Table of contents for January 2016 in Automobile

GIVEN THAT ROBERT CUMBERFORD IS THESE days usually ensconced in his fabulous French farmhouse, it’s not often I see him face to face. Rarer still is a chance for us to walk around a car, where I can watch the man work. I had such an opportunity recently during the Los Angeles reveal of the Hyundai Vision G Coupe Concept, this month’s “By Design” subject. Like many of us in attendance, I fixated on the door handle, which is (gasp!) not on the door. While Robert had more than a few objections to the Vision G’s overall execution, he actually thought the handle’s placement in the panel next to the door an intriguing conceit, which surprised me. Indeed, eyeballing the car was another lesson in how Cumberford and other designers…

IF ONE CAN CALL A BATTLE WITH cancer a “personal Vietnam,” as writer and critic Susan Sontag once did, then maybe it is fair to term the lyin’-cheatin’-pollutin’ scandal that Volkswagen brought upon its house its personal nuclear holocaust. I mean, kaboom: VW’s loud proclamation that its new line of turbodiesel engines could be poster children for a magical new era of clean diesel and environmental friendliness—when they were neither—was bad, a page out of George Orwell. But then actually contriving through the use of secret computer code to trick government regulators into thinking for years VW diesels were squeaky clean when they weren’t even close, well, that was something special. In the fickle world of 21st-century media outrage, the outlandish scheme quickly outstripped things like Tom Brady’s footballs and…

If you hear someone call the 2017 Audi A4 boring, smack him in the back of the head. That clown doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Strap yourself into the A4, and you’ll find the crisp new Virtual Cockpit making up the instrument cluster and a large and equally beautiful display atop the center stack. Why do you need two nav screens? That’s like asking why your phone needs a screen at all. It didn’t, until it had one, and then you couldn’t live without it. What makes the A4 special this time around is the fun you’ll have behind the wheel. This is the best A4 in that department by far. Even under heavy provocation, you’re not going to find any understeer even though the whole engine block is…

BILL MORRIS WAS Land Rover’s chief engineer when the Defender was new, and we’ve enlisted his aid to clear up a mystery that surrounds these Land Rovers of the 1980s and early 1990s: when and how they first came to wear the name. For many, every Land Rover with the profile and layout of the Wilks brothers’ 1948 original is a Defender, an easy assumption as the 67-year-old design prepares to “retire” from today’s Land Rover lineup. But the name didn’t become official until the 4x4 was almost 40 years old, and it wasn’t actually written on a Land Rover until 1990. “The story started in the 1970s,” Morris says. “I’d been the engineer responsible for the Land Rover Series III, so I was in the right place to experience…

2005 Ferrari 575 Maranello Superamerica Sold at $357,500 S/N ZFFGT61A650142572 BLACK OVER TAN leather interior. 532-hp, DOHC 5.7-liter V-12; six-speed automatic transmission. As seen at Bonhams, this Ferrari is less than 13,000 miles from new. It has been very well cared for, and the interior looks new. THE STORY BEHIND THE SALE: The Ferrari 575 is the second generation of the 550 Maranello, the retro-theme car with which Ferrari brought back a classic front-engine, V-12-powered coupe to its model lineup after a decades-long hiatus. The 575’s bodywork carries a few more scoops and flares than the 550’s similar Pininfarinadesigned shape, and it also features some of Ferrari’s latest technology of the times, as seen here in the racing-style, single-clutch, six-speed, F1 automated transmission with shift paddles on the steering wheel.…

“This is my jeep. I’ve had it for 35 years. It’s an American Willys MB, built in 1942 for the American Army. I come down here in it every year.” “It’s the only place in the world where you can experience this kind of stuff. Everyone is dressing up. This is the cream you see, the top-class cars you can find from everywhere. Everything is just right.” “I sing mainly ’50s stuff. A bit of rock ’n’ roll, some slow stuff. I like the older stuff. It’s good fun.” “I like the airplanes. I quite love the Spitfires and the Mustangs. My favorite bit is that they shoot bullets.” “She’s getting victory rolls, a 1940s style that’s quite high and involves a lot of backcombing and strategically placed hair grips,…

It was a nice occasion, totally unexpected: a chance to see a new concept car before any public presentation. The invitation was especially attractive since the car was coming from Hyundai, a firm with two top designers in charge, Peter Schreyer overall and Chris Chapman heading the California studio. Even so, my initial reaction to the car was, “How could this happen?” Reflecting later, I know how: Someone unqualified got between the creators and the car. The best designers in the world can’t save a project if an executive with more influence than design sense is somewhere in the decision tree, imposing his uninformed will as a sign of power. I know of a European project where the design’s graceless rear was imposed by the chief executive, the awkward front…

THANKS FOR JEFF STORK’S VERY WELL-RESEARCHED article, “Harley Earl’s Designing Women” (November 2015). I joined General Motors from the Pratt Institute the same year as four of the women. I also worked with Ruth Glennie, who became assistant studio head in Chevrolet interiors. Please consider following up this article with a report of other women currently working in car design. As a former director of transportation design at the Center for Creative Studies in Detroit, several students of mine are making a real contribution to the industry, including Cecile Giroux at Chrysler, Terese Tant at Cadillac, and Liz Wetzel at Buick. Te car industry needs more women designers. CARL L. OLSEN Detroit, Michigan COVER TO COVER I’ve been buying car magazines as long as I can remember. I have never…

Let’s get one thing clear: The 2016 Honda Civic sedan is a better car than the one it replaces— significantly better. It’s better to look at, better to drive, better to ride in with passengers, and it’s stuffed to the roof with forward-thinking features. From what we’ve experienced of it thus far, we’re convinced this Civic has potential for greatness. In case you didn’t know, Honda consistently sells more than 300,000 Civics a year, so the launch of the 2016 Civic is a huge deal. Honda was stung by the criticism its last-generation compact initially received for being cheap and bland, so if Team Civic had one objective with the new car, it was to get its mojo back. Every generation Civic has had an internal code name its engineers…

Design Analysis: 1. Seen with the finned “cans” behind the lenses, the taillights look like something out of a 1930s Flash Gordon comic. 2. The “mustache” form in the rear is quite a bit more refined looking than the front one and integrates well into what is a very complex rear fascia. FORD GT A MONUMENT OF STYLE, INSIDE AND OUT The latest installment of Automobile’s Design of the Year was almost too easy for us to pick. The Ford GT was the most exciting, most innovative, and most surprising meant-forproduction car to make an appearance in 2015, period. No matter how you consider it—as a front-line competition car or a fabulous high-performance coupe—Ford’s decision to return to serious international sports-car racing 50 years after GT40s first showed up at…

During lunch one day in 1976, 23-year-old Steve Kouracos was sitting outside Sam Foose’s Project Design custom body shop in Southern California eating a sandwich when a long roadster pulled up to the curb. It had a big grille and flowing fenders like an old Duesenberg, but it was new and in desperate need of a paintjob. “Are you the painter?” asked Alain Clénet, the man behind the wheel. Kouracos had worked at the shop for about four years as a painter’s assistant but had never been allowed to paint bodywork. Foose, auto designer Chip’s father, was the man with the spray gun; Kouracos sanded and masked. He stopped chewing his sandwich and said, yes, he was indeed the painter. “Would you come to my home and help me paint…

This is the first public reveal of the Rezvani Beast. We are the first media outlet in the world to see it, and we’re the first to drive it, as well. There are no bright auto show lights, and this is no catered press event. Instead, we’re outside a Starbucks on an uncomfortably humid morning in Irvine, California, about 15 miles from Rezvani Motors headquarters. That’s right. The car named “Beast” is built here in Southern California. Ferris Rezvani, the car’s creator and company founder, is trying to give me the scoop, but he’s finding it tough to answer more than a few of my questions without passersby barraging us with queries of their own about the waist-high, doorless, carbon-fiber-bodied sports car parked streetside. The most asked question is, “What…

As the music pumped and the lights flashed in the dark warehouse, Elon Musk came onstage in front of hundreds of Tesla enthusiasts and did that Silicon Valley strut, as all tech executives since Apple’s Steve Jobs have learned to do. And now that the number of cars Tesla sells each year is closer to 50,000 than 5,000, the performance seems kind of charming. And it became even better when Musk beckoned the Tesla Model X onto the stage. First revealed as a concept car in February 2012, the Model X is now trickling into production, and we had a chance to drive one around the block, which by circumstance happened to be Model X no. 001, Musk’s own car. Like the dualmotor, all-wheel-drive version of the Model S sedan…

Much has been made of the disastrous reign of Dany Bahar, the former CEO of Lotus Cars who departed under a cloud in June 2012. Since the brand’s wildly ambitious multicar reveal at the 2010 Paris auto show, the company nearly went belly-up and, in the process, all but disappeared from the U.S. market (see sidebar). But a far more bizarre and telling spectacle came pre-Bahar, when journalists tried to climb into the first-generation Lotus Evora back in 2008. We’d begged Lotus for years to build this car—a larger, more usable sports car that could take on the likes of the Porsche Cayman. But unfathomably, it was even trickier to get into and out of than an Elise. Just like that, Lotus narrowed its potential customer base to a sliver.…

We were stopped at a red light when a woman on a Harley-Davidson pulled up next to us. “Why are the handlebars vibrating like that?” my wife asked. “The whole bike is vibrating. Is it old? Broken? Or what?” No, I explained. The idea is that a Harley is slightly untamed, wild—a badass beast you must control. Which brings us to a conversation I imagine must have happened in Japan, probably at Yamaha circa 1979, when the marketers brought in a Harley to show designers and engineers. I imagine them looking at the V-twin engine and frowning; there are more efficient designs. Once the Harley shuddered to life and started vibrating, I imagine them saying, “We can fix that!” Followed by some marketing guy trying to explain that, no, the…

Salt water laps over the hood as we wade through the churning sea, and the engine note slowly drops to a dull, sickening groan. A mile of North Atlantic swills behind us, the same in front, and even though the Land Rover Defender 90 has tussled and bludgeoned its way across more than 216,000 miles during its 20 years, this might be its last few moments of life. Two days earlier we began our testimonial tour to celebrate the life of the Defender, which, when it ceases production early next year, will end a 67-year bloodline that began with the Series 1 Land Rover and has yielded more than 2 million vehicles. A replacement is expected around 2018, but it will be an allnew model. Our aim is simple: Test…

From the moment it replaced the Catera, the Cadillac CTS established itself as the brand’s first credible shot at taking on BMW, Mercedes-Benz, and Audi as a competitive luxury brand. More than a few believe the present CTS, launched in the 2014 model year, is already on the German competition’s rear bumper, thanks in part to Cadillac chief engineer David Leone’s adherence to Lotus founder Colin Chapman’s “add lightness” dictum. Though longer in wheelbase and overall length than the second-generation model, the alchemical use of aluminum, high-strength steel and strategic body reinforcement on the latest CTS has dramatically lowered the car’s overall weight, making it the lightest car in its class. We were impressed with the new CTS when we first got into it, so much so that we named…

THE INFO YEARS PRODUCED: 1964-1966 I NUMBER SOLD: 21,093 I ORIGINAL PRICE: $4,639 (NADA) I VALUE TODAY: $16,335-$36,885 (NADA AVG) Here it is, the season of the Rose Parade. And as you watch the dignitaries roll by in classic cars, it occurs to you that it would be more fun to be in the parade than watch it. Maybe you should drive the kind of classic that appeals to parade organizers everywhere, only scaled for mayors, prom queens, and Cub Scouts, not astronauts on Fifth Avenue. Not the 1952 Chrysler Imperial Parade Phaeton built for President Eisenhower, now a $100,000 car owned by the Petersen Museum in Los Angeles, but something elegant yet affordable, like this 1965 Ford Thunderbird convertible. In 1958 Ford designer Bill Boyer and his team transformed…