Sommaire pour January 2017 de Automobile

Bill P., Phoenix, AZ Where’s the radar? An arrow lights up, pointing either Ahead, to the side, or Behind. And, amazingly, it’s never wrong. Arnie R., Atlanta, GA So easy to operate, a box with one knob. No need to poke around at full-arm’s reach for little buttons the size of rice grains. Glenna R., Dallas, TX Love the arrows! Where’s the radar? They tell me every time. A detector without the arrows is like a car without headlights. Chas S., Charlotte, NC Situation Awareness you can trust. With the Radar Locator arrowing toward threats, and the Bogey Counter telling how many threats you face, V1 makes defense easy. Cal L., Trenton, NJ I’ve owned my V1 since 2001, and I’ve had it upgraded twice. I trust the arrows to…

STEVE JOBS IS LEGENDARY FOR making Apple the corporate giant it is today, but the real credit should go to former General Motors president and CEO Alfred P. Sloan Jr. Way back in the early 1940s, Sloan angled to boost slowing sales by instigating annual modelyear design changes to GM’s cars. It was a stroke of marketing brilliance—after all, no one wants to be the lout stuck with last year’s model, especially when the neighbor’s brand-new Chevy Stylemaster is right there in the next driveway, lording over yours with its totally updated radiator grille. Thus was born “planned obsolescence,” and we’ve been obsessively trading in perfectly good cars and trucks for the latest and greatest stuff ever since. That “game-changing” iPhone 8 you’re lusting after is on its way soon,…

MUNICH, GERMANY A PORSCHE PANAMERA 4S / FLYIN’ MIATA MX-5 Half an hour into my blast down the autobahn, the speedo needle dancing to 150 mph, I’m ready to confirm what my eyes told me the moment I laid eyes on the car: The new 2017 Porsche Panamera is the super sports fourdoor the original never was. From exterior styling to cabin design to engine and chassis performance, the new one gets it all right. There’s nothing else quite like it. I’ve never been a fan of the original Panamera, Porsche’s first foray into the world of four-door, all-wheel-drive performance cars. Yes, it drives well enough, and its cockpit is a dramatic, switch-filled riff on a Learjet’s, but—how to put this gently—the bodywork is about as pulse-raising as an afternoon…

AM: With the Concept Coupe and subsequent vehicles, you and your team appear to have absorbed and integrated the Scandinavian design sensibility that has impressed Americans for the past 60 or 70 years. Do you agree, and can you tell us how you are differentiating Swedish from German design? TI: Some would argue that the creator cannot also be the interpreter, but you have definitely captured our intentions with the S90. [Some say they’ve] always liked Volvos, despite their clunky appearance. We want to remove that caveat. We want how our cars look to be part of their appeal. In terms of Germany versus Sweden, I’m not sure that’s the case. It’s about designing the right car for Volvo. We are proudly Scandinavian, and so, of course, that is reflected…

FIAT’S RE-INTRODUCTION to the U.S. market has hit a bit of a rough patch. After an initial surge, sales of the 500 have cooled considerably, and the bulky 500L hasn’t exactly caught on. However, there is reason for renewed optimism. We’re digging the new Mazda MX-5 Miata-based 124 Spider (“Sports Car Saviors,” November 2016), and Fiat’s best hope for a near-term revival lies with the 500X, an all-new entry into the white-hot compactcrossover segment. The 500X is billed as an adventurous little machine aimed at youthful, do-anything types. You know, millennials. Does it have what it takes to stand out in the crowded field, to surprise, delight, and otherwise not bore us? We decided to find out by welcoming a 2016 Fiat 500X to our Four Seasons fleet. The specific…

Tom Tjaarda is an American designer born in 1934 and the son of John Tjaarda, Dutch designer of the prototype for what would become the 1936 Lincoln Zephyr. Tom famously based his career in Italy, working for many of the country’s top design houses where he penned cars such as the original Fiat 124 Spider and the De Tomaso Pantera. We grabbed some time with him at the Concorso Italiano during the 2016 Monterey Car Week. AM: Given your father’s profession, did you know you’d be an automotive designer? TT: No, I studied architecture. I wanted to be an architect, but my last year in college I designed a car, and that’s how I got involved with Carrozzeria Ghia and moved to Italy. It was kind of a natural thing;…

A DIGITAL RENDERING OF A JEEP GRAND Cherokee appears on the monitor. Suddenly, a virtual spray of water splashes over the vehicle. As it spreads across the Jeep’s profile, you see how the liquid flows and coagulates over sheetmetal, windscreen, and tires. It’s the kind of next-level simulation automakers increasingly deploy as they face mounting pressure to shave costs, increase efficiency, and stay ahead of regulatory curves. This technology can improve cooperation and collaboration between vehicle design and engineering teams so they can identify issues earlier in the development process. Exa is the company behind it all, and at the recent 2016 Paris auto show it showcased its latest developments. Founded in 1991, Exa counts most of the world’s top automakers among its clients. Exa normally licenses its PowerFlow software…

ULTRAHAPTIC GESTURE CONTROL Gesture control is already in the BMW 7 Series and will continue catalyzing change in dashboard design. With such a large selection of controls to interact with and only so many ways to gesture your hands, though, eye tracking may soon join the fray with a camera monitoring your eyes and changing the outcome of your gesture depending on where you’re looking. Porsche’s Mission E concept uses this technology, and engineers at Jaguar Land Rover hope to push the technology even further with ultrahaptics, a technology that monitors your fingers and directs ultrasonic pulses through the air toward your fingertips so you can feel vibration feedback.…

LIKE PAINTERS AND MUSICIANS, car designers are always being called upon to explain their work. And, as with these other creative types, the obligation inevitably gives rise to its own set of clichés. The analogizing of automotive forms to those of animals, wild and human, is perhaps the most common. Especially popular are references to large leaping cats and the contours of the female anatomy. I get this. Designers often look to impart a sense of motion, and nothing says motion like a lion coiled to leap—unless you’re a designer saying your design mimics a lion coiled to leap. Cars can be curvy or chiseled, svelte or fat, masculine or feminine, and you don’t even have to squint to see they have all been given faces and butts, features that…

GRAND JUNCTION, COLORADO How I wish the pioneers who first shoehorned big, American V-8s into small, lightweight roadsters could be here today. The creators of those unruly, poorly balanced little monsters would see my trembling hands and laugh, thinking I had scared myself witless with a gut-wrenching tankslapper. But I’m not scared, just unbelievably excited, stopped on this lonely back road in western Colorado only because a pair of mountain goats wandered in front of me. My fingers rap impatiently against the vibrating shift knob, staying in rhythm with the 525-hp crate engine’s loped idle as I wait to further explore Flyin’ Miata’s LS3-powered 2016 Mazda MX-5. This is one of the most communicative, engaging, and enchanting cars I’ve ever driven. I didn’t expect the car would be as good…

We gave the world motor industry every chance, from the Detroit show in January through the Mondial de l’Automobile in Paris in October— where a couple of spectacular French concept cars dazzled the local populace and impressed us as well. But from the time the Pininfarina H2 Speed appeared at the Geneva show in March, we thought it was pretty much a lock as Concept of the Year. Consider: It’s sleek, sporty in the extreme, beautifully so in the classical Pininfarina-Ferrari racing sports-car tradition. And it embodies advanced technology that makes it an almost totally non-polluting vehicle in use— provided the hydrogen gas that generates the energy for its electric drivetrain is obtained by dissociating oxygen from water using only solar energy. That qualifier “almost” takes into account the fair…

VOLUME 31. NO. 10. JANUARY 2017 Automakers spend millions on building physical prototypes in the run-up to production. According to Remondi, “We can help them avoid late-stage problems: thermal-, noise-related issues. Poor compromises get made when you find those problems late.” During its Paris demonstration, Exa had us throw on some 3D glasses and showed us a 4-foot-tall illustration of a present-generation Honda Civic Type R. What looked to be pushpins started shooting over my shoulder and down through the Type R’s lower grille opening. From there, the pins entered the engine bay and changed color depending on how and where the air flowed. The majority of them pinged off a shield and into the brake caliper and rotor area. The point of the simulation was to see how to…

Not one of the people running Cadillac as a separate General Motors entity out of a trendy Manhattan coffee bar appears to know what Cadillac was— irrelevant, they say, we want to be a luxury brand, not just a car company—or what it should be. There have been many fumbling attempts to conceptualize a successful 21st-century Cadillac, some of them well back in the 1980s (remember the Voyage?), but not a single good concept has been followed by a worthy product. No Ciel four-door convertible, no Elmiraj, and— above all—no Cadillac Sixteen. I’m not an unstinting Bob Lutz admirer as so many journalists are, but the guy does indeed know and love cars and had truly great instincts as to what should be built. His Sixteen was a near-perfect modern…