Innehållsförteckning för February/March 2021 från Car and Driver

DUNK TANK Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that you found electrical gremlins in the Land Rover Defender [“Defending the Brand,” November 2020]. The power-steering system gave a false alert, the camera system died, the stop-start system failed to restart at a stoplight, and the satellite radio expired. It’s clear that Joseph Lucas, Prince of Darkness, is alive and well in Britain. Wasn’t it Lucas who was the patent holder for the short circuit? —Allan Robertson Halifax, NS Sounds like the Land Rover would be a fun, if expensive, adventure rig until the electric gremlins creep in. I think I’d rather buy a Jeep Rubicon for weekend woods thrashing plus a Toyota Supra. Loved “the roof rack produces more wind noise than a gas-station burrito” and “the truck shakes passengers like…

2020 BMW M340i Base/As Tested: $57,195/$64,545 382 hp 3792 lb 9.9 lb/hp Tires: Michelin Pilot Sport 4S, F: 225/40R-19 93Y ★ R: 255/35R-19 96Y ★ 2021 Mini John Cooper Works GP Base/As Tested: $45,750/$45,750 301 hp 2888 lb 9.6 lb/hp Tires: Hankook Ventus S1 Evo Z, 225/35R-18 87Y ★ 2020 Chevrolet Corvette Stingray Z51 Base/As Tested: $69,480/$86,865 495 hp 3665 lb 7.4 lb/hp Tires: Michelin Pilot Sport 4S ZP, F: 245/35ZR-19 (89Y) TPC R: 305/30ZR-20 (99Y) TPC THE CLASS BOUNDARIES THE TRACK Virginia International Raceway • Grand Course • 4.1 Miles Oscar winner, salad-dressing tycoon, and racer Paul Newman once said, “If there is a heaven on earth, it is VIR.” We have to agree. Officially, the Grand Course has 24 turns, but completing a 4.1-mile lap requires more than…

The Taycan marks a watershed moment as the first EV to survive our Lightning Lap treatment. 2:55.2 In a straight-line race, the Porsche Taycan and the Tesla Model S are reasonably close. But introduce VIR’s two dozen corners and the difference between this year’s Taycan Turbo S and the P85D we ran back in 2016 stretches to a 22.2-second gulf, a gap as cataclysmic as the one between a Miata and a Ferrari 430 Scuderia or a Camry and a Charger SRT Hellcat. The Tesla couldn’t survive a quarter-lap before overheating and cutting power, which makes any more detailed comparisons—such as speed through the esses, where the Taycan averages 14.8 mph faster than the Model S—irrelevant. Even better than being fast, the Taycan Turbo S is like the company’s other…

The Bugatti Chiron swims in molten torque. There’s so much pure, concentrated grunt that even at idle, the quad-turbo 16-cylinder feels like it’s trying to break free. It would rather crack the engine mounts and vaporize the calipers than stay still. This is physical force evolved into mechanical will. That’s 1180 pound-feet of peak torque amid a mindboggling 1479 horsepower—numbers so otherworldly that they are topped in insanity only by this car’s $3.3 million base and $3.7 million as-tested prices. With that much power and at that cost, this Bugatti ought to damn well be the quickest and fastest car that Car and Driver has ever tested. And it is. More or less. Sort of. Because not even Bugatti can afford to always have the latest Bugatti, the car we…

Gaining Speed Highs: Big power with minimal turbo lag, balanced ride and handling. Lows: Struggles to put the power down, priced at the top of the segment. Hyundai says its N performance division is named for its Namyang proving ground in South Korea and Germany’s Nürburgring, but the team involved would probably say it stands for “nonstop.” Since the Veloster N arrived in 2018, Hyundai engineers have developed six more products, including two performance versions of the new Elantra, three SUVs that are coming soon, and the brand’s most powerful frontdrive sedan ever, the Sonata N Line. That last one is the performance version of the company’s midsize sedan, and it’s positioned to appeal to family-minded enthusiasts shopping the Honda Accord 2.0T, Mazda 6, and Toyota Camry TRD. Behind its…

Look at the Honda e’s front end and tell us you don’t see a face. Those circular headlights and the panel that connects them evoke Hollywood’s cute robots, like WALL-E, 7723, and Baymax. Behind those bright eyes is a rear-drive four-seater packing a lithium-ion battery that provides just 100 miles or so of range. Honda has prioritized fun, giving the e summer tires instead of the low-grip rubber usually fitted to junior EVs. The car’s steering is crisp, and grip levels are high. There’s noticeable body roll under hard cornering, but the ride is pliant, and the e feels agile. Two motor outputs are offered. The base model makes 134 horsepower, and the e Advance has 152 horses on tap. The latter provides instant and satisfying acceleration below 60 mph.…

I don’t understand luxury. How do you decide what is luxurious enough and how much you should pay for it? I understand performance. It’s easily trackable with numbers and math and records, and I can follow the logic that would make huge performance worth huge money. A bespoke sedan? A lifestyle of twinkling-star headliners, embroidered butterflies, knurled turn-signal switches, and open-pore wood? Do you value it by the butterfly? By the knurl? It’s possible I just haven’t experienced enough high-end living. So I made the sacrifice of spending time in two cars from the most famous luxury auto brands on the planet, Rolls-Royce and Bentley, to see if I could gain some understanding of what exactly a luxury lifestyle is. To remain relatable, I started this new all-wealth-and-glamour experience with…

The 301-hp Mini darts to a narrow front-drive Lightning Lap record. 3:03.8 With its front tires furiously trying to hook up, the angriest Mini pulls onto the front straight 0.9 second behind Lightning Lap’s front-drive champ, the Honda Civic Type R. But a mere 14.3 seconds later, the GP closes the gap and noses ahead of the Type R by a tenth, thus snatching the front-drive title. We knew that the GP’s 301 horsepower—32 percent more than the standard JCW model offers—was going to be a big part of the Mini’s lap, but it turned out to be the deciding factor in its success. Without its ability to dramatically reel in the Honda on the Grand Course’s two long straights, the GP wouldn’t have had a chance against the 306-hp…

Ford’s 760-hp monster is wild enough to leave skid marks but obedient enough that it tends not to. 2:44.6 For more than a decade, deputy editor Tony Quiroga has strapped on his chaps and wrangled Ford’s hottest Mustangs at VIR, but with the pandemic keeping him in California this year, Quiroga could only offer advice: “Bring underwear,” he said. “Lots and lots of underwear.” And then he hung up laughing. Sphincter-clenching moments are part of the deal with the 760-hp GT500, the most powerful production car Ford has ever made. The supercharged 5.2-liter V-8 outmuscles a rogues’ gallery of exotica, including the Lamborghini Huracán Evo, the Porsche 911 Turbo S, and even the McLaren 765LT. But those exotics have a couple of distinct advantages over Ford’s relatively affordable badass. They’re…

The Mustang Mach-E wasn’t always going to be a Mustang. It started life as an electrified and lifted Focus. Somewhere along the way, Ford execs realized that if the company wanted to sell its new EV in meaningful quantities, it would have to build something people could get excited about. So Jim Farley, then Ford’s president of global markets, ordered the design team to go back to the drawing board two years before the car’s slated unveiling, a schedule not normally conducive to delivering a functioning product. His instruction: Think Mustang. The resulting vehicle certainly looks the part of a pony car inflated into a crossover. But for the year between the Mach-E’s unveiling and our first drive, we’ve been wondering if it could deliver on the promise of that…

Davis Lee, Hyundai’s North American senior designer, runs his hand along the three prominent creases that intersect on the 2021 Elantra’s front doors. “It can look out of place at first,” he says, “but we wanted the car to stand out.” The styling may turn off some buyers, but Hyundai had to do something to make an impression, as the Elantra’s roughly 10 percent share of the compact-sedan market is far smaller than the Honda Civic’s and Toyota Corolla’s pieces of the action. So Hyundai went big, both visually and literally. At 184.1 inches from nose to tail, the Elantra gains 2.2 inches in length, and its wheelbase is stretched by 0.8 inch, giving this compact one of the longest wheelbases in its class, at 107.1 inches, plus a substantial…

Highs: Intoxicating power, the comfort of a sedan with the powertrain of a supercar, stout brakes. Lows: Uncomfortably close to six figures, awkward seating position, can Dodge survive on Hellcats alone? Once you’ve experienced 700 horsepower, anything less feels utterly ordinary. A 500-hp V-8? Cute. Seven hundred horsepower corrupts you, and as the rush wears off, you start to wonder how you can get your hands on even more. If 700 feels this intoxicating, 800 horsepower must be that much better. That’s what it’s like to drive a Hellcat-powered vehicle, but it also might explain why product development at Dodge has been reduced to fitting increasingly wild variants of the supercharged V-8 into the brand’s three remaining models. The regular Charger Hellcat makes 717 horsepower now, and the Redeye raises…

There are only a couple of reasons why someone would push a Volkswagen Arteon to 120 mph. Either there is no better option for a getaway car or they’re testing it. We were testing it. “That’ll give you an idea of the top-speed test,” said testing director Dave VanderWerp, one hand casually on the wheel. I was riding shotgun and holding a laptop wired to a Racelogic VBox 3i data logger, a five-figure piece of equipment that calculates our position and speed 100 times a second. Another wire ran from the VBox out the rear passenger’s door and up to an antenna stuck to the Arteon’s roof. That antenna connected us to seven satellites. Why do we need satellites to locate the car we’re sitting in? Because using what’s in…

The Tests Paw Patrol Our local Petco provided us with a trash bag of dog hair, which we rubbed into a carpeted floor mat. Snack Attack We seasoned the floor mat with Cheerios and crushed Cheez-Its, just like kids do. Getting Dirty We spilled two cups of potting soil on the mat. Mic Check We used our sound-level meter to measure how loud each vacuum is from three feet away. Weighing In We put each vacuum (without attachments) on a scale. 1. Bissell Multi Auto $180 Attachments: extension hose nozzle, motorized brush, dusting brush, crevice tool The Multi Auto’s motorized brush does a great job picking up deep-seated pet hair. The extendible hose nozzle gives this Bissell an edge in maneuvering under and around seats to find runaway crumbs. We…

Grippy tires and sublime handling pull the junior AMG to a sub-three-minute lap. 2:58.2 Turning a lap in under three minutes on the Grand Course with less than 400 horsepower is an exclusive club, one populated solely with Porsche sports cars and a pair of open-cockpit track toys until the new Supra 3.0 and this top-rung AMG from the junior CLA line joined this year. How is the CLA such a road-course overachiever? Exquisite handling, for one thing, but mostly it comes down to tires and grip. Grip comes courtesy of Pirelli’s most aggressive street rubber: the P Zero Trofeo R. These tires are especially notable because their astronomical price—Mercedes charges $2900 for the set—is sure to make them one of the rarest options to spot in the wild. We…

When the overall Lightning Lap record doesn’t fall in a given year, it can be hard to see the big picture. But even if a track-slaying beast like the McLaren Senna—the current champion of our leaderboard as well as VIR’s, with a 2:34.9 lap in 2019—materializes only every few years, cars as a whole get faster with each running of Lightning Lap. Plotting a trend line over our 277 production-vehicle lap times reveals that, on average, cars are circling the Grand Course 1.2 seconds quicker every year. The average lap time in 14 years of this competition is 3:04.0. Just four of this year’s 18 entrants landed on the slow side of that. Technology progresses and trickles down into cheaper machines, and as a result, cars corner faster, accelerate quicker,…

Jeff Storey says the Chevrolet Silverado 2500HD, the Ford F-250, and the Ram 2500 are the wimpiest tow rigs his 16-ton drag sled has ever seen. In the hairy-chested world of heavy-duty pickup trucks, those are fightin’ words. We came here—to the fairground in rural Blanchard, Michigan—to meet Storey and his tractor-pull sled in order to prove which American brand makes the most macho three-quarter-ton truck, but he just raised the stakes. Each truck is now vying to prove it’s not the weakest tow rig ever to be hitched to the beast known as the Pioneer. We’re used to measuring a vehicle’s fitness with quarter-mile times, but heavy-duty trucks are built for powerlifting, not sprinting. So for this round of the never-ending pickup battle, we decided to stage a tractor…

The noble, dirty sport of rallying has been responsible for many roadgoing performance heroes. Cars like the Audi Sport Quattro, Lancia Delta Integrale, and Subaru Impreza WRX all had race-car alter egos. Toyota’s Yaris GR was supposed to have one as well—the brand’s entrant into the 2021 World Rally Championship—but COVID-19 shuttered those plans, and the team will continue to use the older Yaris WRC for another season. So while the Yaris GR doesn’t have a WRC analogue, the folks at Gazoo Racing, Toyota’s in-house motorsport arm and creator of the latest Supra, have made it feel like a rally car. Sadly, there are no plans to bring this tiny all-wheel-drive hot hatch stateside. And apart from its name, the two-door GR has little in common with the Europe-market Yaris…