Indholdsfortegnelse for Fall 2025 i MotorTrend

MotorTrend has always had an eye toward the future. We tell you what’s going on in automobiles today, but we’re just as interested in what’s coming next year, in the next few years, and beyond. Yet as we look forward to what’s on the horizon in our annual peek at future cars beginning on page 36, we also decided to take a moment to consider what we’re ready to leave in the past. If you talk cars at all, you’ve heard the complaint that today’s models have too much technology. Some of that is just get-off-my-lawn crabbiness in automotive terms, but there’s a case to be made that car companies are running out of ideas for genuinely useful new features and are instead greenlighting increasingly niche add-ons with diminishing use…

“ Now we will turn it to N mode, and you can use the paddles,” said the Hyundai development driver who’s been patiently coaching us around a section of the “little ’Ring” in a camoed prototype of the new Ioniq 6 N super sport sedan. Roger. Can do. Downshifting into an interminably wide hairpin, the tach swings upward and the car’s “engine” wails as we brake hard, patiently turn in, and wait for the final apex to get back on the “gas” and upshift. Whoops, we jump on it too hard coming out of the corner, and the tail wags out a little wide. No worries, just lift a bit, apply more throttle, and we’re back on it, mashing the paddles through an uphill sweeper as software-generated noise fills the cabin…

Perhaps not to be outdone by parent company Honda’s resurrection of a much-liked nameplate, Acura has revived its RSX for today’s market. But like the Mitsubishi Eclipse, Ford Mustang Mach-E, and Chevy Blazer, you can add the RSX to the list of cars that once were (or are) enthusiast offerings but have been reborn as an SUV, an EV, or both. Still, consider a few things before you get too mad. Based on the Acura Performance EV concept that made its debut last year, the RSX prototype previews what will ultimately become Honda’s and Acura’s first in-house electric vehicle. In fact, the electric SUV will represent a bunch of firsts: first EV to be built at the Honda EV Hub in Ohio (which also builds the Acura Integra), first model…

“The future is now” has been used for decades to describe advancements in myriad walks of life, industry, and technology, but the phrase feels more accurate today than ever before. Residents of developed countries have daily access to devices, tech, and services that were pipe dreams, if not entirely unimaginable, less than 20 years ago. But it all became commonplace in the blink of an eye, quickly taken for granted as merely “the way things are.” The same of course applies to the automotive business, from the cars themselves to the hardware and software-defined tech that have made them far, far more than the relatively simple conveyances they once were. Still, in our annual look at future cars, we’ve identified more than a dozen models and several forthcoming vehicle technologies…

Volvo, the inventor of the modern three-point seat belt, is still innovating the concept—now adding intelligence and the promise of over-the-air updates. In other crash-safety news, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is making regulatory changes to both force and entice active and passive safety advances. Volvo Multiadaptive Safety Belts essentially seek to better tailor the way today’s three-point seat belt restrains the wide variety of human forms, shapes, and sizes. A further refinement of the belt-tensioning and load-limiting features, this AI-driven system leverages the ever-expanding onboard computational power of modern cars like the electric Volvo EX60. Myriad sensors provide considerable information about the occupant’s size, weight, and body type. Then, when things go wrong, other sensors explain precisely what type of forces are acting on the vehicle and…

Pointing to the 2025 Corvette ZR1’s 1,064 hp and 826 lb-ft of torque, Chevy on more than one occasion during its official media presentation referred to it as “America’s hypercar,” declaring it a competitor not to standard-fare Porsches and Ferraris but rather to tip-top-level performers like the virtually unobtainable (especially in America) Mercedes-AMG One, McLaren’s 765 LT, Lamborghini’s Revuelto, Ferrari’s SF90, and Porsche’s expected forthcoming 992-generation 911 GT2 RS. But even with an official best 0–60 time of 2.3 seconds and a low-drag-kit top speed of 233 mph, the new ZR1 had a glaring omission compared to those megabucks Europeans (except the McLaren): hybrid electrification. To ensure some technical parity and to unlock even more potential from the ZR1, Chevy has revealed the 2026 Corvette ZR1X with even more horsepower,…

We’re less than a year away from seeing “millions” of autonomous Teslas roaming the globe, if Elon Musk’s April earnings call prognostications hold true. How’s Full Self-Driving Unsupervised going? To find out, we flew to the first test market, Austin, Texas, and caught seven rides in the initial Model Y Robotaxi. (Austin is unique among American cities in offering a choice of autonomous ridehailing services, as Waymo has a fleet of its Jaguar I-Pace cars available via the Uber app. So we resolved to attempt a comparison, beginning on page 86.) Note Tesla’s Robotaxi is not to be confused with its two-door Cybercab; rather, it’s based on a long-range dualmotor 2026 Model Y Juniper. Musk’s “millions” claim suggests a switch will eventually be thrown, allowing existing Tesla owners who purchased…

Known for its performance and fun-to-drive character, the 2023 Volkswagen Golf GTI brought a smile to our faces every time we got behind the wheel. Although not perfect, this hot hatch was a practical, exciting vehicle that surprised us with its roomy interior despite its compact body. After 18,283 miles, several aspects stood out, particularly under the GTI’s hood. VW’s mighty 2.0-liter turbocharged I-4 generates 241 hp and 273 lb-ft of torque, and it delivered exhilarating performance whenever we demanded it. The relentless torque pressed us back into our seats, while the exhaust note filled the cabin with a symphony as the revs soared. Although we regret not opting for the six-speed manual, our GTI’s sevenspeed twin-clutch automatic responded quickly, perfectly complementing the engine’s character. On long road trips, we…

You can argue the North American brands under Stellantis have been defanged in recent years. Under former Stellantis CEO Carlos Tavares’ leadership, Ram trucks lost their V-8s, Jeep lost volume models and failed to launch promised new ones in a timely manner, Chrysler subsists today on minivans alone, and Dodge slow-walked the rollout of its new muscle cars. Now there’s a new sheriff in town, as Antonio Filosa, a man more sympathetic to North American demands, is the new CEO. And Stellantis brought back retired Tim Kuniskis, a man with petrol and adrenaline commingled in his veins and who had ridden off into the sunset not long ago, in June 2024. With the personnel moves came a series of quick announcements: Hellcat godfather and Ram CEO Kuniskis was promoted to…

Honda’s modern crop of sporty, front-drive cars is among the best it’s ever had. But if you ever thought you’d like a specific combo of a hybrid powertrain, performance parts from the Civic Type R, and a two-door 2+2 layout with a liftback trunk, then the new Prelude is the answer. With a Prelude not seen since 2001, the new sixth-generation car will make good on the established pillars of Prelude ideology: spirited, athletic handling and cutting-edge driving technology. In this case, it means pulling the dual-motor hybrid setup from the excellent Honda Civic Hybrid and dropping it in. Beyond the 200-hp and 232-lb-ft figures—same as the Civic Hybrid’s—Honda is remaining mum about other specs. When we asked why it didn’t increase the power output, a company representative merely said…

John and Jane Public aren’t warming to electric cars at the rate many in the automotive industry thought they would, and that’s mostly because EVs still can’t match the cost and convenience of gasoline-powered alternatives. The steady march of progress is chipping away at EVs’ cost, boosting the distance they can drive on a single charge, and hastening their charging speeds (1 megawatt or better is almost here). But maybe there’s a holistically better idea. Perhaps it’s time we dust off General Electric’s plan from 1910, when it equipped its GeVeCo electric trucks with separately leased Hartford Electric batteries designed to be swapped quickly when depleted. Together, these electric trucks covered 6 million miles between 1910 and 1924. Electric forklifts have used battery swapping since the 1940s, and Israeli startup…

Driver assist technology often works great in the lab and in safety tests, but too often it makes drivers crazy, causing them to switch it off, rendering the development and purchase cost wasted. With its brainier Neue Klasse models, BMW is reimagining these features to make them appealing enough to, you know, use. Savvier Driver Monitoring Capacitive sensors in the steering wheel know for certain when you’re holding the wheel, so you’ll never have to jiggle the wheel on a straight highway to confirm you’re there. And a sharper infrared camera inside the rearview mirror determines precisely what the driver is looking at, because not all “distractions” are bad. The computer allows considerably more “eyes off the road” time when those eyes are looking at the mirrors. We’re also promised…

Comparison tests don’t get more Pure Michigan than this one. These luxury SUVs were all primarily designed and developed in southeast Michigan by the Detroit Three. The bosses overseeing development had particularly keen interest in how each turned out, because these are the rigs they use to haul their broods and tow their boats “up north”—it’s a Michigan thing, if you didn’t know—to their lake retreats. Which of these SUVs best telegraphs the message, “My company is more powerful than yours,” or, “Our designers have better fashion sense than yours,” or “We’re the biggest ballers in this game”? To answer those weighty questions, we rounded up a new fifth-generation example of the first of this breed—the 2025 Lincoln Navigator in its top Black Label trim ($120,490 as tested) and pitted…

Today, Waymo is the biggest player in the self-driving car space—at least the ride-hailing portion of it—and has run in various cities around the nation since 2017. Its service expanded into a more publicly available realm in recent years after beginning with more limited ridership, but the basics are this: Waymo, a subsidiary of Google parent Alphabet, has ferried passengers without human drivers for nearly a decade, not including eight years of development. In most Waymo cities, riders hail one of the driverless cars via the company’s own app; in some newer locations, namely Austin, Texas, and Atlanta (and, next year, Dallas), Waymos are fewer in number—and simply mixed into the potential options you might otherwise get randomly paired with from Uber’s ride-hailing app. With Waymo and Tesla both operating…

We won’t pretend this is your average family SUV. The handsome yet unassuming Sorento PHEV we drove for a year occupies an area in the market as gray as its paint. Smaller than other three-row SUVs, it trades interior space for agility. Blending a gas engine with all-electric range, its plug-in hybrid powertrain provides a taste of what EV ownership is like. And although it has plush features befitting its position as the most expensive Sorento, it’s not quite a premium vehicle. So did this balancing act pay off over the course of the year? Our loaded Sorento PHEV has a calm-inducing interior with serene blue leather seats, heated in the first and second rows and ventilated up front. Second-row sunshades provide a relaxing environment for sleeping children, feeling appropriate…

Aston Martin, Lotus, and McLaren are three of Britain’s most famous automakers. These are sports car icons with full-throttle backstories and a splash of style that makes them stand out even in a world where automotive passion is now often defined in terms of a two-second glance at a pretty photo and a thumb-stab at a Like button. They might have fame, but fortune is a fickle mistress that in the automotive business doesn’t always align with great looks and big on-road performance capabilities. Lotus owner Geely bet big on electric cars, and the bet has backfired. Lotus talked of selling 30,000 of its Chinese-built electric-powered Eletre SUVs and Emeya sedans per year by 2026; it has in fact delivered fewer than 720 worldwide in the first quarter of this…

In case you need the reminder, car companies don’t own and operate restaurants. Then again, they don’t own and operate gas stations, either, and Tesla has proven owning and operating its own charging network was a brilliant business decision. The Tesla Diner, though, is uncharted territory. Will history repeat itself? At its core, it’s a simple idea: an upscale fast-food restaurant with a retro-future theme located at a Supercharger outpost, owned and operated by Tesla. The roughly 9,300-square-foot restaurant resides in Hollywood, California, and seats 250-plus patrons combined on the ground floor and roof of the three-story building. (The second floor is inaccessible.) Situated on a corner lot, the building is surrounded on two sides by 30 V4 Supercharger towers. It’s connected at a corner to another Supercharger station on…

The Honda Prelude has a storied history, beginning as a strangelooking 2+2, maturing as the showcase for Honda’s future technology, and culminating as one of the finest-handling front-drive cars of the 20th century. With a new Prelude on the way, Honda gave us the chance to drive all five previous generations of the car. Here’s what they were like, then and now. FIRST GENERATION 1979–82 For all the journalistic praised heaped on Honda in the Carter years, reviews of the Prelude were tepid. Criticism of its odd styling and useless back seat prompted Prelude owner Brock Yates to pen a defense (MotorTrend March 1980): “Can one imagine the ecstatic yelping if Porsche produced a 1.7-liter OHC coupe capable of 100 mph for under $7,000?” Indeed, the Prelude was a hit…

Planning for the F80 began in 2018 along with the 499P endurance racer, a car that just won its third consecutive 24 Hours of Le Mans in June. Ferrari mentioned repeatedly that building a race car is easier than building a road car, hence the additional two years of development. The following only scratches the surface of the R&D effort that makes it so incredibly special. But make no mistake: The F80 deploys all its tech seamlessly and with dogged devotion to making the car fun to drive. Powertrain The low-mounted engine is the same 120-degree 3.0-liter block used in both the Ferrari 296 and the three-peat Le Mans champ 499P, but with several notable differences to make more power. It uses twin 48-volt turbochargers that can spin to 130,000 rpm.…

Archive Cravings I am shocked by the fact your online magazine archive is gone. I have spent hours upon hours reading the words and seeing the old pics. It feels like my reward after a hard day that was reserved just for me. Please bring this back! I have been a fan since 1995; when I graduated from high school that year, I asked for the May edition as a graduation gift. I remember it like it was yesterday: I read and reread the magazine, difficult because I knew no English. I had to bug my father for every single word I didn’t understand, and that’s how I learned, from your publication. It was my dream to have a car magazine based in Puerto Rico, where I am from; I…

You may have rolled your eyes slightly when if you saw the scores of Maybach logos on the hood of the Mercedes-Maybach SL680, but the new PixelPaint process used to achieve that look may have a bright green-tech future, with applications on mainstream cars at vastly more affordable price points. Think of it as “digital paint.” Sustainability A key enabler is supplier ABB’s RB1000i-S paint atomizer, which boasts 95–99 percent transfer efficiency (paint molecules ending up in the finish). This greatly reduces emissions of volatile organic compounds (VOCs), maintenance costs (like replacing the masking material on the robotic arms), waste treatment costs for the fluids coming out of the paint booth, etc. The technology lends itself to highly accurate computer simulation that helps improve paint application, which can lead to…

IT’S PATENTLY ABSURD, BUT THE 1,064-HP CORVETTE ZR1 ISN’T AN OUT-OF-CONTROL WIDOWMAKER The decreasing-radius S curves. The blind-entry Turn 10 kink. The fast triple-apex corner complex of Turns16, 17, and18. ThedeceptivelyfastTurn19. These are the big challenges Circuit of the Americas (COTA) throws at a driver. Make no mistake, COTA is a satisfyingly special place to drive any quick and capable car, but when Chevrolet told us it was holding the official first drive event for the 2025 Corvette ZR1 at the flowing 3.41-mile, 20-turn Texas home of the Formula 1 United States Grand Prix? There was a moment of pause and outright uncertainty. It’s not that Corvettes in general haven’t become incredibly capable road-course cars, especially over the span of the previous 20 years. But ZR1s have always felt more…

How best to evaluate the Black Badge Spectre, the most powerful Rolls-Royce series-production motorcar ever built by the factory? This was our conundrum when the sleek, 659-hp electric coupe glided into MotorTrend HQ. Our usual modus operandi is to flee Los Angeles for the curvy canyons of Malibu or similar, but for a Rolls, that feels a bit undignified, like King Charles having to plunge his own toilet. Best to leave such blatant vehicular aggression to the commoners in their Bentleys. Perhaps the answer lies not in space but in time. New York may be the city that never sleeps, but L.A. is the land of sunshine, and when the sun disappears, so do her denizens. Every weekday night, her Traffic-clogged streets empty out like an elevator after a particularly…

ARRIVAL 2024 Hyundai Ioniq 6 SE Long Range Why It’s Here We couldn’t resist adding an Ioniq 6 sedan, which promises Lucid-like range at Hyundai prices, to the fleet after our Ioniq 5 left. What We Got The single-motor rear-drive Ioniq 6 SE Long Range proved too appealing to pass up. This wallet-friendly $43,775 sedan packs 225 hp and can cover 342 miles in EPA testing while also charging from 5 to 80 percent in about 20 minutes. It’s already vanquished a Tesla Model 3 in a comparison test (Spring 2024), so now it’s time to see what it’s like to really live with the Ioniq 6. 2024 Hyundai Ioniq 6 (RWD Long Range SE) BASE PRICE $43,565 PRICE AS TESTED $43,775 VEHICLE LAYOUT Rear-motor, RWD, 5-pass, 4-door sedan MOTOR TYPE Permanent-magnet electric POWER…

The Toyota Tundra TRD Pro was always going to have a tough go. The growing popularity of factory-enhanced off-road-capable full-size trucks means the rowdiest version of the third-generation Tundra has plenty of stiff competition from the Ford F-150 Raptor, Ram 1500 TRX, and Chevrolet Silverado 1500 ZR2. Toyota needed to come out swinging. Having had all those vehicles as part of our yearlong review fleet at one time or another, ordering a Tundra TRD Pro was a no brainer. Its long list of standard features includes four-wheel drive, Fox Shox 2.5-inch internal bypass remote-reservoir dampers, a 1.1-inch lift, skidplates, and more. Toyota doesn’t offer any major options when ordering a TRD Pro, so the sole option on ours was its $425 Solar Octane orange paint and a few dealer-installed accessories,…