Innehållsförteckning för February 2017 från Car and Driver

UTILITY CHARGES It is both sad and amusing to see how the American public’s appetite has grown for fancy SUVs and crossovers. I understand you have to publish articles covering the better examples of these vehicles for the benefit of some of your readers, but personally, I’ve been into stealthy, high-performance cars that handle. One example has succeeded spectacularly for its intended purpose here in sunny Southern California. It’s my steel-metallic-blue 2002 BMW 325i Sport Wagon. Everything you’ve ever said praising E46 BMWs is right on the money. —Cleveland E. Norton Jr. San Diego, CA Not in my magazine! The November cover is an abomination. “Best Crossovers and SUVs”? Really? This magazine is supposed to be my one escape from reality. Ordinarily, I can lose myself in its pages and…

THE NOTION OF SEMI-AFFORDABLE Italian cars hasn’t exactly gained the traction of, say, a Sotheby’s noodlecraft auction. Fiat 500 sales have been bending toward free-fall since that motorized espresso shot first appeared in 2011. And Alfa Romeo’s mid-engined 4C sells in exotic volumes befitting its exotic looks, but it’s hardly competitive with similarly priced toys. The Giulia will eventually boost Alfa’s sales here by giving the brand a mainstream-ish product, but repeated delays mean deliveries won’t start until about the time you read this. The things that aren’t tough to sell right now are crossovers. They account for a third of the market, and everybody’s getting on board, including Maserati. [To see if that’s a good idea or not, turn to our road test of the Levante, page 060.] Hoping…

IN OUR MINDS, this was going to be a lot more exciting. Our plan to test a Ford Mustang GT with a space-saver spare in place of the full-size rubber at one corner seemed not just imprudent but also stood in direct violation of the advice of the owner’s manual and our attorneys. Mom also weighed in against it. The manual was most explicit: “ . . . do not exceed 50 mph” it warned, with another warning on the diminutive donut. But we defied all that because we wanted to see how much emergency performance you can expect when your car is wearing a spare. Surely there would be fire—actual flames!—from the mini spare as we relentlessly circled the skidpad, reducing the donut to smoldering rubber in only two…

ELECTRIC VEHICLES ARE MATURING THROUGH THEIR ADOLESCENCE, AND JUST LIKE IN MIDDLE SCHOOL, SOME MEMBERS OF THE CLASS ARE DEVELOPING FASTER. Tesla and Chevrolet now have electric cars that will travel more than 200 miles per charge, but the vast majority of battery-powered cars are still limited to a 60-to-90-mile range. In the next decade, the electric car promises to blossom into something that doesn’t require sacrifices in practicality or price when compared with a gasfueled car, but until the EV’s pimples clear up, we have plug-in hybrids. With both a battery and a gas tank, plug-in hybrids strive to be everything to everyone, especially buyers who drive too much to deal with range limitations or who don’t want to spend much time plugged into a charger. The battery pack…

It was with some trepidation that we punched the start button on this Lincoln Continental road test. What if Lincoln revived its hallowed nameplate only because its own execs couldn’t keep straight the alphabet soup of three-letter badges beginning with MK? What if this new flagship turned out to be another lightly fluffed Ford? What if this Conti is no better than the Taurus-based edition sold 20 years ago or it’s a turkey like the Blackwood pickup that lasted exactly one model year? Lincoln fans, especially those still pining for the Town Car, perk up at any mention of the Continental. While few remember that Edsel Ford’s 1939 gift to automotive artistry reinterpreted two classic design features—long-hood, short-deck proportions and the spare tire as a fashion accessory—some surely recall the…

COUPLE THE FUNGAL BLOOM of crossovers with the spread of Mercedes-AMG’s welterweight “43” model designation, and the fortified GLC43 compact luxo-ute seemed inevitable. With it, the AMG folks in Affalterbach painted a bull’s-eye on the back of Porsche’s Macan GTS, offering a slightly softer bearing than the Macan’s but in a very harmonious package nevertheless. A stilted-wagon derivative of the C-class sedan and coupe, the base GLC300 is a lovely if sober mall runner powered by a 241-hp, turbocharged 2.0-liter four-cylinder. The step up to the GLC43 runs $13,750 but adds a gutsy twin-turbo 3.0-liter V-6 and assorted hardware that dramatically alter the GLC’s performance and character. Mercedes also throws in subtly pumped-up fascias, AMG instruments, red seatbelts, and lots of red contrast stitching. While the V-6 is not one…

HOW WE STORE ENERGY will be critical to the future of the electric car. While lithium-ion batteries are likely to remain the standard for at least the next decade, academic researchers and startup companies are racing to discover, design, and manufacture alternatives that will move beyond the limits of today’s chemistries. The following three technologies show the greatest potential: REDUCTION-OXIDATION FLOW In brief: Here, energy is stored in tanks as two liquid electrolytes rather than in the positive and negative electrodes. The electrolytes generate electricity as they’re pumped through the battery cells. Recharging can occur either onboard by reversing the process or by replacing the electrolyte at a fuel station. What might stop it: Many experts believe that achieving adequate range with a flow battery will require storage tanks too…

Screw that guy. In my dreams, I can levitate. Always have been able to. I can’t fly; that nonsense is for dreamers. No, I can just lift off the ground and hang there, maybe six feet from the deck. Sometimes I go up as much as 10 feet, but never much farther. This serves no actual purpose. I’m not moving anywhere. I’m not taking advantage of my elevation to pick apples, or peep in second-story windows, or avoid anything on the ground. I’m just . . . levitating. I’m convinced after spending a couple days in the Nevada desert with Ford’s newest F-150 Raptor that it harbors similar dreams. In its promotional materials, Ford habitually shows the Raptor, both this generation and the last, leaping into the air, big wheels…

Maserati has been here before. Preserving soul-stirring brand values while managing the balance-sheet realities of being a tiny carmaker has never been easy. The last time this Mo -dena-based brand pulled it off, however, was long before Lamborghinis went from sharing farm fields with bulls to being named after bulls. In 1957, Maserati was a builder of low-volume sports cars and even lower-volume race cars. Back then, it was also an independent concern, unencumbered by the burdens or blessings of its current parent company, Fiat Chrysler Automobiles. When its “White Dame” prototype rolled out that year, the Grand Tourer led the way for the series production 3500 GT—a volume seller (relatively speaking, with about 2200 made) introduced into a market ripe for its combination of Italian speed, sound, and flair.…

[+] Instant and connected steering, excellent ride, autentico Italiano. [–] No manual transmission available, cramped back seat. ITALIAN-NESS. We know it when we see it. And when we don’t, we’re usually in an Olive Garden. We see lots of Italian-ness in Alfa Romeo’s new Giulia sedan; it’s clear that Alfa didn’t order parts for it from Chrysler’s menu. If it did, the Pentastar stuff is well hidden. From what we could see, nothing inside the new Giulia’s cabin is shared with a domestic Chrysler, Dodge, or Jeep. The infotainment system is the Giulia’s own, and although the switchgear has a generic European look and some of the plastics are from the hard-and-cheap bin, everything inside appears to be Giulia-specific. What’s even better is that the engines are made and designed…

CIVICS USED TO COME in a lot of different shapes and sizes, from the stubby little CRX to a tall, four-wheel-drive wagon. But long ago, the funneling effects of mainstream consumer tastes (a fancy way of saying that we are all sheep) caused Honda to pare down the Civic line to its two best-sellers, the sedan and coupe. America even got its own Civic platform, while Europe and other overseas markets continued to enjoy a hatchback body style, which was last seen around these parts as the 2002–2005 British-built Si hatch. Well that Anglo-American pipeline is back in business, as Honda’s Swindon, England, assembly plant once again swings into action to produce a Civic hatchback for America. The return of the hatch as a younger, sportier, and more male-oriented alternative…

The angle between cylinder banks determines the placement of the connecting-rod journals to achieve even firing every 120 degrees of crankshaft rotation. In a 60-degree V-6, the journals for the two cylinders opposite each other are located 60 degrees apart [001]. With a 75-degree bank angle, those same journals use 45-degree spacing [002], a number determined by subtracting 75 degrees from 120 degrees. The additional journal-to-journal overlap created by the 45-degree spacing results in more overlap between the journals [003] and thus a stronger crankshaft. To compensate for the small overlap in the 60-degree V-6 [004], engineers can enlarge the journals or stretch the offset between the two cylinder banks to increase the thickness of the counterweight [005] that connects adjacent journals. Acura claims that increasing the offset is the…

IF THE VOLVO BRAND were a Rorschach blot, most Americans would see a station wagon. But this didn’t come about as the result of some Swedish plot for domination of the American suburbs. It was an accident. In the mid-1950s, around the time that Volvo first considered exporting cars to the United States, the brand was unsuccessfully experimenting with selling chassis to independent coachbuilders, but in so doing had built up a surplus of unsold chassis. “So,” says Volvo historian Per-Åke Fröberg, “the management said, ‘Let’s start to do our own wagon.’” Aimed at Sweden’s small-business owners who needed a practical car and a family car but who couldn’t afford both, the wagon was a way to grow the lineup and use the extra platforms. The resulting Duett and subsequent…

It’s not the 10Best loop, nor Virginia International Raceway where we hold our annual Lightning Lap, nor the 20 miles of highway between my driveway and the Car and Driver cube farm. But near the front of my mental card catalog of Roads I Know Well, there’s a tangle of Portuguese pavement where the Atlantic Ocean rises to the Sintra Mountains. I’ve hustled Porsches and Jaguars through here, and now a 2017 BMW 5-series from the new G30 generation. This car on these roads stirs nostalgia more than most drives, because it was from behind the wheel of its predecessor that I first discovered the Portuguese Riviera in 2010. For BMW to return here with the seventh-generation car feels a bit like taking a mulligan on that sixth gen. It…

Last year, the Car and Driver testing budget ran deep into six figures, and that’s just for facility rentals. A complete test kit—including a Racelogic VBOX data logger, a timing gate, scales, and a sound-level meter—will set you back more than $25,000. And our Dunkin’ Donuts receipts make that number seem small. The suits in New York actually pay us to go do this. We’re professionals, after all. You’re not. But that doesn’t mean you can’t give DIY car testing a shot. Really, the only thing you have to risk is your driver’s license. Maybe prison. Potentially your own life, as well as the lives of others. So don’t try any of this under any circumstances. Anyway, coming up with the numbers to fill out one of our test sheets…

THE KIA SOUL TURBO is dressed for the job it wants, not the job it has. With its flat-bottomed steering wheel, bits of red exterior trim, and dual exhaust tips, the boosted Soul may evoke notions of the Volkswagen GTI. In reality, it is simply a slightly more powerful version of Kia’s successful little lunchbox. Kia is keen to avoid any such disadvantageous comparisons by resolutely assuring us that the blown Soul is not a hot hatch but a sporty small crossover— which may be splitting hairs. Rather than give the Soul a wholesale performance makeover, Kia simply slotted in a 201-hp, turbocharged 1.6-liter four-cylinder. With the exception of slightly larger front brakes and marginally stiffer damping, the turbo model has a chassis setup that’s nearly identical to other Souls.…

WHAT CAN YOU SAY about a car that hits 60 mph in 2.6 seconds? That it’s quick, and that quick is beautiful. From the high perch of a crossover, the Turbo might look like a thousand other 911s, but that’s because the reactor core behind the rear wheels can’t be seen from above. We’d call that inner beauty, and isn’t that what’s important? At the heart of this love affair is a twin-turbocharged flat-six that ingests enough gas and air to provide 540 horsepower and 523 pound-feet of torque. That’s a meaningful 20 more horses than last year’s Turbo and a remarkable 142 horsepower per liter, improvements that come from increases in boost and fuel-injection pressures. If that’s not enough, Porsche offers the 580-hp Turbo S, though it’s no quicker…