Sommaire pour November 2017 de Automobile

FIVE OF US are in an inflatable boat, engine at idle, maybe 150 feet from the Land Rover BAR America’s Cup catamaran, which is sitting still in the crystal-blue water in Bermuda’s Great Sound. We are waiting for something to happen. Suddenly, a yell, and the Rover BAR boat takes off. Its hull quickly lifts off the water like a woman raising her skirts before she tiptoes across a puddle. Only the comparatively tiny hydrofoils make contact with the sea, scarcely leaving a wake. How the Land Rover BAR accelerates from a dead stop using nothing but wind power generated by its 78-foot-tall wing sail is simply stunning. Our inflatable’s powerful outboard engine roars to keep up. Thirty-five knots, or 40 mph, might not sound like much, but on the…

BMW SHOULD HAVE badged it Z3. Why? Because the new Z4 is in many ways a reincarnation of the first Z3 roadster that rolled off the line at the automaker’s Spartanburg, South Carolina, factory back in the mid-1990s. It sheds the last Z4’s bulky and ill-conceived retractable hardtop in favor of an electrically operated soft top. There are no more ungainly cutlines segmenting the elegant silhouette, and cargo volume increases by 50 percent with the top down, though the rear blind spot just about doubles in acreage with it up. But this is a what-the-heck automobile not a two-seat driving-school car; it’s made to be driven alfresco. Like every new rear-wheel-drive BMW, the next Z4 is underpinned by a spinoff of the automaker’s modular CLAR architecture and will get adaptive…

MARANELLO, Italy—I don’t know how Ferrari does it. For years I’ve been coming to Italy to test-drive the latest V-12 magnum opus from the House of the Prancing Horse, and every time I think, “Wow, how could a front-engine V-12 sports car possibly get any better?” And then Ferrari goes right out and makes a better one. THE NAME SAYS IT ALL Back in 2006 it was the 599 GTB, which at the time I dubbed perhaps the finest all-around Ferrari ever. Then in 2010, I tested the fire-breathing 599 GTO at Italy’s Mugello race circuit and came away practically foaming at the mouth. The GTO was, I wrote, “the best sports car I’ve ever driven.” Last year it was the four-passenger GTC4Lusso, which I called an all-wheel-drive Formula 1…

What about Pebble Beach? Fear not, loyal reader! Yes, this issue landed in your hands sometime after the confetti settled at the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance, but our print deadline means everything was written before we even left for Monterey. By the time December’s issue hits your mailbox, we’ll have drunk all the champagne and ogled every classic in a 100-mile radius to bring you the soaring highs and searing lows of Monterey Car Week’s legendary auctions and their sometimes flamboyant characters plus America’s classic-car crown jewel, the Best of Show at the Concours d’Elegance, as viewed through the critical lens of Robert Cumberford. July 2017 BringATrailer.com In the digital age, a collector-car auction is never more than a click away This month we take a look at recent sales…

1 Front 3/4 View BAYERISCHE MOTOREN WERKE AG has existed since 1916, initially as a builder of aircraft engines. It moved to earthbound vehicles when in 1923 it offered a motorcycle to keep its employees occupied—the WWI armistice prohibited German aircraft manufacture—and only moved to cars in 1928 when it acquired a railroad-car maker, Fahrzeugwerke Eisenach, which was license-building British Austin Sevens under the Dixi name. The first BMW-badged, Austin-derived 3/15 models came in 1929. Since those first cars, the firm has had a truly complex and erratic design history. BMW was one of the first European carmakers to have an internal styling (as opposed to body engineering) department. Set up by Wilhelm Meyerhuber, who went to Bavaria from Opel, where there was awareness of General Motors’ pioneering in-house Art and…

1. This bump, as seen from the back, is the upper corner of the big-box front corner openings on both cars … 2. … and this angle is the same on both, but for the Z4 a surface break gives a protruding lower lip of painted material. 3. At the top of the slash, there is a sharp corner where two straight lines intersect, and on the 8 a radius leads into a curved line that softens and disappears in the door skin. 4. Below this soft line on the 8 Series, the entire body side is essentially concave down to the bottom of the door. On the Z4, the hard line from the slash runs all the way back to the taillight, with a narrow concave section interrupted by…

WE SEE THE plume from 10 miles out, the long, white-sand road billowing skyward. There’s barely room for one truck let alone two, and we know we’re in for a stop long before the agent slows his green-and-white truck. There’s no one out here but buzzards, Border Patrol, and us. We shove the 2017 Ram Power Wagon off the road to make room and drop our windows to give the guy a better view of who and what’s inside. The air-conditioning vanishes immediately, replaced by dust and viciously dry heat. The agent is in the waning days of his young years. His close-cropped hair is light brown, strands of gray gleaming along his temples in the Arizona sun. The corners of his eyes are creased with constant narrowing. He’s fit.…

It wasn’t all that long ago that a prime example of the Ferrari 308, the successor to the Dino 246 GT, could be had for the cost of a new Toyota Camry, give or take a few grand. Today, the Ferrari 308 in all its forms has risen in price to be more comparable to buying a new BMW 5 Series—expensive but not out of the “someday” range for many of us. The Dino 308 GT4 was the first of the range (308 desig- nating 3.0 liters and eight cylinders), entering production for the 1975 model year as a wedgelike, Bertone-styled 2+2 replacement for the two-seat Dino 246. Later, it would be given Ferrari badges to replace the Dino items, and it was joined in the marketplace by the curvier,…

“THIS YOUR FERRARI?”Before I’d answered, the guy was pressing his nose against the passenger-door glass to look inside. I didn’t feel like explaining. (“Actually, I’m an auto journalist, so I regularly get cars to review, and that might be a Kia or a Volkswagen, but this week it’s a Ferrari GTC4Lusso.”) So I just answered, “Yes.” He backed away from the curb for a better look, a mirror image of his face now imprinted on the Ferrari’s window. “How much?” he asked, squinting at the car. “About $350,000.” For a moment the guy said nothing, his eyes drinking in the Ferrari’s lines. Then he turned, flashed a grin. “Smarter than me. One year I probably spent that much on cocaine.” If you’re driving a Ferrari—especially a new and relatively unusual…

1. Both cars share a bad idea from the past. Comprehensive Air Force studies have shown that having gauge needles operating in opposing directions within the same narrow field of view reduces operator comprehension and slows reaction time. This reversion to old ideas in order to seem new may be an endemic corporate philosophical weakness. Remember how silly the central-dial instrument panel—like a 1948 VW—was in the Z8? 2. The layout and formats of the central data screens seem to have no particular commonality, other than—like most such devices—they both provide too much information. 3. The transmission selector lever appears to be the same part on both cars, and why not? It’s something that must fit comfortably in small hands and large ones. This one is a handsome sculpture. 4.…

CERNOBBIO, ITALY “THE 8 SERIES COUPE is the sportiest car in its segment,” claimed BMW chief technical officer Klaus Fröhlich, roughly a year before the production version of the BMW 8 Series even makes it to market. That’s a bold proclamation. “It’s neither a Vantage nor a 911 but a proper high-performance BMW with a character of its own.” Maybe it’s the only car in its segment then? In any event, we’re not willing (or able) to explore the validity of that statement from behind the wheel of BMW’s one-off Concept 8 Series—a raw, handmade car from bottom to top save for the chassis and drivetrain. Like every other concept car worth a couple million dollars, this one must be treated with kid gloves. That said, BMW let us have…

Twenty Seventeen GENTLEMAN RACER MIRABEL, QUEBEC, CANADA ACCELERATING TOWARD THE late, late apex of a sphincter-tightening right-hand sweeper at the 16-turn International Center of Advanced Racing (Circuit ICAR) just north of Montreal, I squeeze the throttle. This unleashes the full fury of 306 turbocharged horses, and I then do what I always do when cornering at max lat in a potent front-drive car: I brace for torque steer. But the new 2017 Honda Civic Type R I’m wringing out does not try to yank the steering wheel from my fingertips. It does not scream “yeeeeehaaawww!” or use its 22.8 psi of turbo boost to burn the 20-inch front tires into acrid black jelly. Instead, with absolutely zero fuss, the Type R blasts me out of the turn and into the…

THE BIG SKY was as clear as the back roads we had driven to reach the lighthouse on the 300-foot cliffs of Dunnet Head. The most northerly point of the island of Great Britain, Dunnet Head overlooks Pentland Firth, a strait that separates the British mainland from the Orkney Islands and is known for its fast tides. The residents of Dunnet Head—razorbills, kittiwakes, and puffins—have a magnificent panorama from their cliff ledges as far as Cape Wrath 60 miles to the west. Resting nearby was the silver metallic 1979 Porsche 911 Turbo we’re driving on the coastal tour of the Scottish Highlands that is the North Coast 500. I first traveled the little-known loop in 2001. Said to be one of the world’s greatest coastal routes, it can be considered…

“Data is literally the new oil,” declared Intel CEO Brian Krzanich during an address at last year’s L.A. auto show. The idea that bits and bytes will replace petroleum as the primary fuel for the world’s economy—and the auto industry in particular—isn’t an original one. But it summarizes what many insiders believe: As data analytics engines become more valuable than vehicle engines in the coming years, the flood of information gleaned from them will serve as a primary driver of automotive innovation with potentially billions in profits at stake as a result. Cars are just now becoming connected, and as autonomous technology moves into the mainstream the flow of data will turn from a trickle into a full-blown gusher. Automakers, their major suppliers, and large tech companies are already jockeying…