Innehållsförteckning för November 2017 från Car and Driver

“THE CIVIC Si AND THE NEW BMW 8-SERIES CONCEPT HAVE VERY SIMILAR AND UGLY FRONT ENDS, BUT ONLY THE CIVIC GETS CALLED UGLY.” GREEN MACHINE The green Civic Si on the cover of the August 2017 issue looks like the Hulk ripped his pants and tried to hide his undercarriage. —Lukas Lin Anaheim Hills, CA Kinda ugly? Against the current pantheon of ugly that includes the snowplow grille of the new Toyota Camry, the Civic Si rises to the top. Atrocious. —Russell Buonasera Houston, TX Who are you calling ugly? So youze guys at Car and Driver put the new Civic Si on the cover, and you have the nerve to say it’s “still kinda ugly.” Let me tell you something . . . nobody gets off calling dis car…

SCANT BITS OF TECHNOLOGY trickle down from racing to street cars anymore. Multimatic’s Dynamic Suspensions Spool Valve dampers are one of the few. The Canadian supplier’s dampers first appeared in the 2002 CART series, then migrated to Formula 1, and now populate about half the Le Mans starting grid. Aston Martin’s limited-edition One-77 was the first production car fitted with DSSV dampers and Chevrolet’s fifth-generation Camaro Z/28 followed in 2014. With their blend of street comfort and track-ready attitude, DSSV dampers are like shampoo and conditioner in one. Currently you can find them in the Ford GT, the Mercedes-AMG GT, and the Chevy Camaro ZL1 1LE and Colorado ZR2. Their simplicity is a thing of engineering beauty, so we uglied one up by cutting it in half with a band…

DODGE VIPER, ALSO KNOWN AS SRT Viper, Spinning Cobra, and— among more colorful commentators— the Dutch Oven Kit Car, lost its battle with popularity and cost on August 31. It was 25. It is survived by its brothers from Gehenna, Hellcat and Demon, and was preceded in death by its cousins in obsolescence, Plymouth Prowler and Chrysler Crossfire. Though the curtains are certainly final this time, Viper endured a two-year coma between 2010 and 2012, at which point its 10-chamber, 8.4-liter heart was defibrillated with Italian cash for a final five-year run of glory. Even from its 400-hp beginning, Viper moved with purpose—defining itself with spleen-crushing mechanical grip and driving its point home with big-cubic-inch clarity. It was always that kind of car, razing the hype that makes up car…

I’m not one to give advice, but here’s some that I came by the hard way: Don’t try to race a NASCAR driver on his own private dirt track. Especially don’t do that in a turbocharged Polaris RZR, which is explosively powerful but has the center of gravity of James Comey wearing a lead top hat. Because what might happen is, you charge into Turn 2 a little hot, you fail to apply enough throttle to break the rear end loose, and those knobby tires dig into the clay and send you into a half-ass Joie Chitwood Thrill Show before you tumble 90 degrees off- kilterand hang there in your harness like a skydiver dangling in ornamental shrubbery. There’s a moment when everyone checks that you’re okay, and then the…

The first automobiles, in the early 1900s, were a headache. The tool kit of the 1907 Pierce Arrow included, ominously, an extra set of intake and exhaust valves. Cars needed weekly oil changes. One manual of the period suggested that drivers have on hand, among other things, a small pipe wrench, a pair of gas pipe pliers, large and small screwdrivers, a pair of flat-nosed pliers, a small hammer, a pair of wire cutters, a large jackknife, half-round and three-cornered files, a roll of sticky tape, a chisel, a coil of soft iron, a monkey wrench, a few links of extra chain, a piece of asbestos for making gaskets, cans of oil and grease, and extra plugs. In response, owners adapted the model they had been using for years with…

Charlie Miller made headlines in 2015 when he and another cybersecurity researcher, Chris Valasek, remotely hacked into a Jeep Cherokee as it was being driven down the highway for a story in Wired magazine. (The Cherokee’s driver, a Wired writer, knew what was happening.) Having made no prior physical contact with the vehicle, Miller and Valasek used the Jeep’s Uconnect cellular connection to access its computers and take control of its acceleration, braking, and, during a later test, even its steering—all from Miller’s couch. The most chilling aspect of the attack? It would have worked on any vehicle in the United States running that version of the Uconnect software. Their findings led to a recall of 1.4 million Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep, and Ram vehicles to have the vulnerability rectified. Miller…

The Shapes of Things to Come We tend to think of computer-driven cars as one of two forms: a futuristic pod with no driver controls or a conventional car with the ability to drive itself in certain situations. However, we’re likely to see driverless vehicles in a variety of shapes, sizes, and uses if Level 5 technology comes to fruition. The vehicle concepts presented here have been identified by the Department of Transportation’s Volpe National Transportation Systems Center, which is charged with exploring emerging mobility issues.…

Last year, I got a call from a strange outer-borough number. The voice on the line was immediately recognizable as America’s foremost lateral thinker, Malcolm Gladwell. Turns out, he’s a C/D reader. He remembered the testing we’d done on unintended acceleration and wanted to do a piece for his Revisionist History podcast on why people are liable to press the wrong pedal in panic situations. I guess he liked working with us, because he agreed to edit the bulk of this issue, the 31 pages we’ve devoted to investigating the driverless car [beginning on page 058]. The driverless car has beguiled the sages and confounded the media mandarins for five years. The tech is here, right? Lane keeping, adaptive cruise control, automated emergency braking, sentient steering—that’s all front-loaded into most…

I was once assigned to drive an 8.2-foot-long Smart Fortwo— about the size of a poufy sectional sofa—to a U.S. destination where the car was least likely ever to have been seen. Daimler AG nixed Nome, Alaska, saying something about no service and cloven-hoofed Smartmauling impediments. So I opted for the Oklahoma Panhandle, ground zero for ground, by which I mean the Dirty Thirties Dust Bowl. When I arrived, the Panhandlers, once known as “pumpkin rollers,” were kind to me, apart from mocking a car that nearly lost a collision with one of their tumbleweeds. Forgive me, but the Okies all seemed to be awaiting the arrival of Nikita Khrushchev and the Hula- Hoop. So when I rolled through Slapout, Oklahoma, the Smart drew two of the town’s eight people…

One morning this past spring, Baruch Fischhoff, a professor in the department of engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University, was walking to campus on a quiet tree-lined Pittsburgh street when a prototype computer-driven Uber, a gray Volvo XC90, motored slowly past. Pittsburghers have grown accustomed to seeing the vehicles prowling the streets of the company’s de facto outdoor test bed. But as Fischhoff approached the corner, he noticed a road crew and a cement mixer in the middle of the intersection. “I thought, ‘Gee, I wonder if the computer can figure out if this is something in the road that’s not moving.’ ” He waited for the car, which was idling to his left, to make a right turn—the only plausible move. But it did nothing. “It was…

Long before mobility became an auto-industry buzzword, before partyers could summon a ride via an app on something called an iPhone, and before Silicon Valley and Detroit became alleged rivals, William Clay Ford Jr. could foresee the tectonic forces pushing to upend traditional transportation. As early as the turn of this century, he prodded Ford Motor Company to reckon with a future that would demand more energy efficiency and pollution reduction from its vehicles while also understanding that future populations would be more concentrated in megacities that couldn’t absorb additional traffic. In 2007, with a mind toward creating business models that matched such a future, he proposed that the company explore alternate modes of transit. “I’m not sure the term ‘mobility’ existed, but I wanted to invest in transportation solutions…

“As one judge said to another: ‘Be just and if you can’t be just, be arbitrary.’” That’s the late junk maven William S. Burroughs from Naked Lunch, a book every disaffected teenager started reading 20 times but failed to finish even once. What I remember most from my aborted attempts: multiple uses of the word “spectral” and the original definition of “Steely Dan.” Anyway, it’s a great line. I don’t recall the context. Surely he was referring to the heat closing in on him or the tyranny of something or other. He was almost certainly not speaking about light trucks. Yet, the sentiment nicely encapsulates the thinking at play when defining what is and what is not an SUV or other light truck. You might say, as I often do,…

Making a computer that drives more reliably than a human should be easy. Making a machine that can safely negotiate the chaos of our roads and still move at reasonable speeds—that’s the hard part. But it will be essential if robocars are ever to co-exist with human drivers. “[Humans] make quick judgments based on not a full analysis, and it gets us by most of the time,” explains David Strayer, a professor of cognition and neural science at the University of Utah. “When we make decisions, we basically use a lot of shortcuts to get us to a good answer most of the time.” In contrast, artificial-intelligence computer systems offer “kind of a bruteforce analysis that pulls together a lot of different pieces of information.” Homo sapiens’ faith, intuition, hope,…

Earlier this fall, not long after Senate Republicans sank their party’s sevenyear assault on Obamacare, the House of Representatives did something almost unthinkable in the era of Congressional inaction. Twohundredandforty Republicans and 194 Democrats voted unanimously to approve a bill. That bill did not propose a pay raise for Congress or publicly suggest Kim Jongun suck on a uranium rod. It was actual policy. Citing the potential safety benefits and economic payoff of robocars, House members established an early framework for driverlessvehicle regulations. Or, more accurately, they established that, in the near term, the rules will be few and far between for such vehicles. When it comes to future regulations in this area, lawmakers appear ready to let go of the steering wheel and hand over control to auto manufacturers…

Starting in the mid-’50s, a European radio station broadcast a rock-and-roll show on Saturday and Sunday nights. Radio Luxembourg, as it was called, played the revolutionary new music from America—songs from artists that the stuffy national broadcasters of the U.K. and Europe wouldn’t touch: Bo Diddley, Little Richard, Chuck Berry. A gawky teenager named Keith Richards in the market town of Dartford, east of London, heard Elvis Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel” for the first time on Radio Luxembourg, and it blew his mind. “Radio Luxembourg was notoriously difficult to keep on station,” Richards writes in his autobiography. “I had a little aerial and walked round the room, holding the radio up to my ear and twisting the aerial. Trying to keep it down because I’d wake Mum and Dad up.” About…

C/D: What’s been difficult about being a race broadcaster? KP: The hardest thing in making that transition was being honest. Just telling how you feel. My whole world was inside that fence in the infield—what’s known as the garage area. All those other drivers, all those other owners, and all those other team members? We talked openly. If somebody did something stupid, we just said it to each other in the garage area. But saying it in the garage area and saying it on a broadcast to millions of people are entirely different things. ▪ Is broadcasting as rewarding as driving was? □ No, nothing is as rewarding as driving. When you’re four, five, six, or seven years old, and you decide that that’s what you want to be— you…