Indholdsfortegnelse for July/August 2025 i Car and Driver

IF YOU’RE THE GUARDIAN-ANGEL TYPE, you’ll want to make sure yours blocks out time in their schedule before you settle into the new Corvette ZR1. You also might want to issue them earplugs because there will be decidedly blasphemous outbursts when the mighty LT7 engine conjures its full output. It would be unprofessional to admit that the ZR1’s specs are terrifying. But 1064 horsepower and 828 pound-feet of torque are certainly intimidating. Twenty years ago, the Bugatti Veyron inaugurated the four-digit club and charged more than a million bucks for admission. Generating the Bug’s 1001 horsepower took 16 cylinders, 8.0 liters, and four turbos; putting it to the ground required all-wheel drive and custom-made tires that cost $25,000 a set. The ZR1 has a twin-turbocharged 5.5-liter V-8 and routes its torque…

Settling arguments is often the basis for story ideas, and one particular debate regarding the magnitude of vehicular progress over the past six decades seemed perfect to tackle on the occasion of our 70th anniversary. The question is this: Could the muchheralded, world-beating muscle cars of the 1960s keep up on a back-road blast with even the least coordinated vehicles on sale today? “It’s hard to imagine anything worse than this dynamically,” remarks executive editor K.C. Colwell after a plunge through our rough-and-tumble evaluation loop in rural Michigan in a 2025 Jeep Wrangler Rubicon 392. A vehicle, in fairness, whose extended ground clearance, solid front and rear axles, knobby 35-inch all-terrain tires, body-on-frame construction, and recirculating-ball steering are completely at odds with ripping down paved roads. Yet its imprecision and…

Imagine you’re driving a Toyota 4Runner. A huge one. Or a Jeep. Yeah, a lifted Jeep. With big tires, antennas for comms, and a Dometic cooler full of Klondike bars. Now imagine thumping along your favorite off-road trail, mixing it up in beautiful brown mud while giant tread blocks stomp over downed tree limbs and reveling in the belief that you won’t meet traffc along your secret path. Then, you see it. No, you hear it first. It sounds like a swarm of bees fighting in a civil war. Your heart sinks as the noise moves closer. You can’t believe what you’re about to ask yourself. Is that . . . a Subaru? But on our endeavor, traffc would be of no concern. Just north of Pittsburgh is an off-road…

WHY OWN A VEHICLE unless it transports you to scenery, wildlife, and a carjacking or two? The experiences we’ve had over seven decades appear, quite often, to have been risky, at odds with common sense, and deleterious to the car or the driver. Nevertheless, we do it in the interest of returning to the offce with a great expense report and an even greater story. Nothing put us off the map like our tour of Baja California. It was a comparison test, but the adventure—part Mexican telenovela, part police procedural—is what’s remembered, not the finishing order. And to celebrate hydraulic diarrhea, we hydrolocked a Datsun Maxima in a flash flood. Thanks to a cartographer named Poppet Seymour, we drove a Land Rover Defender 90 and hiked in Utah to what…

“SIDE-BY-SIDE COMPARISONS are more revealing than you could believe.” So we said, introducing a September 1966 sports-car comparison test that Ken Miles helped judge. The statement remains true today. Circulating through a group of cars over three or four days immerses us in a vehicle segment in a way no press junket or single-car drive can. On comparison tests, we swap cars every 20 to 30 minutes and make sure to drive on freeways and twisty roads, in urban traffc, and even on racetracks. We evaluate and rate back-seat comfort with two and three occupants, an often sweaty endeavor that lays bare colleagues’ hygiene. We rip up and down mountain roads. When the brakes cool, the differences between the cars in the test become as clear as the Ten Commandments.…

ILIKE TO THINK I’m an adventurous tourist, if not on the level of Anthony Bourdain, then at least more ambitious than your average Croc-wearing American sunburn victim. And yet, it took three trips to Jamaica before I heard about Dover Raceway, a 1.6-mile road course up in the hills between Montego Bay and Ocho Rios. It turns out I’ve stayed about 15 minutes away, in the ironically named Discovery Bay, without realizing that a legendary Jamaican racetrack was right there in the backyard. Which, in my defense, would have first required realizing that this beautiful island nation of 2.8 million people has legendary racetracks, a matter on which I was regrettably ignorant for far too long. So this year, I decided to attend the Jamaica Race Drivers Club (JRDC) Carnival…

CURIOSITY MAY HAVE killed the cat, but it hasn’t taken us down yet. Delving into big subjects is a key thread in the fabric of Car and Driver. Sparked by skepticism and the joy of exploration and discovery, we love to dive into technical matters to separate truth from popular opinion and myth from reality. Our engineer-led testing team makes C/D uniquely equipped to generate and examine objective and subjective data and make sense of the rules, the laws, and the science behind questions. Over seven decades, we’ve probed major topics affecting enthusiasts and all drivers. In 2017, with a little help from Malcolm Gladwell, we explored the future of self-driving cars in a feature that inspired the 2019 documentary film Autonomy. More recently, we analyzed how engineering advancements…

WHILE THERE ARE MANY PARTS to Car and Driver, a foundational element that separates us from lesser publications is the road test. The ultimate expression of our product expertise and knowledge, the road test blends subjective opinion garnered from our experience with objective numbers generated by our instrumented testing, which covers everything from sprints to 60 mph to stops from 100 mph. ROADTEST has even been a New York Times crossword answer (clue: “Car and Driver assignment”). Besides serving as a check of sorts on carmakers’ claims, the road test’s objective numbers provide readers with quotable data, and the story should give anyone flicking through C/D’s pages a thorough understanding of how a given vehicle performs from the driver’s perspective. Our aim is to put your butt in the Recaro.…

The National Corvette Museum and its Motorsports Park sit in the shadow of the Corvette factory in Bowling Green, Kentucky. The museum opened in 1994 and has an amazing collection of Corvettes, although the first ZR-1, a package on the 1970–72 C3, is missing. So, for our photo shoot for the cover of this issue, a ’71 Stingray LT1 reps the C3 generation. The C1, a ’57 with its famous scalloped body, had a small-block V-8, which launched in the original body for ’55. The museum also supplied a ’63 split-window, which inspired the C8’s rear decklid. The C4 ZR-1 and the C6 ZR1 are the red ones; the C7 ZR1 is orange. A yellow Z06 represents the raciest C5 offering. The track is very photogenic, but we have a…

THERE’S A LOT OF LORE around the GTO-versus-GTO test from Car and Driver’s March 1964 issue. At the time, pitting a Pontiac against a Ferrari with no Ferrari present, let alone the idea of comparing the two, was enough to send tweed caps spinning and upset the stringback-leather-glove club that worshipped at the altar of Enzo. It’s also the story that set us apart from the too serious, too starched, too conservative, too dogmatic folks at Road & Track and established the ingenuity, silliness, and intelligence that remain hallmarks of C/D to this day. While we’re willing to do things others wouldn’t dare to, we try to do them without churlishness or callowness. Toppling expectations and beliefs, poking giants, and tampering with sacrosanct ideas is important work. It’s healthy to…

THERE RESIDES IN the human psyche an overwhelming urge to fiddle with a good thing. Which is our excuse for project cars. Our first was a 1957 Plymouth Fury inhaling Daytona Beach air through twin four-barrels. It managed 124 mph. We once stuffed a Pontiac single-overhead-cam inline-six into a Jaguar XK-E. In 1966, we attached a set of Koni dampers and Maserati airhorns to a Plymouth Fury wagon—maybe 60 minutes of customization. Who but Car and Driver would install two engines in a first-gen Honda CRX? And we extorted a Penske mechanic into inserting a 370-hp V-8 into a Camaro we called “the Blue Maxi Z/29.” On occasion, projects bore actual fruit: A 212-mph Corvette—427 cubes, 603 horsepower—that we built to celebrate the magazine’s 40th. A 150-mph 1998 Ford Crown…

HERE WE GO AGAIN, driving sports sedans and untangling some of the finest canyon roads Southern California has to offer. Sports sedans have long been Car and Driver favorites. Former editor David E. Davis Jr.’s 1968 ode to the BMW 2002 was a seminal work in celebration of the genre, back when muscle, pony, and sports cars were what captured the imagination. Today, ultraquick EVs, mind-bending hypercars, desert-running pickups, and SUVs of all stripes garner most of the attention, but we’re still drawn to the purity and practicality, the aesthetics and the athleticism of this enthusiast-friendly four-door format. The cars we assembled for this comparison test come from the U.S., Japan, and Germany. Each contender provides genuine performance for an outlay that’s not far beyond the current new-car average. The…