Table of contents for September/October 2017 in Automobile

“The best car in the world.” Rolls-Royce used that phrase for its automobiles long ago, and in terms of solid engineering and precision manufacturing it was likely true. And those cars were certainly highly impressive, with the top models—called Phantoms from 1925 on—truly imposing. Alas, very few Rolls-Royce cars were really very good looking in their times, and truly beautiful ones were rare indeed. Imposing, yes. Symbolic of quality, yes. But toward the end of the company's British ownership, Rolls-Royce and sisters-under-the-skin Bentley models were rather like Gloria Swanson’s aged character in “Sunset Boulevard”—still imperious but well past it, faded at the edges and threadbare There is no question BMW ownership and engineering supervision have bestowed a new grandeur on the hallowed badge. Or, more likely, it enabled Rolls-Royce to…

WHEN TO EXPECT IT: SUMMER 2020 IN 2016 the car-making industry saw its seventh consecutive year of record sales in the U.S. with 17.55 million purchases in all. So far in 2017 the numbers seem to have finally plateaued, with analysts forecasting a final total closer to 17 million—still not too shabby. Various social, political, and economic factors are driving the slight decline, but don’t blame it on a lack of interesting, exciting, and appealing new vehicles designed to grab our attention. Indeed, the following section is filled with more than 100 cars, crossovers, SUVs, and trucks that are either on sale now or will be within a few years. Even so, this lineup is not exhaustive in terms of everything coming down the pipe. It is composed of the top…

THE CARS MATERIALIZE out of the predawn darkness, and the high-pitched whir and clatter of air-cooled engines mark them as Porsches. Here we are in Los Angeles on a Sunday in May as an atypical rain shower is just leaving town, and it’s pretty much like so many other weekend gatherings of Porsches and Porsche people. Of course, there are a couple of notable exceptions to what you might expect. First, the cars are not all perfect. Second, the people are not all old. Luftgekühlt first came together in 2014 when two friends in L.A. put together a kind of small, invitation-only Cars and Coffee event for their friends, some of them car people and some not. Patrick Long, a professional sports-car racer under contract to Porsche Motorsport North America,…

STANDING IN A dark photo studio in downtown Los Angeles, we suddenly hear a voice. Her tone soft, seductive, and slightly eerie, a woman whispers the words on her script, purple prose written by Rolls-Royce to boast about its rose-colored past and the idyllic future it imagines. She ends with, “Today, we become tomorrow.” Overhead lights brighten, and a two-tone Rolls-Royce Phantom comes into view. A thoughtful redesign of the marque’s flagship model, it’s not immediately apparent that this eighth-generation Phantom is a platformup project. It doesn’t look dramatically different from today’s Phantom, stale after 14 years on the market. Probably because Rolls-Royce engineers and designers were faced with this conundrum: modernize Rolls-Royce’s longest-running nameplate while retaining the model’s classic elegance. Rolls-Royce calls the Phantom “the conveyance of choice for…

RUMMAGE THROUGH YOUR car’s glove box, ignoring the piles of old receipts, the owner’s manual, and maybe a longforgotten Nirvana CD, and you’ll notice there’s something missing. Something that, seemingly overnight, vanished into history. With the swift development of in-car navigation and then Google in the palm of your hand, physical maps have faded into obsolescence. Artist Matthew Cusick, 47, is instead finding new avenues for exploration in their faded pages. Born in New York City and now living in Dallas, Texas, Cusick’s fascination with history manifests itself in dizzying collages of old cars and somehow-beautiful vistas of highway networks. Each one made up of numerous map scraps, sometimes of the same location from various points in time, Cusick’s creations are like looking back at the ebbs and flows of…

WILL THE FARADAY FUTURE FF91 BE AROUND TO FOLLOW? THE ELECTRIC CAR market is booming. Tesla makes more than 84,000 Model S and X cars per year for global consumption, and CEO Elon Musk promises that the addition of the affordable Model 3 to the lineup will push the company’s production to a half million in 2018. Wall Street analysts remain gaga over Tesla, driving market capitalization that has trumped Ford Motor Company, which helped send Mark Fields packing as that automaker’s erstwhile CEO. But so far, that EV boom mostly has been in Wall Street’s big head. EVs make up about 1.5 percent of the U.S. market still and just 1 percent of the global market. What does Tesla’s future hold in light of the coming onslaught of EVs…

1970-’76 Porsche 914 THE PORSCHE 914 has long been thought of as the redheaded stepchild of the brand’s early 1970s lineup. Developed as a replacement for both Volkswagen’s aging Karmann-Ghia and the entry-level, four-cylinder Porsche 912, base models of the car were marketed in Europe as a VW-Porsche. In the U.S. it was badged as a Porsche only, and it sold relatively well, thanks in part to the car’s sub-2,200-pound curb weight and its motorsports-inspired mid-engine layout. Early versions of the 914 were powered by a 79-hp, 1.7-liter, flat-four-cylinder, air-cooled Volkswagen engine. Shortly after the beginning of its production run, the 914-6 was also made available. It utilized a carbureted, 2.0-liter flat-six from the previous year’s 911T that was good for about 110 hp. In ’73, the 914-6 was quietly…

“WE HAD THIS idea that we would actually encapsulate and create space within which we can do all sorts of crazy things with materials, finishes, and commissioned art,” says design director Giles Taylor. The “gallery” will come standard on all Phantom models with the base gallery wrapped in a silver woven-silk cloth that uses metallic thread. “It’s this little stage in the car. At night, with the backlight, it looks just beautiful,” Taylor says. In the short term, owners will be able to swap out the silk wrap for wood, leather, or metal. A bit further down the line Rolls-Royce will work with owners and artists to commission and create unique installations. You can have whatever the hell you want, create whatever you think you want to have in your…

WHY, ROBOT? WE ALREADY KNOW the what: Coming in the near future are driverless, fully autonomous automobiles. We know the where and the when, too: not on Mars or Krypton but right here on Mother Earth, possibly as soon as 2021 if you believe some optimistic auto execs. But what we don’t know yet—scratch that, what I don’t know yet—is the how and the why. How, I keep asking myself, are fully autonomous vehicles going to take over our streets? What’s more, why are they coming at all? Let’s consider the how question first. Mind you, I’m already done with wondering how the world’s automakers and tech giants are going to overcome the staggering technological hurdles involved. Sure, there might be a few initial teething problems with the extraordinarily complex…

On July 20, 1969, astronaut Neil Armstrong took one small step for a man and one giant leap for mankind by walking on the moon. It was quite the feat but a small step nonetheless because traversing the surface proved more difficult than predicted. To move around efficiently and effectively, astronauts needed something with four wheels. So NASA and Boeing improvised the development of a collapsible, all-electric two-seater called the Lunar Roving Vehicle (LRV) to accompany astronauts on the final three Apollo launches. In December 1972, the last men on the moon parked one of the three original LRVs and left it some 740 feet from their landing site, where it sits today. How much fun it must’ve been, skipping along at 11 mph on a rock with one-sixth the…