Innehållsförteckning för March 2019 från Car and Driver

PROFESSIONAL AUTO RACING IS the Rodney Dangerfield of athletic pursuits—it gets no respect. Many casual observers assume that the car is doing all the work. But behind every rubber-scuffing hot lap is a human body also being pushed to the limit. Temperatures inside the cockpit can reach 130 degrees and most race cars do not have air conditioning. Drivers can lose 5 to 10 pounds in water weight during any given race. And racers must reckon with lateral and longitudinal forces that can go from 3.00 g’s in turns (what an astronaut experiences during a rocket launch) to in excess of 5.00 g’s under braking (blackout territory for the untrained). “And that force,” says veteran IndyCar driver James Hinchcliffe, “is applied to every inch of your body.” In the dark…

Tesla didn’t attract nearly half a million reservations for the Model 3 because electric vehicles are lame. Quite the contrary: Instant torque, one-pedal driving, and minimal running costs mean EVs should appeal to even ardent fans of internal combustion. Yet Tesla hasn’t closed a significant number of those sales, with many would-be buyers presumably unwilling or unable to spend $45,000 or more for the Model 3 as it is currently offered. With no sign of the promised $35,000 version and Tesla’s federal tax credit winding down, perhaps it’s time to consider other options. You won’t get Tesla’s luxury cachet in the alternatives, which come from mass-market carmakers, ones that sell on price. You won’t get much choice, either. Currently there are just two EVs that sticker below $40,000 and boast…

THE POSH ALMOST-LIMOUSINES of the luxury segment have long been totems of vehicular advancement, with future tech that, over time, filters down through the automotive strata. The fourth-gen A8 continues the tradition of pushing its metal, plastic, and silicon to the forefront of luxury-car modernity, so much so that Audi isn’t yet keen to permit the full deployment of the car’s headlining Level 3 automation capability here in the U.S. The new A8’s aluminum-intensive architecture is offered stateside only in its long-wheelbase configuration, the A8L. At 123.1 inches, its axle span is up a smidge yet is still 1.5 inches shorter than a Benz S-class’s and 3.3 inches trimmer than a BMW 7-series’ s. Overall length increases slightly to 208.7 inches, though, and the Audi’s rear quarters remain supremely accommodating—complete…

THE CX-5 IS EVERYTHING to Mazda these days. It outsold the rest of the automaker’s combined lineup in the U.S. last year, and it has become the clearest representation of the tiny Japanese company’s ambitions to become a premium brand. Ostensibly, this crossover competes in the mainstream. But like many other Mazdas, the CX-5, especially the second-generation model that made its debut for 2017, feels a class above in its execution. It is prettier inside and out—and, crucially, far more refined—than rivals such as the similarly priced Honda CR-V and Toyota RAV4. Now Mazda is offering a lot more CX-5 for only a little bit more money. For 2019, the CX-5 gets the same turbocharged 2.5-liter inline-four engine already found in the 6 and the CX-9. The new range-topping Signature…

SECURE POSSESSION of one’s Man Card is too frequently associated with the overt machismo of one’s truck, a metric closely tied to the size of its tires, the power of its engine, and, of course, its number of cylinders—not necessarily in that order. Which, in the world of presumed stereotypes, puts Chevy’s new fourcylinder Silverado in a tough spot. We discovered, however, that it is indeed a manly and capable thing. Consider exhibit A: This all-wheel-drive double-cab Silverado, laden with 6080 pounds of trailer, car, and ballast—the same weight we towed in our recent light-duty truck comparo [see “Show Boats,” January 2019]—achieved 60 mph in 12.8 seconds, a paltry 0.9 second slower than the 2019 Ram 1500 4x4 equipped with a 5.7-liter V-8 assisted by a 48-volt motor. Despite a…

In the December “Snow Shoes” feature, you said that on dry pavement, the Corvette’s “big footprint was an advantage and not a detriment” compared with the 911’s contact-patch size. It’s not obvious to me why a larger contact patch would be a detriment on snow and ice. Can you explain, please? —Bob Woolley, Asheville, NC In winter conditions, the best traction is achieved by cutting through snow and ice in two directions: down toward the road surface and forward as the vehicle travels. A narrower tire acts like a sharper knife, whereas wider tires are more likely to plow through and float on the snow. Mounted on the same vehicle at the same pressure, different-width tires will have the same total contact-patch area, but the narrower tire’s longer contact patch…

ELECTRIC VEHICLES OFTEN LOOK and act much like the cars we’ve always driven. But there are nontrivial differences between the cars of the past and the mobility devices of the future, and among them is the EV’s near-total lack of powertrain sound. Audio company Harman has created a suite of products, called Halosonic, that claims to address two issues that have arisen with the proliferation of EVs. The first is safety: Cyclists and pedestrians are safer when they can hear cars coming. The second issue, according to Rajus Augustine, senior director of product strategy and planning at Harman Lifestyle Automotive, is that even EV drivers prefer hearing an engine. When EV drivers can’t hear an engine, they are more likely to notice other noises coming from their vehicles, such as…

DECEPTION IS FAR FROM THE POINT OF A GRAND TOURER, BUT DECEPTIVE SPEED IS THE HALLMARK OF A GREAT ONE. A SPORT CAR THRILLS AT HIGH SPEEDS. A luxury car will wallow and grow nervous. But a grand-touring automobile calms as the speedometer winds toward the big numbers. It finds its composure. A proper grand tourer is the sort of car in which the driver can sneak up on seriously extralegal speeds without disturbing his passengers, in which there’s no tell to the extreme heading of the rate needle other than the grin on his face and the increasingly brief blur and whoosh of passed traffic. There is no truer example of the grand tourer on sale today than the Bentley Continental GT. And “GT” is not just there in…

Big grand-touring coupes are anachronisms, conceived for a time when sophisticated men wore Sansabelt slacks and carefully coordinated their sport coats and turtlenecks. When sideburns mattered, and every adult smoked three packs of Tareytons and drank a six-pack of Michelob every day. A time when Sinatra set the standard. But here—at the tail end of the 21st century’s tattooed, crossover-obsessed, virtue-signaling second eco-decade—comes the 2019 BMW M850i xDrive coupe. It’s a twin-turbocharged, all-wheel-drive 523-hp fondue pot. “God, it looks like an Accord coupe,” a friend blurted upon seeing the revived 8-series for the first time. That’s a cruel stretch, but BMW certainly didn’t bring back the old 8 with this new one. That previous 8-series, the E31 produced between 1990 and 1999, was brilliantly distinctive with its low cowl, shark…

THE POPULARITY OF THE TOYOTA PRIUS hatchback is shrinking faster than the polar ice caps. In 2016, after a full redesign, the Prius sold fewer than 100,000 units in the U.S. for the first time since 2004. A year later, sales fell below 66,000. And last year, only about 50,000 people brought home a new Prius. Toyota launched its Save the Hybrids campaign this January by overhauling the model with redesigned front and rear fascias and a slightly nicer interior. The more conservative look betrays Toyota Design’s culpability in the sales downturn. True, few people want a hybrid when gas is cheap, but evidently even fewer want an ugly car. Yet it’s the shift in consumer tastes toward compact crossovers that has most impacted the venerable hybrid. Toyota’s own RAV4…

It’s natural to question the unknown, especially when there’s nothing wrong with the known. Take breakfast: Bacon and eggs work. No, it doesn’t matter that the Waffle House dining room looks just like the bathroom. This is delicious. Newness can be intimidating and a little annoying at the morning table, as elsewhere. Sqirl—yep, that’s how it’s spelled—is a breakfast spot in the achingly hip Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles that has the following items on its menu: urfa-dusted poblanos, sorrel pesto, whey-fermented lentils, and lacto-fermented hot sauce. Sure, you might recognize some of those words, but only a few millennials with the waxiest handlebar mustaches will understand them all. It’s a similar dilemma with the Porsche 911. Every new 911 is greeted with the same sort of skepticism as…

2019 Ford Ranger XLT SuperCrew 4x4 Driving a pickup changes your perspective and, consequently, your outlook on driving. Part of it is that the truck is a bit of a costume—a cowboy hat and a Western shirt. But it’s also that pickups are built to haul, not handle. From the pilot’s perch in the new Ford Ranger, the road passes by somewhere way down there, whole feet below your toes. The suspension, frame, body, and even the seat work to numb away the passing asphalt. Little more than a smooth hum makes its way into the cabin. We measured 68 decibels at 70 mph and a pleasing 76-decibel growl with the accelerator flattened. Bystanders will hear a whistling turbo, but aside from some almost diesel-like injector clatter, not much reaches…

YOU’VE GOT TO APPRECIATE VOLVO’S steadfast and irrational commitment to America’s consistently dismal wagon market. While other automakers have been doing the hokey pokey when it comes to the body style, the 2019 V60 is Volvo’s third new wagon in the past 18 months. It’s an example of sticking with what got you here. Longroofs were the brand’s signature product from 1962 until the launch of its first SUV, the XC90, for the 2003 model year. Wagons are to Volvo what rear-engine sports cars are to Porsche. Broad shouldered with sharp speed lines and longitudinal-engine proportions, the V60 is another affirmation of Volvo’s current design language. But the engine actually rides parallel to the front axle on the brand’s Scalable Product Architecture, which the V60 shares with the S60 sedan…

GOODYEAR’S NEWEST-GENERATION BLIMP doesn’t ferry passengers from one place to another, nor does it carry cargo anywhere, engage in dogfights with other blimps, or drop bombs. It’s great at capturing those Brent Musburger–spec establishing shots of televised sporting events (“You are looking live at…”), but overall its utility is limited. It cruises at about 40 mph and tops out near 80. It’s enormous but can carry only 14 people because much of it—up to 297,527 cubic feet—is filled with inert gas. Also, it’s not a blimp. It is, however, 2957 inches of iconic automotive culture, and its 12-ribbed carbon-fiber -and-aluminum skeleton means it’s technically a semirigid airship; blimps are, in contrast, giant balloons. A product of Germany’s Zeppelin Luftschifftechnik (ZLT), Wingfoot Two was built on ZLT’s New Technology (NT) platform.…