Innehållsförteckning för September 2019 från MotorTrend

What do you call a myth that finally comes true? Well, you can call it the cover story of this special 70th anniversary issue. After decades of our theorizing and Chevrolet’s teasing, the Corvette quits banging on the limiters of a grand touring platform and upshifts into the realm of mid-engine supercar. Seventy years of MotorTrend means, at minimum, 840 covers, not counting special editions or different versions of issues for newsstands and subscribers. We have a feature this month on the staff’s favorite covers over the years, and this exercise led me to count up the number of times we’ve prominently featured a Corvette on our most prized page, with either an image, headline, or other callout. The love we’ve given the Chevrolet Corvette is astonishing and frankly a…

Flagships always get the coolest tech first, and the Corvette C8 is most definitely Chevrolet’s flagship and a standard-bearer for the entire General Motors Corporation. Here are four technologies that piqued the interest of your humble MotorTrend technical director. Cylinder Deactivation + Twin-Clutch: Neither is a new technology, but GM is the first to combine them in this market and this segment. This is a big deal because the vibration that comes with shutting off half the cylinders is harder to absorb or mask without a torque converter in the driveline. Torque converters are basically fluid couplings, and fluid is great at absorbing vibes. And even when they’re locked for fuel savings, their housings can incorporate nifty pendulum mass dampers tuned to absorb torsional wiggles. All a multiplate clutch pack…

By my count, this is MotorTrend’s 263rd Technologue column, stretching back to May 1982. For the first two years, the page answered readers’ techie car questions. Then Ron Grable, Rick Titus, John Hanson, B.J. Hoffman, and Don Fuller took turns mostly explaining new technologies hitting the market. Between January 1988 and September 1995, Technologue downshifted from monthly to occasionally. During the pre-Markus era, 23 future-tech concepts were explored, my favorites of which were the crazy Waller opposed-piston swashplate engine of September 1986 and the Acro-Tech “Vented Valve” concept of August 1994. Since November 2004 I’ve mostly used the page to explore how engineers, chemists, physicists, and scientists of all stripes are working to make our motoring world a better place. For this anniversary issue, I’ve spent a month working up…

It’s not every day that a company buys a valuable heirloom, an actual piece of its history. But as MotorTrend lights 70 candles on its birthday cake, it’s this car—this obscure frog-green 1949 Kurtis we recently purchased—that’s being wheeled up as our present to ourselves. Why the Kurtis? The easy answer is that it’s the automobile on the magazine’s first grainy, three-color cover. Not just any Kurtis. The exact car. Another reason is that 70 years is time enough for everybody present at MT’s birth to have now packed their desks and relocated to that great printing press in the sky, most notably our founder, Robert Petersen, who started the magazine on Hollywood Boulevard and moved it to a black-glass tower on Sunset Boulevard and then to a monumental bronze…

Seventy years is a long time. Few vehicles can date their lineage back that far. Fewer still can trace back anything more than a few signature design cues. Then there’s Jeep and the iconic Wrangler, which can draw a direct line in the sand of Omaha Beach back to World War II military vehicles and the civilian SUVs they inspired. Pulling a 1945 Willys-Overland CJ-2A from FCA’s heritage collection and lining it up against a 2019 Jeep Wrangler Rubicon is a humbling experience for the homage the current JL pays to its past. As MotorTrend celebrates its 70th anniversary, we take you on a bit of a walkaround of two Jeeps, both built in Toledo but 73 years apart. We hope you’re as pleasantly surprised by this tale of morphing…

In June 1956, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed a landmark piece of legislation he’d been championing for years. The Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956, more commonly known as the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act, authorized $25 billion (more than $235 billion in today’s money) for the construction of 41,000 miles of interstates over 10 years. Popular lore tells of General Eisenhower’s interest in the strategic value of Germany’s autobahn during the war and his desire to replicate it at home. But the history is much longer than that. In fact, it predates both World War II and World War I. It does not, however, predate Eisenhower. As popular interest in the automobile ignited in the early 1900s, Congress recognized the need for better roads for both strategic and…

It’s fitting the C8 Corvette graces the cover of this, the 70th anniversary issue of MotorTrend magazine. We’ve grown up together, you see. “We wanted a magazine that would interest the foreign car exponent, the sports car enthusiast, the custom car fan, and also be equally interesting to the stock car owner,” original MotorTrend editor-in-chief Walt Woron wrote as he put the finishing touches on the September 1949 issue. “A magazine that brings you the trends of the automotive field: designs of the future, what’s new in motoring, news from the Continent, trends in design.” MotorTrend founder Robert Petersen’s personal connection with Southern California race car builder Frank Kurtis perhaps explains why he chose the Kurtis Sport Car as the first cover car for his new magazine—rather than, say, a…

“We’re none too pleased to have you here.” Soul-crushing words from Corvette chief engineer Tadge Juechter. Chevy’s PR department, relenting to MotorTrend’s barrage of begging for early C8 Corvette access, has twisted Juechter’s arm into letting me ride shotgun for three rotations of a development drive in the latest C8 prototypes. His team is loath to expose the press to anything less than a fully baked, buffed, and polished, production-ready, no-excuses Corvette—and this drive is a crucial step in that process. Upon solemnly swearing not to report on any quality lapses I may detect, I strap into the right seat of a 2020 Chevrolet Corvette Stingray Z51 with FE4 suspension. “Cars are complicated,” Juechter deadpans, noting that writing, developing, and perfecting the software that controls the myriad microchips, solenoids, motors,…

Prepare to be bombarded with facts, trivia, and minutiae covering every aspect of the long-awaited mid-engine Corvette in the weeks leading up to its on-sale date. For now, here’s a concise distillation of the most basic information you need to get the conversation going at your local cars ’n’ caffeine gathering. Engine: The base Stingray’s 6.2-liter V-8 engine is the least interesting part of the new C8, yet it has been significantly revised in morphing from LT1 to LT2 nomenclature. Myriad little refinements contribute to the roughly 45-hp jump in output to what is still an estimated 500. A big one is the camshaft. Another biggie: All variants now get dry-sump lubrication, featuring three suction pumps and a more compact remote reservoir. The system is said to be capable of…

Although anniversary issues tend to dwell on the past, we wanted to also look into the future. Our interview subject is the man history might deem most responsible for changing the course of the traditional internal combustion vehicle. The following are excerpts from a video interview, edited for length and clarity, of Tesla Motors co-founder and CEO Elon Musk, at Tesla’s design studio in Hawthorne, California. For the full-length interview, head to MotorTrend.com. When you look at the first Model S concept, what does it bring back? Heartache. We gave our heart to this car, for sure. Everything just all in. Is there any particular feature your team sweated over? Door handles, for sure. The nose, every curve, every crease, angle, we went over every tiny piece all the time.…

The very first time we attempted to identify “the” car of a particular year was in our November 1949 issue. Instead of rounding up early 1950 model cars and putting them through a rigorous testing regimen, we looked back at the year that had been and selected among the cars that had been on sale for a year, some of which we’d driven. This was only our third issue, and we’d only “tested” two cars—an MG TC and a Studebaker Starlight Coupe (if you consider eyeballing the speedometer and clicking a stopwatch “testing”). Oh, and the aforementioned “we” wasn’t a dozen staffers arguing. Rather, it was a single freelance writer named John Bond. Yes, the John R. Bond, who would later go on to edit and publish Road & Track…

I have made a terrible mistake. Gallons of gasoline spew wildly, spectacularly, apocalyptically out of the Ford police cruiser. As I dash to stop the potential conflagration—my ears abuzz with furious hornets, my vision narrowing with the dreaded rose mist—I wonder how I’d gotten myself into this mess. Nearly 70 years ago, in the April 1950 issue of MotorTrend, we published what was our first road trip story—a Mobilgas-sponsored fuel economy run from Los Angeles to the Grand Canyon via Las Vegas. The rules were onerous: You had 18 hours and 30 minutes to drive your stock sedan in the most efficient possible manner, with the winner determined by their overall “ton-mpg”—calculated by the weight of the car and passengers in tons times miles traveled divided by gallons consumed. The…

In planning our homage to the original “Mobilgas Grand Canyon Economy Run” story, published way back in 1950, we made an early decision to not use the rules our forebears set. Time is money, so our winning driver would be the one who spent the least amount of money on gas and the least amount of time on the road. But what if we’d followed the old rules? In the original fuel economy run, we used a “ton-mpg” figure designed to level the playing field between big and small cars. “To provide a basis of comparison for all cars,” we wrote, “a ton-mpg figure was chosen instead of vehicle mpg, for with the latter method, a heavy car with good fuel economy for the particular engine could not compare favorably…

Everything about building a mid-engine car was new to the C8 development engineers. There’s virtually nobody left from the earlier mid-engine Corvette programs (or even the Pontiac Fiero team) to consult with, so the C8 team pretty much had to benchmark state-of-the-art competitors. And because most competitors have been developing mid-engine sports cars for several generations, the pressure on the Corvette squad has been high to nail the benchmarks right from the start. Plenty of computer-aided engineering and rough mule prototype vehicles were involved. Below are a few of the diciest challenges the team faced. Engine Note Tuning: Some of the nastiest (in a bad way) sounds an engine makes are now 12 inches from the driver’s ear: the accessory drive. Hence the firewall is well insulated, and the bulkhead…

How could you? Better yet, how dare you? Our Ultimate Car of the Year test (page 32) will likely dredge up memories of some rather, ahem, controversial choices that this magazine has made in annually naming the best sled on four wheels. The letters that MT editors have received over the years regarding our Car of the Year decisions contain enough paper to repopulate a small forest. Most boil down to some version of the following: “Choosing the Pontiac 6000 SUX over the Nissonda Camcord clearly means your editors spent too many fireside nights imbibing brown liquids rather than actually, you know, driving the cars.” So imagine the challenge to go back through our 70 years of existence, pick a representative vehicle from each decade, and line them up to…

MotorTrend’s original editors could never have imagined what the Car of the Year award would become. At first, it almost seemed like an afterthought. Buried in our third issue, the award was envisioned as a way to recognize the most advanced automobile of 1949. All models were considered, and of the three finalists—Cadillac, Ford, and Oldsmobile—it was the Cadillac that would make history as our first winner for its powerful and efficient new overhead valve V-8. Since its humble beginnings, Car of the Year has evolved from an award given to an entire automaker to one given to a specific car that most lives up to our six modern-era criteria: Advancement in Design, Efficiency, Engineering Excellence, Performance of Intended Function, Safety, and Value. As new types of vehicles have been…

In the late 1940s Detroit had just finished winning a war. America was in an ebullient, optimistic mood. The economy was booming, suburbs were sprouting like spring weeds, and everybody was replacing cars and trucks that had largely worn out during the auto industry’s 44-month diversion to Arsenal of Democracy duty. The folks building this new American dream needed trucks to get the job done, and when their work was done, they wanted to come home to their suburban paradise and be informed and entertained reading about their latest obsession: cars. Ford read these tea leaves and plowed the bulk of its engineering might into redesigning its entire truck range first, following with cars a year later. At about the same time, Robert “Pete” Petersen, who’d just launched a magazine…

November 1949: Untitled There’s a fabulous sense of speed in this shot; the car almost looks like it’s bending around the corner. You can see the rear end starting to slide on a loose surface, the driver leaning into the corner, the front wheels cranked over to hopefully make it around that slippery, high-risk corner. Plus, the old Motor Trend logo is undeniably rad. Duncan Brady June 1950: What Is the Future Trend in Sports Cars? One of our earliest covers is among the most effective, and it set a tone many others would follow. Despite its relative simplicity, it instantly captured my interest. No need for catchy headlines or splashy colors—the image of a car sliding across the desert floor represents pure, unadulterated motoring thrill. It says, “If this…

ARRIVAL: 2019 Jeep Wrangler Unlimited Rubicon EPA CITY/HWY/COMB Fuel Econ: 22/24/22 mpg “Speccing our long-term Wrangler involved quite a bit of arguing among the staff. I won.”Christian Seabaugh Base price $43,040 As tested $57,110 Never has ordering a new long-termer been more difficult than it was with our new 2019 Jeep Wrangler Unlimited Rubicon. The process is supposed to be pretty simple, especially if the car is a recent award winner like the Wrangler—our 2019 SUV of the Year. In these cases, soon after the award has been announced, we’ll place an order for a long-termer in a feature-rich spec with the latest technologies so we can act as the canary in the coal mine, so to speak, for our readers. However, ordering a Wrangler isn’t as simple as deciding…