Innehållsförteckning för June 2013 från Car and Driver

Sic your dogs on us at: editors@caranddriver.com or join the discussion at: backfires.caranddriver.com ON THE CUSP Cool phraseology with the "cusp of sports-car nirvana." Wow! The all-new Corvette C7 is at the apex of bliss/heaven for sure! GADS ain't it grand to have this Stingray to "buzz" about this fall. Falling off my chair. I have been "stung" by the return of the Stingray. GOOD HEALTH TO YOU!! WAYNE MARTIN CENTRAL CITY, IOWA THANKS!!—Ed. FASHION POLICE The Corvette looks like a great car except for the ugly Camaro-looking rear fascia. Unless GM corrects that fatal flaw, I'll wait for the C8! DAVE WITTNEBERT SENECA, SOUTH CAROLINA Here we go again, GM demonstrating that committee decision making is alive and well. A new Corvette, and it copied elements of…

The physics of… Redline THE TERM "REDLINE" TECHNICALLY REFERS only to the red hashmarks on a tachometer, but it is synonymous with maximum engine speed. The 9000-rpm Porsche 911 GT3 and Ferraris prove that, even if redlines are dropping with the proliferation of turbocharged and diesel engines, there are still some high achievers out there. In the above illustration of the 458 Italia's V-8, we've highlighted the factors that determine how fast an engine can spin. AIRFLOW We all need oxygen. Straighter intake runners allow easier breathing, as do variable intake manifolds. The latter allow engineers to tune shorter, straighter intake passages for high rpm, as well as longer ones that better fill the cylinders at lower rpm for more torque. Because a high-rev screamer needs flexibility. VALVETRAIN DESIGN At…

It was 300 PEOPLE having simultaneous aneurysms. Then, an instant later, the excitement became a roaring wave of frantic communal lust moving through Studio 33 at CBS Television City in Los Angeles. From the audience, it crashed up onto the stage and crested behind the set. There's never been a moment quite like that split second on March 19 when the door on the set of The Price Is Right swept open and announcer George Gray belted out that the next contestant would be playing for … "a new Ferrari!" It was a 458 Spider, a work of $285,716 thermonuclear awesomeness dropped in front of an audience notorious for going ape over Hyundai Accents and stripped Toyota Tacomas. "It takes a lot to get the crew interested," said Paul Belben,…

What is it with this need to compare and rank? Where does it come from? It has to be an evolutionary imperative, some kind of deep programming that keeps us from eating the wrong berries, because it's literally everywhere. As kids, we compared who could run faster, who could throw farther, which superhero could out-superhero whom. But we never abandon the comparative impulse. Advancing age and technology don't dull it, they just add nuance—variables and stats that comfort us into surety. Think about it. Has an hour gone by when you didn't weigh the merits of one thing against another? Open the fridge and it's there: Coke or Coke Zero? Drive down a freeway and the faster lane beckons. Even your TV remote is a comparison tool. The hoary cliché…

Geneva is a quiet Swiss city of enormous but restrained wealth. The Palexpo center, where the auto show is held every gray March, is modestly sized, and the automaker stands are, by regulation, relatively small. The scene is pretty chill. If you wandered to the front of the Lamborghini sanctum this year, you saw a large pile of sharp knives called the Veneno. Prying your eyes off this gloriously absurd car-as-publicity-stunt was difficult, but walking another eight feet of industrial-grade red carpet brought you to the glossy-white altar of McLaren. There posed the production version of the 903-hp hybrid P1 hypercar, its smooth, melting-butter shape evoking the world's most expensive personal massager. Its bright-yellow nose was pointedly aimed away from the Lamborghini. Across the convention hall, Ferrari's highly anticipated magnum…

All this talk about diesels remains largely just yammer. Despite years of automaker promises and auto-show oaths, plus hipster queues at Volkswagen dealerships for Jetta wagons with stick shifts and 500-mile ranges, the American diesel market is barely running at a cold idle. In fact, this gathering of five vehicles is an all-inclusive roundup of every single entry in the most hotly contested compression-ignition segment in the U.S.: diesel sport-utilities sized medium-large and priced medium-ridiculous. Even the working-pickup market can boast only three diesel players at present. More oil-burners are surely coming, especially from Europe. There, diesel-evangelical automakers are desperate to amortize their increasing development costs by spreading the religion beyond the E.U. With its scant appetite for diesels, Asia is lost. So the push is in America, which is…

EXTREME MERCEDES MONTH: MOST POWERFUL Not particularly beautiful but extremely rare and exotic, carbonado is the impossibly hard stone also known as the black diamond. A Black Series is the unlikely brute of a Benz created when the AMG perform ance shop tires of building mere 500-plus-hp commuters. The fifth car to wear the badge, the SLS AMG Black Series is also the most expensive and most exclusive Mercedes of the moment, with no more than 200 coming to the States at about $260,000 apiece. And as the extra-fortified version of the only car fully designed within AMG, this SLS is as hardened as a Mercedes comes. The Black's engine is derived from the SLS AMG GT's naturally aspirated and aurally gifted 6.2-liter V-8. An additional 39 horsepower and a…

Enthusiasts winced when news came through that BMW would subject the new 3-series to its "Gran Turismo" treatment. With all the recent talk about offering front-wheel-drive cars and electric vehicles, not to mention the Pillsbury Doughboy-as-wagon-replacement 5-series GT, haven't we been subjected to enough BMW experimentation lately? Our feelings notwithstanding, BMW's goal is to pull yet another genre-bending derivative off a perfectly fine sedan. This one is designed to offer a lot more space and versatility than the sedan while avoiding the station-wagon look that is—inexplicably—disdained by customers outside of Europe. So here comes the 3-series GT, which, like its big brother, the 5-series GT, tries to be a master of all disciplines, only here it's not supplanting a traditional wagon. To bake the new GT, BMW took the long-wheelbase…

WHEN CAR GUYS REMINISCE about the 2013 Geneva motor show, they're likely to refer to it simply as "The Big One." This was the year the three major supercar houses unleashed their heaviest artillery, all of it in the seven-figure range [see Pund's story on page 62 for details]. Ferrari's LaFerrari was there, with a body like a robot pinup and a name like a Designer Imposters fragrance. Also present was Lamborghini's $3.9 million Veneno, which looked all but ready for the grid at Le Mans. The McLaren P1 is unimpeachable, a work of tortured genius, and even it couldn't match the wattage of the Italian extroverts. These cars will become shorthand for Geneva '13. But the most interesting item there may have been the Volkswagen XL1, an anti-supercar that…

SETTING THE RECORD STRAIGHT When hybrids first NOSED THROUGH auto-show curtains at the turn of the century, we were intrigued by their fresh approach to more efficient propulsion. At the time, skeptics raised a few potential battery pitfalls—concerns that have now been disproven. MYTH #1: The naysayers predicted that depleted batteries would take their place next to bald tires and lead wheel weights in the Environmental Hazards Hall of Shame. The truth is that both Honda and Toyota aggressively scavenge all used nickel-metal hydride (NiMH) cells from wide-ranging sources to reclaim the valuable nickel contained within. MYTH #2: When lithium-ion batteries entered the market in 2009, NiMH was deemed a stopgap technology. Also untrue. Even though lithium-ion batteries are more efficient, they cost 25 percent more. Replacing the Prius's current…

There are certain workers upon whom Americans would gladly deposit sheep entrails: trial lawyers, Wall Street bankers, congressmen. Of course, the most virulent contempt has historically been reserved for car salesmen. Which is odd. I love car salesmen. I love their stories, I love their tactics, I love undercoating, I love the occasional sewer transaction, I love their pants. When Saturn announced no-haggle prices, I thought, jeez, there goes half the adventure. I mean, who'd sign up for a safari in which you sit at home and a hardworking Kenyan fellow simply FedExes you a couple of dead lions? Plus, salesmen afford one of life's chocolate-covered cherries: test-driving someone else's automobile. For free. I made a whole career of it. "You live 80 years," George Carlin said, "and at best…

Spiritually, we feel a little adrift. When Pope Benedict XVI resigned in February, it was the second deeply confounding blow in a short period. A few months prior, we'd pitted the new F30-generation BMW 328i against a Cadillac ATS and concluded that the Caddy was the more entertaining car. Given the 3-series's history in our testing—22 consecutive 10Best awards and a nearly unblemished comparison-test record—this revelation was, to us, unsettling. While the 328i eked out a victory over the ATS on the merits of its powertrain and overall polish, it seemed that perhaps the time had come to convene our own College of Cardinals. From the cars gathered here, we shall anoint the spiritual leader for sports sedans everywhere. Don't get us wrong. BMW still builds a divine driver, and…

It was Archbishop Vittorio Contini-Verchese in The Thorn Birds who said, or, no, maybe it was Father Guido Sarducci who said: "Ralph, our God has given us free will. And with that free will comes the burden of choice." Well, by this point in the issue we're sick of choosing. You have to do some of it for once. Which is why we asked you, on backfires.caranddriver.com, to repay your free will by filling out this survey, full of deceptively simple comparative questions. Not so easy, is it? Here's what you had to say.*…

In September 2012, Apple jettisoned Google Maps from its iOS 6 operating system and a maelstrom ensued. Users complained, refusing to update their devices, and Apple CEO Tim Cook soon apologized. The tech giant's stock plummeted from over $700 per share to $419 in six months. While hardly the sole cause of Apple's Wall Street woes, Google Maps is undeniably the 800-pound gorilla of navigation. It helps us eke out seconds to grab a latte between just-in-time deliveries of child, spouse, and family materiel. And its turn-by-turn directions for driving, public transit, and walking gave us an idea: We'd compare all three and find out what lies behind those two other buttons we never press. The obvious problem was how to level the playing field so each method had an…

EXTREME MERCEDES MONTH: SHEIKIEST In the Middle East, only tourists ride on camels. Nowadays, oil-rich Arabian natives are more focused on jets and cars. Or, more accurately, Gulfstreams and huge SUVs. The garages of cashed-up kingpins house entire car collections, especially in the absurdly wealthy United Arab Emirates. But how can a sheik stand apart from his neighbors when every desert McPalace is overcrowded with Benz G-models, Toyota Land Cruisers, and Porsche Cayennes? Some do so by purchasing the ultimate off-road vehicle, the Mercedes-Benz Unimog. The Unimog, however, is a heavy-duty truck lacking any creature comfort. It's more difficult to handle than Kurt Busch after a bender, and a nightmare to park anywhere but in a strip mine. So to solve this platinum-plated problem, AMG has come up with something…

The bratty, spunky, and altogether wonderful little Ford Fiesta ST is more important for what it says about Ford than what it does for the company's bottom line. It proves that Ford isn't without a soul. Somewhere inside that giant monolithic pickup-truck mill are people who actually know how to kick car ass. Hot Fiestas have haunted European showrooms for a couple of decades, but the new ST is a North American newcomer as Ford takes more of its products global. Going on sale in the U.S. this August, the Fiesta ST comes out of Ford's Cologne, Germany, engineering center; was finessed at its Lommel, Belgium, proving grounds; and will be assembled for North America in Mexico with an engine shipped in from the United Kingdom. That's a lot of…

THE TUMULTUOUS HISTORY OF THE "/" 1967 RPO Z28 appears, homologating the Camaro for the SCCA's new Trans-Am series. 1968 Now a fender badge denoting a stand-alone model, the Z/28 earns its slash. 1970 The second-gen Camaro ditches the slash. It will remain in hiding for the next 24 years. 2014 What's a retro car without authentic designations? The slash returns. At this spring's NEW YORK AUTO SHOW, the media at Chevrolet's press conference expected the curtain to rise on the Camaro's mild mid-cycle face lift, which had already been revealed on a morning TV squealfest. But when a new Z/28 rumbled onto the stage, the jaded crowd was so shocked that it erupted in genuine applause. Here was the return of an American road-race icon, one that got its…

A K&C machine is one handy tool you won't find at Sears or in the Snap-on catalog. This $3 million rig depicted above and owned by Morse Measurements in Salisbury, North Carolina, ventures beyond static alignment-shop settings to reveal which way the wheels point and tilt when subjected to the full array of cornering, accelerating, and braking forces. While car and tire companies also operate K&C machines, this is the only one in the U.S. in independent hands. The "K" part of the name stands for "kinematics," a fancy word for the motion experienced by the wheels as they steer around corners and soften the road's bump and grind. The "C" stands for "compliance." Because no part of a car is perfectly rigid, and the kinematics provided by the chassis…

Before we go any further, let's be clear on one thing: I'm a fan of Tesla Motors chief Elon Musk. It's not because he's both two years younger than me and, with a net worth of $2.7 billion, ranks 527th on Forbes's 2013 list of ridiculously rich people. For that, I should hate him. I'm a fan because Musk did what I'm fairly certain that I wouldn't have done, had I been handed a check for several hundred million at the age of 31 for inventing PayPal. Had it been me instead of him, I would have called my contribution to mankind complete and frittered away my remaining days on some island, with brief public appearances on the entry rosters for the Pebble Beach concours, the Mille Miglia Storica, the…

Forgive this observation, but most modern compact SUVs have all the personality of an escalator. And they're all pretty much the same escalator, as the genre has recently coalesced around a single approach. After years of experimentation that brought us everything from the Suzuki X-90 to the Isuzu Amigo, items such as transfer cases, V-6 engines, softtops, and three-door models are all as out as, well, Suzuki and Isuzu. Gone, also, is any semblance of truckishness. Even with their optional all-wheel-drive systems, these jacked-up unibody wagons now make no pretense of any real off-road ability. But for all the conformity, the car industry is clearly giving buyers what they want. Small crossovers are now one of the market's fastest-growing segments. Only Mazda seems intent on subverting the compact-crossover template by…

Driving a family sedan tells society that you're toeing the line. It's the responsible move, presumably one of many. Buying one is akin to getting a tattoo lasered off: You might be the same person afterward, but the edginess of youth and the dumb things you used to do are now painfully erased. In the '50s, you would've been the man in the gray flannel suit. The French would call you bourgeois. If anyone even notices. Nearly all family sedans are vehicular camouflage, a way to disappear into the crowd. But in this segment that projects so much sameness, the new Mazda 6 draws long, involuntary stares. We caught ourselves eyeing it quite a bit. Sure it's gray flannel, but it appears to have been tailored in Milan. That's Milan,…

MERCEDES SLS AMG BLACK SERIES / MERCEDES G63 AMG 6X6 / 2014 CHEVROLET IMPALA / 2014 BMW 3-SERIES GT / 2014 FORD FIESTA ST EXTREME MERCEDES MONTH: CHEAPEST The Great Germanic Model-Expansion Bonanza has reached a new low. No, BMW hasn't announced a minivan—yet. But soon a tide will wash a bunch of $30,000, front-wheel-drive small cars onto Audi, BMW, and Mercedes-Benz dealer lots. While premium automakers have sold small cars here before, the efforts and expectations behind these new models have never been so high. Blame a stumbling E.U. for this renewed interest in the States. In a couple of years, this segment may be as competitive as the current three-way catfight between the Audi A4, BMW 3-series, and Benz C-class. First out of the gate is Mercedes-Benz, which…

After eight years on the market, Chevy's feckless Impala has been replaced by a son absolved of his father's sins. The 10th-generation Impala's exterior lives large, and Avis had no hand in trimming the interior. More important, the new car has an unexpected athleticism. Imagine a large, roomy, four-door Camaro (V-6—I mean, come on) sneaking into a segment where lapsed gym memberships are the norm. As usual, the basic Impala idea is Cadillac space and grace at Chevy prices. Out goes the ancient W-body platform, in comes the long-wheelbase version of GM's global Epsilon underpinnings shared with the Buick LaCrosse and Cadillac XTS. A 3.6-liter V-6 engine with a couple additional horses and a six-speed automatic are the major carry-overs. Two four-cylinder engines—with and without eAssist mild hybridization—arrive later this…

Forty-fourth vice president of the United States, now chairman of Cerberus Global Investments, Quayle, 66, is also a director at Bell Automotive—maker of steering-wheel covers, fuzzy dice, and glowing-skull lighter plugs. C/D: Mr. Vice President, let's get right to the fuzzy dice. DQ: I'm just on [Bell Automotive's] board. I have nothing to do with their products. But I've had some dice and seat covers and steering-wheel covers in my cars. Not a lot. C/D: What cars do you own? DQ: I've got a Durango, a Land Cruiser, a Tundra, and a Dakota. The Dakota is old, but it's a good little car. C/D: As a kid, what cars did you desire? DQ: I was not so much interested in cars, per se, as in racing. I've gone to the…