Car and Driver September 2019

backfires:

SUMMERTIME ROLLS You started your “Ragtops to Riches” comparo [June 2019] by noting that the cars got no attention in Los Angeles but “people stare” in Lake Isabella, California. What is the significance of this? Just curious. —M. Reed Danville, CA Sports cars like the Porsche 718 Boxster and BMW Z4 don’t get much attention in car-jaded L.A., but a sports car out in the country is a rare and eyeball-grabbing sight—Ed. Let me get this straight: BMW charges $360 to put Apple CarPlay in your car, then after the first year, you have to pay $80 per year to continue using what you’ve already bought?! What kind of ridiculous rip-off is that?! I vehemently object to that! Yet another reason I will never buy a BMW even though I can. My Hyundai Elantra…

david gordon johnson

Car and Driver contributing editor Davey G. Johnson died this June, the victim of an accidental drowning. He went missing on a motorcycle trip on the 5th, and his body was recovered days later. He was 43. “I saw Davey as the voice of his generation,” says former C/D editor-in-chief Eddie Alterman, who hired Johnson in 2014. “He was a gifted, innate storyteller and a man consumed with his enthusiasms.” Johnson had been making an impression on the business since he started writing about “the machines that move us,” as he described them, in 2001. Editor Andrew Wendler remembers him as “a superbly talented writer and master of the nebulous reference. Davey wrote without a net, often blending cultural touchpoints as disparate as punk rock, obscure Soviet history, and golden-era French motocross…

upfront and driver alternative fools

WHAT DO DRUGS, Christmas, and cars have in common? They’re all subjects of that cultural phenomenon known as “the war on X.” Growing interest in autonomy has popularized an imagined future in which car ownership dies and everyone travels around in driverless on-demand pods. We’re betting that future never materializes, but some elements of it seem inevitable. With that in mind, we devised a challenge: Go one week, Monday through Friday, in our quasi-urban college town without using personal vehicles. In so doing, we would see if the current alternatives to vehicle ownership could convincingly replace a car. In addition to biking and walking, we cobbled together a week’s worth of transportation using Ann Arbor’s limited bus system; ridesharing services such as Uber and Lyft; General Motors’ short-term car-rental/car-sharing service, Maven;…

cloud nine

CHRISTIAN VON KOENIGSEGG’S latest automotive peacock, the Jesko, makes 1603 horsepower and reportedly breaks 300 mph. What’s faster? Its Light Speed Transmission (LST), for one. That name is used as a figure of speech and not a technical claim, though we’re told the transmission’s shifts are superquick even by today’s norms. Koenigsegg says the gearbox can jump between any two ratios in just two milliseconds. To accomplish that, the LST combines elements of conventional automatic and manual transmissions to create a nine-speed automatic unlike anything we’ve seen before. In the simplest terms, the LST is essentially two three-speed transmissions arranged in series. Think of a bicycle with three gears at the crank and three at the rear wheel and you’ve got the basic principle. There is no torque converter or other…

chalk talk

YOU’VE SEEN THE PRACTICE BEFORE. Known as “chalking,” it’s when parking enforcement officers use chalk to mark a car’s tire placement, allowing them to track how long a car has been sitting in the same spot. But chalking might be coming to an end thanks to a woman in Saginaw, Michigan, with an ax to grind. Alison Taylor is, depending on your point of view, either a hero or a serial offender with a good lawyer and a serious grudge. The recipient of 15 parking citations from the same chalk-happy officer, Taylor decided to take the city of Saginaw to court, arguing that its policy of marking her tires without a warrant constitutes an unreasonable search of her property and, as such, violates her Fourth Amendment rights. The city argued its…

dust busters

PORSCHE, VERY MUCH IN THE business of solving First World problems, finally has the technology to reduce the amount of dust produced by the Cayenne’s brakes. The company says its new Porsche Surface Coated Brakes, or PSCBs, cut down on dust by 90 percent compared with conventional iron discs. The appeal to vanity doesn’t end there. The mirror-like surface of the rotors is so reflective that you can see yourself well enough to pick spinach out of your teeth, fix your hair, or take a selfie. Brake dust that accumulates on a car’s wheels comes from the rotors, not the pads. Porsche’s solution, developed with Bosch, sprays a 0.004-inch tungsten-carbide coating onto iron discs, making them five times harder. In addition to reducing dust, the tungsten-carbide-coated brakes are said to limit…