Indholdsfortegnelse for November 2020 i MotorTrend

A man envisions a future of electric cars, starting with a high-powered, six-figure, midsize super sedan, followed by a platform-sharing SUV, then migrating to smaller, more affordable vehicles in mass quantities. Sales will be mostly handled online (thanks to a virtual reality app), with a scattering of factory-run boutique stores in tony enclaves. Service will be via remote van. If it reads a little like Tesla’s playbook, it’s because Peter Rawlinson, the Lucid Motors CEO and CTO, was once Elon Musk’s engineering czar before venturing out on his own. He wants to build a better mousetrap. It’s also basic business strategy: You have to pay off your initial investors, and selling high-zoot luxury cars delivers larger margins than trying to pinch pennies to sell zillions of small, affordable EVs. It…

As a Delta 2Million Miler, I’ve spent lots of flight time airborne dealing with dodgy Wi-Fi, watching progress bars stall and web pages time out. So my ears perked up when I learned about a revolutionary new satellite antenna that promises to provide robust, ubiquitous data transmission to and from any moving object—planes, trains, and automobiles—anywhere on earth (except the poles). Netflix streaming in any mode of transportation will be fun, but reliable in-car satellite internet connectivity as a backstop for today’s cellular vehicle-to-everything communications brings full vehicle autonomy another step closer to reality. Satellite antennas for cars are not new. In February 2004 we covered the KVH TracVision A5—a gigantic, expensive roof rack–mounted contraption that nonetheless lost the DirecTV picture under every bridge. That electromechanically steered system was too…

SUPER SUVS FROM BMW, MASERATI, MERCEDES-AMG, AND PORSCHE LOOK TO PUNCH A TICKET TO BEST DRIVER’S CAR I earned my driver’s license among the pothole-pocked streets of Lower Manhattan, where “good” places to drive are few and far between. My suburban friends had twisty back roads and empty fields. At best, I had Brooklyn’s Second Avenue waterfront. The few times I could steal the keys to Dad’s Range Rover Sport, I would find myself bombing down Second Avenue’s cobbled road late at night. It wasn’t much of a driver’s road, but it was one of the few places in the city I could go without pedestrians or other motor-ists. It was my escape, the supercharged V-8 echoing off the barren brick-front warehouses, the click-clunking of the air suspension over disused…

After 103 years, Lincoln is getting out of the business of making sleek, stylish sedans to concentrate on building the elephantine SUVs that everyone wants now. That’s sad news for car enthusiasts, but at least the brand is exiting the way it entered: with a high-end, coach-built special. Ask any automotive history buff which American automaker offered the most custom body designs in its catalog, and they’ll likely be surprised to learn it was Lincoln. We have Henry Ford’s son, Edsel, to thank for that. Immediately upon being placed in charge of Ford’s newly acquired Lincoln brand in 1922, Edsel set about enlisting the top custom coachbuilders in the U.S. to design bodywork for the brand’s technically brilliant Model L chassis. Over the years, Lincoln worked with nearly all the…

Technology certainly can change in a half century. The process of erecting the convertible top of my 1959 Austin-Healey Bugeye Sprite starts with digging its folded steel tube frame out from behind the seats, spreading its fingerlike tubes, connecting all their ends together, and gingerly cantilevering it across the cockpit and then down into vertical slots on the left and right sides. Except everything is misaligned by an inch, so you have to climb up on top of the seats and wrestle it like an Everglades alligator. This is just the quivering, hair-trigger frame. Any sudden movement will cause it to mousetrap off the car and violently disassemble. Which would be just as well, as I still don’t have the vinyl top that makes getting into the Healey like wiggling…

RANGE TEST IF IT HOLDS UP, THE LUCID AIR’S 517-MILE RANGE FIGURE WILL CATAPULT THE SEDAN INTO THE STRATOSPHERE OF ELECTRIC CAR RANGES. It’s 8:09 a.m., and we’re doing 66 mph on I-580 in the Bay Area, heading east from Hayward, California, when the odometer of the Lucid Air we’re riding in shows we’ve gone 100 miles since leaving the company’s headquarters at daybreak. The PR guy driving calls out, “We’re at 83 percent of the battery now,” and I jot this all down while in the back seat of a beta prototype of the aero-wheeled Air. Tapping out numbers on my phone’s calculator app predicts a wild 588 miles of range, so I’d better calculate it again—but it really says 588 miles. It’s unwise to project an EV’s range…

FIRST LOOK Cadillac enjoyed two years of increasing sales pre-pandemic, but MotorTrend hasn’t exactly been singing the praises of its heart-of-market XT4, XT5, and XT6 crossover vehicles. The brand hopes to change our tune with the 2023 Cadillac Lyriq (like a song’s words), by giving it dramatic proportions and a new face, plus Tesla-esque electric performance, range, and technology. Technically, the “show car” you’re seeing here is a concept, but Cadillac assures us it’s 80–85 percent production-ready. With the 2023 model year two years away, you can expect the final production Lyriq to look very similar. THIS IS A CONCEPT, BUT CADILLAC ASSURES US IT’S 80–85 PERCENT PRODUCTION-READY. Its Ultium EV platform will feature rear-or performance all-wheel drive, powered by an underfloor structural battery featuring nickel-cobalt-manganese-aluminum chemistry that supports 150-kW…

Guitar-shredding James Hetfield, the lead singer of Metallica, is known around the world for his music, but he’s also a passionate car customizer who recently donated most of his collection to the Petersen Automotive Museum. You can also see them in his new book, Reclaimed Rust: The Four-Wheeled Creations of James Hetfield. You have an enormously popular band. You have a fleet of custom cars. You have a family. You have a ranch. What made you think, “I should write a book, too”? I knew these cars needed to be seen by other people. I just wanted to have a book, basically kind of a yearbook, of all the cars that Rick Dore and I have put together. Having a book is a lot easier than having all these cars…

Hot rod Euro SUVs are great fun and all, but what if A) you’re looking to spend about half the average base price of our five super-utes (say, mid-$60Ks) or B) you need three rows of seats? That kind of cash will only get you one of the smaller two-row Euro utes, like an Audi SQ5, BMW X3 M, or Mercedes-AMG GLC SUV. Audi’s three-row SQ7 starts at $85,795, BMW’s X7 M50i commands $100,595, and the 2021 Mercedes-AMG GLS 63 surely won’t be cheaper than the outgoing 2019 ($126,150). So you’ll be buying American. May we suggest one of these two hi-po utes—the Dodge Durango 4 SRT 392 or the Ford Explorer ST? Note: A Ford Explorer ST with all the boxes ticked just tops $65,000, while the Durango 4…

During the rollout of the 2020 Lincoln Continental Coach Door Edition, the press has fallen all over itself comparing the car to the midcentury modern JFK “suicide-door” fourth-gen Continentals. But 334,345 of those cars were mass-produced by Lincoln in Wixom, Michigan. No, the modern Continental Coach Door Edition deserves to be compared with classic Lincolns dating back to the earliest days of the brand, back when Lincoln’s catalog offered the greatest selection of custom bodies of any American manufacturer. Ugly cars designed by Lincoln founder Henry Leland’s milliner brother-in-law, Angus Woodbridge, were killing his nascent brand. (Ladies’ hats are very different from cars; who knew?) So as soon as Henry Ford bought Lincoln and ousted the Lelands, his design-oriented son, Edsel, enlisted the cream of the coachbuilding crop to design…

FIRST LOOK Blame social media for coming up with the nickname. Ram execs swear “TRX” is not pronounced “T. rex.” They say internet forums made it up. Not like Ram is going to stop the chatter, because the false name makes a certain sense. As Jurassic Park taught us (incorrectly), Tyrannosaurus rexes lunched on Velociraptors back in the day. Frankly, we fret that this new TRX, powered by a 702-hp, 650-lb-ft supercharged V-8, might not feel sated upon devouring the current Ford Raptor, what with its comparatively puny 450-hp, 510-lb-ft twin-turbo V-6. It’s tempting to get greedy and wonder: Why doesn’t the TRX get the fully hellish 707-plus horsepower? Because it needs a deep-sump truck oil pan capable of guaranteeing proper lubrication at wild off-roady angles and new exhaust manifolds.…

Readers Respond to September’s “Driving While Black” I must commend you for including Dr. Sorin’s article on driving while Black in your September issue, and I would like to emphasize a few key points in response. As a Black motorist who has driven a car in each one of our 50 states over 30-plus years, so far I have survived numerous unwarranted traffic stops, and a white motorist once helped me avoid being lynched by a local mob when my water-cooled Volkswagen overheated late one evening while driving through rural South Carolina. Even so, I cannot afford to forget for a moment that many white people still feel entitled, in their hearts and minds, to serve as the judge, jury, and executioner of my body and existence at any moment.…

As enthusiasts, we’re taught from a young age to view front-drive cars with contempt. They are flawed. Wrong-wheel drive. Plagued with torque steer if you give them any power. They are the product of corporations cutting costs to please shareholders. Like my fellow enthusiasts, I was indoctrinated in the scriptures of Zora, Carroll, and Ferry: the only performance cars that matter are rear-wheel drive. But things have changed a lot in the past couple decades. Front-wheel-drive performance cars are—dare I say—quite good. They are composed. They’re balanced. They’re equally capable of obliterating canyon roads and soaking up interstate runs. As a result, pocket rockets such as the Ford Fiesta ST have been segment standouts, even finishing a respectable sixth place at Best Driver’s Car, vanquishing the likes of the BMW…

There’s a diamond in there somewhere. Chevrolet launched the original Suburban during the first year of FDR’s first presidential term, in 1933. That makes the Suburban the longest-running nameplate in automotive history. I strongly suspect that 87 years from now, Chevy will still be selling these gargantuan people movers. It has been a fixture on American roads for a third as long as the United States has been a country. Why such longevity? Because Americans need Suburbans. We’re big people with large families, husky friends, and an endless supply of outdoor toys, living in an expansive land filled with majestic redwood forests and shimmering Gulf Stream waters. This SUV was made for you and me. When my European friends visit, they look at these extra-full-size Chevys and ask, “Anyone can…

Overlanding has become a thing in America. Before the coronavirus pandemic tapped the brakes, people all over the country were jumping into their 4x4s and taking the road less traveled, turning away from the interstates and the neon-lit desolation of cheap hotels and fast food joints, journeying instead along the quiet back roads and trails that still crisscross the country. Overlanding has made the voyage as important as the destination. Where I grew up, it always was. Australia is about the same size as the lower 48 states but has just 7 percent of the population, most of which lives within 100 miles of the eastern and southern coasts. What in the U.S. is called the Heartland is in Australia called the Outback. No prairies and cornfields and red-painted barns…