Innehållsförteckning för December 2021 från Car and Driver

You go through the effort to set up a secret alliance with retired Olympic skier Lindsey Vonn’s team, but it’s for naught since your trucks are hidden among 4000 acres of North Carolina woods. So you spend the first hour of the day standing next to some sheep with your photographer while the other two guys on your team try to find the Defender so you can begin the Land Rover TReK off-road competition. They show up, and you try to attempt the nearest of a dozen challenges vaguely mapped around the property. But you get lost and end up driving repeatedly through the parking lot of a skeet-shooting competition, where people with guns look increasingly annoyed. When you finally find a challenge, it entails driving slowly around pylons in…

THE CASUALTY LIST OF AFFORDABLE PERFORMANCE CARS IS PRETTY MUCH EVERY CAR WE SEARCH FOR ON BRING A TRAILER: PROBE, PRELUDE, CELICA, COBALT SS, SRT4, IMPULSE, TALON, DAYTONA, LASER, 240SX, XT6. A victim of a culture obsessed with sitting high and cornering slowly, going fast on a budget is harder than ever. Decades ago, nearly every brand sold an affordable sporty car; now we’re down to just a few choices. We’ve gathered four of the last players here. Yes, you could count it as three if you consider the Subaru BRZ and the Toyota GR86 as one car, something we reserve the right to do when it’s convenient, like maybe in next month’s 10Best issue. Having both along allows us to explore the differences and avoid angry letters asking why we included one and not the…

The Beliefs The Devil’s Triangle is a diabolically winding loop in East Tennessee favored for hairpin turns, leafy scenery, and the tantalizing ever-present danger of flying off the road at speed. It has ecstatic terrain and interesting history in its corner. I had a 2021 Corvette Stingray with the Z51 Performance package and a friend who suggested we head north from Georgia and see what the car and “the coal road,” as he called it, were made of. I am not a card-carrying member of the Corvette cult and never have been. The Corvette is the car of people I am not. When I was young, Corvettes belonged to guys named Todd, freshly divorced dentists, and country singers with awe-inspiring substance-abuse issues. I am none of these. I grew up…

Just in case you couldn’t figure this out on your own, the R in both the Civic Type R and the Golf R stands for racing. It could also stand for revvy, rapid, and (surprisingly) refined. Oh, we’ve got two more: recurring rivals. The fiercest fish in the hatchback tank, the Type R and the Golf R can’t be in the same place without a fight breaking out. Things were peaceful in 2020, as Volkswagen took a year off from the Golf R. But as soon as the 2022 eighth-gen Golf showed up, it was on like a nitrous bottle in a Fast & Furious movie. (There, got that out of the way. An F&F reference is legally required in any hot-hatch review.) A redesigned Civic Type R will come…

Tape measure in hand, Lucid CEO Peter Rawlinson is in the driver’s-side footwell of his company’s Air Dream, measuring the distance from the brake pedal to the rear seatback. It’s a nontraditional dimension that Rawlinson, a former Lotus and Tesla engineer, uses to assess interior space, and he’s out to prove that his company’s new electric car hit one of its targets. The design of Lucid’s first car, which has yet to reach a customer, is born of two goals he set: It should have the interior space of the Mercedes-Benz S-class, and it should handle like a Lotus. The metal tape crackles as it bends through the cabin, and we get the number: 83.1 inches, a few more than what he measured in the S-class. We’ve now driven the…

Performance SUVs continue to proliferate, but Lexus is unlikely to add to those growing numbers. Its only remotely sporty SUV is the NX, the smaller, spunkier sibling of the cushy RX. Boasting the brand’s first turbocharged engine, the first-gen NX was a hit—Lexus’s number-two seller. The second-gen NX continues the successful formula. The new design is evolutionary. The spindle grille returns, with the checkmark-shaped daytime running lights relocating above the headlights. The length and wheelbase have grown 1.2 inches. Lexus put those inches to good use, increasing luggage space behind the rear seats by a substantial five cubic feet. Conversely, max cargo volume shrinks by seven cubes, a trade-off that seems worthwhile. Because performance matters to us, we tested the mid-tier NX350 AWD, which gets a new turbocharged 2.4-liter inline-four.…

You won’t confuse the Sabre for any other McLaren. McLaren Special Operations (MSO) made sure of it. Only 15 will be made, each with an exacting set of requirements from McLaren’s most valued U.S. customers. “Sabre was designed with a brief to be a show car for the road,” says Neil Underwood, MSO’s global sales manager. “Customers wanted the car to look like it arrived from space. I think we delivered.” While the Sabre is based on the Senna and shares that car’s greenhouse, more than 70 percent of its parts are unique to it. Underneath, a number of suspension changes make the Sabre more compliant, a nod to its road-first intent. The 4.0-liter V-8 makes 824 horsepower and has new cylinder heads and revised mapping. Aero changes mean the…

CORVETTE EXECUTIVE CHIEF ENGINEER TADGE JUECHTER IS CANDID about the real reason why America’s sports car got a mid-engine layout: “When we went mid-engine, the justification for it wasn’t the standard car.” While the mid-engine architecture works great for the 10Best-winning Stingray, the bigger motivation for a new platform with the engine in the middle has everything to do with the 2023 Corvette Z06—a winged widebody supercar aimed squarely at the enthusiast’s heart. “The higher-horsepower cars benefit the most from getting all of that traction in the back,” Juechter continues. Exactly how much horsepower Chevy has extracted from its all-new double-overhead-cam (DOHC) 5.5-liter V-8 will be revealed when the engine passes its certification. But engineers promise this will be the highest-horsepower naturally aspirated V-8 ever installed in a production car,…

We already know that the new Bronco deserves a good bit of its hype. To see how it matches up against the Wrangler, we took lightly equipped examples, the kind most consumers will buy, on a 450-mile adventure of our own, one that would force us to appreciate sound insulation as much as locking differentials, ride comfort as much as suspension articulation. The tamest four-door Bronco we could lasso was an Outer Banks model. That midrange, luxury-biased trim ups the base price from $34,695 to $42,945 and comes with body-colored fender flares, LED headlights, and a range of niceties. The $3590 Lux package (12.0-inch touchscreen, adaptive cruise control, 10-speaker stereo), the $695 removable hard top (a soft top is standard, as it is on the Wrangler), the $1590 advanced four-wheel-drive…

Approach Ford’s Maverick pickup, and the most striking first impression is that you can see over the top of the cab (well, if you’re six feet tall), a rarity for a pickup today. Though it’s nearly five inches lower than the current Ranger and almost seven shorter than the F-150, the Maverick has a tall order: to be the entry-level offering in Ford’s lineup, now that Mustangs are the only cars left. Roughly the size of the previous-gen Ranger that Ford dropped a decade ago, the Maverick is available only as a four-door crew cab in XL, XLT, or Lariat trim. Its unibody platform underpins the Escape and Bronco Sport and has been beefed up here to support a 1500-pound payload capability. The pricing is another big surprise. The $21,490…

With modest sales and only six models in its U.S. lineup, Mitsubishi needs a hit—something with a standout design but enough mainstream appeal to get folks to open their wallets. The new Outlander seems to be the company’s best shot. It has the practicality SUV buyers want and stands out in the Kroger parking lot. The Outlander gets its platform and its 181-hp 2.5-liter inline-four from the Nissan Rogue. That engine replaces Mitsubishi’s 166-hp 2.4-liter four and 224-hp V-6. The 2022 model reaches 60 in 8.2 ticks, and the engine is responsive at city speeds. However, its enthusiasm (and consequently ours) is dulled by the continuously variable automatic transmission’s languid behavior and rubber-band feel. At least it mimics traditional gearchanges and mitigates the dreaded engine drone under hard acceleration. But…

Automotive Safety Integrity Level (ASIL) ratings are an engineering classification of potential risk, with A being relatively innocuous and D the most hazardous. The plate on Alex MacDonald’s homebuilt Stalker reads “ASIL Z.” It also has a bike rack. “If it doesn’t haul a bike, it’s not a car,” MacDonald quips. MacDonald is General Motors’ Corvette and Camaro vehicle-performance manager, which means, among other jobs, he’s in charge of making sure the Corvette chassis sings to you [see “Heart Attack,” page 24]. It’s an engineering challenge he relishes, but it comes with rules. His weekends, however, are a little more freewheeling, and the Stalker is the result of hundreds of hours of fabrication and unbridled creativity. Starting with a frame designed to accept the running gear of a second-gen Mazda…