Innehållsförteckning för November 2019 från Car and Driver

HEY, YOU. YES, YOU. DON’T PRETEND YOU JUST NOTICED SOMETHING ON THE BACK OF YOUR HAND OR THAT YOUR PHONE IS BUZZING IN YOUR POCKET. WE’RE TALKING TO YOU. You who couldn’t get enough of procreating and now need three rows of seating in a vehicle. We know you well enough to know that you don’t want a minivan and that only a twobox crossover will do. Lucky for you, carmakers are swiping right on you, which explains the flood of new three-row products tailored for your life. There’s so much churn in the class right now that, for most of our testers, this is our first exposure to three of these models. Most promising is the Ford Explorer. It might look like a malnourished example of the last-generation model,…

To meet stringent Euro 6 emission standards, European models of the 718 Spyder and Cayman GT4 are fitted with two particulate filters, one for each bank of cylinders. Euro 6 allows for only one-tenth of the previously allowed particulate emissions. On European models, the exhaust gases are forced through the filter walls, trapping soot that is burned off later. U.S. models use a straight-through filter design without the expensive, soottrapping preciousmetal coating. This makes them inert and nothing more than sound attenuators. Porsche keeps these on U.S.-bound 718 Spyders and Cayman GT4s so it doesn’t have to change the specification of the muffler.…

Explorer, Pathfinder, Blazer, Forester … great names on vehicles that don’t explore, find paths, blaze trails, or fell trees. Apart from that last task, Toyota’s 2020 body-on-frame 4Runner TRD Pro delivers on what those lazy crossovers aspire to do. But everything that allows this 4Runner to be a true off-roader hampers its on-road manners. The Nitto Terra Grappler tires will squish and conform to rocks and terrain to provide tenacious grip, but they’re loud on pavement. Bovine suspension motions during your commute ensure surefooted wheel articulation off-road, and the sluggish steering is precise and free of kickback when crawling around under 10 mph. Shift the transfer case to lowrange four-wheel drive and the 270-hp 4.0-liter V-6 will trundle along with barely a prod. Changes for the 4Runner are light. There’s…

What do the Apple iPhone 11, Lucky Charms with the new unicorn marshmallows, and the 2020 Ferrari F8 Tributo have in common? They are all more an evolution of a good thing than something entirely new. The Tributo isn’t named for the kickback you give the don; it’s named as a tribute to Ferrari’s most powerful V-8 engine. The F8 is a mid-cycle refresh, and it’s difficult at a quick glance to differentiate it from the 488 that it replaces. A longer examination shows there’s a lot more to the F8. In the nose, there’s a downforce-enhancing “S-duct” derived from a similar piece in the special-edition 488 Pista. Plus, a reworked underbody, a new diffuser, and a more efficient spoiler press the F8 even harder into the ground. Underneath the…

Fuel economy and effortless towing make opting for a diesel engine in a heavy-duty truck a sensible choice. And according to Ram, 90 percent of its HD customers tow. With a light-duty truck, towing is less of a priority (although Ram diesel buyers in the light-duty segment are 23 percent more likely to tow than gas customers). But there are reasons to choose the oil burner. The 2020 Ram 1500 EcoDiesel’s 260-hp V-6 runs quietly, has fuel-economy and range benefits over the 395-hp 5.7-liter V-8, and has a similar max tow rating as the eight. But from its sound to its acceleration, the less expensive V-8 is a serious charmer.…

Chassis: At the end of the last Defender’s long life, it was still riding on a ladder frame strapped with live axles, front and rear. The new one features a 21st-century unibody with an independent suspension closely related to that of the Range Rover and Range Rover Sport, which is to say multilink at both ends. It employs JLR’s aluminum-intensive D7x architecture that, according to the company, provides three times the structural strength of traditional body-on-frame models. Land Rover’s engineering boss, Nick Rogers, makes the bold claim that the Defender has been designed to “perform better off-road than any other current model.” In Off-Road mode, the long-wheelbase model, the 110, has 11.5 inches of ground clearance, a wading depth of 35.4 inches, a 38.0-degree approach angle, and a 40.0-degree departure…

In 2007, Boris Johnson, the man who is now prime minister of the United Kingdom, shared his experience of driving a Ferrari F430 with GQ: “I seemed to be averaging a speed of X and then the M3 opened up before me, a long quiet Bonneville flat stretch, and I am afraid it was as though the whole county of Hampshire was lying back and opening her well-bred legs to be ravished by the Italian stallion.” Yes, before he became mayor of London in 2008 or leader of the Conservative Party and prime minister this year (and perhaps by the time this is published, former prime minister), Johnson was an occasional automotive journalist. A journalist who let outrageous thoughts escape from under his blond mop. And whose editors, lucky for…

Sedans aren’t dead. Evidence includes the 10Best-award-winning Honda Accord, the bold Hyundai Sonata, and the less boring Toyota Camry. American carmakers may have given up on them, but the rest of the world is still making new ones. Subaru’s redesigned Legacy is one of those new ones, although, at first, second, third, fourth, and fifth glance, it doesn’t look as if much has changed. If you’re familiar with the old one, you might say that the new one’s wider fenders make it look a bit more chiseled and athletic, but we’re guessing that the Legacy’s subtle revisions might confuse even Subaru salespeople: “Folks, this here [points to 2019 car] is the redesigned 2020 Legacy.” Interior changes are a little easier to identify. The design is shared with the new Outback…

AMG took a reasonable sedan, made it stupid fast, stupid loud, and able to do huge smoky powerslides. You’re gonna love it. The CLA45 has never been a picture of stalwart Mercedes refinement. “The CLA45 buzzes through its rev range like a chain saw,” we said in a 2017 drive of the last-gen car. Having spent two days with its successor, we can report that the engineers in Affalterbach have done nothing to mellow its buzz. Few do underhood rage better than AMG. In the CLA45 S, which sadly has not been confirmed for the U.S., the M139 2.0-liter makes 416 horsepower. We’ll have to settle for the detuned version in the 382-hp CLA45. This engine is loosely based on the M133 unit in the outgoing car, except things are…

Mazda, which has been teasing us with diesels for nearly a decade, finally delivers one in the CX-5 crossover. Now that it’s here and we’ve put our foot to the floor, we’re a bit underwhelmed by the acceleration from its 168 horsepower. The diesel CX-5 requires 8.4 seconds to reach 60 mph, which is 0.3 second lazier than a 2.5-liter all-wheel-drive CX-5. That there’s also a much-quicker (6.2 seconds to 60) gas-fed 250-hp turbocharged CX-5 only further diminishes the diesel’s appeal. Sequential turbos—a small one for low-end response and a larger one for higher rpm—work to smooth out the meager power delivery and contribute to the car’s 290 pound-feet of torque. Redline is a high (for a diesel) 5500 rpm, but the engine stops making useful thrust at least 1000…

The arrival of the electric 2019 Audi e-tron SUV hardly feels like a revolution. If you ask Audi, that’s by design. The company is dead set on positioning the e-tron as a “normal” car, implying that its rivals—the couture Jaguar I-Pace and the weird-door Tesla Model X—are abnormal. Different or not, those rivals have better EPA ranges than the e-tron’s 204 miles. The company has its reasons for the low number, namely that this EV uses only 88 percent of its 95.0-kWh battery capacity for the sake of longevity and repeatable performance. Based on our testing, however, both the I-Pace and e-tron have identical 190-mile highway ranges (we have yet to test the range of a Model X), which leads us to believe Audi’s reporting is conservative. Audi is keen…

Could you please explain why certain engines, like the GM 6.2-liter V-8, are called small-blocks while certain older muscle cars have smaller-displacement engines but are often referred to as bigblocks? In other words, what differentiates a small-block from a big-block? —John Edwards, Broomfield, CO Back when Detroit ruled the roads, many of the brands offered multiple V-8s from one of two in-house engine families: a compact one, known as the small-block, and a large one, known as the big-block. At Chevy, the small-block refers to the V-8 that has 4.40-inch bore spacing—the distance between the center of one cylinder and the center of an adjacent cylinder—whereas the big-block has 4.84-inch spacing. The distance between the cylinders largely defines the physical size of the block, but not displacement. Since bore and…

We may complain that the drive into work is nothing but a sea of SUVs, but that whining sounds a lot like the grumblings about the abundance of female leads in action movies even though there have been, what? Like, a dozen? There are still plenty of movies being made about Thor, just as there are plenty of cars being offered for sale. In the interest of examining what you can buy, we’ve surveyed the new-car market to gain a clearer picture of what’s out there. We gathered every vehicle currently offered for sale in the U.S. and categorized each brand’s offerings by body style. So while Volkswagen sells six different types of Golfs, that vehicle line gets credit in this tally for only two body styles: one mark for…

My enduring memory is that I was enraged. Everything was awesome and I was enraged. It was almost 25 years ago, at the dawn of my adulthood, a time that is widely assumed to be carefree by people who apparently never experienced it or who are too old to remember it. It was 1995, and I was a newly minted motorsports correspondent for AutoWeek, tasked with covering the IMSA race at Sears Point in Sonoma, California. As a measure of how long ago this was, that track has changed its name twice in the intervening years. As payback for my meager pay, I took full advantage of my California work assignment and scheduled a vacation with my newish girlfriend. I borrowed a car from Nissan. Well, not just a car.…

Spend some time at a racetrack and you’ll see that drivers are a superstitious lot. While much of the driving experience is under our control, the bits that aren’t are scary. So we try to cope with the anxiety in weird ways. Wait, this isn’t my lucky underwear. Where are my socks with the checkered flags on them? What would I like for lunch? Same thing I’m having all week. No, I’m not defacing press cars. I’m painting four-leaf clovers on them. None of the C/D staffers who lap cars at Virginia International Raceway for this story are too open about their superstitions, but no one can deny that thoughtful pause before choosing underwear each morning. Undergarment choice is especially important this year, as we’re on our 13th trip to…

An expert look at the newest and most important vehicles this month. Some cars are for winning races. Some are for winning attention. Porsche’s 718 Spyder is for winning souls. It’s not the quickest car in the 718 Boxster/Cayman family. Or the most structurally stiff. But what it lacks on the spec sheet, it returns in deep and meaningful allure. We spent two days firing through the Spyder’s six-speed gearbox, kissing 8000 rpm with its flat-six until our ears rang, and bending Southern California’s Sierra Nevada roads to our will. No turbos, just a manual trans and a 414-hp 4.0-liter boxer with enough character to merit a documentary. What more could we ask for? Central to its appeal, and at the core of what it once meant to be a…

INTERIOR I love my car’s interior design and see no improvement in the new model’s. The control layout is different and not necessarily worse, but the design strikes me as less elegant, and the materials feel cheaper—at least until you spring for the cha-ching upgrades. Score one for the console-mounted cupholder, but I don’t like the lack of flexibility in the electronic displays. One advantage of LCD screens is the ability to individualize them, but nearly all carmakers seem to take evil pleasure in restricting that function. CHASSIS My 991.2 handles and drives very well, but the 992 is better. The wider front track makes for sharper turn-in, and the steering is tauter and more responsive. Largerdiameter, 20-inch rear wheels and tires (base 991 Carreras had 19s all around) yield…

McLaren Automotive has the most spectacularly awesome problem. It builds tremendous mid-engine sports cars, all low and pointy with doors that open skyward. No problem there, right? Right. Unless the company wants to expand to include a more relaxed and more practical car. What happens then is that McLaren takes the same basic Lego kit from which it builds all its cars (carbon-fiber tub, twin-turbo V-8, and seven-speed dual-clutch trans) and assembles the 2020 GT. It costs $213,195 to start and is a low, pointy midengine car with doors that open skyward. But McLaren has added some of the attributes generally associated with grand-touring cars: visual elegance, comfort, and a few nods to practicality. Its styling, absent any fixed wings or weird intakes, is more subdued than that of any…