Car and Driver March 2020

C TO THE EIGHT I took one look at the December cover of the new Cor-vette and tore it open to find the answer to the question “New, but improved?” I read the first line of the road test and Rich Ceppos lost me [“The Big Question”]. “High expectations”? Okay. With you so far. But then “Adele’s next album”? Really? What planet is this? I almost chucked the whole issue. —Scott Slivka Liberty Township, OH Hello from the other side—Ed. No manual shifter in the new Vette? Having a manual shifter is not about believing that it will enable the driver to outperform the paddles. It is about the pure and simple joy of shifting. After all, paddle-controlled acceleration makes a minuscule difference in performance and will rarely, if ever, be used on the…

Do engines that feature cylinder deactivation always shut down the same cylinders? If so, I’m wondering about the wear and tear on the cylinders that are always activated versus those that shut down. The term “cylinder deactivation” is a bit misleading because none of the pistons stop moving. What actually happens is that the valves of specific cylinders are deactivated. Some engines, such as the Volkswagen Group’s 4.0-liter V-8, run the same cylinders when the engine operates as a V-4. The most sophisticated cylinder-deactivation system on the market, General Motors’ Dynamic Fuel Management that’s fitted to some of its V-8s, has 17 possible firing orders, allowing the engine to vary which cylinders fire and which don’t. GM also employs a simpler system that’s similar to the VW Group’s setup, and Joe…

When Cadillac showed the Escala in 2016—the third in a string of gorgeous full-size concept cars to escape the brand’s design studio in the ’10s—we thought it might mean that General Motors’ halo brand was finally going to make the Mercedes-Benz S-class fighter it needed to compete in the luxury market. Pieces of the Escala’s design have begun to filter down to the Cadillac lineup, but the true production form of that show car won’t arrive as a chauffeur-worthy sedan. Instead, it comes as the 2021 Escalade. Like earlier generations, the fifth-gen Escalade will share its platform with GM’s other large SUVs, the Chevrolet Sub-urban and Tahoe and the GMC Yukon. Magnetorheological dampers come standard on all but the base Escalade, and a set of height-adjustable air springs will be available.…

When an older Porsche 911’s rear end succumbs to snap oversteer and Newtonian physics, you might just find yourself in a field. Getting back to the road usually requires a humiliating call for a tow. But what if you could drive out of the muck yourself? What if a field is exactly where you want to be? Porsche began building rally-car 911s in the ’60s, then lifted them in the ’70s and ’80s for off-road races like the East African Safari Rally and the Paris-Dakar. But until recently, few private owners were interested in turning their garage queens into something that could run up a mountain and back down into the holler. Racer Leh Keen decided he wanted to do just that, so he formed the Keen Project and modified his…

Driving is dangerous. You know it, we know it, your cousin who sells insurance makes a living off it. But cars are such a normal and crucial part of our lives that it’s easy to forget that disaster is just a distracted driver away. Here with the gruesome reminder is the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and its report on traffic fatalities in the United States in 2018. First, the good news: Fewer people died on the roads in 2018 than in 2016 or 2017 even though there were some 280,000 more car crashes overall in 2018 than in the previous year. This suggests that cars are getting safer even if our driving isn’t. Now the bad news: Compared with 2010’s statistics, there has been a 46 percent rise in pedestrian deaths…

In the quest to make SUVs handle as well as cars do, Mercedes-Benz has overshot the target. The company’s E-Active Body Control (E-ABC) suspension can lean the vehicle into turns, similar to the way a motorcycle corners. New to the lineup for 2020 and available in the GLE and GLS, E-ABC uses hydraulic pumps driven by 48-volt motors to adjust ride height, counteract body roll, and stabilize the vehicle under crosswinds. Going around a bend, an equipped SUV can lean into the turn by controlling the suspension position, tipping unnaturally into the corner instead of tilting (body roll) to the outside the way physics intended. The overall effect is entirely unexpected—you’ve never been in an SUV that corners like this. PRESSURE POINTS Vehicles with E-ABC are equipped with air springs and adaptive…