Indholdsfortegnelse for January/February 2026 i Car and Driver

WINNER: MAX VERSTAPPEN Sometimes Formula 1 drivers try racing in a different series, and it doesn’t go well. That certainly wasn’t the case with Max Verstappen’s first GT3 race at the Nürburgring Nordschleife. Verstappen, like Shohei Ohtani showing up at your beer-league softball game, started third in his Ferrari 296 GT3 and took the lead on the first lap. He set the fastest lap of the race (two seconds off the GT3 track record) and built a lead of more than a minute. He turned the car over to his teammate, and they won the four-hour race by over 24 seconds. Other GT3 drivers, we assume, went home hoping Verstappen can find a different hobby. LOSER: MERCEDES, FOR ADDING MICROSOFT TEAMS Sure, the dinosaurs got wiped out by an asteroid…

Ever since the debut of the seventh-generation BMW M5, the G90, we’ve been asked which M5 body style we prefer. To some extent, that question will depend on your own priorities—practicality, curb weight, and style all factor into what is, ultimately, a subjective personal choice. Nonetheless, we’re here to make tough decisions, so we brought two M5s together to figure out which one we’d take home ourselves. In one corner, we have the BMW M5 sedan, the latest in a line of four-door legends. In the other, a decidedly unconventional take on the M formula: the twodoor, four-wheel-drive Kubota M5. The safari trend has been going for a while—Porsche 911 Dakar, Lamborghini Huracán Sterrato, the ’78 Camaro on a Blazer chassis that your uncle Duane built just to show off at…

IN BRITAIN THEY SAY THAT there is no such thing as bad weather, only unsuitable clothing. The sentiment is top of mind when driving a Morgan Plus Four. The Plus Four is a replica of a classic design Morgan has made since 1950. The word replica is significant, because this car does not meet all vehicle standards for 2025. It fulfills emissions regulations but not most crash requirements, although it does have airbags for both driver and passenger. Morgan can sell it in the United States under the FAST (Fixing America’s Surface Transportation) Act’s replica-car rule as long as it caps sales at 325 cars per year. And that’s why onlookers were so gobsmacked when they heard it could be purchased new. It looks and feels like an antique. One…

CAN YOU BELIEVE Ford’s autocross-ready Maverick Lobo sport truck comes factory fitted with all-season tires? We couldn’t either, so we went shopping for a set of performance summer rubber that matched the Lobo’s size. Of the three available choices, we settled on a set of Porsche-spec Michelin Pilot Sport 4 tires ($1240, from tirerack.com) developed for the Taycan. As we expected, the grippier rubber improved the Lobo’s braking and lateral grip, though at the cost of more noise at cruising speed. What we didn’t expect was slower acceleration to 60 mph on the summer tires. We suspect that the Michelins’ additional weight (four pounds per tire) contributed to the slower times. A Lobo with Stock Tires Goodyear Wrangler Territory HT, 225/55R-19 103H M+S B Lobo with Summer Tires Michelin Pilot…

THERE SEEM TO BE A REMARKABLE number of outdoorsy types around these days. Apparently, everyone is hiking and camping and overlanding and trail riding and skiing and boating and ranching and hunting. Go to the dentist’s office or the grocery store, and the parking lot looks more like a national park, littered with Honda TrailSports, Mazda Meridian Editions, Chevy Trail Bosses, Subaru Wildernesses, Nissan Rock Creeks, Volkswagen Peak Editions, and a variety of letter-and-number combinations that involve a nubby tire and a plastic-clad wheel well, mostly trims introduced in the past few years. The outdoors is in, and we’re seeing a lot of small and mid-size all-wheel-drive SUVs dipping a chunky tire in waters previously only traversed by serious four-by-fours. Some label these vehicles as off-road lite or soft-roaders, because…

HOW DEDICATED ARE YOU to this whole enthusiast thing? Perhaps you drive a sports car or sedan and think of yourself as an attentive and skilled driver. Your Car and Driver subscription probably goes back years, and maybe you’ve even written to Ed. griping that we review too many Porsches. Well, here’s a good test for that dedication: one more review of a Porsche 911 GT3. But the 911 GT3 is a car that tests your dedication in more ways than one. Are you ready for every drive to feel like you’re qualifying at the Daytona 24-hour race? How’s your hearing? It’s about to get worse thanks to the 99-decibel scream (in Sport exhaust mode) from the 502-hp naturally aspirated flat-six. Even at idle, this engine is intense, sending its…

FERRARI’S FIRST EV TAKES SHAPE Ferrari is dishing out details on its first EV months ahead of its debut. We’re surprised, and given the specs, we’re also stoked. The four motors powering the still-unnamed EV will combine to produce more than 1000 horsepower, which should be enough e-motivation to shoot this new model to 60 mph in the low-twosecond range. Those electrons will come from a battery with a 122-kWh gross capacity. We believe that will enable a range of at least 280 miles. Ferrari says the EV will have four doors, a curb weight just below 5100 pounds, and a wheelbase of 116.5 inches. That means it’s anybody’s guess as to whether this vehicle is a sedan, an SUV, or a wagon (as you might imagine, we’re hoping for…

ABOUT 35 YEARS AGO, Car and Driver’s editors gathered around an oval table similar to what a Love’s truck stop uses for rebuilding starter motors. A building inspector had already declared the room “sick,” and back then it didn’t mean “majorly cool.” It meant Legionnaires’ disease. All of us had just returned from new-vehicle debuts, and technical director Csaba Csere asked if there was anything outstanding at Nissan. Our Nicholas Bissoon-Dath, formerly a Formula 1 aerodynamicist, responded: “Nope [cough, heave]. Okay, well [hack, blow, spit], there’s a version of the little Sentra. Stupendous engine.” Then the ambulance arrived. Nicholas meant the 1991 Sentra SE-R. When it alighted in our parking lot, our editors (including me, snorting phlegm) celebrated a 140-hp DOHC 16-valve 2.0-liter four that right then was raining cats…

BOB LUTZ might no longer be an executive at a large automaker, but the 93-year-old product guy still makes cars. Except now the cars he builds are made almost entirely of paper. It’s a hobby he picked up as a kid but let fall by the wayside as he rose through the ranks of BMW, Ford, Chrysler, and General Motors. About a decade ago, he returned to the craft, building paper model airplanes. But certain planes he wanted to attempt were not available as kits. “So, I decided to do it myself, and it wasn’t half bad,” Lutz tells us at his Ann Arbor home. Lutz persevered and expanded his repertoire, creating 1:24-scale replicas of iconic cars, including the Lancia-Ferrari D50, the BRM Type 15, and the Mercedes-Benz W196.…

IT’S HARD TO BELIEVE how long this has taken, but the Nissan Leaf may finally be at the end of its long road to redemption. The OG Leaf went on sale in December 2010, the first mainstream mass-produced electric vehicle, a little car carrying big hopes for the future. Drive gas-free! Help reduce global warming! Show off your eco-consciousness! Sure, but Nissan didn’t know what it didn’t know: that the original Leaf’s 73-mile driving range and the U.S.’s nonexistent charging infrastructure would make buyers leery. It was a dud. Fast-forward 15 years to this, the new third-generation Leaf. Fearless prediction: It will not be a dud. It looks nothing like the first two generations, with their plump, nebbishy sheet-metal that whispered, “Move along. Nothing to see here.” The new one…

GLOOM AND DOOM ABOUT EVS and their prospects is pervasive these days in business media, especially in reports coming out of Detroit. It’s the polar opposite of car brands’ soaring plans of just a few years ago, as executives proclaimed they would migrate largely or entirely to battery-electric vehicles by some deadline within 10 or 15 years. Tech enthusiasm routinely peaks and then crashes; ask anyone who lived through the dot-com bust of 2000. But globally, EVs are getting more affordable and continue to improve, with longer range and faster charging. You might not know it from the coverage, but EV sales hit a new record in the third quarter of 2025, taking about 12 percent of the U.S. market. That’s at least partly because the $7500 federal-government purchase incentive…

2025 Toyota GR Corolla HIGHS: Ultraplayful chassis and steering, hatchback versatility, automatic makes eating tacos while driving easier. LOWS: Inconsistent launch-control starts; less acceleration, efficiency, and money in your pocket than with the manual. PICKLES AND PEANUT BUTTER. It’s a thing, though if palates could talk, many might argue it’s a combo that shouldn’t be. Kind of like how we feel about hot hatchbacks with automatic transmissions, especially ones as entertaining to drive as Toyota’s GR Corolla. But sometimes you’ve got to eat. Which, for Toyota, means exposing its anabolic econobox to broader tastes. Enter the 2025 GR Corolla and its newly optional eight-speed automatic. You get the same rowdy 300-hp turbocharged inline-three with 22 more pound-feet of torque than last year (now 295), a driver-configurable all-wheel-drive system, and enough grip…

The compact-SUV class is fat with choices that are thin on fun. The Volks­wagen Tiguan SEL R-Line Turbo aims to stir up that segment. The new Turbo model uses VW’s familiar turbocharged 2.0-liter four, but here it’s fortified with strengthened internals and a larger turbo with higher boost pressure. The result is 268 horsepower and 258 pound-feet of torque, improvements of 67 ponies and 37 pound-feet over the standard Tiguan and seven more horses than a base Porsche Macan. That extra output becomes noticeable the moment you step on the accelerator. The 60-mph time drops from a languid 8.5 seconds to a sprightly 6.7, landing the Turbo among the class leaders. Surprisingly, the more powerful engine barely affects fuel economy, with the Turbo’s EPA combined estimate of 25 mpg matching…