Innehållsförteckning för September 2020 från MotorTrend

@markrechtin When MotorTrend first hit newsstands in 1949, discriminatory Jim Crow laws were commonplace in much of America. Although the 1964 Civil Rights Act outlawed segregation, institutional racism toward Black drivers persists in more insidious ways even today. The recent protests following the killing of George Floyd and others show that to be the case. This month, MotorTrend traces the history of Black motorists battling Jim Crow laws. This legalized prejudice banned them from driving in certain towns after sunset and dictated where they could (and couldn’t) lodge, dine, or pump gas. And, terrifyingly, if they got in an accident, which hospitals would treat them. Some of you will read this and say, “Stay out of politics. Stick to cars.” Like it or not, the automotive industry is incontrovertibly linked…

FIRST LOOK Replacing the Bullitt for 2021 and effectively replacing the GT350, too, is the reborn Mustang Mach 1. It’s to be the track Mustang for folks who can’t swing the note on a Shelby. As with the again-discontinued Bullitt, Mach 1 gets just one engine choice—the 5.0-liter Coyote V-8. We’re told it’s not identical to the Bullitt’s, though it is rated at the same 480 hp at 7,000 rpm and 420 lb-ft at 4,600 rpm. This one shares its intake manifold, oil filter adapter, and engine-oil cooler with the Shelby GT350. The Bullitt was only offered with a Getrag six-speed manual. The Mach 1 gets the Shelby GT350’s Tremec TR-3160 manual and short-throw shifter along with its auxiliary oil cooler, though the Mustang GT’s twin-disc clutch is used. Mach…

FIRST LOOK Buick launched the Envision in the United States for the 2016 model year, and almost half a decade later, the compact people mover is getting a complete overhaul. The 2021 Buick Envision goes on sale early next year with a more modern interior and a much more compelling exterior design. Buick claims the new Envision is lower and wider than before, and we can definitely see the change in these photos the brand released. The Envision features a wider grille with a more subtle wing element running through the Buick badge. Along with the new grille, the front end sports sharper headlights and bolder creases on the hood. Slimmer taillights are the focal point of a more streamlined rear end design. A new Avenir trim is on the…

Every Wednesday night, Josh Gates takes his fans around the world to investigate the greatest legends and mysteries in history on his show Expedition Unknown. Getting to dig sites, tombs, and lost cities isn’t like taking a vacation, though. The show could just jump straight into the legend, but a big part of its charm is the journey. Traveling deep into the deserts, forests, swamps, and mountains requires cars, trucks, SUVs, motorcycles, ATVs, helicopters, boats, snowmobiles, and even military vehicles, and that’s all part of the story. Whatever Josh is driving, riding, or piloting, you’ll hear about how good, bad, or just plain odd it is. We got Josh on a video call direct from the set of his new show, Josh Gates Tonight, also known as his spare bedroom.…

Every Jeep model carries a spark of the original flame kindled by the iconic WWII Willys original. This makes it way easier to sell Jeeps, even the ones that don’t still resemble the primordial jeep. Ford (which incidentally built almost as many original jeeps for the war as Willys) wants in on that action. So it’s reviving its own nostalgic icon—the Bronco—and aiming it squarely at the Wrangler. But only one in four Jeeps sold in the U.S. is a Wrangler, and Ford needs its Bronco-mania to entice a wider audience. Behold the Escape-based Bronco Sport. Escape Bones, Bronco Muscle Yes, the Bronco Sport shares about 80 percent of its parts with the Escape, not the Bronco pater familias, but the sun never hits most of them. The two trucklets…

If you care about lap times, you don’t buy a convertible. So if you’re going to buy a convertible Ferrari, why not treat it like a GT car and just enjoy the drive? The motors and hinges and reinforcements that allow you to choose your level of enclosure add weight, but in this case, it’s a relatively meaningless 44 pounds. Meaningless because this car makes 710 horsepower and 569 lb-ft of torque. If we assume, for a moment, it weighs 44 pounds more than the coupe model we drove recently, it still weighs less than 3,600 pounds. All this to say the pop top has effectively zero impact on performance. I don’t really care, but racers would. Every ounce counts on the track. Convertible buyers are not burdened with such…

IN EVERY EPISODE OF LIFE SIZE, streaming on the MotorTrend app, professional race car driver and builder Nicole Lyons explores some of the real-world, full-scale versions of vehicles from the Hot Wheels Garage of Legends. Lyons not only tells the stories behind the unique designs of each vehicle but also gets to do something many people only dream of doing—take them for a test drive. The opening episode, “Bone Shaker,” details the 425-horsepower, open-roof, skull-grilled, spinal-column-shifted 1932 Ford hot rod that epitomizes what people love about both Hot Wheels and homemade cars. Next comes “Twin Mill” (pictured), the first car that Hot Wheel commissioned to make life size. Twin Mill has two engines, two superchargers, and zero visibility. After highlighting all the full-size Twin Mill attributes, Lyons takes the temperamental…

After launching the powerful NSX and winning races, Acura is taking the next step on its relaunch as Honda’s performance division. The second-gen Acura TLX ditches almost everything it had before and adds key ingredients to truly compete in the sport sedan segment. And not only is the new TLX going to herald a bolder design language, but Acura also will resurrect the Type S high-performance model. With a standard 2.0-liter turbo for the regular model and a 3.0-liter twin-scroll turbo V-6 for the Type S, Acura is doubling down on emotion. On top of that, the TLX brings a striking new design that borrows lines from the Acura Precision concept and the stunning Type S concept. The TLX’s proportions leap out. The long dash-to-axle dimension (7.8 inches longer than…

FIRST LOOK Since its debut last fall at the Los Angeles Auto Show, we’ve chronicled the remarkably comprehensive midcycle refresh of Korea’s S-Class, the 2020 Genesis G90. Now, we’ve had an opportunity to slap our test gear on it and take the full measure of its refreshness. Our rear-drive 3.3-liter twin-turbo G90 proved quicker than all four of the G90 3.3Ts we’ve tested to date, hitting 60 mph in 5.1 seconds (0.1–0.3 second quicker) and crossing the quarter mile in 13.7 seconds at 102.8 mph (0.1–0.2 second quicker and 1.7–2.9 mph faster). Sure, all four 2017 and 2018 G90 3.3Ts we’ve run were equipped with the 150-pound HTRAC all-wheel-drive system, but at least one of them weighed slightly less than this 2020 rear-driver. Those acceleration numbers are within a tenth…

Forget the Rubicon. The Gladiator Mojave is the best Gladiator, full stop. It will do 90 percent of what the Rubicon will, but the Rubicon can’t do half of what the Mojave can. Here’s why: The Jeep Gladiator was never going to be a great rock crawler, and that’s what the Rubicon is set up to do: scratch and claw its way over anything. The problem is, it has the longest wheelbase of any short-bed truck in its class. Without modifications, the Gladiator is going to drag its belly and potentially high-center on obstacles other trucks would clear. This rock crawling weakness is the Gladiator Mojave’s strength. Long-wheelbase vehicles are inherently more stable when cornering, meaning they’re less likely to oversteer. Although power slides are fun, on a bumpy trail…

As my garage door went up and the morning light bathed the car’s taut and cohesive curves, I said to myself, “This would never get old.” Instead of hopping right into the 2020 Porsche 911 Carrera, I paused to reflect on how simple, restrained, and unmistakable the Carrera coupe’s form is—yet how much thought and work went into its shape. All those compound curves, one flowing into another, positive and negative spaces, and there isn’t a single flat surface. There’s no bolt-on “jewelry,” no character lines or sheetmetal creases. The whole car is a jewel and gesture in and of itself. Name another car with so few design details that looks as good. There isn’t a bad angle. It’s sculpture you can drive. The 2020 Porsche 911 Carrera is the…

Green Book—the Oscar-winning Hollywood movie loosely based on the life of African American virtuoso pianist Don Shirley and his white driver and bodyguard, Frank “Tony Lip” Vallelonga—introduced white filmgoers to The Negro Motorist Green Book, one of several travel guides used by Black families and business travelers in the Jim Crow era. Many white audiences were startled by the idea that Black Americans driving a car in the supposedly civilized postwar United States could be fraught with racial hazards, from dealing with surly gas station attendants and cruel restaurant hostesses to encountering angry mobs and hostile law officers. To help Black motorists navigate these potential dangers, The Green Book provided a state-by-state listing of restaurants, tourist homes, hotels and motels, night clubs, and other businesses and attractions that welcomed Black…

FIRST LOOK Believe it or not, the 2021 Ford F-150 XLT you see here is 92 percent new or revised, including every exterior panel. This is some Porsche 911–grade design evolution right here. Clearly, the unbroken stuff goes unfixed, as engineers instead concentrate on continuing the F-150’s unrelenting march upward in payload and towing capability. Also improved are the ride quality, stability, and interior refinement, all in the name of enabling the truck to better assist its owner in getting various jobs done. Most dimensions, the size and configuration of the three available cabs and boxes, and the powertrains (except for the axed six-speed automatic) are unchanged. Leading the roster of cool improvements is a new PowerBoost hybrid offering, which includes Pro Power Onboard. PowerBoost mates the Explorer Hybrid’s transmission-mounted…

In May 2019, online insurance aggregator NetQuote did a study swabbing vehicle interior touchpoints for bacteria in ride-hailing vehicles, rental cars, and taxis. It then compared those findings against cultures from a toilet seat. (Hint: Maybe don’t read this while eating your lunch.) The results predictably tracked the level of oversight each industry gets: Taxis were 160 times germier than the toilet seat, and ride-hailing vehicles measured 219 times germier than the taxis. We didn’t cover that story at the time, figuring only germaphobes of the Howard Hughes or Howie Mandel ilk would care. But now that we’re all hypersensitized to pathogens, three novel technologies for disinfecting shared vehicles caught my full attention. The best-developed concept hails from Michigan-based supplier GHSP. Called Grenlite, it employs germicidal 254–264-nm-wavelength ultraviolet-C light that…

Thunderclouds threaten as our group stands in the middle of Johnson Valley OHV Area, looking at two pre-production 2021 Ford Broncos. One is a Cactus Gray four-door Badlands hardtop, but we can’t take our eyes off the Cyber Orange two-door Black Diamond with the removable roof fully removed. It looks utterly fabulous. A concept car come to life, driven straight off the auto show stand to an off-road paradise known for King of the Hammers. The consensus: Ford is gonna sell a million of these things. The Bronco—especially the papaya-colored small fry—just looks right on. Design This new truck, available in two- or four-door styles, resembles the old first-generation Bronco from the ’60s and ’70s without being slavish. The 2021 Bronco is fresh, futuristic, fun. It looks like a kid’s…

The shapes of these machines, especially in these colors, make children jump and squeal with joy—while most adults wish they weren’t quite so self-conscious so that they could do the same. Because you’re wondering, oh yes, some grownups act like kids around these things (yours truly first and foremost). This trio truly is a collection of rare, exotic beasts. Each one represents a topless version of its respective company’s near-pinnacle performance car. I say “near” because McLaren just unveiled the 765LT, Mercedes-AMG makes the GT R Pro, and Porsche, well, you just know there will soon be a GT2 RS that makes this car seem like a snail. Plus, all three manufacturers are in the hypercar business, to varying degrees (P1, Senna, Project One, 918 Spyder). The question, then, is,…

If you’re a subscriber to the MotorTrend app, over the past few weeks you may have seen our new original series, Hot Wheels Life Size, in which NASCAR and NHRA racer Nicole Lyons gets behind the wheel of—er—life-size versions of some of Hot Wheels’ wackiest toy cars, including Twin Mill, Bone Shaker, and the Darth Vader car. But back in the 1960s, when Mattel was creating the original Hot Wheels models, they did it the other way around with cars like the Custom Camaro based on actual vehicles. What makes the Original 16 lineup of Hot Wheels launched in 1968 both groundbreaking and fascinating, though, is that even the ones that look crazy enough to have sprung straight from the febrile imagination of a toy designer are based on actual…

Willy T. Ribbs isn’t a household name outside of racing circles. But he should be. During the 1980s, he was one of the fastest damn drivers around any racetrack, be it an oval, road course, or circuit. Ribbs had all the necessary items to become a world-renowned racer—except for the color of his skin. After showing great promise at age 22 in becoming British Formula Ford “Star Of Tomorrow” champion, Ribbs found progress in American racing to be slow going. Despite sponsors turning their backs and some pit crews slow-walking mechanical improvements or slow-talking communication, Ribbs still found a way to win races and contend for championships in Trans-Am and IMSA series racing. His only shot at the big time was qualifying for the 1991 and 1993 Indianapolis 500—the latter…

The Laws of Physics Why sim racing can never be as hard as the real thing “A mini car crash at every corner.” That’s how Mark Webber, nine-time grand prix winner, describes the battering a driver’s body takes at the wheel of a modern Formula 1 car. Why? Physics. Take Turn 13, the first part of the right-left flick onto pit straight at Montreal’s Circuit Gilles Villeneuve, where Webber finished in the top five in each of his past three races there with Red Bull Racing. Every lap he’d mash the brake pedal, applying 275 pounds of force through his left foot for just a fraction over 2 seconds, to slow the car from 210 mph to 80 mph in just 400 feet. The rate of deceleration? About 5 g.…