Car and Driver November 2017

“THE CIVIC Si AND THE NEW BMW 8-SERIES CONCEPT HAVE VERY SIMILAR AND UGLY FRONT ENDS, BUT ONLY THE CIVIC GETS CALLED UGLY.” GREEN MACHINE The green Civic Si on the cover of the August 2017 issue looks like the Hulk ripped his pants and tried to hide his undercarriage. —Lukas Lin Anaheim Hills, CA Kinda ugly? Against the current pantheon of ugly that includes the snowplow grille of the new Toyota Camry, the Civic Si rises to the top. Atrocious. —Russell Buonasera Houston, TX Who are you calling ugly? So youze guys at Car and Driver put the new Civic Si on the cover, and you have the nerve to say it’s “still kinda ugly.” Let me tell you something . . . nobody gets off calling dis car ugly. Protruding taillights evoke the daring look…

Last year, I got a call from a strange outer-borough number. The voice on the line was immediately recognizable as America’s foremost lateral thinker, Malcolm Gladwell. Turns out, he’s a C/D reader. He remembered the testing we’d done on unintended acceleration and wanted to do a piece for his Revisionist History podcast on why people are liable to press the wrong pedal in panic situations. I guess he liked working with us, because he agreed to edit the bulk of this issue, the 31 pages we’ve devoted to investigating the driverless car [beginning on page 058]. The driverless car has beguiled the sages and confounded the media mandarins for five years. The tech is here, right? Lane keeping, adaptive cruise control, automated emergency braking, sentient steering—that’s all front-loaded into most every highly…

THE THIRD ITERATION of BMW’s Z4 roadster is just around the corner, and it represents a new approach to the way Werke does business. This roadster has been co-developed with Toyota, which will market its version of the car as the reborn Supra. The Concept Z4 also indicates a stylistic departure from every past generation of the company’s smallish droptop, with the long-hood proportions and sweeping body lines of the outgoing car reshuffled. Heck, the concept even reinterprets BMW’s familiar double headlights. Together with the recent 8-series preview, this Z4 points clearly to a new direction for BMW’s design language, one that emphasizes angles over curves. Departure though it may be, the Concept Z4 is a looker. STYLING Trading the flowing, slightly bulbous lines of its predecessor for an aggressive chiseling throughout,…

SCANT BITS OF TECHNOLOGY trickle down from racing to street cars anymore. Multimatic’s Dynamic Suspensions Spool Valve dampers are one of the few. The Canadian supplier’s dampers first appeared in the 2002 CART series, then migrated to Formula 1, and now populate about half the Le Mans starting grid. Aston Martin’s limited-edition One-77 was the first production car fitted with DSSV dampers and Chevrolet’s fifth-generation Camaro Z/28 followed in 2014. With their blend of street comfort and track-ready attitude, DSSV dampers are like shampoo and conditioner in one. Currently you can find them in the Ford GT, the Mercedes-AMG GT, and the Chevy Camaro ZL1 1LE and Colorado ZR2. Their simplicity is a thing of engineering beauty, so we uglied one up by cutting it in half with a band…

THINK THAT BLINKING RED LIGHT ON YOUR DASH doesn’t do a damned thing? Anti-theft measures on modern cars have prevented millions of hot-wiring, steering-lock-snapping thefts over the last two decades. Even as our swelling population registers a record number of light vehicles, people can’t steal them like it’s 1991, when vehicle thefts peaked at nearly 1.7 million. Heck, they don’t even steal them like it’s 2005, when the rate of motor-vehicle thefts was 61 percent higher than it was in 2014. (The data here is compiled annually by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Since it’s a government agency, NHTSA runs a little slow; 2014 is the most recent year for which it has analyzed data.) But determined thieves still prey on late-model cars and even brand-new ones. NHTSA ranks the…

FORMULA E, THE ELECTRIC formula-car series, seemed like a doomed political obligation when it made its debut in 2014. But its fourth season is set to kick off in December in Hong Kong, and in its first three seasons, Formula E attracted major automakers Audi, Jaguar, and Renault. In July alone, three more announced plans to join, and Audi formalized its intent to up its involvement, going from a partnership with one of the original teams to fielding a factory entry this season. Doomed? Hardly. BMW will contest the 2018–2019 season, with Mercedes-Benz and Porsche following a year later. Mercedes will be supplementing its effort in Formula 1, but Porsche is leaving the hybrid-racing program that gave it three consecutive Le Mans wins to prioritize Formula E. “There is a big groundswell…