Car and Driver September 2021

DOG DAYS Best picture of the year? The Oscar goes to James Lipman with a huge assist from Lemon [“Good Dog,” May 2021]. —J. Peter SchererNewport Beach, CA Man’s best friend comes to the rescue again. —Nick AndalRenton, WA The cover photo of the M4 schnoz would be unpardonable if not for the one with the dog blocking the offending portion of the car. That photo is so good that all the people who complained that you have an obvious BMW bias will now write in to apologize. —Ray BenCalifornia, MO They’ve moved on to accusing us of having a Porsche bias—Ed. I plan to frame that great photo of Lemon! —Lane NapoliAlexandria, VA Please ask Lipman to take more pics of Lemon. Give me some backstory on this hound. —Robert BrooksRamstein, Germany Like most influencers, he is on Instagram. You can…

You’re a conflicted bunch. I mean, we knew that already, given your letters to Ed., but it came into focus this month. For this issue, we wanted a read on how life has changed for American drivers, so we pushed out a survey to get a broad look at what’s happening outside our home-office walls. Many Car and Driver readers expressed a surprising amount of excitement about how EVs will boost performance, but you’re also bummed about a future with less driver engagement. For example: John Kerekes of Pittsford, New York, said that when thinking about the future of cars, he’s most excited about “electric sports cars with rapid acceleration.” What worries him? “The death of manual transmissions.” Of course, EVs almost never come with manual transmissions, so to be excited about…

The International Union for Conservation of Nature says more than 37,400 species are threatened with extinction. Big V-8s in small cars and unexpected off-roaders are not on the ledger, but if they were, we’d expect to see them listed as “near threatened,” defined by the conservation union as “species close to the threatened thresholds or that would be threatened without ongoing conservation measures.” Since high-horse V-8s can still be spotted in Land Rovers (Range Rover, Range Rover Sport, Defender), Jeeps (Grand Cherokee, Wrangler Rubicon 392), Cadillacs (CT5-V Blackwing), Lexuses (IS500 F Sport), and Dodges (Hellcat everything), to name just a few, they’re clearly not yet extinct. Possibly, they’re not even endangered. On the automotive watchlist, V-8s are still healthier than the manual transmission, but they’re roaming the land in fewer…

THE PRIZE Catalytic converters are hot. The National Insurance Crime Bureau recorded 2347 thefts of the emissions-cleaning devices in December 2020, up from 578 a year earlier. Thieves are after the precious metals inside that change highly toxic pollutants in exhaust into less harmful gases. The price of one of those metals, rhodium, spiked as high as $30,000 per troy ounce (slightly heavier than a standard ounce) last year due to an existing shortage exacerbated by the pandemic. A single cat contains about $400 worth of rhodium. THE JOB The theft is typically a two-person job. One of the bandits jacks up the car and extracts the cat with a pipe cutter or a reciprocating saw. The accomplice drives the getaway car. THE STRATEGY The crime often takes under three minutes. Thieves tend to target…

As we write this, the House of Representatives has agreed to a slimmed-down version of President Biden’s proposed infrastructure plan. The bill sets aside $7.5 billion to build a national network of 500,000 EV charging stations, many of which would be in rural and low-income areas. Regardless of whether the bitterly divided Senate will allow his plan to come to fruition, other government initiatives and businesses are driving the construction of charging stations across the country. But where will they go? That depends on what’s used to determine the optimal network layout, according to Mehrnaz Ghamami, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at Michigan State University. She led a team of researchers to develop a plan for optimizing electric-vehicle charging in Michigan. Their proposal suggests first putting stations between…

For 10 years, the fourth-generation Chevrolet Camaro dominated Mustangs on the street and the strip as it bridged the gap between GM’s legacy-small-block era and its LS-powered future. The last Camaro to offer T-tops, the fourth gen paid tribute to the windblown, big-hair ’80s while its sleek and stylized body looked forward to the wind-tunnel-optimized days ahead. As ’90s cars become collectible, this Camaro’s aero emphasis and V-8 options make it both a fun driver and a worthy investment that (we think) hasn’t quite reached its potential. Muscle-car fans in search of a good deal should focus on the initial Z28 with the 275-hp LT1 or the SS model with the 305-hp V-8 that came out three years later. For those with a bigger budget, the 1998–2002 Camaros borrow the Corvette’s…