Car and Driver August 2016

Backfires: I have received no more than one or two letters in my life that were worth the postage. —Henry David Thoreau STILL WAITING Better recheck your specs! The 2017 Chevy Camaro ZL1 will sport a 10-speed automatic, not the eight-speed! —Thomas Peterson Bay City, MI You got us, Peterson, our intel was short two speeds—Ed. I bet you guys are feeling pretty foolish after picking a Camaro as the top car worth waiting for, when, in less than a week, more than 300,000 people put a grand down to be on the waiting list for the Tesla Model 3. —FranÇois deVilliers San Jose, CA In your preview of the 2017 ZL1, I don’t agree that the Ford Mustang Shelby GT350 and R models are the ZL1’s competition since they’re naturally aspirated. I think the 2015 Z/28…

GERMAN DESIGN IS SUPPOSED to be about restraint, about form following function. Bombastic flourishes and stylistic middle fingers are typically verboten; Mercedes-Benz design chief Gorden Wagener is fond of telling his staff to pull lines out of their designs. But with the AMG GT R, they went ahead and added a few, and you won’t hear us complaining. The be-winged, be-splittered GT R exudes just the right amount of menace for AMG’s new range topper. POWERTRAIN Under that mile-long hood, the GT R sports a twin-turbo V-8 based on the one in lesser AMG GTs, but with a revised intake, new forged aluminum pistons, and a higher compression ratio. The output dial gets turned up, from 503 horses to 577, and from 479 pound-feet of torque to 516. A lighter dual-mass flywheel…

IF YOU’RE OLD ENOUGH, you’ll remember a time when the cheapest cars on the market could be purchased devoid of options. Scarlet letters of shame were assigned to four-wheel drum brakes, hubcaps on steel wheels, and a big delete plate over where the big-shot edition’s air-conditioning controls would be. Times have changed, and so has the list of basic options. Wideranging consumer demand for gadgets and amenities has helped amortize their costs, such that on many models, it’s simply not worth it for the automaker to design and manufacture, say, a door panel with space for both a hand crank and power-window mechanisms. It’s one case of the trickle-down theory actually working; we don’t miss the days of cranking the window up with one hand while helping it with the…

DESPITE OUR BEST EFFORTS, the clutch, that fantastic frictional fuse between engine and transmission that has served us so long, has a dim future. With the manual gearbox critically endangered and an industrywide focus on efficiency, the smartest minds in engineering are now hellbent on excising energysapping friction discs, even those in dualclutch automatics. Dan Dorsch, a Ph.D. candidate and National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow in the mechanicalengineering program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is one of those minds. In April, he won the LemelsonMIT “Drive it!” gradstudent prize, awarded to the design demonstrating the best potential for societal benefit, economic success, and environmental impact. Dorsch’s design is a hybridvehicle transmission that replaces the traditional clutch or torque converter with a dog gear, using interlocking teeth rather than friction…

CERTIFIED-USED-CAR PROGRAMS are a bumping side business for most automakers, but they tend to trade in late-model vehicles. For seven luxury brands in the heart of a surging collector market, though, factory restoration and certification operations are now full-time divisions unifying formerly separate parts, service, and archival departments. Their advantage over independent shops? They’ll recreate many parts from the original tooling—sometimes even with the original workers—and bless the car with a certificate that could add thousands or even millions to the price at auction time. Even though he runs one of those independent shops, Wayne Carini, longtime restorer and host of Chasing Classic Cars, sums up one possible appeal: “People buying cars now, they’re not car people. So who do they trust? It’s a stamp, a guarantee.” 001. ASTON MARTIN WORKS YEAR…

In 2005, I wrote a true-crime book called God Wants You To Roll, the story of two California teens—Robert Gomez and James Nichols—who sold $21 million worth of nonexistent cars to 4000 buyers. The cars typically sold for $1000 or $2000, and some were quite spiffy—a Lamborghini and a couple of Porsches, as I recall. Well, “spiffy” if vehicular ghosts in the heated imaginations of two dead-end security guards are spiffy. They kept the con percolating for five years, then were busted and tried in Kansas City, Missouri. The trial lasted the better part of a month, until the boys both drew 20-plus years in prison. A more entertaining month I have never spent. Of the two perps, Robert was the more flamboyant. I had lunch with him one day, and…