Car and Driver October 2019

backfires:

AMERICAN HIGH I’m glad you put a Camaro and Mustang on your July cover so all the whiners will quit bitching about a truck on the cover!—Bob DinkinsOlathe, KS Keep up the good work! Love those drone images!—Joe StrapacBellflower, CA Wow. Great cover for the Fourth of July, themed with red, white, and blue, plus two iconic American muscle cars in blue and red, the Mustang GT and Camaro SS. It would be great to see a follow-up to the cover story “Take Me Home, Country Roads” with both cars fitted with 10-speed automatics.—Andrew J. SultanAustin, TX SUP, Y’ALL? Your test of the new Toyota Supra [“Shake Your Rump,” July 2019] shows that it performs well, but geez, that is one ugly little bridge troll.—Ron ClineSalinas, CA With the possible exception of the Pontiac Aztek, the new…

twenty questions for 2020

1. Are millennials ruining the car industry? IF YOU’RE SHAKING your partially clenched fist at whichever millennial abandoned that rented electric scooter on your lawn, nothing we say will help. Besides, that assumption is ageist—anyone could have left that scooter there. The notion that young people are killing the car industry probably started with sensationalized news stories that suggested ride-sharing apps, smartphones, generational migration to population-dense cities, and, yes, those scooters were chipping away at their interest in cars. But the auto industry is not dead. At least not yet. A car remains a useful asset no matter your age. And millennials, defined by the Pew Research Center as those born between 1981 and 1996, have steadily increased their new-car purchases since the Great Recession ended. The financial kerfuffle of 2008 is behind…

deep roots, long shadows

On its face, this grouping could be mistaken for an ordinary of-the-moment comparison test: four purposeful sports cars, each costing around $60,000 and capable of hitting 60 mph in roughly four seconds, all laser-focused on driving gratification. We’ll admit that’s how this story initially came together. But our understanding of, and appreciation for, these machines swelled over three days of hustling them on spastic mountain roads. Even under the aura cast by 1500-year-old, 200-foot-tall sequoias, these four sports cars are timeless giants. The examples collected here represent some of their makers’ best work, both in the past and today. BMW’s M2 Competition is the closest thing we have to a spiritual successor of the iconic E30-generation M3. The Ford Mustang Shelby GT350 wears a 53-year-old name yet remains the zenith of…

electric father land

The Taycan, Porsche’s pivotal step into the high-performance and high-price end of the EV landscape, is quick, comfortable, and likely to be a serious Tesla contender. The Taycan (pronounced TIE-kahn) is at least as important to Porsche as the first-generation Cayenne, not in terms of profit, but for reshaping the arc of the company’s future vehicles. The automaker was determined not to do an electric SUV, and it knew a sports car wouldn’t be able to sell in high enough numbers to satisfy global regulatory requirements. So Porsche landed on a fastback-sedan configuration. The Taycan is very nearly the same length as a Tesla Model S and 3.4 inches shorter than the Panamera, but it has a substantially lower roofline than either. But Tesla certainly deserves credit for doing the very…

new faces of automotive enthusiasm

The world is full of soothsayers predicting the end of the world. Or at least the end of car culture as we know it. With every headline that’s published complaining about millennials and their lackluster new-car-buying habits, we imagine a wizened old newspaper editor wearing a green visor as he bangs away at his IBM Selectric. “Kids these days! They hate cars!” Spoiler alert: They don’t. Things have changed just a little from the days of yore. Young and young-adjacent people are filling up on their automotive passions by watching YouTube videos at home, listening to podcasts, or paging through Instagram feeds of their favorite offbeat paint-color enthusiast. They’re off-roading in borrowed Jeeps, or they’re learning how to be their own mechanic from a woman who decided to teach herself about cars…

hide and sleek tested

Automakers building luxury vehicles from mainstream models is kind of like people picking their noses. Everyone does it, but no one wants to be caught in the act. While the 2020 Cadillac XT6 takes parts from other General Motors vehicles, most buyers will never suspect that there’s a Chevrolet on the dealer lot next door that shares so many nuts and bolts. The XT6 rides on the size-medium variant of the platform also known as C1XX (or sometimes Chi), with a wide track and a relatively short wheelbase. It is dimensionally most similar to the GMC Acadia, while the Chevy Traverse and the Buick Enclave ride on a longer wheelbase. The slender headlights and clean look of the handsome Escala concept car make their first appearance on a production vehicle here.…