Indholdsfortegnelse for August 2021 i MotorTrend

A public service announcement: There are no self-driving cars for sale today—anywhere. You don’t own a self-driving car, no one you know does, and anyone who tells you differently is wrong, and dangerously so. This seems like something car fans should already know, and it’s something MotorTrend has reiterated in its stories. However, it’s become abundantly, disturbingly clear the message isn’t reaching an increasing number of people. So, I’ll say it louder: YOU CANNOT BUY A SELF-DRIVING CAR. They don’t exist outside of the tech companies trying to develop them, and they likely won’t exist in public for many more years. What exists today is a collection of tech called Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS), which can handle basic driving tasks for short periods of time in specific, ideal conditions.…

The S-Class of Mercedes’ new EQ subbrand, the 2022 EQS electric sedan is aimed squarely at the Tesla Model S in size and range. But it serves up far more luxury, including a dash-spanning “Hyperscreen” and a rejuvenating “nap mode.” So yeah, it’s fancy. The styling is decidedly cab-forward and points the way for EQ. With no engine to package, roominess and comfort were prioritized, and this lozengelike design facilitates more space for humans. It also makes the car look like a supersized and electrified Lincoln MKZ. Built on Mercedes’ new EVA2 architecture, the EQS rides on a skateboard-style chassis stuffed with a proprietary battery pack. The U.S. will only get the biggest 108-kWh pack at launch, though the smaller 90-kWh battery could come later. The single-motor rear-drive EQS 450+…

Although it is refreshed, this is largely the same Lexus IS that’s been available for seven years on a platform that traces back to 2005. Car dorks like us moan about well-worn car designs, but most consumers aren’t as picky. It’s likely they don’t care about ancient powertrains or outdated interior bits. Mostly, they’ll be happy the revised infotainment system is easier to use. The all-wheel-drive IS 300 has the same 3.5-liter V-6 as the IS 350, detuned from 311 hp and 280 lb-ft to 260 hp and 236 lb-ft. Lexus apparently found it more cost-effective to kneecap the 3.5 than modify the AWD system to work with the 2.0-liter four-cylinder in the RWD IS 300. The lower output didn’t hinder the IS 300 AWD, though. Our test car sprinted…

If we told you there’s a new vehicle on the block with 470 horsepower and 470 lb-ft of torque from a 392-cubic-inch V-8, a 0–60 time of 4.2 seconds, a quarter-mile time of 12.9 seconds, and that it’s an all-wheel-drive convertible, would you guess we’re talking about a Jeep Wrangler? Maybe—if we also told you the doors come off, the windshield folds down, and it has a crawl ratio of 48:1. Meet the 2021 Jeep Wrangler Rubicon 392. After years of customer requests, Jeep finally put a factory V-8 in the Wrangler for the first time, and, holy heck, it was worth the wait. The powertrain is the same 6.4-liter V-8 and eight-speed automatic found in the Jeep Grand Cherokee SRT, but the engineering team needed to make several substantive…

The online car shopping vortex sucked me in once again. For months I’d been on the hunt, motivated by whimsy as much as need. Instinctually I punched in my search parameters. Image? Has. Color? Green. Transmission? Manual. Price? Less than the options on the Pacifica reviewed here. By that point I was used to miscategorized ads, but this one said “five-speed manual” right up top. The photos confirmed it—a shifter wrapped in a rubber accordion boot stood proud on the floor. Calls were made, dollars were extracted, papers were signed. Next thing I knew, I was cruising home in my 1994 Dodge Caravan. This is no hoity-toity Grand Caravan, mind you—rather, it is shockingly basic. Five seats and a single sliding door is about all there is to it. It…

Most people today are well aware of the air-pollution discussion, but it’s far rarer to hear anyone talk about air quality inside their cars. Yet closing the doors and switching on the air conditioning does not provide a protective seal in the way you might think. Emissions Analytics tested 100 late-model cars in the U.S.; it measured the proportion of particles in the outside air that infiltrated the cabin through the ventilation system and any installed filters. It also measured CO2 buildup inside with the climate control’s air recirculation engaged; inhalation of particles is known to correlate with negative health effects, including cancer. CO2 inhalation can also lead to reduced cognitive performance and, therefore, reduced driver comfort and increased crash risk. The average internal concentration of particles—as measured by the…

Ten years ago, the Lotus Evora S finished dead last during our inaugural Best Driver’s Car competition. It was rough around the edges, but it had enormous potential. The original Evora won praise for its on-road handling, but driving it on a track revealed unpredictable behavior at the limit. The Evora GT eliminates the sketchiness. There’s plenty of grip once the rubber heats up, with mild understeer midcorner and modest oversteer on the exits. Overall, the Evora GT is super communicative and playful without being harsh or threatening. The Evora’s ability to deliver serious performance without beating up its driver has always been its greatest strength; in the GT, performance has increased demonstrably, and comfort has improved. The pedals used to be positioned too far to the right, with the…

Fresh aesthetic takes on the two-box SUV are rare, especially now, when there are simply so damn many of them. Yet Hyundai has managed to create a stunner, using sharply creased panels to visually separate its new small SUV from the pack. Of course, it would all be in vain if the new Tucson didn’t deliver across the board. As it turns out, if you’re the Honda CR-V or Toyota RAV4, you should be afraid. But if you’re expecting the exterior styling to bleed into the cabin, you’re in for a surprise. The dashboard encompasses a wide, flowing arc with the instruments and center stack floating on standalone panels. Touch-sensitive controls dominate the cabin, but the “buttons” are easy to find and press while on the move. Our biggest complaint…

Alan Merenbloom of Baltimore writes: “Every month, I realize I never sent these pictures to you. It was July 2013, and I was on a boat off of Seal Island in False Bay, South Africa, heading back to the dock. If that sounds familiar to you, that’s because you see it every summer on Discovery’s Shark Week. In fact, we were on the same boat Discovery hires for the purpose. It was mid-winter daybreak (July in South Africa), the morning cloud cover hadn’t cleared. [At one point] I was lying on the transom in a small boat in open seas, and [a shark breached the surface]. The whole thing happened in about a second. The full-extension image was the shot of a lifetime.”—Ed.…

The plug-in Wrangler is quick, heavy, and a little bit complicated Say howdy to the Jeep Wrangler 4xe—that’s “four-by-e,” like “four-by-four”—the brand’s first plug-in hybrid in the U.S. It’s a niche model in search of the right buyer, ideally a Jeep fan who’s jealous of the neighbor’s Tesla but isn’t ready to go fully electric. They must also be comfortable driving the most complex Wrangler in history. The 4xe combines a turbo I-4, a 17.3-kWh battery pack, and an electric motor to deliver up to 49 mpg-e (EPA combined) and 21 miles of electric-only range. With a combined system output of 375 hp, the 4xe is the second most powerful Wrangler behind the V-8-packin’ 392. Peak torque is a massive, V-8-tying 470 lb-ft. Even so, the 4xe weighs between 500…

Brand tribalists will hate this comparison between the 2021 Chevrolet C8 Corvette and 2021 Porsche 718 Cayman GTS 4.0. Speed-actuated decklid spoiler alert: There’s a first-place finish at the end, but it’s a two-piece ranking of our conflicted preferences. Frustrating, right? Everyone loves a winner, no one aspires to be a loser, but one cannot exist without the other. On the subject of horsepower and performance, there’s a more powerful car, a faster car, and a slower car, and there’s only one choice—otherwise, why bother harvesting test data to begin with? These decades-long Porsche versus Corvette stand-offs usually raise subjectivism versus objectivism in our minds like bile in our throats. After all, the Corvette—in all its modern permutations—is the de facto victor on the performance-per-dollar front; it shouldn’t lose, at…

Any new BMW M3 is a big deal to the car enthusiast community. Forget for a moment what the car actually is, and focus instead on understanding what it represents. The M3 is the souped-up, hot-rodded, better-to-drive version of the traditional “ultimate driving machine,” the BMW 3 Series. The 3 Series is supposed to be a driver’s car right out of the box; the 3 Series after BMW’s M Division performance gurus have fiddled with it? We’re talking hopes and dreams here. It will never be cheap, but this level of M performance should be somewhat attainable. M3s tend to look pretty good, too, going all the way back to the swole-fendered, deep-chinned, bewinged OG E30 generation of the 1980s. I don’t think I’ll ruffle many feathers by saying fans…

More than 15 years ago, the Bugatti Veyron stunned us with its 1,001 horsepower. A thousand-and-one hp? In a street-legal road car? The world wobbled on its axis for a moment, especially when in 2005 the big Bug whooshed to a 253-mph mic drop on the 5.4-mile straight of the high-speed track at the VW Group’s Ehra-Lessien test facility. Bugatti in 2017 upped the ante with the 1,479-hp Chiron. Think about it: Nearly fifteen-hundred horsepower in a car with catalytic converters and mufflers and all the other paraphernalia required by legislators around the world. It was an utterly extraordinary feat of engineering, a benchmark for the internal combustion engine. And what did it feel like? “We’re loafing along at 100 mph or so in fourth gear when I nail the…

Even among Subaru’s already fanatical customer base, Outback buyers are among its most fervent. And yet a subset wanted this wagon-UV to be even tougher and more adventure-ready. Subaru obliged, and out popped the Outback Wilderness. More than just a trim, the Wilderness takes a top-spec Outback and drives it through an ORV parts catalog before bounding into an REI. Changes include additional cladding, gold accents, redesigned bumpers, LED foglights, new 17-inch wheels with Yokohama A/T tires, and a stronger roof rack. Inside are all-weather floormats, while gold stitching adds a little zazz to the shifter boot and knob, steering wheel, dashboard, and seats. The aesthetic updates would probably sell more than a few Outback Wildernesses on their own. But there is the question of increased capability, and a few…

Faced with slumping U.S. sales at the start of the 1990s SUV boom, Subaru added plastic body cladding (and eventually a suspension lift) to the Legacy wagon, called it “Outback,” and thus convinced Americans to actually buy longroofs. Porsche hopes the tactic will yield similar results with the new electric Taycan Cross Turismo. The Cross Turismo is basically a dual-motor all-wheel-drive Taycan sedan featuring a Gravel drive mode, a standard air suspension, a longer roof, and minor ride-height increases. With dual-motor AWD standard, the entry Taycan 4 Cross Turismo has 375 hp and 368 lb-ft of torque; the 4S boasts 482 hp and 479 lb-ft. The Taycan Turbo Cross Turismo—which we drove for this review—features 616 hp and 626 lb-ft, and the Turbo S spits out 616 hp and 774…

If you’ve recently bought a new laptop or electronic device and marveled at how tiny its power “brick” is, you may have gallium nitride to thank. Gallium nitride (GaN) hit the spotlight in the 1990s when it made the first white LED lights possible, along with bright full-color LED display screens and the violet/blue lasers that read data from a Blu-ray disc. GaN now seems poised to enable quicker electric vehicle charging and longer range in EVs using any type of battery. Gallium nitride is a semiconductor material. That word means what it says: The material partly conducts, so it can be made to serve as an electrical conductor or as an insulator. Semiconductor materials are used in the solid-state transistor “switches” electrified vehicles use to convert electricity between the…

Some emails are better than others. Case in point: When Bugatti PR asks if you’d like to compare and contrast the Chiron Sport against the new Chiron Pur Sport (pronounced “pure sport”), well, that’s a pretty good email. Yes, I spent a day driving two cars that between them have 3,000 horsepower, 32 cylinders, eight turbochargers, 128 valves, and 20 radiators. Together, they cost north of $7.7 million. That’s $3,757,150 for the blue exposed-carbon-fiber Chiron Sport and $3,959,000 for the Jet Grey Pur Sport. I’ll get to the differences between them, but first a little story about the first time I drove a Bugatti. In 2010, Bugatti unveiled the Veyron Super Sport at the annual Pebble Beach hootenanny. The ultimate Veyron was fresh off its (then) record-setting top-speed assault, where…

2021 Chrysler Pacifica S Limited AWD .............. $56,090 2021 Honda Odyssey Elite ..................................... $49,390 2022 Kia Carnival SX Prestige .............................. $47,770 2021 Toyota Sienna Platinum Hybrid AWD ....... $54,138 From the 1980s through the late ’90s, families and minivans went together like ketchup and French fries. That was certainly the case among my friends’ families, all of whom drove around Mexico City in white Ford Windstars. Our own green Windstar was easier to spot in our school’s pickup/drop-off line, but its sliding door, spacious interior, and carlike ride were no less perfect for our usual carpool of six. Prior to that van, we had a red Windstar and a white Chrysler Voyager, but those ended up being stolen. See, we told you minivans were popular. But the rise of two-box…

One of the biggest potential laughs in automotive-themed time travel would be to set your dial to the mid-1990s—the beginning of Aston Martin’s Ford era—and roll up to Aston’s old Bloxham, U.K., factory in a contemporary Explorer SUV. Posing as a FoMoCo executive, in your ill-fitting suit, you’d round up a cluster of Aston’s finest engineers. “I want you to make that,” you’d say with a smile, pointing at the Explorer, “handle, ride, look, and sound like that,” swinging your finger over to a DB7 in the car park. Thankfully, back in the present, the British automaker developed its actual first-ever SUV, the 2021 Aston Martin DBX, on its own terms, unbeholden to any looming corporate overlords. And the result breathes life into our ridiculous fantasy: The DBX is a…