Innehållsförteckning för December 2018 från Car and Driver

AUDI SHOWED A CONCEPT of what would become its first all-electric vehicle way back in 2009 at the Frankfurt auto show. At the time, Tesla was still selling tiny numbers of Lotus-based Roadsters. Here’s some more context: In the decade it’s taken Audi to bring its EV to market, Tesla launched three original vehicles; BMW introduced the i3; Chevrolet, the Bolt; Jaguar, the I-Pace; and Nissan, the Leaf. During that time, Audi worked through many other electrified concepts, took a detour through plug-in hybrids, and made a body-style change from sports coupe to SUV. But it’s here now. In the e-tron, Audi promises an EV with the range and dynamic capabilities—if not the Ludicrous acceleration—to challenge Tesla. DESIGN Although undoubtedly handsome (as Audi SUVs tend to be), the e-tron is…

[+] Attractive exterior, spacious rear seat, smooth nine-speed transmission. [-] Haunting specter of fit and finish problems, middling performance, interior doesn’t match price. [=] An imperfect offering that checks enough boxes to maintain strong sales potential. Cadillac is in flux. Johan de Nysschen, veteran of Audi and Infiniti, who led Cadillac out of Detroit and into Soho, left the company in April. In September, General Motors pulled the plug on Cadillac’s East Coast adventure. Now Steve Carlisle, a career GM guy, is at the helm, and the crest is moving back to Michigan. But long product-development cycles mean that as Cadillac retreats to its midwestern home, some holdovers from the New York era remain. The XT4 is one of those remnants. Unveiled around the 2018 New York auto show, mere…

Yeah, winter can be a drag. We gauge the temperature by how fast snot turns from goo to solid ice even though it’s still in our nostrils. Months spent hibernating indoors watching SCTV reruns, only emerging periodically to shovel snow, will wear a person down. But anyone who thinks winter sucks probably doesn’t own a snowmobile. Over the past decade, these tracked machines have gone from mere high-performance sleds to absolutely bonkers powder-slewing slingshots. You’d probably need the skills of Gilles Villeneuve, we thought, before their manufacturers would loan you one. Here’s how the conversation went: “Hey, can we borrow your fastest model for a few days? Only one person on staff has any idea what he’s doing.” “Sure, how many do you want?” The first to arrive was a…

The worst part isn’t the cold—although it’s plenty cold in Baudette, Minnesota, a stone’s throw from the Canadian border. During the month of January, the average low is minus 7 degrees Fahrenheit, and the thermometer makes regular dives to 30 below. It’s so cold that people don’t turn their cars off when running errands for fear they won’t restart. And in the seconds it takes to dash inside the grocery store, the cold pierces your many layers of clothing so quickly that it’s almost as if you’re wearing nothing at all. Your face will start to hurt—not just tingle with the cold but actually hurt. You get the real sense that if the power goes out, we’d all die, and quickly. Baudette is also extremely remote: In the amount of…

[+] Outra-geous acceleration, track sharpness, everyday comfort and utility. [-] Do-it-all personality results in extreme complexity; no Stetsons in the back seat. BECAUSE MERCEDES-AMG is a company filled with stoic, formally dressed Germans, you should believe them when they say that the chassis in their new GT 4-Door is stiffer than the E63 S sedan’s, that it can better support higher cornering loads from its wide tires, and that all this is necessary to undergird the highest-output version of the company’s twin-turbocharged 4.0-liter V-8 produced to date. Yet when all 630 of the GT63 S’s snarling horses are loosed, you’ll understand that all the austerity is only a thin veneer spread over the Affalterbach cowboys’ true lunatic temperament and that their Dressler suits are merely a façade worn over John…

[+] Sports-sedan agility, well-rounded performance, intriguing design. [-] Clumsy stops, other EVs travel farther and recharge quicker. WHEN IT’S NOT Chevy’s new design language or the latest Phillips tale keeping us up at night, we stare at the ceiling and ponder if an electric car can match the character of a vehicle powered by tiny explosions. Complexity begets personality in machines. Can the eerily smooth and silent ever measure up? Jaguar’s electric I-Pace offers our best hope yet. It’ll never be mentioned in the same breath as Miata or Cayman or Corvette, but the I-Pace whisked us away from traffic lights and through sweepers in ways that left our oil-stained palms tingling. While the EV genus is anchored to Earth by half-ton battery packs, the all-wheel-drive I-Pace builds off that…

[+] Improved packaging yields better utility, suite of standard and available safety features. [-] Exiting stage left: the Forester’s turbo engine, manual transmission, and soul. SOMETIMES THE NAMES an automaker gives its cars are a feint. Take Subaru: Ascent. Forester. Outback. Names that suggest that their owners are adventurous and outdoorsy people who require a rugged and capable car to support their way-finding lifestyles. It’s a compelling pitch, and it’s working for Subaru, which posted its 82nd consecutive month of sales growth in September. But the names—and the image—have increasingly little to do with the cars themselves. Are Ascent owners ascending anything steeper than a driveway? Are Forester owners foresting? As the Forester enters a new generation for 2019, the truth emerges that this little SUV has always just wanted…

NEW CARS HAVE MORE safety technology than ever, and yet accident rates and road fatalities are on the rise. The reasons behind the trend and the best way to combat it are hotly debated, but some city planners think they have the key to reversing it. So-called nudge theory helped economist Richard Thaler win a Nobel Prize in 2017; it posits that policies and environments should be designed to encourage people to make choices that will benefit them in the long run. When applied to public roadways, the logic goes that when drivers are comfortable with their surroundings, they’re less likely to pay attention. So traffic engineers design cues into the roadways that spur people into changing their behavior without realizing it. Chicago was one of the first U.S. cities…

Let’s talk about sex. About lust and passion and desires we cannot control. About taut lines and provocative shapes that make our brains burn. About things so freakishly gorgeous that when you see them, your pupils dilate explosively. There’s nothing rational about sexual attraction. It’s transcendent. If Audi’s second-gen A7 “five-door” Sportback coupe isn’t supersexy, there’s no reason for it to exist at all. Because the same car in a classic four-door body sits across the showroom floor wearing an A6 badge. The A7 has the same all-new, turbocharged 3.0-liter V-6, the same Quattro all-wheel drive, the same 48-volt stop-start system, but a base price that’s $9100 more. That’s a lot to pay for sex appeal. So how sexy is the new A7? To our eyes, not quite as sexy…

Winter is more enjoyable when you can keep warm. Air hitting your skin at 100 mph and the consequent skin-cell death will ruin your day. But you don’t have to dress like Randy Parker (Ralphie’s little brother) to survive snowmobiling. We never would’ve imagined we’d be standing on an iceberg and complaining about being too hot, but that was exactly our experience during our photo shoot. Outfitter Klim’s riding gear offers superior lightweight protection from wind and subzero temperatures. And as our novices learned how important it is to be able to easily move about atop the sleds, we appreciated the lack of bulk in Klim’s jackets, bibs, and boots. Pro tip: If you wear glasses, go for a full-face helmet. Goggles and glasses don’t mix.…

[+] Nothing screams America like giving a 707-hp muscle car another 90 horsepower. [-] Limited restraint, subtlety, and grip. No quicker in the quarter-mile than without Redeye. WHEN HOMETOWN HEROES VAN HALEN learned that David Bowie was set to receive a seven-figure payday for appearing at the 1983 US Festival in San Bernardino, California, the boys did exactly what any masters of self-promotion would do: demand an additional half-million bucks and, once acquired, promptly parade “Diamond” David Lee Roth, the band’s effusive stoner-philosopher front man, before the TV cameras to gloat. As any hype man worth his weight in shrimp cocktail and middle-shelf booze knows, the true victory is putting ludicrous numbers on display to be worshiped by a nation of red-blooded, gape-mouthed Americans. This game of one-upmanship is largely…

[+] Athletic without being aggressive, good ride quality. [-] Less fun than we’d hoped, price creep. Is a Ford STUV something we need? IT WAS INEVITABLE that Ford’s Performance division would turn its attention to massaging SUVs as the Blue Oval moves to largely jettison passenger cars from its lineup. While the first crossover to benefit from that altered focus, the Edge ST, doesn’t live up to the feisty nature of the ST-badged sport compacts that have come before it, neither is it a poorly considered upgrade over the basic Edge. Think of the Edge ST as a mildly hotter version of the Sport model it replaces, both of which emerged from the same Edge underpinnings that were new in 2015. Revised tuning frees up 335 horsepower and 380 pound-feet…

You know an automaker is serious about performance when it stakes a claim on a piece of the alphabet. Letters are fast, particularly once you move past frumpy B and lackadaisical H into the latter two-thirds, where M, R, and S transform mass-production ennui into factory-built adrenaline. That’s exactly what we have here: two ordinary economy cars overengineered into track-capable front-wheel-drive hot hatches, brought to us by the letters N and R. Their speed, grip, and theatrics had us cackling like Elmo. Born under the care of ex–BMW M bosses, Hyundai’s nascent N division honors both Namyang—home to Hyundai’s Korean R&D center—and the famed Nürburgring Nordschleife. The division’s first export to the States, the three-door Veloster N comes bearing a turbocharged 2.0-liter inline-four, six-speed manual transmission, and powder-blue seatbelts. The…

Even in the land of ice and snow, life finds a way. Ask your nearest arctic woolly bear caterpillar, which spends much of its life frozen solid. Or ask the woolly humans who live north of the 45th parallel—that is, they live closer to the North Pole than to the equator. They not only survive decades of deeply uncomfortable, face-blistering cold (through liberal use of saunas, alcohol, hot meat pies, engine-block heaters, and alcohol), but they find ways to actually enjoy their habitat. Upon great sheets of frozen water, they ride machines powered by fiery explosions. This is their story. Valhalla, they are coming!…

Emmitt M. Tucker registered the Sno-Cat trademark in 1944, and over the nearly 75 years since, the Tucker Sno-Cat Corporation of Medford, Oregon, has built some 8000 to 10,000 over-snow vehicles. Its current best seller is the Model 2000, which has a base price of $195,000. It’s a rear-engined, body-on-frame vehicle that weighs between 11,000 and 13,200 pounds. It’s available with two- and five-seat cabs. Most Sno-Cats are used for snowmobile- and ski-trail maintenance, during which they tow grooming sleds. But the company sells models outfitted for utility companies, the military, and even private owners, such as Scatman Crothers. Power comes from a Cummins turbo-diesel 6.7-liter inline-six that makes 173 horsepower and 590 pound-feet of torque. It’s mated to a five-speed Allison automatic transmission. A 300-hp, 760-lb-ft version is also available.…

To those of us who endure Michigan winters, with their coatings of dirty slush and skies the color of raw aluminum, the harbingers of spring are keenly cataloged. In grade school, we were taught to be on the lookout for the return of that prodigal son of the avian world, the robin. To the frostbit and vitamin D deficient, the presence of the orange-breasted bird inspires hope that light and warmth will indeed return eventually. Birds are nice and all. But, for us, the ultimate sign of spring is catching sight of the year’s first Corvette. Thirty years ago, nobody drove their Corvettes in the winter. Not in the upper Midwest, anyway. Nobody. No, winter was the season when you broke out the old Plymouth Volaré and mounted big gnarly…

2019 Rolls-Royce Cullinan It sounds more than a little pretentious the first time you hear a Rolls-Royce representative refer to the brand’s “patrons.” He or she is speaking, of course, of the people who buy Rolls-Royces. Most brands would call them customers, or, if they were being a little self-consciously uppity, clients. But patrons? The arts have patrons. But then again, so does Déjà Vu, so maybe it’s a humbler word than it first seems. Ever since the Porsche Cayenne, nearly every prestige brand to launch an SUV has seen that SUV become its best seller within months. Or second-best seller, behind another SUV: Porsche Cayenne and Macan, Jaguar Paces F and E, Alfa Romeo Stelvio. But lately, we’ve wondered if there isn’t a certain level above which a brand’s…

The GT 4-Door’s rear-axle steering allowed engineers to vary the vehicle’s steering response across the different AMG Dynamics modes. A computer sets targets for the yaw rate (how quickly the car rotates) based on the setting and then dials in an appropriate amount of rear-wheel steering to complement the driver’s inputs. With increasingly aggressive driving modes, a given steering angle at a given speed increases the steering response. Or put another way, the sportier modes decrease the amount of steering input required to rotate the car into a corner. Helped by an ultraquick, variable-ratio front rack that speeds up off-center (13.2:1 to 8.7:1), the GT 4-Door moves a lot like its two-door brother, the AMG GT.…

[+] Roomy cabin, overachieving powertrain, sporty chassis. [-] Bland exterior styling, ergonomics need work, signature technology still in beta. THE QUINTESSENTIAL MERCEDES is still a technology-laden luxury sedan. Yes, today the company’s three-pointed star adorns a wider variety of vehicles than even Ford’s Blue Oval. But that is merely the cost of chasing luxury market share. Mercedes’ commitment to its ideal form is so strong that it graces even its most entry-level car, the A-class subcompact, which has grown and grown up. Now offered as a proper three-box design—two more than it started with in 1997—the fourth-generation A-class makes its debut in the U.S. market early next year. Under its steel skin, the A-class rides on an evolution of the transverse-engine platform underpinning the current CLA. At just more than…