Innehållsförteckning för July 2017 från Car and Driver

A LIST OF “BESTS” IS ALWAYS TEMPORARY, but these books will add weight to anyone’s corpus of knowledge for cars, racing, and race drivers. Our list includes recent titles as well as some oldies that deserve reacquaintance. And nobody’s automotive library is complete without Sir Stirling Moss’s All but My Life: Face to Face with Ken Purdy, Purdy’s The Kings of the Road, Denis Jenkinson’s The Racing Driver: The Theory and Practice of Fast Driving, and The Reckoning by the late David Halberstam on the parallels of the American and Japanese car industries. Total Competition: Lessons in Strategy from Formula One Ross Brawn and Adam Parr; Simon & Schuster A valuable peek behind the veil at the politics of Formula 1 and the sport’s economics over the past 20 years.…

It’s been a while since I’ve heard of any car company paying big money to someone with a vague New Agey job description, which means the time is ripe for me to cash in on that lucrative sector. I figure that my angle is to tell them things that ought to be obvious but somehow aren’t, so I’m going to call myself the Innovation Dictator. (I was gonna go with Innovation Consultant, but autocracy is so hot right now.) I hereby invite product planners and design directors to consult me whenever they’ve got an idea that just might be cockamamie. What kind of ideas? Glad you asked. Let’s say a designer comes to me and says, “We’re thinking about this new idea for a shifter.” I’ll say: “Stop right there.…

As get-rich schemes go, this one was fairly foolproof. All it took was a close reading of the Volkswagen settlement and some capital for a few astute individuals— and, rumor has it, a handful of non-VW dealerships— to cash in on the TDI buyback program, creating a homegrown VW diesel trade that fattened a few pockets. Several months ago, you too could have picked up a used diesel-powered VW for well below book value, then sat on it for a bit before turning it in to VW for the buyback money. Sometimes the payoff would be only a few thousand dollars, but one buyer who got the system wired, and who talked to us only on the condition of anonymity, claims to have made around $20,000 on some vehicles. The…

Mobility scooters are ubiquitous. At hot-rod shows, they fly in squadron formation with each pilot trailing a gray ponytail. Take your dog out for a constitutional and one will whiz by, forcing Fido off the sidewalk and into the gutter. Occasionally someone will get drunk, steal one, and drive it into a canal. Trader Joe’s should add banking to the sweeper through the produce department; Walgreens and CVS sell them on their websites; and the scoots are now a go-to reference for jokes about growing old, alongside walk-in bathtubs and reverse mortgages. The future may soon bring autonomous flying cars with onboard Chipotle service. But the present belongs to crossover SUVs and mobility scooters. So, here’s this comparison test. There’s a crossover first drive on page 094. You may think…

Arrival: Oct/2015 Miles: 37,428 Observed mpg: 33 Warm weather has returned to our Midwest headquarters. That means two things: 1. We’re dialing back on our meds, and 2. We’re dropping the Miata’s top every chance we get. Need to move the car to a different part of the parking lot? No reason to do so with the top up. The squeaks and rattles we heard during winter’s coldest commutes have vanished, as has the sad shiver our Miata exhibited while idling in what felt like absolute zero. There, there, little guy. Oh look, the sun! You made it, buddy! Our only persistent problem has been a tire-pressure warning that erroneously lit up a few times while the Miata wore winter tires. The pressures were actually fine. It’s easy to reset,…

C/D: After 42 years, do you ever feel Bigfoot is a curse? BC: Sometimes when I’m working long hours. When we started doing shows with Bigfoot, my wife and I would sit down at the end of the year and say, “You know, we need to get to as many of these shows as we can because it’s not going to last.” It’s still great. ▪And still busy? □ Some years we do over a thousand shows and displays. Right now it’s a little bit slow. Some years we’re at 600 or 700. Actually our business increased each year when the economy went sour. Apparently people can’t take big vacations, but they can sure spend money on a local monster-truck show. ▪Bigfoot’s been in the movies. □ We’ve been in…

IN THE BAD OLD days when you busted one plastic switch on a Pontiac Bonneville, your dealer forced you to buy an entire set. Now you can pay a Russian who builds replica Star Wars guns a couple of bucks to ship you a brand-new, OEM-quality part for your old Bonnie. And soon you may want to just make it yourself in your garage. At this point, an aftermarket car part made by a 3-D printer could save you hours and hundreds of dollars, or it might simply snap in half. But just as computer-aided design rewrote automotive engineering in the 1980s, 3-D printing is looking to revolutionize the replacement-parts business, allowing car owners to create precise copies in their own garages, albeit with varying degrees of success at this…

Back in the days when I had the courage to board a commercial aircraft, I remember a few transatlantic trips where I was given a little bumper sticker that could be affixed to the side of my seat. It said, “Wake me for meals.” Wow. Really? Wake me for belching, too. That was during an era when you daily saw bumper stickers that read, “America: Love it or leave it!” At the time, plenty of us wanted to commission our own that read, “America: Love it and fix it.” Speaking of using your car as a biographical information center, I’ve recently seen five or six bumper stickers—all on pickup trucks—that read, “If you take my guns, this is my weapon.” It’s a little hard to fathom the message. Does it…

Last year, Ford Performance chief Dave Pericak found himself standing next to Edsel Ford II at the edge of a certain pastoral French racing circuit that has witnessed 84 years of glory, gore, grudges, and relentless grit. “You know,” mused Ford, according to Pericak’s recollection, “I was here 50 years ago with my father, when we won it. Now I’m here with my son.” When you work at FoMoCo, you work for a family. Pericak, who, with a small group of volunteers, took over a padlocked basement room in Dearborn, Michigan, and labored on his own time and after hours for months on “Project Phoenix” before it was even approved, tells me with a faraway look: “To bring that trophy back and hand it to that family, to return the…

To reduce the chances of another TDI fiasco, carmakers and government regulators alike have expanded their tailpipe-emissions measurement capabilities, moving out of the lab and onto the road. Gathering real-world insights regarding how cars behave in customer hands has necessitated a new category of tools called portable emissions-measurement systems (PEMS). Some of this gear is cumbersome and expensive, while other units— including the analyzer we borrowed from Infrared Industries for this test—are more wieldy. The company’s FGA4000XDS PEMS is a nine-pound box containing non-dispersive infrared and electrochemical-cell sensors capable of quantifying concentrations of hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, and oxygen in the exhaust stream. It can also display air-fuel ratio and engine rpm when connected to the engine’s ignition system. It is factory calibrated and certified to comply…

Arrival: Sep/2016 Miles: 17,849 Observed mpg:22 With nearly half our test complete, the XE has already given us a full complement of annoyances, including recalls, flat tires, infotainment glitches, and repeat dealership visits that failed to resolve a cacophony of underhood whining, rattling, and vibrations that, apparently, we’re just going to have to get used to. Yet, most of us thoroughly enjoy driving the car, which offers ample power and grip. Complaints about a tight back seat and an unimaginative interior are outweighed by raves for its superlative steering and playful chassis. And the XE’s unassuming style suits our sensibilities. You take the good, you take the bad, you take them both and there you have the facts of life.…

As my bosses keep reminding me, I’m extraordinarily lucky to have this job. The luckiest part is that it allows me to meet guys like Yates. Through adventures as varied as the coastto- coast Cannonball and the writing of such inflammatory genius as The Decline and Fall of the American Automobile Industry, Brock embodied high-speed rebellion, shattering the rules that served to limit our freedom. He stoked young men’s fantasies of driving fast and not giving a shit. And he along with David E. Davis Jr. and Patrick Bedard formed the Holy Trinity of this magazine. When I met him, it was post-post-Cannonball, he had waxed famous, and I half expected him to be someone who thought his name preceded him. If anything, meeting Brock was better than worshipping him…

A Volvo lying on its side in Tempe, Arizona, wouldn’t normally rate a national headline. After all, Volvo has long asserted that the best attributes of its cars reveal themselves only in a crash. But this was an autonomous Volvo, part of a small test fleet Uber operated in Pittsburgh, San Francisco, and Arizona. The latter had welcomed Uber with open pro-business arms after the company and the California DMV got into a semantics spat, since resolved, over a $150 permit. The Cal DMV had revoked the registrations for Uber’s 16 test vehicles, and if the bureaucrats were motivated by the fear of a couple tons of undercooked technology circulating among the driving public, those fears seem to have been vindicated by the photos of the capsized Volvo. It doesn’t…

The true genius of Porsche’s new GT3, the second coming of the model on the 991 platform, is that even a master will never fully exploit it. That’s the trait that defines the GT3, not just among Porsches but among the world’s best drivers’ cars. As a result, it is endowed with a power to fascinate found almost nowhere else. No matter how hard it’s pushed, there’s still wizardry in its response, still delicacy in its feedback, still joy in its boundless ability. This is a machine whetted to a bayonet point on the mill of necessity. It is noise and feel and heat and speed wrapped in a physically absurd package, all in the pursuit of efficient corner circuitry. The case it makes is this: When all of a…

Throwing money at problems is how corporations make them go away. Pay for more lawyers, pay for more public relations, and certainly pay for more marketing in the hopes that the world will believe your new promises. For Volkswagen, those invoices have recently been supersized, befitting the scope of the diesel cheating scandal that has engulfed the company and prompted the recall of approximately 590,000 vehicles in the United States. Yet, its attorney bills and the costs of hiring extra PR staff must seem like little more than a few padded expense reports to the accountants in Wolfsburg. Since a group of West Virginia University scientists announced in May 2014 that they had found unexpectedly high emissions from VW’s TDI vehicles—which led to the uncovering of the company’s conspiracy to…

Arrival: Apr/2016 Departure: Apr/2017 Long-Term Test: When the tires get worn and the factory warranty runs out, that’s where we come in. Car and Driver is your source for the 40,000-mile evaluation. Even as crossovers continue to conquer America, and seemingly every automaker has a two-door vanity project to cast a glow over its lineup, big luxury sedans still project gravitas in the German-car business. Audi’s, BMW’s, and Mercedes’ largest cars remain totems of brand values and stylistic themes, as well as vanguards for the technologies that trickle down to the rest of the fleet. A year and 40,000 miles with Munich’s latest flagship, a 2016 BMW 740i, confirms what we’ve been saying for almost a decade: The soil under BMW HQ has truly shifted. The 7 makes clear that…

Arrival: Jul/2016 Miles: 25,043 Observed mpg: 15 The job of a workhorse can be thankless: Witness the dearth of praise in our Titan XD’s logbook. Despite its comfy seats and its effectiveness as a mover of winter toys and stricken jalopies, drivers have continued to comment on the stubbornly uncouth automatic transmission, the difficulty it takes to climb into the cabin without running boards, and its ravenous appetite for diesel exhaust fluid (we’ve added nearly 26 gallons thus far). We've had no other expenditures since our last update, other than fuel, which the XD is still consuming at the rate of 15 mpg. We will, however, be returning soon to the dealer to have the tailgate latch replaced once more, as a recent “fix” made the handle nearly impossible to…