Inhaltsverzeichnis für November 2019 in Automobile

DUSK ARRIVES LATE in July over Loch Faskally. It’s well after 10 p.m. as the fading light plays over a well-positioned Miami Blue 2020 Porsche 718 Spyder, one of the stars of our two-day sortie into the Scottish Highlands. The other new offering on the GT menu during this trip is the 2020 Porsche 718 Cayman GT4, a car we’ve anticipated driving for a very long time. All of Porsche’s “GT” cars are born in Flacht, Germany, home to the Porsche Motorsport group and the brains who make this secret sauce. The 718 Cayman GT4 and 718 Spyder—the latter now also the GT division’s responsibility despite not actually featuring “GT” (or “Boxster”) in its name—set new pinnacles for the Cayman and Boxster lines. Dealers are accepting orders for the duo…

THE EAGLE TALON TSi AWD, like the bird and claw for which it is named, is a regal scavenger. A product of the confounding confluence of marques and vehicular partnerships bundled into the Chrysler Corporation in the late ’80s—including Dodge, Plymouth, Jeep, Mitsubishi, and the hodgepodge refuse of the American Motors/Renault alliance that became known as Eagle—the car rummaged for componentry and branding in the giant multinational conglomerate’s parts bin and came up with a delicious meal: a nearly 200-horsepower, turbocharged, sharp-handling, good-looking, all-wheel-drive sports coupe. “At that time, sporty coupes were a huge part of the market, from entry-level cars up all the way through mid-priced and luxury,” says Nate Berg, director of product planning at Mitsubishi North America. Berg is also the serial owner of four Diamond Star…

“This is a legendary road.” That can be said of many great routes, but in the case of the Daegwallyeong pass over Korea’s eastern mountains, it is literal. Legend has it a famous Confucian philosopher, Yi I, traveled over it in the 1500s on his way from the East Sea to Seoul. Amazed at its steepness and curves, he ate a single pomegranate seed for each turn. At the end, he’d consumed 99 seeds. He called the road kubigubi, a phrase that translates, roughly, as “crazily curvy.” In fact, spiky, foliage-covered mountains make up some 70 percent of Korea’s countryside. Although long the bane of tired travelers, today these roads are the great delight of a different kind of philosopher—those who tune chassis and suspensions. Former BMW M engineer Albert…

LIKE THE CHEERING throngs that met giant steamships pulling into New York Harbor back in the glory days of ocean travel, clamoring investors eagerly awaited initial public offerings this year of mammoth ride-hailing services Lyft and Uber. They might as well have lined Wall Street, waving straw boaters in a dockside confetti parade as they gathered to welcome the boatload of cash that was meant to disembark. Except then it was as if this towering liner of modern commerce had only just put in, then suddenly exploded, sinking and killing thousands before a helpless and horror-stricken crowd. Lyft’s stock tanked after its hopeful March IPO. In May, Uber’s first public offering failed to even meet its projected price, much less exceed it, as the market prefers. Both scanned as tragedy…

SOME THINGS ARE SO rightly matched with one another, it’s often difficult to approach them independently. In our neck of the woods, cars and watches fit the description, but the collaborative results between the two worlds aren’t always a hit. It’s difficult to find a balance, and the end product is frequently neither tasteful nor well executed. However, find a balance, and the result can be impressive. Matthew Humphries Design (MHD) Watches illustrates this harmony well; founder Matthew Humphries is an established automotive designer who turned his talent toward machinery on a much smaller scale. British designer Humphries accrued an extensive design portfolio at Morgan Motor Company, where he became the brand’s head of design at just 21. “After sending a rendering off to Charles Morgan, I began working at…

I FELT BAD for our photographer because I couldn’t answer any of his numerous questions. He knew everything I did: We would travel to Iceland, and beneath a midnight sun, we would ride pull-start minibikes and drive $500 cars through the desolate Highlands. I told him as much, but he wasn’t convinced. All I could say was, “Don’t worry. This is how the Gambler 500 works.” The Gambler 500 started as an email chain between friends who decided to go off-road in $500 cars never intended to be driven off-road. There would be no winners or losers, and there were only two rules, which remain the event’s only rules: clean up the trail as you go, and don’t be a jerk. On weekends they met at Wanker’s Corner Saloon outside…

THE CRASH WAS as horrific as it was predictable. Back in May, near the end of evening rush hour in Encino, California, a 25-year-old male crashed a 2016 Lamborghini Huracán with such violence that he and his 19-year-old girlfriend were ejected from the car and killed instantly. In an eerie coincidence, I had driven on that exact stretch of Burbank Boulevard just the day before, and I remember thinking, “I bet a lot of drivers speed here.” The road is three lanes wide in each direction with a grassy, tree-filled strip in between, the asphalt mostly straight or flowing in long bends, a golf course on one side lending a rare bucolic air to the usual urban crush of Los Angeles’ bustling San Fernando Valley. Apparently, the sudden aroma of…

THE CORVETTE HAS been a big part of my automotive life. I saw the very first one at the Los Angeles presentation of the 1953 GM Motorama show when I was a design student at The Art Center School, months after the Corvette’s Waldorf Astoria event in New York. I got a ride in one of the first 300 production models—all of them white with red upholstery—early in 1954, when I was living in the backyard garage apartment of Road & Track owner (and technical editor) John Bond’s house in Glendale, California. A not widely known fact is that the Corvette was an inch-for-inch dimensional copy of the 1948 Jaguar XK-120; same wheelbase, same 3.5-liter engine size, same placement of seats, steering wheel, pedals. Just the track was changed to…