny issue unresolved by the European version: how to retain the sleek concept-car flush glass while allowing the second-row windows…

The 2025 Aston Martin Vantage and the 2024 Porsche 911 Turbo can feign normality. They’re comfortable and composed, with their available heated and ventilated seats and nice sound systems. Hush their active exhaust, and they speak with their inside voices. Their doors open the normal way (the Aston’s with a subtle arc upward to clear curbs), and a valet won’t have any problem figuring out how to put them in gear. But these are supercars, however you care to define the term, and even a half-asleep supercar is capable of stupendous feats—as a guy in a Hyundai Elantra discovered when he decided to join our comparison test midway down a highway on-ramp somewhere in Ohio. He squeezed between the Vantage and the 911, and we only realized how fast we…

THERE ARE A LOT of trick new performance features in the upper echelons of the 2024 Porsche Panamera lineup, but even the entry-level version is a high-tech weapon. If you think it’s going to be some sort of bargain, though, LOL. LMAO, even. The third-gen Panamera looks a little different outside; there’s greater change within the roomy cabin. Three screens (one of those is optional and for the passenger) span a rejiggered dashboard with a new push-button start on the left, a weird new gearchange protrusion inherited from the Taycan on the right, and smudge-attracting gloss-black trim all over. Moving the vents still requires the use of a touchscreen—which is still dumb. New stuff generally means more weight, and this Panny tips the scales at 4419 pounds, 81 pounds heavier…

2024 Lucid Air Pure MILES: 2995 OBSERVED MPGe: 107 It isn’t often that Car and Driver gets this excited about a base model, but the 430-hp Lucid Air Pure is one that deserves as much praise as the 1234-hp Air Sapphire. Not so much for its 4.3-second dash to 60 mph or its 419-mile EPA range—both solid performances—but for the exceptional value and truly luxurious experience behind the wheel. The cabin is quiet, well appointed, and coddling in this $81,350 spec, a price we could prune by omitting the Stealth Appearance package (black exterior trim, essentially, for $1750) and striking Zenith Red Metallic paint ($800), though everyone agrees that its curb appeal is tough to beat. On top of the $71,400 base price, we also added the DreamDrive Premium package…

WHEN THE FIRST PORSCHE 944s arrived in the States in the spring of 1982, they were like manna from heaven for Porsche enthusiasts. With an initial base price of $18,980, the 944 cost thousands less than the 924 Turbo it replaced, despite delivering equivalent performance and sporting a genuine Porsche engine rather than the Audi-derived unit in the 924. It also rolled on fashionably wide tires for the day, housed under muscular fender flares. Though Porsche derived the 944 from the 924—meaning its engine was still at the front and water-cooled, both anathema to Porsche hard-liners—it was a great all-around car. One of its key virtues was excellent balance, thanks to a rear-mounted transaxle that helped it achieve near-perfect weight distribution. In our October 1984 issue, after a three-part evaluation,…

THERE’S A TARGET on the tailgates of kei trucks. These pint-size haulers have a small but fervent following in the U.S. The federal government exempts imported vehicles that are at least 25 years old from common safety and emission standards, and yet classic Japanese kei trucks are running into legal hurdles, with several states prohibiting owners from titling or registering their vehicles. This includes Car and Driver’s home state of Michigan. What gives? A lot of people believe it’s coming from the nonprofit American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators (AAMVA), says Kevin Burton, a Michigan-based lawyer representing a group of kei owners in the Great Lakes State. Though AAMVA has advocated against titling certain vehicles, including classic kei trucks, for on-road use, the association lacks enforcement power. “AAMVA is not…

THOUGH PRODUCTION OF THE BELOVED Volkswagen Type 2 Microbus ceased long ago, the iconic vehicle’s popularity has never waned in the collective consciousness. Born in the 1950s, adopted by the youth movement in the ’60s, relentlessly referenced in the media, and co-opted for crass marketing agendas ever since—it’s hard to believe Volkswagen waited until now to take a serious stab at harvesting some of that cultural currency for its own benefit. Of course, this isn’t Volkswagen’s first attempt to mine its ample nostalgic reserves. The New Beetle—a front-engine, water-cooled reimagination of the original Type 1 Beetle—arrived in the late 1990s and served as a totem of the boomer generation’s infatuation with its own past. Slipping the new ID.Buzz EV into the current zeitgeist, however, is an entirely different challenge. Merging…

In 1951, Nissan introduced the Patrol (also known as the Safari in Japan), a four-wheel-drive vehicle in the vein of the Toyota Land Cruiser and the Land Rover Defender. The Patrol doesn’t have the U.S. following of those vehicles, although it is beloved in Australia. The Patrol trucks offer all the off-road goodies you need (two-speed transfer case, limited-slip differentials, a body that wears a trail-scarred patina well), and over the years, they have come in wagon and pickup bodies. The QX80 wasn’t always part of the Patrol family tree, but this is how it slid in.…

HYBRIDS WERE STILL an idiosyncratic option when Honda exiled the last Civic Hybrid nearly a decade ago. These days, gas-electric power is mainstream, and this revived hybrid shows why. The hybrid powertrain effectively replaces the previously available 180-hp turbo four. It’s part of a broader update to the 2025 Civic that includes a handful of design tweaks and alterations to the compact sedan and hatchback’s trim and powertrain lineups. The gas-electric setup pumps out an Siequaling 200 horsepower courtesy of a pair of electric motors and a 2.0-liter four-cylinder. In most instances, the electric part of this equation directly drives the wheels, while the gas engine spins the generator to charge the 1.1-kWh lithiumion battery tucked under the rear seats. When the mood is right, such as at highway speeds,…

IT ISN’T OFTEN WE can say that we really influenced a vehicle’s development. And while Cadillac will never admit it in a press release, the CT5-V Blackwing fitted with the Precision package is a glass slipper with our name on it. And so far, we’re the only ones to have driven it. Back when we drove the V-8 Blackwing at Lightning Lap 15 [February/March 2022], we hypothesized that a stickier tire would crown it the four-door king of Virginia International Raceway. At the time, the Caddy was just 0.1 second off the Mercedes-AMG GT63 S, which rode on Michelin Pilot Sport Cup 2s. Well, with the Precision package, even more extreme Cup 2Rs are on the Blackwing’s menu. The new-for-2025 package is strictly a chassis upgrade. Alex MacDonald, chief engineer…

PINT-SIZE SIBLING FOR THE EV9 Do you like the Kia EV9 but wish it were way smaller? The new Kia EV3 fills that slot nicely, although it won’t do so in the U.S. until 2026. We drove a Korea-spec model, which has a single motor driving the front axle and makes 201 horsepower and 209 pound-feet of torque. All-wheel-drive and hopped-up GT variants are also in the works. In our brief spin around Seoul, we loved the supple ride and the full complement of cabin tech, which includes nearly 30 inches of digital real estate and a whole bevy of regen-brake settings we’re not sure we need. We’re hopeful the EV3’s 81.4-kWh battery will get it to the all-important bogey of an EPA-estimated 300 miles of range. Despite a 400-volt…

The BRZ line’s track prowess gets a boost thanks to the new-for-2024 tS model’s larger Brembo brakes and Hitachi dampers, but we wondered how much of an improvement a few bolt-ons could make to our long-term car. Since the BRZ’s regular brakes struggle under extended hard use, we installed a set of track-oriented Carbotech XP12 brake pads ($397) and fresh OE rotors ($364) and replaced the stock brake fluid with high-temperature Castrol React SRF Racing DOT4, which we got from Amazon for $56. We then fitted our Limited model’s 18-inch wheels with stickier yet street-legal Bridgestone Potenza Race tires, which cost $1220 on Tire Rack for a set of slightly wider 225/40R-18s. With the new rotors bedded in (we paid Carbotech $40 to break in the pads for us), the…