Indholdsfortegnelse for Apr-15 i Car and Driver

Infiniti’s hot, Nissan GT-R–powered Q50 Eau Rouge concept is dead. Cooler heads have prevailed now that itinerant luxury czar Johan de Nysschen has decamped for Cadillac. So shed some tears. Pour some Red Bull on the curb. But grieve quickly because Infiniti has something more tangible—and more important—coming relatively soon. The Q60, on sale next year as a 2017 model, is Infiniti’s answer to Audi’s A5, BMW’s 4-series, and Mercedes’ C-class coupe. Like that German triad, the Q60 will offer a choice of turbocharged four-and six-cylinder engines. The four will be nearly identical to the 241-hp 2.0-liter found in the C-class, as this product of the partnership between Daimler and Nissan-Renault will be built on Nissan’s engine line in Decherd, Tennessee, which is already shipping engines to the Mercedes plant…

American whiskey is having a moment. According to the Distilled Spirits Council, revenue from “super premium” bourbon and Tennessee whiskey went up 104 percent between 2008 and 2013. Lesser hooch made nice gains, too, as Americans developed a newfound appreciation for a liquor historically synonymous with saloon brawls and slurred arguments over who done left the T-tops of the Monte Carlo right before that there rainy spell. Bourbon is respectable now, chic and popular with the swells. To find out why, and maybe to enact some quality bootlegging dirt-road fantasies, we decided to take a V-8–powered southern road trip across the hills and hollers of Peak Whiskey. If you’re going to venture deep into NASCAR country—and, for that matter, the sport’s liquor-running foundations—you need a machine with some bona fides.…

SEDAN For those not keeping score at home, a quick recap of the state of the sports sedan: In our June 2013 issue, a Lexus IS350 F Sport beat a BMW 335i M Sport in a three-car com-paro. Ten months later, the 3-series’s two-door twin lost to an Audi S5. Then in January, our 10Best awards arrived without a single 3-series variant on the list. For the first time in 24 years, this sweet-spot segment is without a definitive leader. As disciples of the compact-luxury holy trinity—sportiness, refinement, practicality —we find ourselves rudderless. But now Jaguar, historically a purveyor of fusty British pomp and popped fuses, shows us a way forward with sharp handling, sweet steering, and luxury amenities in a serious attempt at a right-sized sports sedan. We’ve just…

Full-size pickups have become so large that the notion of a somewhat smaller truck suddenly seems like a very big deal. Indeed, General Motors has been basking in attention for more than two years since announcing that it is bringing to market all-new “mid-size” trucks, the Chevrolet Colorado and the GMC Canyon. Now they’re here for 2015, whipping up some serious media froth by simply entering a neglected segment, one that has largely been dominated by decade-old designs from Nissan and Toyota. For our first test of the Chevy, we’re taking the measure of the biggest of the new mid-size trucks: a Colorado crew cab with the long bed (six feet, two inches). It also has the V-6 engine and four-wheel drive. In this four-door specification, stretched over a 140.5-inch…

Acura clearly wants to get this thing right. The original aluminum-intensive 1991 NSX was a stunner, a sunrise of engineering inspiration that chased away the darkness in the realm of sports cars and laid bare the multitude of sins being committed there. For the first time, a large automaker that took quality seriously had applied itself to a segment rampant with all manner of pop-riveted, glued-up, hammered-down, and wiggy-wired silliness. In the presence of the $60,000 NSX, the self-important air-puffed mediocrities of the eroti-car industry scurried for cover. It didn’t last. Everybody else got better, with newer and faster cars, while the NSX mainly just got more expensive, chained as it was to the rapidly inflating yen. The final targa-topped NSX went of the line in 2005, and hardly anybody…

You can see why Toyota and BMW would choose the code name “Silk Road” to describe their collaborative effort to build a new generation of sports cars. East meets West and all that. We will forgive the companies the minor historical inaccuracy— the Silk Road trade route never extended to Japan or Germany—because we greatly prefer sports cars to silk. And this alliance will result in the next BMW Z4 and the return of Toyota’s long-lost Supra. According to leaks out of Germany, the Supra coupe will appear in two years as a 2018 model. Why would the Germans be leaking Supra details? Because underneath the Toyota-specific body will be mounted a turbocharged inline-six BMW engine. And, if that’s not enough sacrilege, the coupe’s rear-drive chassis will be developed largely…

PORSCHE 911 TURBO S PRICE > $195,175 POWER > 560 hp TORQUE > 516 lb-ft WEIGHT > 3590 lb C/D OBSERVED MPG > 14 CHEVROLET CORVETTE Z06 PRICE > $102,120 POWER > 650 hp TORQUE > 650 lb-ft WEIGHT > 3530 lb C/D OBSERVED MPG > 13 NISSAN GT-R NISMO PRICE > $151,880 POWER > 600 hp TORQUE > 481 lb-ft WEIGHT > 3894 lb C/D OBSERVED MPG > 12 Now that the California Highway Patrol is switching to Ford Explorers, every Ford SUV in the mirrors looks like a threat. The stress level is especially high when you’re traveling in a three-car, jelly bean–hued convoy propelled by 1810 horsepower. And this excuse probably won’t fly: “But officer, it’s hard to say how fast we were going because the numbers…

CHOICE HAULERS During the 1940s and early ’50s, a 1939 or 1940 Ford, particularly a Business Coupe with a load-carrying platform in place of a rear seat, was the preferred tool for delivering moonshine. For power? In the beginning, the ubiquitous Ford fathead V-8, typically a 59A-series block (standard in the 1939 and ’40 Fords). But, recognizing the weight of the payload and the speed needed to keep revenue agents at bay, the fathead’s standard 85 horsepower just didn’t cut it. According to Wilkes County, North Carolina’s own Junior Johnson, quoted in the 1999 book Brave in Life, about his moonshining exploits: “The first thing you did was take the motor out. You’d bore the thing, stroke the crank, port the heads and manifolds, change the camshaft—you put a high-performance…

Twenty years ago, any West Coast liberal arts school worth its Great Books curriculum featured streets filled with E30 BMW 3-series convertibles. Whether they were given as sweet-16 presents or inherited from mom and dad when the young one zipped of into the collegiate unknown, these leftover 1980s yuppie-caricature mobiles were movable campus fixtures. People bought small convertibles in volume back then, and you might recall that Volks wagen’s Rabbit-based cabriolet was still rolling of dealer lots as late as 1994. Though VW still offers niche-y open-top cars in the form of the on-its-deathbed Eos and the too-cute-by-half Beetle convertible, the Audi A3 cabriolet seems a worthy spiritual successor to both the original Volkswagen Cabriolet and the E30 convertible. While BMW’s M235i recently replaced the 3-series on our 10Best list,…

BLINDING YOU WITH SCIENCE THE NEW SMALL — A nanometer, or one-billionth of a meter, is how much your fingernails grow each second. In scientific notation, this is 1x10-9 meters. The average human is 1.7x100 meters. The diameter of the sun is 1.4x109 meters. NOW THAT CARBON-FIBER composites have migrated from the world of blank-check motorsports to semi affordable production cars such as the BMW i3 and Chevrolet Corvette, what’s next? Is there another breakthrough material that will reset our expectations for strength, stiffness, and weight the way carbon fiber has? Carbon nanotubes will. Imagine a tiny pipe with walls made of carbon atoms linked neatly together. The “nano” part of the name comes from nanometer, meaning one-billionth of a meter. Each carbon nanotube is only one nanometer in diameter,…

There’s comfort in the latest Miata— sorry, MX-5. It’s not the comfort of plush leather seats, a soft ride, or opera windows. It’s the comfort of knowing that Mazda’s fourth-generation two-seat roadster steadfastly remains a Miata. The MX-5 is sui generis partly because of its size and the toy like character that size confers. As the world around it grows—cars are bigger, mediums are larger, waistlines are rounder, SUVs still exist—the defiant Miata retains roughly the same dimensions of the 1990 original. What did you look like a quarter-century ago? Even more impressive, the new MX-5 has actually dropped a pants size versus the previous, third-generation car. It has a shorter wheelbase and is nearly a half-inch lower. But if the car looks and feels trim, it seems bigger inside.…

To ensure that nothing is lost in translation, Yukihiko Yaguchi pulls out his iPhone and scrolls through the photos. The chief engineer of the 2016 Lexus GS F stops on a pic of a mid-90s Toyota Chaser—a Japanese-market mid-size sedan—sporting a tiger decal on the hood and orange stripes across its roof and flanks. It’s a Japanese Touring Car Championship racer in which Yaguchi scored seat time back in 2000, but the experience sticks with him today as one of several race cars that inspired each of the Lexus F cars he’s developed. A proper race car, Yaguchi says, is easy to drive fast. And that is exactly what he wants drivers to say about his new GS F. Yaguchi doesn’t obsess over top speeds and quarter-mile times. Like the…

OVERWHELM THE SENSES or starve them. connect the driver so completely with the car that he has to duck to avoid the crankshaft throws, or isolate the cabin so absolutely that its occupants feel cleansed by its serenity. constant stimulation or sensory deprivation? when engineering an expensive car, a path must be chosen. But the 2016 Mercedes-May bach s600 charts a difficult middle course. It’s not a frantic supercar, nor is it a numb isolation chamber on four wheels. Instead, it indulges each of the five senses in considered doses. Of course, the new Maybach isn’t a car for people who merely have their names on parking spaces. It’s a $190,275, 523-hp, twin-turbo v-12–powered leviathan for the titans who have their names on buildings, especially in china. After all, even…

If you were surprised when Ford sent us the first turbo four-banger Stang in three decades for a November-issue road test and it showed up with an automatic, raise your hand. (Okay, put your hand down, the dentist is getting nervous.) The EcoBoost was the supposed “enthusiast’s deluxe” model, meaning lighter and nimbler than a GT and with the efciency of a compact. But an auto? Just when the non-GT Mustang was shedding that secretary-car stigma? We have a feeling that the car’s gearing was why Ford opted to send us the automatic first. Manuals with the Performance package ($1995) come with the slightly shorter 3.55:1 rear-axle ratio, which is just short enough to make 60 mph a two-shift run. This is why this manual, at 5.5 seconds, isn’t as…