Innehållsförteckning för Oct-14 från Car and Driver

Sic your dogs on us at: editors@caranddriver.com or join the discussion at: backfires.caranddriver.com THIRTYSOMETHING The cover blurb on the July issue says "30 Cars Under $30K." You only have 29. No. 22 doesn't count. If you don't know the difference between a car and a pickup truck, perhaps it's time to change the name of the magazine. This is especially puzzling considering all the articles you've published touting station wagons over SUVs. So … an SUV is a truck but a pickup truck is a car? JERRY BARRAX JR. SHERMAN, TEXAS THE BIG 3-OH Why is a 15.3-second quarter-mile in a Jeep Wrangler Willys ["All-American Boy," July 2014] like "the haste of a freight train," when a few pages earlier a Fiat Abarth is 15.7 and the Mini…

When bored, horses often chomp down on a fence post and suck air. One theory holds that this gives them a buzz. Another holds that this is baloney. But whether or not horses get lit, horsepower certainly can. And that is the purpose of a pedal tavern. Known by a variety of names, a pedal tavern is a multi-rider bike built around a bar. The HandleBar, in Indianapolis, runs a fleet of four bikes, each a PedalPub, which is a brand imported from the Netherlands and claimed to be the original bar bike. Ten pedalers sit around the perimeter, and there are spots for six passengers and one (presumably sober) driver. Many places forbid imbibing while pedaling, but PedalPubs run in 28 cities around the U.S.—including Indianapolis, which has no…

I live in a locale where it is fashionable—maybe mandatory—to excoriate the federal government for pretty much everything, from bark-beetle infestations to the "pernicious" pasteurization of milk to the disappearance of well-managed whorehouses where you could smoke before and after, well, anything at all. One particularly incendiary conversation starter is the government bailout of Chrysler and GM, despite an outcome so buoyant that it would float an armada of warships. In fact, I've started defending the bailout on a war-metaphor basis. For one thing, during World War II, Detroit was as vital to victory as our men and women in uniform. In 1940, America had few guns or planes. As our Mr. Alterman pointed out in June, it was F.D.R. who leaned on Henry and Edsel Ford to churn out…

GM's head of global product development, Mark Reuss, confirms that the company is working on the next Corvette. Our sources elaborate on this salient piece of information, telling us that, after 61 years of evolution, the C8 will be revolutionary. The new Corvette will be the mid-engined American Dream Machine that Chevy couldn't, until now, muster the courage to build. In truth, the factory is still not prepared to detail what's coming, which is why you're looking at the 2017 model year through our freshly waxed crystal ball. Why mid-engine? Because the C7 Corvette, especially the Z06 edition, is tapped out. Adding more power to a front-engine design only accelerates the conversion of rubber into smoke at the rear. Moving the engine's mass closer to the drive tires is the…

And the first is getting closer, rushing toward the Lambo's windshield like we're seeing it both in slow motion and fast forward at the same time. Right foot pinned to the floor. Throttle wide open—yawning, gaping, screaming for justice. The Lamborghini's engine roars, both aptly and tritely, like an enraged bull. A big, angry bull with a banderilla deep in each shoulder and a suspicion that you've been dating its mother. Yet our pace is undiminished, the hairpin closing in, fat lines of rubber leading to it and through it and toward the flimsy, battered barrier that lies beyond. Up above, the sun toys with the mountain peaks, licking them lovingly to life, turning them—metaphorically if not quite literally—into gigantic pink Popsicles. But down here we're in the shadow of…

C/D: What's the coolest thing that's happened to you at Ford? JF: Hundreds of things. Like when I met Hal Sperlich, I couldn't stop asking him questions. "What was it like to design the Mustang, and why didn't Ford go for the first minivan?" Being able to call Carroll Shelby to talk about cars. Talking to NASCAR drivers. Historic-racing a GT40 at the Le Mans Classic with a Porsche 917 right next to me in the rain—who's gonna lift first for the chicane? Talking to you. C/D: How'd you develop your intense enthusiasm for cars? JF: Not sure. When I was little, I was known as "Jimmy Car-Car" because I always carried a toy car to church or to dinner. I grew up in a desolate performance era; I was…

Towing companies are A NECESSARY EVIL when it comes to parking enforcement and property repossession. But in the Google Earth we now inhabit, tow trucks do more than just yank cars out of loading zones. They use license-plate readers (LPRs) to assemble a detailed profile of where your car will be and when. That's an unnecessary evil. Plate readers have long been a tool of law enforcement, and police officers swear by them for tracking stolen cars and apprehending dangerous criminals. But private companies, such as repo crews, also photograph millions of plates a day, with scanners mounted on tow trucks and even on purpose-built camera cars whose sole mission is to drive around and collect plate scans. Each scan is GPS-tagged and stamped with the date and time, feeding…

We know that EVERY BURNOUT results in at least one angry bystander because science tells us that every action generates an equal and opposite reaction. Newton's Third Law also states that the torque that propels your car creates a reactionary force that acts on the Earth's surface. Geologically speaking, you're insignificant, and that force is minuscule. But what if we launched every car on the planet, all at once? Could a coordinated effort to accelerate every car extant, in the same direction at the same instant, substantially alter the speed of the Earth's rotation? If you're at the equator, the Earth's 24-hour revolution means you're moving at a linear speed of roughly 1070 mph, but this number isn't constant. The 2011 earthquake in Japan redistributed enough mass to shorten the…

Commander Dave Bowling is a big guy in a small chair as we waft at 31 mph over Los Angeles. Our torpedo-shaped shadow slithers over freeways and swimming pools and glinting piles of junk in the backyards of tiny square houses arrayed in the orderly patterns of some long-ago blueprint for suburban utopia. Somebody spots a vintage Camaro parked in a yard, but from 1500 feet up it could just as well be a Lexus. Bowling has a '97 30th Anniversary Z28 and a '69 Camaro that he's restoring with his dad. When asked what he does for a living, Bowling often replies, "I sell tires." It saves time. This Goodyear blimp (there are three in the U.S.), the Spirit of America, lives just a few miles from me in…

Every candy bar needs an enticing wrapper, and every prom queen deserves a gorgeous gown. The Corvette is no different: It's an automotive candy bar, a V-8–powered prom queen. To give the Zora shape and form, we held a design contest and invited three world-class automotive artists to draw their visions of the C8. To pick a winner, two dozen C/D staff members pored over the submissions. The bake-off got heated at times, but the win was decisive. Their renderings are on these pages. KEN OKUYAMA Japan native Ken Okuyama's portfolio includes the original Acura NSX and the Ferrari Enzo. He was Pininfarina's creative director for two years and worked on the Chevy Camaro and C5 Corvette at GM. During a stint at Porsche, he helped sculpt the 996-generation 911…

1 FERRARI F136 Applications: Ferrari 458 Italia, 458 Spider Engine type: DOHC V-8 Displacement: 274 cu in, 4497 cc Specific output: 125.0 hp/l Max engine speed: 9000 rpm Bore: 3.70 in Weight: 2.1 lb 2 FORD FOX Applications: Ford Fiesta, Focus Engine type: turbocharged DOHC inline-three Displacement: 61 cu in, 999 cc Specific output: 123.1 hp/l Max engine speed: 6500 rpm Bore: 2.83 in Weight: 1.5 lb CROWN COMPRESSION RINGS OIL RING WRIST PIN COOLING GALLERY COMBUSTION BOWL LANDS SKIRT DIESEL CUTAWAY BORE COMPRESSION HEIGHT FRICTION-REDUCING GRAPHITE-IMPREGNATED RESIN CONNECTING ROD The slugs of aluminum inside your engine live in a fiery hell. At full throttle and 6000 rpm, a piston in a gasoline engine is subjected to nearly 10 tons of force every 0.02 second as repeated explosions heat the…

You might HAVE EXPECTED looming fuel-economy regulations to spell the end of crossovers and SUVs. But consumers love their stilted wagons, and those regulations are driving such a rapid pace of innovation that automakers are feeling free to bring to market more crossovers, not fewer. Like the monsters in the latest Godzilla movie, the genre is feeding off the very radiation that should be killing it. We've long since given up screaming into the wind about the superiority of station wagons over rolling bricks. To force ourselves to be okay with the crossover takeover, we've come up with the most convoluted justification for them we can muster: The beauty of a hatched vehicle is in the practicality afforded by its gaping rear portal. But if space matters, then so does…

When you need a potent engine or a sturdy gearbox for your fantasy supercar, Ricardo should be your first call. This U.K.-based engineering firm has roots reaching back more than a century and branches that cover Europe, Russia, Asia, and the U.S. of A. Ricardo's expertise can be found across the industry [see below]. Among its recent projects is the HyBoost, a Ford Focus fitted with an electrically driven supercharger. Ricardo built this HyBoost with two goals in mind: topping Toyota Prius fuel efficiency while skirting the cost, bulk, and weight of the Prius's two electric motor/generators and battery pack. The experiment is a timely one—every carmaker sees 2025's 54.5-mpg CAFE requirement looming, and most need help meeting it. To create the HyBoost, Ricardo replaced the original 1.6-liter four-cylinder engine…

Greetings, Earthlings. This is a momentous occasion, my debut column for Car and Driver. I told editor-in-chief Eddie Alterman that I want this first piece to be a sensation, the magazine equivalent of those Dodge Neon ads that said "Hi." He replied, "You're fired." I'm kidding, of course. I'm only on probation. And frankly I think that has more to do with a little situation involving stodgy office dress codes and mesh half-shirts. A little bit about me: I have a fully valid driver's license. I own three turbochargers. Junior Johnson once mailed me some ham. I put my pants on one leg at a time, except when I'm in training for the World Speed Dressing Championships—which are held quinquennially in Copenhagen, so I'll be out for a couple of…

WE HOLD IT AS GOSPEL THAT A LAP TIME ON A FAST AND TECHNICAL CIRCUIT IS THE PUREST DISTILLATION OF A PERFORMANCE CAR'S ABILITY. SO BACK WE WENT TO VIRGINIA INTERNATIONAL RACEWAY, THIS YEAR WITH 25 CARS, IN PURSUIT OF THAT BIG NUMBER. IT'S BELIEVED THAT JAMES MADISON STRODE THE WHITE HOUSE and the War of 1812 was rapidly becoming the War of 1813 when an oak sapling poked through the soil in a southern Virginia meadow to witness its first sunrise and splash of rainwater. The tree's shadow steadily grew as nearby Danville's cotton mills and tobacco warehouses thrived on slave labor, as the vanquished Confederates retreated from advancing Yankees, and, a century later, as water cannons blasted civil rights marchers. In 1957, a bunch of North Carolina racers…

If you're into fantasy, the calendar runneth over with conventions you can attend dressed as a sci-fi or comic-book character. Who doesn't look good as Yoda? But if you just want to go somewhere in costume, you could simply sit in traffic in a modern crossover, pretending to be fully engaged in the "active outdoor lifestyle" that automotive marketers so fastidiously craft around such vehicles, and nobody will call you a weirdo. It is into this costumed realm that BMW inserts its smallest crossover, the X1. This diminutive machine borrows its underpinnings from the E91 (previous-generation) 3-series station wagon. It's taller and more outdoorsy-looking than any wagon, though, and BMW hopes the "X" in the model name also flips the switch in consumers' brains from "wagon = leprosy spreader" to…