Car and Driver May 2019

THE SUPRA RETURNS The new Toyota Supra isn’t butt ugly, but it’s darned close [“Supracar!” February 2019]. The Z4 it’s based on isn’t exactly beautiful itself, but at least it isn’t as nasty as the Supra. The Japanese have a way of taking a great car and rendering it unappealing, and with the Supra, that’s just what they’ve done. I thought that after the blandness of the 86, they’d have learned something, but obviously they haven’t. Yikes! —Steve AndersonTucson, AZ Instruction on how to screw up the evolution of one of the most iconic cars of the last 30 years: Turn to page 012 of the February edition of Car and Driver to find out. —Gaetan TardifFossambault-sur-le-Lac, QC I’m banning the word “iconic” from here on out, everyone. Even the Quebecois are using it now—Ed. Thank…

I read in another magazine that the odometer in a new German car can be off by 25 miles for every 1000 miles driven. So it may show 1000 miles on the odometer after having traveled only 975 miles. In many new cars, the warranty runs out when the odometer shows 36,000 miles, which would be 900 miles short of the true distance. On a per-car basis, that’s a bit less coverage. However, if that company sells 100,000 of that model, it really adds up. If this holds true for all cars made by that company, well, you get the idea. This also makes the fuel mileage appear better than it is. —Paul Messier, Portsmouth, NH It’s not just German cars. We perform an odometer calibration on every vehicle we test and…

IT’S GETTING HARD TO KEEP UP with progress at Aston Martin. The English sports-car maker used to operate at such a leisurely pace that it took more than 70 years from its 1913 founding to produce its 10,000th car. Now, with the impending launch of the DBX crossover, it could soon be producing that number of vehicles every two years. But the biggest surprise in Aston’s five-year plan is a new family of mid-engined models. You already know about the Valkyrie, the Adrian Newey fever dream that looks set to become the most capable track car ever to wear a license plate. The next fruit of that collaboration with the Red Bull Formula 1 team, the upcoming AM-RB 003, will be less extreme than the Valkyrie but more extreme than…

YOU MIGHT THINK a company that makes steering wheels would view automated vehicles the way an ex-Blockbuster exec looks at streaming video. But Joyson Safety Systems, a supplier of steering wheels to many automakers, is looking to make its products an integral part of an automated future. Only cars at the tiptop of the automated-driving pyramid, known as Level 5, will come remotely close to the driverless, steering-wheel-less transit pods of our night mares. And mainstream consumer cars may never get there. The steering wheel, then, isn’t going anywhere—in fact, it’s a crucial element of lower-level automated-driving technologies. Joyson supplies steering wheels for vehicles equipped with Cadillac’s Super Cruise and BMW’s Extended Traffic Jam Assistant, the only systems currently on sale in the U.S. that will accelerate, brake, and steer the…

THE WORST-CASE SCENARIO IN restoring a classic isn’t that a rare part might be hugely expensive. It’s when the part is out of production, there’s no aftermarket equal, and junkyards come up empty. Advancements in 3-D-printing technology mean that you might find someone who will knock out a replacement part for a minuscule customer base, but the variety of printers, design software, and operator motivations make it hard to be sure that the part you’re commissioning will measure up to the original. Now, though, car manufacturers are waking up to the technology’s potential. Brands such as Porsche and Mercedes are employing it to reproduce hard-to-find parts—such as window regulator stops, oil-pump covers, and mirror stands [see “Mirror Mirror”]—to the same rigorous standards that applied to the originals. Here’s a look…

A HALF-CENTURY LATER, IT’S among the most indelible images in American sports. Mario Andretti, a 29-year-old two-time USAC national champion, had just won the 1969 Indianapolis 500 and pulled his turbocharged Ford-V-8-powered Hawk III onto Victory Lane. There, Andy Granatelli, the car’s owner and CEO of STP, looking like a ripe tomato in his STP blazer, planted a sloppy kiss on Andretti’s cheek. That kiss changed American racing. “He was so dynamic and visible in every way,” Andretti recalls about the Dallas-born Granatelli. “And he certainly paved the way for other brands to follow suit, who saw what he did with a product that’s, you know, not 100 percent necessary. He created a euphoria about STP so that you could not do without it.” And he’d done it by using racing…