Innehållsförteckning för Jun-14 från Car and Driver

COVER CRITICS Wow, a Corvette on the March cover! Jesus, that is sooooo original! How'd you guys ever think of that one? All right, so here is the cover lineup for the rest of the year: June: Porsche 911 July: Corvette August: Porsche 911 September: Corvette October: Porsche 911 November: Corvette December: Porsche 911 Next year: Repeat, starting with … What else? January: Corvette. Any questions? ED REGIS SABILLASVILLE, MARYLAND You forgot about the Mustang—Ed. Given the picture of the new Corvette Z06 on the cover of your March issue, the coupon inside for Cialis seemed a bit unnecessary. JOHN SECHRIST PITTSBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA LETTER OF THE MONTH In the 1920s, player pianos became popular. Piano rolls, the software of the day, were recorded by many piano greats: Fats Waller, Jelly…

Kids aren't into CARS, YOU SAY? Look at the sales of the latest Gran Turismo or Forza video games, or the number of hits on any Ken Block gymkhana video. They're into cars, all right; they're just getting their kicks from the couch. But how to instill an appreciation for the visceral world over the virtual one? Maybe by teaching them to orbit the couch in a drift that would make Block puke. The $400 Razor Crazy Cart looks like a cafeteria tray with a steering wheel, and is to the Power Wheels Disney Princess Tot Rod what the SRT Viper is to a golf cart. The Crazy Cart has a sturdy steel chassis and an oddball drive arrangement that gives it unsurpassed spinning and sliding capabilities. Its electrically driven…

Bill Huth's face is lit by a volcanic desert sunset streaming through the windows of his apartment, which is above a garage down in Turn Nine of his Willow Springs International Raceway, the so-called fastest road in the west and the scene of some umpteen million magazine tests and car commercials. At 90, Huth is at the age where memories skid into each other like cars on an icy street. He says, "You're going to have a helluva time writing this story, it jumps all around." In a Burbank, California, that was just a farm village surrounded by fruit orchards, Huth's father died when Huth was five, "which left me kind of wild." The boy got into the muffler business at 14, but "I got tired of it. When you're…

MAZDA 3 i TOURING PRICE > $23,235 POWER > 155 hp TORQUE > 150 lb-ft WEIGHT > 2915 lb C/D OBSERVED MPG > 29 HONDA CIVIC EX-L PRICE > $23,530 POWER > 143 hp TORQUE > 129 lb-ft WEIGHT > 2871 lb C/D OBSERVED MPG > 28 HONDA CIVIC EX-L PRICE > $23,530 POWER > 143 hp TORQUE > 129 lb-ft WEIGHT > 2871 lb C/D OBSERVED MPG > 28 HONDA CIVIC EX-L PRICE > $23,530 POWER > 143 hp TORQUE > 129 lb-ft WEIGHT > 2871 lb C/D OBSERVED MPG > 28 TOYOTA COROLLA S PRICE > $22,870 POWER > 132 hp TORQUE > 128 lb-ft WEIGHT > 2912 lb C/D OBSERVED MPG > 30 As We Emerge from a Winter that saw record-low temperatures lead to the rebranding…

Despite our love of driving other people's cars, we do occasionally use our own rides, and oftentimes these pristine machines need assistance getting from place to place. Enter the tow vehicle. While heavy-duty pickups are designed for hauling serious tonnage, Chrysler's high-tech updates to the light-duty 2013 Ram 1500 made it an ideal candidate for a long-term transportation study. During 40,000 miles in less than 12 months, in which our True Blue Pearl crew cab rarely sat idle, one of the wimpiest of Ram's pickups proved more than capable on nearly every front, and especially when towing our battered heaps to tracks across the country. Unlike our previous long-term Ram 1500—a 2009 model with four-wheel drive and the 390-hp, 5.7-liter Hemi V-8 ["Handy Man," July 2010]—our 2013 SLT crew cab…

TESTED + The automatic sees the same chassis as the manual WRX, easier in stop-and-go traffic. - Turbo, tranny lag; requires a move up to the Premium trim level; don't be lazy, use your left leg. A collective groan went out from the car-loving world when Subaru announced that its WRX would be getting a CVT. This is the first two-pedal WRX since 2008, an autobox reprieve we knew couldn't last. But a CVT? Beulah, fetch my pitchfork and torch. And then we drove it. And we started to think: If you buy the WRX with an automatic, then you deserve this transmission. Subaru has programmed this CVT to mimic a six- or eight-speed auto by operating in stair steps rather than one fluid sweep of ratio change. Slip the…

WHAT WE SAID: "The automobile was the ultimate freedom machine; high-speed data is more often like a set of invisible shackles."—C/D, SEPTEMBER 2012 Insurance is the application of shared risk. Individuals agree to pay a fee to a company in exchange for the promise that the company will cover a major incident that befalls them. It's a great idea, even highly profitable, but for it to work, each payment must be commensurate with the payee's exposure to risk. Most car insurers assess this exposure by tabulating a driver's age, location, type of car, and driving history. But modern technology allows much more focused risk assessment by monitoring an individual's driving habits. Enter the Snapshot from Progressive Insurance, which plugs into a car's OBD II (on-board diagnostics, second generation) port. Mandated…

The significance of Fiat Chrysler's decision to unveil the 2015 Renegade in Geneva in March is plain: It will be the first U.S.-market Jeep to be built abroad. Sharing a platform with the Fiat 500L and built in Fiat's Melfi, Italy, assembly plant, the Renegade also has a simple mission: to give Jeep an entry-level model that's not a Compass or Patriot. While there certainly will be howls from the most reverent Jeep enthusiasts about the Renegade's immigrant status, the new B-segment crossover should work harder at putting a smile on your spare-tire cover than those two small leftovers from the DaimlerChrysler era. The official line is that the Renegade is not a replacement for those fraternal C-segment twins. But we imagine that's just corporate misdirection to keep the retail…

With its Escape, EXPLORER, AND EXPEDITION, Ford has created clear imagery for its SUV lineup: People are going places, escaping, exploring, etc. (And once upon a time, for a really big trip, you'd take an Excursion.) But Ford's big E isn't the only nomenclatural device out there: Similar threads of commonality also run through other automakers' naming conventions, and not just within individual companies but among them as well. Even cars labeled with letters and numbers rather than words conform to certain patterns. Here, we've created as comprehensive a taxonomy—or, for those who smoked dope through high-school biology, a scientific classification—of vehicle names as you'll find anywhere. Disclaimer: For companies such as Mercedes-Benz and BMW, for which the drivetrain details relate to the model names and are shared across multiple…

PRICE > $39,845 POWER > 220 hp TORQUE > 258 lb-ft WEIGHT > 3369 lb C/D OBSERVED MPG > 21 MERCEDES-BENZ CLA250 4MATIC PRICE > $37,455 POWER > 208 hp TORQUE > 258 lb-ft WEIGHT > 3437 lb C/D OBSERVED MPG > 21 BMW 228i PRICE > $38,225 POWER > 240 hp TORQUE > 255 lb-ft WEIGHT > 3353 lb C/D OBSERVED MPG > 21 Seems like only yesterday that we were giving last rites to the compact-sports-sedan segment as its standard-bearers ballooned in dimensions, features, and price. Does a BMW 3-series need to be the size of the old 5? Well, yes, now that the 5 is the new 7 and the 7 is the new battleship Bismarck. If you didn't buy an Audi or a BMW or a…

Three alternatives to the mainstream-crossover playlist. 2015 VOLVO V60 T6 AWD R-DESIGN PRICE > $50,475 POWER > 325 hp TORQUE > 354 lb-ft WEIGHT > 3996 lb C/D OBSERVED MPG > 22 BMW 328i xDRIVE SPORTS WAGON PRICE > $47,775 POWER > 240 hp TORQUE > 255 lb-ft WEIGHT > 3800 lb C/D OBSERVED MPG > 25 AUDI ALLROAD QUATTRO PRICE > $48,745 POWER > 220 hp TORQUE > 258 lb-ft WEIGHT > 3901 lb C/D OBSERVED MPG > 24 THREE'S A TREND, BUT SOMETHING SHORT OF A COMEBACK. Even with enough wagons clustered in one segment to warrant our first roundup in 13 years, the two-box car remains endangered. The taller, truckier version of the wagon, the compact crossover, now dominates the market for utility vehicles. Case in point:…

2015 CHEVROLET TAHOE LTZ / 2015 SUBARU WRX / AMS RONIN GT-R For the past few years, Mer- cedes-Benz product planners have been vigorously overhauling the lineup, cutting the SLS supercar, revamping the top-shelf S-class, and adding entry-level-status bait in the form of the CLA sedan and GLA wagon. But they have essentially left the old C-class to its own devices. A mild makeover a couple of years back improved its looks but failed to address its primary shortcoming: It wasn't as fun to drive as BMW's 3-series. This all-new C-class arrives at a critical moment for its segment. Now that the BMW 3-series itself is no longer as fun to drive as a 3-series, Mercedes' tenacious application of big-car style and technology to the C-class seems prescient. It has…

Meet the 1000-hp Nissan GT-R called the "Ronin." The name, which translates roughly as "a warrior without a master," would seem to overdo it on the samurai imagery, but this car, this barn-built Bugatti, is the quickest road car we've tested in our 59 years. So maybe the name fits. AMS Performance in West Chicago, Illinois, built the Ronin, which is not even the quickest GT-R it sells. That one has 1800 horsepower and a service interval of a quarter-mile. AMS president Martin Musial explained, however, that the Ronin is its optimal street-going package. To achieve the four-figure horsepower rating and 850 pound-feet of torque, all on 93 octane, AMS installs a stroker crank and connecting rods in the GT-R's stock V-6 block, increasing displacement from 3.8 liters to 4.2.…

TRADING TIMES: The difference between trading in a 2010 Ford Mustang GT to a dealer and selling it yourself works out to about $2000. —kbb.com Selling your car has always seemed like a binary choice: Either trade it in to a dealer for a pittance or put it up for sale yourself and face ridiculous inquiries, insincere tire-kickers, and the risk of counterfeit checks. But there's now a third possibility: consignment sales. Consignment means hiring someone to sell your item for a fee. It's been common for decades in other trading spheres—art, antiques, boats, planes, and real estate. And it's been part of the collector-car world virtually from the moment someone first asserted that a car was "collectible." Now it's becoming more popular for ordinary cars, as sellers try to…

Engines ARE designed TO RUN on commonly available fuels, but as every street racer knows, injecting a little something extra can help performance. (Certain athletes seem to have picked up on this concept, too.) Auxiliary injection systems provide tremendous power gains in a relatively easy-to-install package. What is injected generally falls into one of three categories: coolants, oxygen enhancers, or additional fuel. Here's how they work. COOLANTS When you spray water into an engine's intake manifold, the water vaporizes, lowering the temperature of the intake charge and making it denser. A denser charge means more air and more fuel reach the cylinders, which translates to more power. The lower charge temperature also greatly reduces the likelihood of knock or detonation, allowing either a higher compression ratio or more boost pressure.…

WINTER OF DISCONTENT At dawn on February 8, I climbed into C/D's long-term BMW X1 and set out for Carmel, California, where I was to drive the new Subaru WRX STI. When I headed out, we had 36 inches of snow on the ground, and the stuff was still pelting down "like twelve mad bastards," as Hunter S. Thompson would say. After four hours of blindly aiming the BMW through shadowless ruts—many of which felt like driving over concrete curbs and dead cows—I'd covered 90 miles. Given the proper chemicals, Lance Armstrong could have done better. The BMW's rear wiper clogged and stalled, then the relentless snow glacialized the grille. Bingo: an overheated engine in an ambient temp of 12 degrees F. I used a ballpoint pen and a 99-cent…

Chevrolet Corvette Stingray Convertible PRICE > $76,725 / POWER > 460 hp / TORQUE > 465 lb-ft / WEIGHT > 3496 lb / C/D OBSERVED MPG > 18 Jaguar F-type V-8 S PRICE > $100,370 / POWER > 495 hp / TORQUE > 460 lb-ft / WEIGHT > 3960 lb / C/D OBSERVED MPG > 16 The Chevrolet Corvette convertible and the Jaguar F-type V-8 S we've gathered here fulfill the basic tenets of the hot-rod faith. Window-shattering V-8? Check. Two seats tucked into a body that will draw longing stares and disapproving looks? Check. Guy behind the wheel wearing a Hawaiian shirt? Check. But the Corvette and F-type do have differences. One has a DOHC engine with a supercharger on top, the other a pushrod V-8 that will send…

LIKE A THIEF IN THE NIGHT, WIND RESISTANCE IS A STEALTHY INTRUDER THAT SAPS YOUR SPEED AND MURDERS YOUR MILEAGE WITHOUT LEAVING FINGERPRINTS. THE GENTLE MURMUR OF AIR STREAMING OVER, UNDER, AND THROUGH YOUR CAR BELIES THE WIND'S HEINOUS WAYS. Even if there's no alternative to driving through Earth's atmosphere, we can at least fight wind resistance with science. Aerodynamics—the study of air in motion—can lift our top speeds, curb our fuel consumption, and, if we're smart about it, keep our tires stuck to the pavement. Long before automotive engineers fretted over aerodynamics, aviation pioneers defined the basic principles of drag and lift. Inspired by birds and airships, early speed demons also toyed with streamlined shapes. The first car to crack 60 mph (in 1899) was an electrically propelled torpedo…

"It's a bit like driving a shipping container," said our U.K.-based passenger. He didn't mean it as a compliment. If you'd never driven a Chevy Tahoe, you, too, might be shocked by its gargantuan size and 5756 pounds. Shipping containers are spacious and useful, though, and so is the new Tahoe. Much of this SUV's appeal stems from its politically incorrect size. It's a Big Mac in a world going vegan. Big on this scale means you don't have to bother organizing your dog kennels, antique firearms, and stuffed elephants; just throw everything in back, it'll all fit. Don't like who's riding shotgun? No worries. A console as big as a coffee table keeps the driver and front passenger from violating any restraining orders. And there's even more than an…

WHAT WE SAID: "The 370Z roadster will smoke a standard Porsche Boxster. And look good doing it." — C/D, NOVEMBER 2009 2009–13 The shopper seeking a sub-$30,000, rear-drive sports car with a warranty has few choices. In the new-car market, there's the Mazda MX-5 Miata and the Subaru BRZ/Scion FR-S, all great fun but not truly fast. And they all can be smoked by a V-6 Honda Accord. Opt for a Certified Pre-Owned Nissan 370Z, though, and you can tap into 332 to 350 horsepower, get to 60 mph in less than five seconds, run to 157 mph, and corner at 0.97 g. Those numbers are legit performance-car material. To be eligible for the CPO program through Nissan dealers, Z cars have to be no more than six years old,…

2001-04 The C5 Corvette's Z06 variant made its debut for 2001, reviving an option code last used on the 1963 C2 Sting Ray. The fifth-gen's Z06 used the hardtop-coupe body and was engineered to be the highest-performing factory Corvette ever. At this year's Detroit auto show, Chevy showed the upcoming C7 Corvette Stingray Z06, a 625-hp (or more) pavement sucker that represents the next generation of track-ready Corvettes. With attention focused on the new Z06, we thought it high time to bargain-hunt its C5 predecessor. How is the Corvette we called "a keeper at any price" in 2001 holding up today? — james tate ENGINE: The C5 Z06 comes equipped with a small-block 5.7-liter LS6 engine, essentially a version of the standard C5's LS1 with a higher compression ratio and…