Innehållsförteckning för April 2020 från Car and Driver

10BEST REACTIONS The “10Best for 2020” feature highlights only five cars [January 2020]. Another sign of deep-state influence or the coming apocalypse? Not sure which. You choose. —Patrick Ramsey Northville, MI I loved this year’s 5Best list! —Vito Antuofermo Staten Island, NY I was intrigued by the changes to 10Best this year. I understand why you did it. I just want to know more about allowed price point and whether or not it has to be five cars and five SUVs and trucks. I’d rather you be mostly Car and Driver. Keep up your good work and irreverence. —Jay Hancock Greenwood, SC We had a base-price cap of $90,000. And there’s nothing that says it has to be five and five; the ratio may change in favor of cars in…

If living in the information age has taught us anything, it’s that our personal information is not safe in the hands of private companies. It’s somewhat more disconcerting to learn that our information is not safe in the hands of the government, either. An investigation by Vice found that, in several states, the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) supplements its income by selling drivers’ personal information—including their names, dates of birth, addresses, and the cars they own—to third parties. Florida’s motor-vehicle-licensing department made $77 million that way in 2017, and California’s DMV made $52 million. And they’re not the only ones. DMVs across the country—including those in Delaware, Indiana, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Wisconsin, among others—are profiting, too. This is legal under a 1994 federal law known as…

As of January 29, 2020, the 450,000 people who drive in to San Francisco each day must avoid a 1.9-mile stretch of one of the city’s busiest roads. Privately owned automobiles are now banned from Market Street to make way for pedestrians, bicyclists, taxis, buses, historic streetcars, and freight trucks. Jeffrey Tumlin, director of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, thinks a car-free Market Street will support his goal of safely moving the maximum number of people in the minimum amount of space. Buses will travel faster without cars getting in their way, which should attract new riders. New bike lanes are planned, which could boost another space-efficient transportation mode. Tumlin also expects that a car-free Market Street will be safer. “Half of our most deadly intersections are there,” he…

April 2020 Cadillac Motor Division 30400 Van Dyke Avenue Warren, MI 48093 Dear Cadillac, The alarms didn't go off when the CTS became the CT5. At a glance, an "S" is pretty close to a "5" and the CT5 is enough of a redesign to merit a new name, but just as the CTS moniker had started to mean something, it's gone. May be we can get coffee and talk about what happened there. Did the badge supplier accidentally make a batch of 5s? Was it a deposed CEO’s idea? Did something happen when you lived in New York City? Aren't you going to bring back names from your past like d'Elegance? We'll talk later. The real purpose of this letter is to discuss a car called the CT5-V. Although…

DEMOCRATIZING THE HOLE SHOT Using your own two feet to balance an engine’s torque with the traction available at the tires will always be deeply satisfying. Which is to say: It’s fun as hell to perform the perfect hole shot and rip from fully stopped to real fast in a blink or three. But properly launching a car without electronic assistance takes great skill. And even then, the very best drivers are still only human. Whether or not technology is as artful in practice as our own efforts, launch-control systems have unquestionably helped us get off the line quickest in far fewer attempts than we could have on our own. Consider Porsche: Its PDK dual-clutch automatics feature the crown jewel of launch control. Starting with the 2010 model, launch control…

WE DIDN’T SET OUT TO DANGLE THE COMPETITION UNDER TESLA’S NOSE. The plan was merely to line up a Model S against a Porsche Taycan—the Tesla’s first true challenger—to see if there’s a new EV front-runner. But if you want to experience the most powerful Supercharger in the greater Los Angeles area, you’re going to find yourself at SpaceX’s Hawthorne headquarters, which is also home to Tesla’s design studio. As we plugged in the Model S for a max-charging session, Tesla employees mobbed the Taycan. Sizing it up on a granular level, they were visibly impressed by the build quality of the preproduction Porsche and genuinely excited about a new EV contender. Their level of open-mindedness—far exceeding what we’ve come to expect from Tesla owners and fanatics—is no doubt one…

“DMVs should not be in the business of recklessly selling drivers’ personal information to third parties.” —Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) “This is just another example of how unwitting consumers are to the ways in which their data is collected, sold or shared, and commercialized.” —Mark Warner (D-Va.) “The DMV should not use its trove of personal information as a tool to make money.” —Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) “Congress should take a close look at the Driver’s Privacy Protection Act and, if necessary, close loopholes that are being abused to spy on Americans.” —Ron Wyden (D-Ore.)…

In the realm of detestable corporate lingo, the term “disrupter” barely rates. It might be routinely and annoyingly misused to dress up a mundane change or as cover for a disastrously bad business decision, but compared with linguistic crimes such as “peel the onion,” “let’s unpack this,” and “drill down,” the word “disrupter” is a paragon of clean, simple language. It has a meaning that’s not easily captured by other metaphoric mumbo-jumbo. In general discourse, “disrupter” refers to a product, person, or process that upsets the status quo. Automotive history is chockablock with innovative thinking and technological progress. But most of it is iterative, not disruptive. That is to say, these advancements are merely refinements to a familiar concept that make the product better. This is the process of continuous…

AN EXTREMELY STABLE GENIUS It’s quite a nice thing when your car’s trip computer gives you accurate information. It’s even nicer when your engine runs smoothly and reliably. But of all the things computing power has brought to the automobile in the last couple decades, few have had as positive an effect as electronic stability control (ESC). ESC comprises various sensors—for wheel speed, lateral acceleration, yaw rate, steering-wheel angle and rate—all of which feed info to the onboard computer to help your car recognize when it has “gone out of control,” in the parlance of people who don’t like to drive cars. Importantly, ESC can also help remedy this condition—the out-of-control part, not the part about people who don’t like driving. Its greatest impact has been to reduce fatalities. NHTSA…

Craig Newmark revolutionized the used-car marketplace for buyers, sellers, and chronic tire kickers. Netscape, Compaq, CompuServe, AOL … defunct, defunct, defunct, and that’s still around, huh? The old digital guard fades away, but Craigslist.org persists. It’s a throwback, still the plain-text cyberhub that wiped out newspaper classified ads, transformed finding an apartment, facilitated a lot of illicit hookups, and without even trying, revolutionized how cars are bought, sold, and habitually perused. And it was Craig Newmark who built it. Newmark founded Craigslist, an email newsletter shared among about a dozen friends, in 1995 after being laid off from Charles Schwab. From that, it morphed into an unceasing disrupter of any ad market that could be classified. Based in San Francisco, it has grown and grown despite its founder’s lack of…

EXPERIENCE THE NETWORK EFFECT What good is a car if you can’t easily drive it considerable distances? In 1932, with the ambition of making that question obsolete, General Motors president Alfred P. Sloan formed a powerful lobby to ensure that a national system of highways got built. By doing that, Sloan helped create what economists call an indirect network effect. The presence of a nationwide road system made cars more valuable and more desirable than they would have been without it. It’s the same reason why, beginning in 2012, Tesla built a web of Supercharger stations as it launched the Model S. Without these DC fast chargers (which cost about $300,000 a pop), Tesla’s growth could not have happened. Neatly forgetting its own history, GM (along with other automakers) has…

AFTER TRACKING EVERY FILL-UP, SERVICE, PROBLEM, COMPLAINT, DENT, AND DOG HAIR, CAR AND DRIVER PRESENTS THE 40,000-MILE EVALUATION. Regular facelifts and redesigns are the ticks and tocks marking the passage of time in the car business. But even with continuous improvement being the cadence of the industry, there are updates and changes and then there are wholesale reinventions. Infiniti’s 2019 QX50 wasn’t a mid-engine-Corvette brain exploder, but it was an unusually clean-sheet undertaking. What had been an almost-wagon became a fully profiled crossover and went from a rear-driver to a front-driver (with all-wheel drive optional on either), from offering a seven-speed automatic to a CVT, and from having six naturally aspirated cylinders to four with a turbocharger. But Nissan-Infiniti’s new turbocharged inline-four isn’t just another 2.0-liter in a market brimming…

An expert look at the newest and most important vehicles this month. It would be easy to fill pages with moon-eyed poetry praising the intoxicating zing of the new 718 Cayman GTS’s 4.0-liter flat-six engine. Oh, the noises it makes hunting down the glory of 7800 rpm, all the while electrifying scalps, tingling spines, and purpling prose. Yet perhaps the most telling change over its four-cylinder turbocharged predecessor is a much smaller one and the first thing you notice when you start the car: The sewing-machine idle of the flat-four—that busy, not-quite-full-enough ticking reminiscent of an air-cooled Volkswagen Beetle—is gone. Fired up, the GTS 4.0 makes the full mechanical chatter that comes from having 50 percent more cylinders and valves. The Cayman sounds like a proper Porsche again. The new…

Don’t miss the Yeti. Actually, that would be a little tough. The 11-foot-tall statue stands beside the Montezuma Valley Market in the tiny outpost of Ranchita, California, about 140 miles southeast of Los Angeles. It’s just past that big white beast where Montezuma Valley Road (S22) enters Anza-Borrego Desert State Park and becomes one of San Diego County’s greatest drives. From the road’s origin in the rolling San Felipe Hills, this wide 18-mile-long two-lane runs east through greenery, then climbs into a rockscape at 4200 feet before dumping you into the valley town of Borrego Springs. Things get good after the summit. It’s a 12-mile run down the backside, a 5 percent grade that starts with a fast double-left and continues to a series of third- and fourth-gear corners and…

I ought to want an IROC Camaro. I’m 42 and that was my first car, so I’m about at the point where I should grow a mullet, put on a Starter jacket, and stalk Craigslist for a black 1985 model with TPI and rear-window louvers. I have many fond memories of my IROC exploits, from the first time I was pulled over for doing a burnout to the second time I was pulled over for doing a burnout to the time it shifted into second gear so hard that the ass end snapped sideways, which caused me to get pulled over. Oh, I ought to covet an IROC. There’s only one problem: They’re dumb. When you rev an IROC, it doesn’t go “vroom!” It goes “DUURRRRR!” Before I get eviscerated…

FREE MONEY! General Motors launched Keep America Rolling, its 0 percent financing plan, mere days after September 11, 2001, as a way to juice car sales and help stabilize the U.S. economy following the terrorist attacks. The program did exactly what it was intended to do: keep Americans buying new vehicles at a time when the world seemed like a scary, unpredictable place. But that morphed into something else—an aggressive, addictive way of doing business. It launched an arms race among carmakers desperate to keep factories running at full tilt and dealers happy. “The industry was forever changed when those incentives came in,” says Mike Ramsey, senior director at Gartner’s CIO Research Group. “[GM’s 2001 program] essentially created a whole new tier of incentive spending that was well beyond what…

One day in 1987, Dave Illingworth, the general manager of Lexus, dictated to his assistant “The Lexus Covenant.” Hokey in a way that mission statements can be, Illingworth’s spark of inspiration nonetheless reshaped customer service throughout the industry. “The Lexus Covenant” was carved into a block of granite and placed in the company’s then headquarters in California. Every Lexus dealer, none of whom had seen or driven the LS400, had to sign a copy. You can find it on Lexus’s dealership training website, though with a slightly evolved intro. It reads, in part: “Lexus will do it right from the start. Lexus will have the finest dealer network in the industry. Lexus will treat each customer as we would a guest in our home. If you think you can’t, you…

Occasionally, technology emerges that promises to change the way things are done, then fails. When the paradigm doesn’t shift, conspiracy theorists whisper, “Here’s what really happened, man.” But a novel idea isn’t usually killed because some corporation decided to quash it. What really happens is far less treacherous. Here are three ideas that sounded like the next big thing but ultimately weren’t. Saturn After spending the 1970s watching Japan’s cars erode his company’s market share, GM CEO Roger Smith decided to spend $5 billion to take on the import competition by creating a brand called Saturn. Founded in 1985, Saturn was more than just a small-car maker; it was supposed to change the way GM did things and improve worker relations, productivity, vehicle quality, and the dealership experience. Saturn launched…

Looks luxurious, feels luxurious, but the powertrain’s jerky behavior totally breaks the luxury spell. —RICH CEPPOS Large enough to haul people and stuff but not too big for city parking and maneuvering about town. i did not enjoy the nonlinear acceleration at all—and neither did my passengers. —JULI BURKE The seats are comfortable. The rest is meh. —MIKE FAZIOLI A rather attractive and luxurious little ute—comfy, quick enough, and mostly inoffensive. —MIKE SUTTON Many aspects of this car are fine, but i would be perfectly happy to never drive it again. —ANNIE WHITE I love the design inside and out. it’s distinctive and rich, and the cabin materials are well worth the asking price. —JOEY CAPPARELLA I appreciate the communication of the propilot system. it will say, “steering unavailable, bad…

Now that we’ve tested the Speedster, we can finally put the 991.2 generation of the 911 to bed. For those who accuse us of covering too many Porsches, it’s not as if we tested every model-and-powertrain combination. As you can see, we got to only 32 of a possible 43 variants. But we’re focusing on the numbers we got, not the numbers we missed. And we’re looking forward to testing all the 992s. 2017–19 PORSCHE 911 TEST RESULTS, A.K.A. THE 991.2 MATRIX…