Car and Driver May 2023

PAINT YER WAGON Good idea to camouflage your 10Best Cars issue by wrapping it in the single worst cover Car and Driver has ever printed [January 2023]! Really? Pieces of metal nailed onto plywood? No cars? I can only assume an employee’s kid was taking beginning art and needed extra credit. Or your art director quit and a guy in shipping volunteered to fill in. Or a staffer working for the art director wanted revenge for being denied a raise. Or is this a test to see how many readers are losing their eyesight? —Peter HomesteadMission Viejo, CA Before I read all the complaints, I don’t care what anyone else thinks. At least you’re trying something new with the cover art. Keep it up. —Jeremy Chicago, IL I am pretty sure you will receive backlash…

I am curious why a 2022 Mercedes-AMG SL63 takes 150 feet to stop from 70 mph [“Connection Restored,” November 2022] and a 1954 Studebaker Champion four-door stops in the same distance from 60 mph. The Mercedes has disc brakes with 15-plus-inch rotors in front and 14-plus in the rear and massive tires front and rear, plus it benefits from anti-lock brakes. The family-friendly Stude had 10-inch drums in front, nine-inch in the rear, and 6.40-15 bias-ply tires all around. A testing magazine (October ’54 issue) used an “electrically actuated detonator” for accuracy and reported the Studebaker “just sat down on its haunches and stopped, in a straight line, and faster than any other U.S. car.” Yes, both cars have superior brake performance for their time, but why has there not been a more…

I sold the Miata. A tough decision made easier since it went to photographer James Lipman. He’d wanted it for years, and a couple of text messages during a cross-country flight closed the deal. He now owns a black-on-tan 1995 Miata. I now miss a black-on-tan 1995 Miata. Like so many automotive photographers, Lipman shoots cars out of love, one that has resulted in an eclectic eight-car collection. Snappers without their own fleet are prone to frustration over not getting to drive the cars we test, although the excuse “I’ve got to find a better spot to shoot interiors” usually works. Cue a Porsche ripping into the distance. Getting a gorgeous photo of a sports car tearing up a winding road usually involves standing on a hillside in the rain (or the…

When Akio Toyoda took the reins as president of Toyota Motor Corporation in 2009, the company was not in a good place. Yes, it led global auto production with 7.2 million units, ahead of GM’s 6.5 mil. But Toyota, reeling from the global recession, had just reported its first financial loss in decades and was deep in the throes of its unintended-acceleration controversy, which would result in a $1.2 billion fine in the U.S. Then things got worse. In 2011, the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami devastated the east coast of Japan, destroying or damaging three of Toyota’s factories and knocking many suppliers offline. Touring the devastation soon after, Toyoda said it “totally dwarfed” every other challenge he’d yet faced. Toyota’s production stumbled that year, with the company falling to number…

Before today’s Screenozoic era, automobile “infotainment” mostly meant “stereo.” Modern systems, such as the 2023 BMW X7’s iDrive, let you do way more than just play tunes. Controlling the myriad functions is increasingly done through massive touchscreens, leading some car buyers to ask, “Can’t we just have a knob?” We gave our illustrator free rein to imagine a touchscreen-free cockpit for the X7 that still offers all the features we want in a modern car. LET THERE BE LIGHT The 2023 X7 M60i’s interior lighting offers 15 color options on top of 11 brightness levels for the background and accent lighting. And you can adjust what the interior lights do when you change driving mode, receive a call, play music, or enter and exit the vehicle. Not to be outdone, the head-up…

As modern cars become ever quieter, trading roaring V-8s and grumbling six-cylinders for muffled turbocharged small-displacement engines and near-silent electric motors, the cabin’s soundscape is now a mélange of small ticks and tones previously masked by combustion noise. Without engine noise, electric vehicles don’t have much to hide ancillary rowdiness coming from climate-control fans, coolant systems, and tires. “There are no tricks: We need it all to be quieter,” says Tim Bohn, a noise, vibration, and harshness engineer at General Motors. “The levels from each subsystem have to be lower than we’ve ever had, especially in electric-vehicle cooling systems, where we now put much more effort into isolating coolant lines.” You might not think of cooling systems as noisy, but their hums, bubbles, and gurgles are a prime generator of uncouth…