Innehållsförteckning för September 2020 från Car and Driver

Ford invited skepticism when it decided to hang the Mustang name on its upcoming electric crossover, the Mustang Mach-E. A four-door EV wearing a Mustang badge? What’s next? An electric race car with body panels made of flax? Actually, yes. Also seven motors, all-wheel drive, and 1400 horsepower. Ford is pretty sure that the Mustang Mach-E 1400—Vaughn Gittin Jr.’s new four-seat hell sled—is worthy of the badge worn by your 5.0. Gittin Jr. is no stranger to fast Mustangs. His race outfit, RTR Vehicles, built Ken Block’s Hoonicorn, the twinturbo all-wheel-drive Mustang-bodied tube-frame beast that set a seemingly unreachable bar for drift craziness. Gittin Jr. himself runs an 1100-hp Mustang in Formula D. And yes, he’s excited about an electric car. Specifically, the winged monster in his RTR garage in…

Between 1993 and 1997, Land Rover exported fewer than 7000 Defender 90s to North America, and prime examples now go for more than $100,000. But what if you could have the blocky charm of a North American Specification 90 combined with modern power and amenities for about the same price as a nice used one? For those who care more about driving than provenance, Osprey Custom Cars in Wilmington, North Carolina, builds some of the nicest Defenders that never were. Company founder Aaron Richardet began restoring Defenders in 2009 and eventually realized that if you’re replacing nearly every component, you may as well start from scratch. “We’ll do it either way, as a restoration or from the ground up, but you end up at about the same price,” Richardet says.…

My neighbors must think I’m a drug dealer, a successful but stupid one. The other day, I had a Lamborghini Huracán, a Porsche 911, and an Aston Martin Vantage in my driveway, and each has a different transmission-control layout. So the first time I moved the Huracán, it took me forever to realize you shift into drive by pulling the paddle shifter. I just sat there revving it in neutral like a jerk. Porsche’s reverse takes a little flick forward of the shift nubbin. The Aston uses push buttons. There haven’t been this many ways to set up an automotive cockpit since the Stutz Bearcat placed the throttle between the brake and clutch pedals and Fords controlled acceleration with one lever and the spark advance with a different lever. There…

South Carolina is loosey-goosey when it comes to rules. You can ride a motorcycle without a helmet. Golf carts ply the streets. And fireworks are not just legal but extremely legal. Roman candles, mortars, 50-milligram M-80s: What’s your pleasure? Marquees outside the fireworks stores brag that they offer the biggest booms. Want a seveninch artillery shell? Step right in! As a resident of (relatively) sane North Carolina, I typically don’t pay much attention to the gunpowder bonanza happening in the neighboring state. This year, however, with most public shows canceled, South Carolina’s lax fireworks policy assumes greater import. My normal Independence Day routine—setting up some folding chairs and gazing skyward while regularly asking, “Think that was the finale?”—isn’t going to happen. So I decide to rectify the situation by road-tripping…

What you notice first about the Flying Spur is that it makes you feel underdressed. The paint gleams and glows, and the interior is immaculately tailored. The top of the instrument panel is covered in a single piece of leather; the center timepiece—it’d be gauche to call it a clock, right?—is nearly worthy of one of Bentley’s collaborations with Breitling; and the knurling, oh, the knurling. Those fine ridges are on just about everything fingers manipulate—the vents, the temperaturecontrol knobs, the backs of the door handles. There’s just a single letdown: The gas cap, which looks like an ingot, is in fact plastic. Pulling away from a stop is done with grace, which is an accomplishment for a car with a dualclutch automatic. On glassy roads, the Flying Spur rolls—er,…

When the mood strikes, Toyota knows how to build great driver’s cars. Back in 1985, the purveyor of sensible transportation burnished its sports-car credibility with a tidy two-seater that tucked a high-revving 16-valve Corolla engine behind the cabin. The MR2 combined traditional Toyota hallmarks—efficiency, reliability, comfort—with near perfect dynamics. Racer Dan Gurney had a hand in finalizing the car’s chassis tune, and you can feel it in the MR2’s handling precision and neutrality. Considering the MR2’s age, it’s remarkable how many are well preserved today. Cars with less than 50,000 miles come up for sale nearly as often as those that have surpassed 150,000 miles. —Eric Tingwall ENGINE The 4A-GE 1.6-liter inline-four is more exotic than its 112-hp rating suggests. It sings a sweet melody on its climb to 7500…

For nearly a decade, I spent many bedtime hours poring over Richard Scarry’s Cars and Trucks and Things That Go with my three children, taking note of the fantastically make-believe toothbrush car and the alligator vehicle and the ridiculous pickle mobile while my kids tried to stall off sleep for another five minutes. So imagine my surprise when I found myself driving a real-life toaster van earlier this summer. It was disguised as a 1967 Volkswagen Samba Microbus Deluxe, on loan to us from VW’s museum collection. Logically, I knew it was going to handle terribly. But I was won over by its charm and good looks, and more importantly, it arrived in the middle of stay-at-home orders, just when I needed to look forward to a little something different.…

Wait … that’s a different story. This is the tale of the new Audi station wagon you probably won’t buy, marooned on a secluded island you’ve probably never heard of. The idea is enticing: Escape to an island and forget about the world’s troubles for a moment. But as we board a ferry to just such a place—Beaver Island in Lake Michigan—we start to wonder if the escape is worth the trouble of getting there. We’ve already driven four hours north to Charlevoix, and now we’ll spend another two on a 32-mile boat ride that costs $32.50 per person. Should’ve brought a book. We paid $105 to have the good people of Beaver Island Boat Company load our 2020 Audi A6 Allroad onto the ferry, too. This car is a…

SERVICE LIFE EXPECTANCIES SERVICE TIMELINE • March 18, 2019 174 miles Long-term test begins. • April 11, 2019 2798 miles Glass shop fixes a chip in the windshield. $50 • June 13, 2019 9289 miles 10,000-mile service: Dealer changes oil, rotates tires, inspects vehicle, and updates the occupant-restraint controller per a recall. $61 • August 12, 2019 15,708 miles Tire shop patches a nail puncture. $20 • September 10, 2019 19,675 miles 20,000-mile service: Dealer performs oil change, tire rotation, and inspections and replaces the engine air filter. $103 • October 9, 2019 21,804 miles Dealer replaces the worn windshield wipers. $62 • November 7, 2019 23,880 miles We swap to 18-inch wheels and Nokian winter tires. $1869 • January 2, 2020 29,755 miles 30,000-mile service: Dealer changes oil, rotates…

Enzo Ferrari reputedly said, “I build engines and attach wheels to them.” But we can’t imagine the SF90 Stradale’s powertrain was what he had in mind as a starting point. This new productionseries Ferrari, which will sit at the top of the range until a successor to the limitededition LaFerrari is revealed, can run almost silently on nothing more than electrons providing frontwheel drive. Even in our current messedup reality, that’s strange, right? Now before panic sets in at the thought of an electric Ferrari, we’ll tell you that the SF90 Stradale also has a twinturbocharged V8 right behind the passenger compartment. This hybrid powertrain delivers 986 horsepower, a number that might have caused even the notoriously grumpy Il Commendatore to smile. Under battery power, Ferrari’s plugin supercar is capable…

It only seems as if Cadillac has been struggling in the luxury compact segment since Antoine de la Mothe, sieur de Cadillac, founded Detroit in 1701. It hasn’t been quite that long, of course, but it has been nearly 40 years since the brand introduced the wrongheaded Chevy Cavalier–based Cimarron. It took a few decades after that debacle for Cadillac to field a legitimate small luxury sedan—no, not the Catera. We’re talking about the rear-wheel-drive ATS of 2013. That’s really where the CT4’s story begins. Cadillac says its latest, smallest, and least expensive sedan is all-new, but that’s a bit of a stretch. It’s more a redo and refocusing of the ATS. While the ATS attempted to go head to head with the BMW 3-series and Mercedes-Benz C-class, Cadillac has…

We’re pretty test forward at Car and Driver. If we’ve laid our hands on a car, we’ve probably also laid a VBox on it, taken it to a test track, and displayed the results in a graph that even loyal readers may struggle to decipher. We run so many tests that not all of them see the light of the printed page. Among them is the H-point test, which measures how high the driver’s hip (the “H”) is above the ground. When people talk about a command seating position, they’re talking about something with a high H-point. The results displayed here show the distribution of H-points across segments. What’s the takeaway? In many segments, automakers benchmark the same set of vehicles, so there’s barely an inch of variation among them.…

Chevrolet Corvette Z51 ........... 1:26.4 Porsche 718 Cayman GT4 ......... 1:26.5 Grattan is a tight 1.9-mile course that rewards patience. On our day of lapping, it was well over 90 degrees and the track was very greasy. Given that, these aren’t the fastest laps on record, but they are comparable. The Gt4 just barely wins the sprint to the slowest corner with a 104.0-mph peak to the C8’s 103.0. the wait through this roughly 35-mph turn is torturous; neither car feels in its element going this slow. The Gt4 soaks up the reverse corkscrew—a right-left climb with a big dip at the apex of the initial turn—much better than the C8. then it’s a dead-even drag race down the straight. After the jump, the right-left-right-left-looooong-right combination is essentially a wash.…

Price As Tested .............................. $72,910 Base .................................................................. $66,895 Vehicle Type: front-engine, all-wheel-drive, 5-passenger, 4-door wagon Options: Prestige package, $4500; Soho Brown Metallic, $595; puddle lamps, $450; all-weather floor and cargo mats, $310; USB cables, $110; first-aid kit, $50 Audio System: satellite radio; USB, SD-card, and Bluetooth-audio inputs; Android Auto and Apple CarPlay interfaces; 16 speakers Engine turbocharged and intercooled V-6, aluminum block and heads Bore x Stroke ...... 3.33 x 3.50 in, 84.5 x 89.0 mm Displacement ............................... 183 in3, 2995 cm3 Compression Ratio ............................................ 11.2:1 Fuel Delivery: direct injection Turbocharger: BorgWarner Maximum Boost Pressure ......................... 19.7 psi Valve Gear: double overhead cams, 4 valves per cylinder, variable in-take- and exhaust-valve timing and intake-valve lift Redline/Fuel Cutoff ................... 6500/6500 rpm Power ............................................ 335 hp @ 6100 rpm Torque ....................................... 369…

EPA range and efficiency tests are run on dynamometers, which must be calibrated so the resistance of the rollers mimics what happens out on real roads. the net force fighting a vehicle’s forward motion is called road load and encompasses aerodynamic drag, tire rolling resistance, and driveline friction. Road load is measured through coastdown tests, wherein vehicles coast—hence the name—in neutral from about 80 mph all the way down to 10 mph. the resulting data of how quickly the vehicle slows is used to calculate the three coefficients for a quadratic equation that expresses the pounds of force resisting a vehicle’s forward motion at a given speed. those coefficients define the dyno’s resistance during efficiency and range testing. There are, of course, a number of guidelines in the SAe’s 39-page…

Honeymoon Phase 2020 VOLVO S60 T8 ARRIVAL: MAY 2020 MILES: 4834 OBSERVED MPGE: 33 Volvo’s situation is a little odd these days, being Swedish but owned by the Chinese and with a new factory in Ridgeville, South Carolina. But maybe its diverse roots will result in broader appeal for the brand’s products. At first glance, they deserve it. The new-for-2019 S60 wraps a high-tech interior in sleek sheetmetal that handsomely blends the boxiness of traditional Volvos with, um, curves. So we recruited one for a long-term test. Every S60 has a 2.0-liter inline-four, but we passed over the turbo-only T5 and turbo- and supercharged T6. Ours is the 400-hp T8 model, which has the turbo and the supercharger plus two electric motors and a 9.1-kWh lithium-ion battery pack for up…

When you buy a convertible Ferrari, what you’re buying is a front-row seat to the internal-combustion show. Well, at least it should be. When you’re sitting so close to a 710-hp 3.9-liter V-8 that you can smell the heat coming off it, you sort of expect that when you park it with the exhaust tick-ticking away, your ears will ring in the afterglow. Except the F8 Spider doesn’t do that. This Ferrari comes with earplugs. Not literally, of course. It’s just that the F8’s twin-turbo engine isn’t obnoxiously loud. On the sound spectrum, we’d put it somewhere between a Porsche 911 Carrera and a Lamborghini Huracán Evo. This is a great place to exist, but if you’ve ever turned your head and dropped your jaw in response to the bark…

When asked why he purchased a dieselpowered Oldsmobile in 1981, Dad responded, “Everyone was doing it.” Today, that herd mentality also seems to drive the popular subcompact-crossover segment. Whatever you call these potatoshaped pods, people are buying them as if they are as good as curly fries. They aren’t, but here we are. Chevy is slicing its spuds pretty thin these days. While you can’t tell at a glance, pull out a tape measure and you’ll see that the Trailblazer is slightly larger than its showroom mate the Trax. But a couple inches here and there do add up to five more cubic feet in the cabin and six more cubes in the cargo area. Plus, a longer wheelbase gives the Trailblazer nearly four more inches of rear-seat legroom than…