Innehållsförteckning för May 2016 från Car and Driver

CHANGES When the February issue arrived, I had to check the cover to be sure you didn’t send out the April Fools’ edition early. The caption “America, meet your new sportscar king” was just about as convincing as the Ford commercials of yore, proudly proclaiming that the Mustang was certified a sports car by the United States Auto Club. When you want to compare sports cars, the cars in the comparo should all BE sports cars. Your February cover and article only featured one. Hint: It was the blue one. RICH FRAYSIER CHARLES TOWN, WEST VIRGINIA Seriously? Four straight months of Mustangs on the cover? Did you hire that woman from Seinfeld who wore the same dress every day to choose your cover art? I almost missed my February issue…

BUICK CREATED ITS FIREBALL V-6 in 1961 by pruning two cylinders from a troublesome aluminum V-8. The engine did a stint with Jeep, and then GM refined it with a balance shaft and even firing. In the turbocharged 1987 Buick GNX, it made 300 horsepower. As the 3800, it powered everything from Chevys to Cadillacs and sold more than 25 million copies. Race versions landed four Indy 500 poles. Its final assignment was in the 2009 Buick LaCrosse. MANKIND’S ABILITY TO make things, sometimes out of practically nothing, is what distinguishes us from our knuckle-dragging ancestors. We can dig up ore, melt it, and ladle it into a mold, and out pops an engine block. Jaguar Land Rover’s AJ126 engine is a more economical form of human ingenuity; it’s a…

A R ACETR ACK CAN’T GET OFF TO A BETTER START than hosting a major international series as its inaugural event. That’s exactly what Road Atlanta did with the seventh round of the Can-Am Championship on September 13, 1970. Road Atlanta hosted nine more Can-Am races before the series died, along with numerous Trans-Am, Formula 5000, IMSA Camel GT, NASCAR Busch Grand National, and ALMS events over the years. All were attracted by the bracing 12-turn, 2.5-mile circuit created by draping pavement over the undulating red-clay hills near Braselton, Georgia. The challenge of coping with Road Atlanta’s combination of blind corners, traction-trimming crests, and severe compression-inducing dips has also attracted countless club races through the years. Between 1970 and 1993, the track was the site of the annual SCCA runoffs…

I’ve been strangled through my driver’s-side window. A friend of mine had a guy pull a hatchet on him. I’ve bent my own steering wheel. Cars incite passion, and passion’s close cousin is rage. Driving can be joyful, yes. But it can also be so, so infuriating, to the point that—what? What? Oh, you give me the finger? I’ll give you four fingers, shaped like a fist! And yes, Mr. Thumb is along for the ride, too. It’s a one-way trip. Into your face! What was I talking about? Oh yes, road rage. I’m a fairly even-tempered individual, but even I’ve been party to some highway hatred. Sometimes you have no choice. Like the incident with the racist Canadian. I was in Regina, Saskatchewan, deep into an ill-conceived story about…

It’s 2:55 p.m. on a Monday when I pull up in front of [redacted] high school for my first day of driver education. School has just let out, and hundreds of kids are racing to their cars. Nobody looks when they back out of their spots. Stop signs? What stop signs? While those at the head of the exit line inch along, glancing at their cellphones, drivers jam up both lanes of traffic trying to queue. Others beeline across the lot to the other exit, darting between unoccupied spaces, dodging kids still on foot. Making my way to visitor parking is like navigating rush hour in Rome. The situation is frightening. But then I remember, this is what the whole world seems like when you are 15 and learning to…

Nobody was a bigger star than Burt Reynolds in the ’70s. And his biggest film was 1977’s Smokey and the Bandit. Now 80, his recent memoir is But Enough About Me. C/D: When you were growing up in Florida, how important were cars to kids back then? Did you have a car? BR: Actually it was a huge status symbol. Our family really didn’t have a car; we had my dad’s police cruiser. Later he got a Buick, and that’s what I was driving when I had a wreck. I’m lucky it was as big and strong as it was, because that Buick is what saved my life. I had an Indian Scout motorcycle during high school, but I never could take it to school. My dad would sneak out…

Have you ever replaced the exhaust system on your car in search of a little extra performance? Ever reflashed your ECM? Or worse, ever gone whole-hog and built a competition car out of a street machine? Congratulations. According to a recently proposed regulation, the EPA wants to make you an outlaw. Now the good news: This is nothing new. The EPA’s first amendment to the Clean Air Act in 1970 set out to restrict owners from altering t their cars’ emissions controls. And you’ll notice from all the aftermarket respiratory parts for sale that the EPA has been wildly ineffective in this pursuit. This past summer’s proposal seeks to expand that antitampering measure from “motor vehicles,” defined as “any self-propelled vehicle designed for transporting persons or property on a street…

You build. You tweak. You soup up. And, in the process, you also discard. Herein lies the showdown of the trash container’s durability versus the owner’s physical strength. Knowing each task has the potential to crack a trash container —or, worse, ruin the man who attempts such a feat — even the garbage industry is innovating to make face-offs a thing of the past. Gone are the days of, “Will it or won’t it hold up? Will he or won’t he hold up?” Now every lift, drag, or drop isn’t a game of roulette. Today you can spend half the energy you used to when taking out the trash. The key: venting channels. BRUTE’s new container design creates air circulation that eliminates the vacuum effect, which occurs when lifting bags…

It seems possible to me that you can test a man’s enthusiasm for cars by counting the number of times he’s slept in one. This notion occurred to me last October, as I dozed off in the bed of my Toyota Tundra in the uninhabited territory known as the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness, from which, I must assume, at least Frank returned. But forget camping. Usually, my nights in cars can be chalked up to poor planning or perfect planning played out in the infields of Watkins Glen, Daytona, or Road America. I’ll bet I’ve spent 100 nights in cars. Racetrack designers copy the curves in my spine. In 1993, with three other guys, I spent a month driving around Borneo in a diesel Land Rover Discovery. We…

Recently I was chatting with George Peterson, president of the veteran market-research and consulting firm AutoPacific, about Nissan’s strange year. It had a flirtation with sportsprototype racing, debuting the front-drive hybrid GT-R LM NISMO in a lavish Super Bowl ad but running just a single race before axing the whole program. Renault-Nissan chairman Carlos Ghosn has pushed hard to grow U.S. market share from 8.5 percent to 10 percent by the end of 2017, but, as the trade paper Automotive News reported, dealers have complained that the goal is unrealistic and the company’s stair-step incentive program pushes stores into selling cars at a loss. And Ghosn had to work hard to preserve the Renault-Nissan partnership after the French government moved to take more control of Renault, in which it already…

Statistically speaking, this is unlikely to be the car for you. Aston Martin admits that it’s entirely possible it won’t sell a single example of the Lagonda Taraf in the U.S., despite now offering it to a wider audience after initially restricting sales to the Middle East. Even a wave of interest from the nation’s billionaires won’t see more than a handful come stateside, as production has to stop by the end of this year. If you can afford the seven-figure price, or deal with the paperwork of personally importing it under federal show-and-display restrictions, you could end up with a true one-off. Or perhaps a three-off. The Taraf makes no appeal to the left brain. For $1 million you could buy every one of its obvious rivals simultaneously. But…