Indholdsfortegnelse for February 2016 i Car and Driver

LAWYERS NEVER ASK QUESTIONS without knowing the answers. We as journalists subscribe to the opposite view, but conducting a reader survey falls in between. With this one, we sought to tease out some numbers regarding car buying. Here’s one: 80 percent of respondents were “very satisfied” or “extremely satisfied” with their dealership experience. If that contradicts conventional wisdom, it does explain why 68 percent of respondents would not buy or lease a vehicle without visiting a dealership and 84 percent would not buy or lease without a test drive. Indeed, if the bricks-and-mortar dealership system is going to be overthrown, our survey indicates that Silicon Valley might ally with car enthusiasts. While only 34 percent of non-enthusiasts said they would purchase a car over the internet, 54 percent of enthusiasts…

2017 Porsche 911 Carrera/Carrera S Tenerife is a tiny volcanic island poking through the waters of the Atlantic Ocean. Located west of the Sahara Desert, this Spanish outpost combines the topography of Southern California, Mexico, and the Olympus Mons on Mars. It’s a fever dream of a place. Weird and magical, it looks like something Gabriel García Márquez or Salvador Dali would sketch. So it shouldn’t surprise you to learn that we’re here, driving up the side of a volcano in a nearly 15-foot-long Betty-Blue Jelly Belly. With the windows down, a faint whistle can be heard from the stern of our ship. That is the sound of Porsche’s big news, and it’s why we’ve come all the way to Tenerife. Turbos aren’t just for 911 Turbos anymore; the base…

Academically, Goldilocks is a garbage fable. The entitled snot, who becomes an unrepentant criminal over a bowl of oatmeal and a nap, suffers precisely zero consequences for her actions, and the classic tale makes no attempt at a teachable moment. The only takeaway appears to be that, in life, sometimes our options are either too hot or too cold, when all we really want is something in the middle—something just right. That’s about as philosophical as a car review can be. InMercedes-Benz’sC300coupe, a 2.0-liter turbocharged four-cylinder pairs with either rear- or four-wheel drive for a sedate experience more akin to that of a luxury sedan than a sports coupe, which the company claims the C300 is. The car rides nicely and handles respectably, but the engine has the energy of…

Detectives don’t believe in coincidence, but the timing of the new A3 e-tron Sportback, in the wake of the VW Group’s diesel scandal, is at the very least serendipitous. No way Audi could have timed this plug-in hybrid’s release, inked on the calendar years ago, to coincide with a global meltdown over diesel cheating, right? If it did, we want Audi running our 401(k) portfolios. Irrespective of timing and circumstance, Audi is doing its first entry-level hybrid right. Sold exclusively in four-door hatchback guise, the e-tron avoids the potential anonymity that swallowed so many same-bodied hybrid sedans. Also, it forces U.S. hatchback buyers to go hybrid; there are no plans for this miniwagon to be followed by other engine variants. There is a modest plug-in premium, however. The e-tron starts…

GT350R wheelmaker Carbon Revolution starts with carbon-fiber tow (thousands of twisted strands) long enough to lap Earth twice. It places fiber preforms and woven fabric inside a mold with foam cores to fill the spokes, then injects resin, applies a vacuum, and cures the composite in a pressurized oven. Center, lug, and valve-stem holes are drilled, followed by a second cure and painting. Finally, Carbon Revolution fits anodized-aluminum center and lug-seat inserts. AFTER FRED FLINTSTONE started us rolling, mankind advanced the cause of mobility with wheels made of wood, of spokes, and of metals. Now, thanks to the migration of composites from aerospace to motorsports to the assembly line, Ford’s Mustang Shelby GT350R is the first affordable car to fit carbon-fiber wheels as standard equipment. In doing so, Ford shaves…

FORD MUSTANG SHELBY GT350 PRICE > $56,970 POWER > 526 hp TORQUE > 429 lb-ft WEIGHT > 3790 lb 0–60 MPH > 4.3 sec CHEVROLET CORVET TE STINGRAY Z51 PRICE > $70,830 POWER > 460 hp TORQUE > 465 lb-ft WEIGHT > 3452 lb 0–60 MPH > 3.9 sec Chairman Mao Zedong, a fan of the red but not so much of the white or the blue, once said, “I got more hoes than the ozone.” Oh wait, it might have been Abraham Lincoln who said that. The quote we were Google-searching for from Chairman Mao was something about asymmetric warfare, about how a fighter must move amongst the people as a fish swims in the sea, which is way more poetic and stuff. And what we have here is…

Autonomous driving—what the high-minded call artificial intelligence and what we call real brainlessness—may not be as vile as we originally feared. One DeLorean DMC-12 directed by a Stanford University engineering crew can perform perfect opposite-lock, tire-cooking, hands-off donuts at will for as long as the rubber lasts. Lead professor Chris Gerdes explained the rationale underlying this class project, timed to coincide with the fictional arrival on October 21, 2015, of the time-traveling Back to the Future DeLorean: “When we no longer have a human driver in the loop, we think that the automated vehicle should be able to harness the full range of vehicle operating capabilities to avoid collisions, even if this means going sideways a bit to stay on the road.” In other words, loading $60,000 worth of navigation…

To build its latest red-blooded track special, Ferrari set out to ruin a perfectly good car. In transforming the sure-footed F12 grand tourer into the fast-and-loose, apex-hounding F12tdf (Tour de France), Ferrari engineers deconstructed the stability that’s inherent in the F12’s long wheelbase, in its substantial weight, and in its high polar moment of inertia relative to mid-engined cars. The front tire tread fattens from 255 millimeters to 285; an aggressive suspension alignment boosts turn-in and lateral grip; and, with no change to the rear-tire width, a fickle, oversteering monster is born. One Ferrari chassis engineer describes the team’s work bluntly: “First, we screwed up the car.” With the chassis suitably squirrelly, engineers applied the brand’s first use of rear-wheel steering to dial in just enough stability to make the…

The Irish wit Oscar Wilde once postulated: “Deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.” While Oscar faced his own obstacles with deception and Victorian-era romantic restrictions, Infiniti is making a better go of it with the 2017 Q30. For if to deceive is to romance, then the lyin’ Q30 is a four-wheeled lothario. Two deceptions right off the bat: First, the Q30 resembles a crossover, which it is not. Also, it’s an Infiniti, which it isn’t either, exactly. At heart, it’s a rebadged Mercedes-Benz GLA, but to varying degrees and to good effect, Infiniti has put a lot of work into differentiating its potatoshaped thing from Benz’s potato-shaped thing, meaning the narrative heard ’round the internet, that this is just a Mercedes knockoff, is not wholly accurate.…

THERE’S NOTHING SUBTLE about the Miatabased Speedster and Spyder concepts Mazda built for the 2015 SEMA show. The Speedster is a grab-the-Sawzalland-cut-your-way-to-lightness exercise that would make a gastric-bypass surgeon proud. The Spyder, for its part, achieves exotic status by flaunting its own impracticality. Neither car has side windows, and neither is an original idea; the previous-generation MX-5 spawned similar concepts, the Superlight at Frankfurt in 2009 and another Spyder at SEMA in 2011. Yet because they are Miatas and we are red-blooded auto enthusiasts, we cannot look away. EXTERIOR The Speedster quite obviously tips its hat to those racing machines from the era in which men actually wore hats. Gone are the A-pillars, windshield, and convertible top, supplanted by a carbon-fiber front deflector and a hard tonneau cover under which…

BEFORE ASKING WHY BENTLEY IS BUILDING an SUV, first ask yourself what a Bentley should be. In this rarefied realm, excess sells—excess size, excess power, excess capability, excess zeros in the price, and so on. A Mulsanne’s spec sheet with the car’s height redacted reads like that of a pickup truck. Indeed, a diesel dualie lugging a horse trailer, what with its 752 pound-feet of torque. We’re guessing that few Continental GT buyers hit 60 mph just four seconds after leaving a stoplight, and still fewer Flying Spur pilots cruise at 199 mph, even though they could. So just think of a 300-grand Bentayga as exploring a new realm of excess capability. All the old realms are mastered here, too. Inside, it’s a typically roomy SUV, but finished with impossibly…

The AM General High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle occupies an extremely weird place in American automotive culture. It’s a military machine, the official transportation of the world’s finest hellholes. But it’s also the basis of the former Hummer H1, a six-figure attempt at a domestic Geländewagen and a glamorous co-star in the silliest car chase in movie history (see: The Rock). Until very recently, you’ve only driven one of these things if (A) you once wore fatigues and answered to Uncle Sam, or (B) your successful New Jersey nightclub needed a tax write-off for a friggin’ business vehicle. About a year ago, though, a third possibility emerged: private ownership for the ex-military machines. Online heavy-equipment auction site IronPlanet bid on a government contract for “disposal of surplus product,” meaning Humvees…

Tesla’s product architect, Elon Musk, must have been watching a Mel Brooks marathon on TNT when he picked “Ludicrous Speed,” straight out of Spaceballs, as the tag for the fastest acceleration mode in his Model S P90D. And indeed, one must have balls from outer space to fully exploit this car’s launch performance. To sort heroic acts from hype, we ran this electric missile through our test gantlet with, shall we say, shocking results. Cutting to the chase, it’s the first production car with four doors to crack the 3.0-second zero-to-60-mph barrier, doing it in 2.8 seconds. In 30-to-50-mph passing acceleration, it trumps the Tesla Roadster Sport’s all-time record run of 1.5 seconds, also by two-tenths of a second. The P90D’s 11.1-second, 121-mph quarter-mile run, achieved with no hint of…

Here’s how we see it: BMW tempered the driving character of the current 3-series in its quest for a broader audience. We’ve been vocal about this, and BMW has been listening. But maybe not closely enough. While a host of updates address some of our gripes and improve the car’s performance, the 3’s previously sublime tactility—that unquantifiable element that made these cars so engaging—remains muffled in this sixth-generation car. The most obvious change for 2016 applies to the six-cylinder models, which are now badged 340i and feature BMW’s new B58 3.0-liter turbocharged inline-six. Along with producing 320 horsepower and 332 pound-feet of torque—increases of 20 and 32, respectively, over the previous N55 unit—the new engine emits a sonorous exhaust note reminiscent of BMW’s naturally aspirated mills. Paired with a six-speed…