Indholdsfortegnelse for November 2016 i Car and Driver

“IT SEEMS LIKE A GREAT CAR, AND THIS TIME IT IS BEAUTIFUL. I WISH ALFA WELL.” ROMEO AND GIULIA As someone who drove my father’s wonderful (if ugly) 1967 Alfa Romeo Giulia Super to school many a time before it disintegrated into a rust pile, I was excited to read your article on “11 things you need to know” about the new Giulia [“Is the Wait Finally Over?” August 2016]. It seems like a great car, and this time it is beautiful. I wish Alfa well. However, I was dismayed that you got an important fact in the article so wrong. The name “Quadrifoglio” does not mean “cloverleaf,” as stated in the answer to your first question. Quadrifoglio means “four leaf,” as in four-leaf clover. —Mario Jorquera Columbia, MD In…

LINCOLN’S LINCOLN — Big-ticket cars—from the mid-six-figure range on up—are practically impossible to total. As long as the vehicle’s identification plate can be salvaged, the car can be rebuilt around it. Specialty insurers are used to dealing with such claims and accommodating repairs that may require expertise unavailable at the local Maaco. They also may be more understanding when an owner makes a total-loss claim but wants to retain the wreckage. THE LARGEST POPULATIONS OF COLLECTOR-CAR OWNERS ARE IN THESE FIVE STATES: 1. CALIFORNIA 2. MICHIGAN 3. NEW YORK 4. FLORIDA 5. TEXAS THESE ARE THE 10 MOST COMMON COLLECTOR MODELS: 1. CHEVROLET CORVETTE 2. FORD MUSTANG 3. CHEVROLET CAMARO 4. CHEVROLET BEL AIR 5. FORD MODEL A 6. FORD THUNDERBIRD 7. VOLKSWAGEN BEETLE 8. CHEVROLET C10 PICKUP 9. CHEVROLET…

WHO WOULD HAVE GUESSED when the SUV rumbled out of the automotive primordial soup that this simple truckish wagon form would come to dominate its environment? It started simply enough but, beginning about 25 years ago, the SUV mutated into a collection of disparate, dazzling, and sometimes-confounding forms. What we have here is the vehicular equivalent of the Cambrian explosion. Join us on a journey back through time as we map the evolution of the SUV from its wartime roots to today’s many offerings. For our purposes, we consider an SUV to be a relatively high-riding, two-box design. But all bets are off because, well, because of the Suzuki X-90.…

Crossover SUVs are appliances, the toasters of autodom, purchased and driven by pragmatic people making pragmatic choices. They’re as ubiquitous as they are routine, crawling through Piggly Wiggly parking lots and plugging along in middle-school pickup lines. Like refugees of a child-free lifestyle, most have fully surrendered themselves to domestic duty. Crossovers meet the need. They check the box. But they don’t light any fires. Loving one doesn’t come naturally to me. Yet, I do. I own a 2016 Mazda CX-5, and I love it. I love it because I don’t feel the weight of domestic burden every time I turn the steering wheel. I don’t have to. Because it turns like a car. Better than many cars, in fact. When the CX-5 was introduced, Mazda engineers wheeled the…

SUVs are recent entrants to the collector-car marketplace. Here are some of the best: *Good to very good condition TWO TOYOTANS Anyone who went to high school during the Dazed and Confused era knows there were two things that the jocks and stoners agreed on: the one cool weed-smoking cheerleader and the Toyota FJ40 Land Cruiser. But as the jocks and stoners grew up, made some money, and wanted their memories back, better-than-new Land Cruisers started showing up at big-time auctions. Prices soared, with some FJs hitting six figures. If that prices you out of an FJ40, try looking for the next big thing, the first-generation Toyota 4Runner. Its back story is just as interesting as Toyota’s Jeep clone, as the 4Runner started out as the Hilux pickup, the darling…

[+]Classic quality, value, and comfort virtues. [-]Howls as if it has a CVT under full throttle, weak dynamics. A TIDAL WAVE OF JAPANESE CARS soothed our pain throughout what revisionists call the Malaise Era. While beloved 510s, 240Zs, RX-7s, Celicas, and Supras of the 1970s are long gone, Honda’s Accord survived and prospered to celebrate its 40th birthday this year. The 12.7 million cars sold in the States, not to mention a remarkable 30 10Best trophies, distinguish the Accord as a paragon of Japanese quality, value, and driving finesse. The ’76 Accord’s convenience breakthroughs included a single key for the doors, trunk, and ignition, plus service reminders for oil changes and tire rotations. Today’s spoiled buyers, however, demand more. To celebrate the Accord’s birthday, Japanese engineers set a goal of…

[+] Boosted power, nocost manual transmission, the least expensive 911. [-]Conservative launch strategy can’t match PDK, the least expensive 911 is still expensive. FEWER THAN ONE IN 10 new Porsche 911s has three pedals, which means the vast majority of 911 buyers are happy to shell out an extra $3200 to let a PDK dual-clutch automatic do the shifting. We get it. It’s a great gearbox. PDK is quicker than the manual, it’s easier to live with, and it’s smart enough to make you look like an ace on a road course. And yet, to someone adept at shifting gears, letting PDK handle everything is like watching two computers play chess. Thankfully, Porsche still lets us play with a shifter and clutch. We might lack the moves of Deep Blue,…

Oreos are old hat? Wait, why did you put “old hat” and “The Google” in quotes? What the hell is “The Google”? I’ll ignore all of that for now, but I will answer your coherent question. In the turbocharging scenarios of the ’70s and ’80s, engine displacement usually stayed the same. In those days, 200 horsepower was considered a lot, and any uptick in power, however small, was greeted with effusive praise because cars were pretty slow. Today, carmakers aren’t choosing turbos for their ability to make more power—meeting Corporate Average Fuel Economy requirements is much more important. So, naturally aspirated engines are being replaced with smaller-displacement turbo engines that do well on the EPA fuel-economy cycles. In general, these downsized turbo engines provide strong low-end torque, but horsepower outputs…

FOR AGES, AUTOMAKERS have been searching for a practical means of varying an engine’s compression ratio on the fly. How hard the air—and sometimes the fuel—is squeezed before ignition plays a crucial role in overall efficiency: Compressing the mixture as much as possible without detonation yields a longer expansion ratio and more power for every increment of fuel consumed. Since the compression ratio is determined by basic engine geometry (the cylinder volume with the piston at the bottom of its travel versus the top), that isn’t easily changed. One expedient now in wide use is combining the Atkinson cycle with variable valve timing. But Infiniti has made a significant stride with its Variable Compression-Turbo (VC-T). This boosted 2.0-liter four-cylinder, the product of two decades of research and 300 patents, will…

THE PROBLEM WITH SHARED platforms has always been persuading buyers to pay more for what’s basically a fancier version of the same oatmeal. Sometimes the cheaper version even turns out to be more desirable, which might well be the case with the new Audi SQ7, if we can— with a straight face—put the words “cheap” and “new Audi SQ7” in the same sentence. In Europe, the Audi is just over half the price of its supposedly more covetable upmarket sisters. Underneath, as with the standard Q7, this vehicle is closely related to the Bentley Bentayga and the Porsche Cayenne. But the range-topping SQ7 also gets the option of the Bentley’s astonishing active anti-roll system and a body design that forgoes the Bentayga’s Trumpian excesses. The SQ7 also gets a far…

After I lost Lloyd, my brain-damaged cat who had vertigo and used to fall out of trees, I never thought I’d love anything so slow this much. But for some reason, two years ago, we bought a Jeep Wrangler Unlimited for my wife. Actually, the reason was simple: She wanted a convertible with four doors that could be used as a tow vehicle. Being cripplingly indecisive, I liked her criteria because they narrowed our choices down to one. I love putting the top down, which is an immediate experiential upgrade. After two years, we can get it down in about two minutes. I love that all four doors come off— call that a 10-minute job. The exposure is as close as someone with terminally bad judgment needs to get…

If a 3868-pound, all-wheel-drive hybrid strikes you as a curious sequel to the original bantamweight NSX, you’re not alone. As vehicle-performance lead engineer Jason Widmer tells it, the initial prospect of a gas-electric NSX caused as much hand-wringing within Honda’s hallways as raised eyebrows outside them. In the early days of the new car, NSX mules consistently laid down faster laps without the battery-electric assist system that was supposed to make the thing quicker. That was more than five years ago, and the NSX’s hybrid-electric system is now a fully developed piece of go-faster kit. The car rolling out of Marysville, Ohio, seamlessly combines two turbochargers, three electric motors, four driven wheels, six cylinders, and nine forward gears to produce bona fide supercar performance. That won’t make it any less…

[+] Competent driver’s car, Lotus exclusivity, Lotus eccentricity. [-]Doesn’t feel 400 horses strong, Lotus eccentricity. LOTUS IS NOT FERRARI. It’s not McLaren, and it’s not Porsche. What it has in common with those companies is that it manufactures cars. Barely. Despite the well-faded glory of seven Formula 1 Constructors’ Championships, Lotus’s current struggle with solvency is real. In the last decade it has seen three CEOs, the creation and collapse of plans for five redesigned models, and a full year’s delay in deliveries to the U.S. of the most promising car it makes. But finally, we’ve driven that car—the Evora 400, the latest in the Evora bloodline— and it is good. Nine pounds of boost and air-to-water intercooling bring the output of the Evora’s 3.5-liter Toyota-sourced V-6 to an even…

[+] Camaro’s V-6, handling with big-wheel package. [-]Standard car is a creampuff. IT DID NOT TAKE A CRYSTAL BALL to predict that as Buick’s old-line customers continued to die off and the brand courted younger ones the average age of its owners would drop. But no seer or spreadsheet, no pundit or product planner foresaw what has also come to pass: Buick is now predominantly a seller of SUVs. Thanks to the Enclave and Encore, a pair that didn’t exist a decade ago but accounted for 58 percent of the brand’s sales in 2015, Buick’s longstanding reputation as a purveyor of cushy sedans is changing. That has not stopped Buick from marching forward with the completely redesigned 2017 LaCrosse, a distillation of the two previous generations into an attractive and…

IN AN INDUSTRY that lives and dies by the sales of Camrys and pickup trucks, advocating for enthusiasts sometimes feels like standing in a raging river and shouting at it to reverse course. Manual transmissions are slipping toward oblivion. Fuel-economy regulations are driving diversity from manufacturers’ engine portfolios, replacing it with efficient homogeneity. And perhaps most worrying is the proliferation of crossovers. They’re like an algal bloom threatening to choke out all other life-forms in the interest of easy ingress and a commanding driver’s position. But a few shafts of light have started to pierce the heavy blanket of crossover conformity. Porsche’s first glimmer of hope, the Cayenne, dates to before most people realized the market potential of a high-performance crossover. In its first year on the market, the Cayenne…

By Eddie Alterman I’m finding it impossible to summon the level of righteous indignation expected of Audi/Porsche/VW diesel owners these days. My SUV is just too good. The go-to vehicle in our family is the 2014 Audi Q7 TDI. It does it all. It schleps the kids and their friends and their gear to softball practice, to camp, to wherever the hell kids go to chase Pokémon these days. It charges away from stoplights, drawing on a store of low-down torque that can only be described as elemental. Both its interior and its ride somehow manage to be simultaneously uncomplicated and sumptuous; it’s a no-BS affair built for long, stressless days behind the wheel. I have managed to coax nearly 700 miles from its 26.4-gallon tank. It has an understated…

FASHIONS CHANGE . A wealthy gent who once might have expressed his good fortune with a Mercedes-Benz 450SEL or a Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow, both grand barouches for the pedigreed elite of the 1970s, today might roll in something that looks like an International Scout after disastrous plastic surgery. It’s been 25 years since the sport-utility craze took off in earnest and 24 years since the first prediction of the segment’s impending demise. But regardless of their income, people like sitting up in the clouds, they like being able to roll carefree over crumbling infrastructure, and they always like having more space. And carmakers just can’t raise the prices high enough. You can now drop 100 grand on a Cadillac Escalade—six digits for the Saks Fifth Avenue Suburban, the Suburbillac. No…

[+] Potent 390-hp V-8, plush interior, 8500-pound towing capacity. [-]Overboosted steering, smallish cargo hold, tight third row. WHEN NISSAN CREATED its first full-size sport-utility vehicle, the Pathfinder Armada, it did so in the traditional way, using the platform of its full-size Titan pickup. Although there’s now a new Titan pickup from which a new full-size ute could be spun, Nissan decided that worldwide volume for big, body-on-frame SUVs— which sell pretty much only in North America and the Middle East—could be accommodated by consolidating its offerings around the international-market Nissan Patrol. That vehicle, leather-lined and reengineered for a more pampered, pavement-oriented life, already is the basis for the Infiniti QX80, and now it has spawned the new Nissan Armada. The styling changes from the Infiniti are evident mostly up front,…

[+] Composed handling, sweet V-6, comes fully loaded. [-]No brand heritage, visible Hyundai roots, no sizzle. IN AUTOMOTIVE TERMS, Genesis is the name of Hyundai’s newly independent luxury brand. Once merely a model name for Hyundai’s aspirational cars, it has now fully separated from the mother ship and is striving for a Lexus-like rise to prominence. There will be six models in the lineup by 2021, and the rechristening of the Hyundai Genesis sedan as the Genesis G80 was the first platinum-plated stake in the turf. This is a fine starting point, since the G80 is the best-driving Hyundai to date. But for the affluent to consider Genesis in the same thought bubble as, say, Mercedes-Benz, a grand flagship is required. Enter the G90 sedan, which presents as a solid…