Innehållsförteckning för May-15 från Car and Driver

Sic your dogs on us at: editors@caranddriver.com or join the discussion at: backfires.caranddriver.com TAKING ISSUE Last month it was that our cars would soon be broadcasting their speeds for any law-enforcement agency to record. This month it was a $106,000 electric car that, in most places, takes more than 10 hours to recharge on a 240-volt source or more than four days on 110, and a $25,000 Ford whose headlights cost 16 percent of its total price or more than 50 percent more than those of a $70,000 Cadillac CTS Vsport. The automobile world is going mad. JOE BULLMERHORSE SHOE, NORTH CAROLINA LIT AND IN FOCUS Please tell me that it was a misprint in your long-term Ford Focus ST test ["Juvenile Delinquent," February 2015]. You…

Mopar's reputation at the drag strip has been secure for more than 50 years, ever since Chrysler CEO Lynn Townsend told his engineers to get busy building a modern Hemi to rule them all. If not a lineal descendant, the 707-hp powder keg in the Challenger SRT Hellcat is a spiritual scion of the 426 Hemi, and it's in a car that will turn mid-11-second quarter-miles right off the showroom floor. Hmm, mid-11s? That's quick, but not nearly as impressive as the blown eight's output. Power is nothing without traction, and the stock $60,990 Hellcat is somewhat lacking in the latter. There are a few reasons, starting with the same slab-sided sheetmetal as lesser Challengers, which limits what tires can be fitted, plus a prudent corporate policy to spec street…

"So what do you think of the show?" This inanely amorphous question is a way of making idle chitchat with the acquaintances you bump into roughly every 17 feet at an auto show. It's also a question posed by journalists intent on polling colleagues about what it all means, about what's really going on out there. Every auto show gets painted by the media with a theme, a thing, a nutshell, a leitmotif. It could be green tech, horsepower, infotainment, recession, resurgence—all are potential candidates for befuddled writers and broadcasters trying to sound clever through concise distillation of a complex industry. The auto media likes to use itself as its primary focus group, and should you answer the question with a smart opinion, in 20 minutes you may hear somebody…

VW'S CHAMPION SQUARE DANCER GETS FASTER. VOLKSWAGEN GOLF R THE MOST AMUSING THING YOU MAY READ ALL DAY IS THIS: You can now spend $40,000 on a Volkswagen Golf—a Golf! That which was once known as the Rabbit, which has a flat roof, five portals, and is the closest thing to a perfectly cubic car, seemingly engineered by those perfectionist Germans to conjoin with other cubes into an exact grid of dense traffic for the purpose of maximum utilization of the urban road space, now costs 40 Gs. It also has nearly 300 horsepower and hits 60 mph in 4.5 seconds. Well, if you live long enough, you'll see everything. Histrionics aside, nobody who has been paying attention will be at all surprised by our $39,910 Golf R. Volkswagen has…

In Iceland, a kid can be named Neptúnus or Torbjörg or Geirþrú ur, but you'll never meet a Moon Unit or a Zuma Nesta Rock. New parents on this jagged, steamy volcanic plug must choose from a list of 3500 government-approved names or plead for an exemption before the country's Personal Names Committee, a three-person panel tasked with preserving the country's heritage and protecting its children from a life of ritual playground beatings. As restrictive as that sounds, it's too bad the committee doesn't oversee the auto industry. The panel could have stopped Land Rover from abandoning both history and imagery when, in 2005, it dropped the Discovery moniker and began adopting alphanumeric names for some of its models in the North American market. The Discovery became the LR3 (and…

The biggest fear of Jeep die-hards, worse than nuclear war or Disney measles, is the steady dilution of their favorite brand. Like anti-vaxxers, Jeep's fanboys refuse to accept the science, namely that Jeep (and Fiat Chrysler) needs more mainstream vehicles in order to prosper. They hated the car-based Compass and Patriot, and now they've directed their disdain toward the new Renegade, which suffers from the affliction best known as "not-a-Wrangler-itis." You'll have to pry the ladder frames and live axles from the die-hards' cold, dead hands. With the Renegade, however, we're not convinced that their vitriol is well-aimed. Sure, the Italian-built Renegade is the crossover vaccine Jeep needs in order to keep expanding sales and meet stringent fuel-economy standards. But the base-model Sport is a Renegade reduced to its essentials,…

SCRUTINEERING LOST IN TRANSLATION — The Italian cavallo vapore (CV) and German Pferdestärke (PS) are equal to each other but less than SAE horsepower. Lamborghini converts the Huracán's 610-CV rating to 602 horsepower. But Audi will advertise the 610-PS R8 V-10 Plus at 610 horsepower, granting the R8 its first-ever edge over its Lambo platform-mate. IN A WORLD OF TURBOCHARGED FERRARIS, AUDI, OF ALL COMPANIES, IS STICKING WITH NATURAL ASPIRATION. The sideblade can come in a contrasting, body-colored, or carbon-fiber finish. We dig this contrast look. There's a lot OF UPHEAVAL and excitement going on in the world of German sports cars right now. Just not at Audi. BMW recently launched its plug-in hybrid i8, Porsche has announced plans to downsize and turbocharge the complete 911 engine lineup,…

RöHRL-PLAYING GAMES We tried out InnoDrive in rally ace Walter Röhrl's Panamera Turbo. Think Porsche charged him $2415 for the personalized carbon doorsills? Because that's what the custom work costs. Today's active cruise-control systems can read the road, spot impending collisions, and automatically apply the car's brakes. A few even steer to some degree. Seemingly every new luxury car boasts an incremental upgrade—now with gopher detection!—but by decade's end, Porsche will debut an active cruise with one feature that no one else has mentioned: excitement. Its InnoDrive system will allow for cornering at up to 0.70 g. That's more sustained lateral acceleration than most casual drivers have ever experienced and the kind of g-force that has even seasoned lappers reaching for the oh-crap handles. Currently under development by Porsche on…

In 1987, my parents bought their first new truck, a Dodge Ram D150. The Big Dodge Ram, as it came to be called, was so sparsely equipped that it should have come with a vow of celibacy. It had a manual trans hooked to an overtaxed 95-hp slant six. You sat on a bench seat and your headrest was the glass immediately behind your noggin. For options, it had stripes. As a kid, I thought it was the coolest truck in the world. As a teenage driver, my opinion was probably a little different, but the Dodge served nobly during the winter months when my IROC was encased in an ice fortress. No, the Ram wasn't four-wheel drive. But I've found that if you drive fast enough toward an obstacle,…

The sports-coupe segment's most illustrious veteran tells a couple of kids to get off its lawn. Cadillac ATS Coupe 3.6 PRICE > $52,315 POWER > 321 hp TORQUE > 275 lb-ft WEIGHT > 3560 lb C/D OBSERVED MPG > 19 Lexus RC350 F Sport PRICE > $54,405 POWER > 306 hp TORQUE > 277 lb-ft WEIGHT > 3884 lb C/D OBSERVED MPG > 19 Audi S5 PRICE > $59,325 POWER > 333 hp TORQUE > 325 lb-ft WEIGHT > 3954 lb C/D OBSERVED MPG > 19 Sports coupes reside in that Rhode Island–sized space between fully indulgent sports cars and eminently sensible sports sedans. To earn its garage slot, a coupe must adroitly juggle three somewhat contradictory attributes: sex appeal, driving joy, and 2+2 practicality. The three premium coupes in…

We were skeptics of Ford's aluminum-truck-bed-and-body gambit, but in a February-issue comparison test, a $60,000-plus F-150 SuperCrew with a twin-turbocharged 3.5-liter V-6 dispatched the mostly steel four-door competition from Chevrolet, Ram, and Toyota. But there's a new, even smaller engine on the F-150's order sheet, a 2.7-liter V-6. How, we wondered, would it fare under the hood of the mostly nonferrous Ford? Positioned in price between the base 282-hp V-6 and the 385-hp 5.0-liter V-8, the iron-and-aluminum-block 2.7 makes 325 horsepower with the help of two turbos. The $795 upcharge for it over the naturally aspirated base six costs less than the F-150's optional sunroof ($995). A V-8 runs $1595, and the top-hole 3.5-liter turbo V-6 is $1995. The 2.7 hustles this truck to 60 mph in 5.7 seconds and…

Within the rigid hierarchy of BMW's performance models, the M235i cabrio isn't even a proper "M" car. Like its coupe sister, it's one of the half-strength "M performance" derivatives rather than one of the single-digit, purebred M cars (M3, M4, etc.). Yet, despite its place in what should be the beakiest of pecking orders, it's also as much fun to drive as anything that currently wears an M badge, and considerably more entertaining than several of its supposed superiors. The process of what we'll call cabrioization has done little to diminish the considerable charms of the M235i coupe. There are differences, however. During a rapid highway cruise, more noise gets through the convertible's fabric roof. And if you attempt to travel too quickly over a rough surface, then there is…

One Ford Mustang and one Dodge Charger. That was all it took back in 1968 to create what is still considered the greatest chase scene in Hollywood history. A Dodge and a Ford were all Bullitt needed to conjure celluloid magic, if you don't count also needing half of San Francisco. Last year's Need For Speed put together a fleet of Bugattis, Koenigseggs, and a few cars that didn't yet exist, and nobody cared. When it comes to chase scenes, excellence doesn't require expensive sheetmetal or exotic engineering. It just takes brave driving and daring filmmaking. So we're taking a look at how the total value of the hero cars in a selection of pursuit scenes compares with each movie's goodness, expressed through film ratings on the popular website Rotten…

Seventeen years ago, I was rather reluctantly serving as this magazine's executive editor. I remember one day making 57 phone calls. But a highlight of my tenure was Pippa Garner, the illustrator for our "Last Page." Her assignment in February 1998 was "Mass Transit for Car Nuts," and she came back with illustrations of a "Self-Propelled Parking Structure (Drive to work, even if your car doesn't run!)" and of an "Auto-Nomy Privacy Pouch," a car pod that slides into your subway seat, allowing you to "do anything(?) you could do in your own car." It was the first time I'd heard the term "autonomous car." Today if you ask Pippa's age, she'll tell you, "It's complicated." Everything in her life is complicated. She (then he) underwent transgender surgery in Brussels…

Each forthcoming car, truck, and SUV is an as-yet-unrealized promise, but none emerges wholly from the ether. Clean sheets of paper are found at Staples not car companies, whose planners juggle plants, partnerships, powertrains, and platforms to feed global sales channels. This guarantees a high likelihood of product success, but often also a bland if competent uniformity. So, when something reaches off the page and slaps you in the face, when a just-launched online configurator has you rushing to check your bank balance—that's amazing. We are celebrating that here. These are the vehicles that make news each time they shed a bit of camo or whenever a jet-lagged executive reveals a detail about a redesigned wiper stalk. Mere rumors of their existence accelerate competitors' product cycles. The wait to drive…

Anger will not control us. Anger will not define us. Just count backward from 10. That's Anger Management 101. AMG, however, doesn't appear to be interested in any of that crap. AMG's C63 was born angry in 2008, and the redesigned C63 wants to keep it that way. Fine by us. The meaner the AMG the better, as far as we're concerned. So it concerned us quite a bit that the new C-class introduced last year vectored a course deep into the luxury zone. It's a quieter and more subdued car, with obvious design cues from the mother of all vehicular refinement, the S-class. Would AMG keep the C63's rage boiling in the mannered-up C-class? After a brief drive of the European-spec models, we can say without hesitation that the…

You could hear the screams of the purists back in 2009 when BMW first affixed its hallowed M logo to the X5 and the X6. The SUVs were compound heresy, what with their fat dimensions, turbocharged engines, and four-wheel drive. Well, purists are always hollering about something, and the M division now brushes aside any notion of "M-appropriate" engine aspiration or body style, pointing to the 20,000-some M- badged SUVs on the road as proof of the merit of maintaining an open mind. Thus, for the redesigned X5 and X6, there really wasn't a question of whether there would (or should) be more M versions. They sell. And while the idea of the X6 M doesn't make any more sense to us the second time around, we can report that…

Charles Gordon-Lennox, Earl of March and Kinrara, 60, hosts the Goodwood Festival of Speed and the Goodwood Revival each year on his family estate in Sussex, England. C/D: Did visiting Goodwood as a child trigger all this? LM: It certainly helped. I was very close to my grandfather, who lived here then, and we used to come down every Easter for the motor racing. He used to take me to the track, and then a lot of drivers would be here at the House for a party on the Saturday night. I can remember sitting on the big library sofa with Jo Bonnier when I was eight or nine. I was completely in love with racing at that time, so I was very upset as an 11-year-old when my grandfather…