Innehållsförteckning för July 2019 från Car and Driver

TRUCKULANT I am curious. Do you guys get as bored testing trucks, SUVs, and minivans as we get reading about them [“Buffalo Wings,” April 2019]? I understand they dominate new-car sales, and my wife and I each have one—a new Ford Edge for her and a 2017 Chevy Bolt EV for me—but I also drive a BMW E92 M3. Guess which vehicle inspires me to continue subscribing to C/D (since 1985)? Based on your motor trend, you will soon have to rename yourself Truck and Driver—one more cherished institution off track. —Jeffrey Hurwitz Warren, NJ What an irony! The only thing car related on your April cover are three of the letters in your magazine’s name! —Andy Cho Tacoma, WA It’s like rain on your wedding day. It’s a free…

READING CAR AND DRIVER is a great way to whet your automotive appetite. But we can’t give you the satisfaction of nailing a downshift or the warm glow of knowing you’re the best lawn-mower racer in Iowa. If hammering your car through the Climbing Esses at Virginia International Raceway sounds too intimidating, our survey of the 2018 National Speedway Directory shows that there are plenty of other ways to scratch your racing itch. We’ve outlined the number and type of tracks in the Northeast and South. Next month, we’ll look at the Midwest and West. Is this a ploy to convince you to buy our magazine again next month? Who can say?…

AUTOMOBILES HAVE BEEN involved in fatal incidents as far back as 1869, but it wasn’t until the 1930s that automakers began to pay serious attention to safety. This focus eventually gave rise to the crash-test dummy, the industry’s preferred instrument to measure the impact of a crash on the human body. Today’s model, the Hybrid III, was developed by General Motors in the 1970s and is the required dummy used in testing by NHTSA. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) also uses it for certain tests. While this model is 43 years old, there’s nothing old school about the tech. The modern Hybrid III can contain dozens more sensors than earlier versions did, and those sensors are lighter than before—though the dummy, like the average American, weighs more. Here’s…

I show up at Roush Fenway Racing in Concord, North Carolina, with a wrench and a dream. Okay, I don’t even have a wrench. They provide those. But the dream, yes. Think of the story: A writer arrives to do a piece about how pit crews work, and it turns out he’s an undiscovered tire-changing phenom. Next thing you know, I’m leaping over walls from Bristol to Loudon, helping my team get that little extra advantage. Zeeww, zeeww, zeeww! There’s probably a better way to write the sound that air wrenches make. Roush Fenway’s wrenches, like everybody else’s, are a standard NASCAR spec. They’re powered by tanks of compressed nitrogen for consistency, which is important when your socket spins at 12,500 rpm. The jack, too, is a standardized item, part…

It took the Italians seemingly countless attempts to bring Alfa Romeo back to the United States, and now that we’ve lived with one for nearly 40,000 miles, we have to wonder if maybe they should have taken more time. Like Alfa Romeo, French automaker Peugeot pulled out of the U.S. in the 1990s after years of disappointing sales and quality woes. So when parent company PSA Group recently announced its ambitious plan to reintroduce Peugeot to America, it sounded a lot like Alfa’s many promises to return—more than a little incroyable. After all, before that news, Peugeot’s place on the list of dead-to-us nameplates seemed to be permanent, cemented between Opel and Pontiac. But PSA says its goal is to have new Peugeots on our streets by 2023 in numbers…

Without providing any personally identifying information, we asked graphologist Linda Larson to analyze the handwriting in the Accord’s logbook. Larson, who has been a graphologist for 40-plus years, has worked with the police, conducted pre-employment screenings, and is the VP of the American Handwriting Analysis Foundation. Here’s what she saw in our sharp-pointed t’s and undotted i’s: RICH CEPPOS, SENIOR ONLINE CONSUMER EDITOR According to his handwriting, Mr. Ceppos can be as persistent as he can be irritable. He probably has a few traffic tickets. This is a man with a great sense of humor and who does not allow anyone to stand in his way. He is always questioning any given position or situation. He is a challenger, vacillating between confrontation and being conciliatory. And while he has clear…

C/D: A three-time F1 champion, your father was arguably Australia’s most successful racing driver. Your brothers raced but you weren’t meant to, were you? DB: The plan was for me to be a farmer. When I was a kid, my sport was always football. When I was 13, I went to an agricultural boarding school. I was being groomed to take over the family farm—we had 4500 acres—because I’d shown no interest in motorsport. ▪ So what changed? □ To be fair, I’d always loved driving fast on the farm, going sideways in anything. I set to go to college in Wagga Wagga to learn about wool, if you can believe that. I took a couple months off to visit my brother Geoff, who was doing IndyCar; I came back…

Now that I’m old enough to buy a Porsche 911, I’d like to know the difference in acceleration times that translates to a seat-of-the-pants difference. One second? A half-second? Damn, Porsche. Every new, more powerful variant of the 911 seems to be at most a half-second quicker than the last. —Robert, Spokane, WA On one end of the acceleration spectrum, a half-second improvement from 3.0 seconds to 2.5 seconds is the very obvious difference between average acceleration of 0.91 g and 1.09 g’s. In slower cars, a half-second is less noticeable. Going from 7.0 seconds to 6.5, for instance, results in a subtler difference of 0.39 g and 0.42 g. It’s perhaps better to think of it in percentage terms. A 10 to 15 percent improvement in zero-to-60-mph times is…

My fellow Americans, our long nation al nightmare is over. Smart, which never was, is dead in these United States. And true to form, even the minicar brand’s death is unsatisfying. It stumbled into its grave the same way it tripped into our country in 2008, with one unlovable model. For the last year or so, only the battery-electric version has been lingering on our shores. I, like most sentient beings, shed no tears for Smart. In one way or another, I’ve been living with, and sometimes praying for, its death almost as soon as it was birthed. As a publicity stunt, Smart decided that before it began selling cars in the U.S., it would bring a gaggle of Europe-spec two-seaters to circulate around the outside of Cobo Center during…

Peugeot 505 Probably Peugeot’s best-remembered model, having been sold here between 1980 and 1991 in both sedan and station-wagon forms. The rear-drive 505 handled well and was reasonably quick, especially with the later turbocharged four-cylinder engine, which produced up to 180 horsepower. Peugeot 205 GTi In the ’80s, Peugeot came close to introducing the 205 subcompact to the U.S. but feared it would get the same lukewarm reception as Renault’s Le Car. In Europe, it was a hit, with the performance GTi version doing much to trigger the Continent’s love for hot hatches. All of Peugeot’s GTi models are effectively descended from it. Peugeot 208 Peugeot used to mark a new generation of a model by upping the last digit of its name, but now the last integer doesn’t change.…

Newcomer 2019 RAM 1500 4X4 Arrival: Mar/2019 Miles: 5053 Observed mpg: 14 IN A WORLD WHERE PICKUPS often perform the work of minivans, sedans, and crossovers, no full-size truck is as domesticated as the newly redesigned Ram 1500. And among Ram 1500s, few are as richly equipped as our $66,310 Limited 4x4. It layers on comfort, luxury, and tech with air springs, heated and ventilated reclining rear seats, a 12.0-inch touchscreen, a 19-speaker stereo, and enough safety nags to put your significant other out of a job. Its Hemi 5.7-liter V-8, assisted by the new eTorque hybrid system, bumps EPA combined fuel economy to 19 mpg from 17. The 48-volt system makes for buttery-smooth stop-start events, but our observed mileage is off the mark by 26 percent. With sumptuous comfort…

Were you to grab the February 25 issue of Sports Illustrated, you’d see a two-page story on the Daytona 500. There is the requisite ghastly photo of the inevitable late-race “Big One”—sparks, fires, parts scything through the dense beach air. But nowhere in the coverage is there mention of this year’s winner. Nowhere. As snubs go, my friends, this is titanic. What we have here is the first mate serving the captain his late-night cocoa but forgetting to mention the iceberg. And you can bet your final five lug nuts that it was intentional. SI once assigned me a story, and the mag’s fact-checkers and copy editors just about tied my intestines to my toes. Who won the Daytona 500? SI doesn’t care. In fact, the bulk of the story…

TONY QUIROGA, PRINT DIRECTOR Left foot hard into the floor. Every time I stepped into the Supra, my left leg went instinctively for a nonexistent clutch pedal. Something this low, this fendered, this red triggers muscle memory. But there’s no clutch in any new Supra. And while the automatic makes the loss a little easier to take by downshifting as though it just graduated from a Skip Barber school, a Supra needs a manual. My left foot knows best. ANNIE WHITE, ASSOCIATE EDITOR I was pulled over after about 15 minutes in the Supra. An instinct against self-incrimination prevents me from disclosing my speed [She told me 90—Ed.], but it was easy to attain and easy to overlook thanks to the engine’s linear power delivery. Hefty steering, firm brakes, and…

Your car doesn’t know the octane rating of the fuel in its tank. Instead, the engine controller calculates an inferred octane with closed-loop logic that continuously advances the ignition timing until it detects knock, which occurs when a portion of the fuel-air mixture ignites before the spark-plug-initiated flame front reaches it. The further the computer can advance the timing without provoking knock, the higher the octane rating. During knock, the flame front travels through the combustion chamber up to 10 times quicker than the normal spark-initiated flame front. Left unchecked, these pressure waves can damage the head gasket, pistons, or cylinder head. But the occasional brief knock is a useful tool for checking that the engine is operating efficiently. It’s detected with one or more knock sensors bolted to the…

Arrival: Apr/2018 Departure: Mar/2019 In which almost nothing goes wrong. It’s not every day that a staffer marches into the Car and Driver newsroom and declares, “Someone should buy that car.” Well, actually, it is every day that this happens. But usually the car in question is touted in a bad-idea Craigslist ad that contains a phrase such as “started last time I tried it,” “needs some TLC,” or “nearly complete.” This time, the words sprang from the lips of C/D’s director of vehicle testing, Dave VanderWerp, who had just taken a farewell spin in our long-term Honda Accord. And it’s a good idea. The Accord joined our fleet in April 2018, fresh off its 32nd 10Best win and redesigned and reengineered for its 10th generation. Its pedigree meant our…