Sommaire pour March 2016 de Automobile

THE JOINT IS PACKED, AND MUSIC THUMPS into the night. The models strut around a massive black box doubling as a video projection screen, fashionably dour looks on their faces as the latest in dark, loose-fitting, pre-fall finery from New York fashion house Public School swings from their tall, thin frames. We’re in Dubai, land of mega-rich sheiks and home of the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building. The outdoor runway rollout is a huge deal for Public School founders Maxwell Osborne and Dao-Yi Chow—a global reveal in a glittering Arab capital. But this is more than a fashion show. Something lurks beneath the box, and the cover lifts to reveal an all-new, fourwheeled model: the 2017 Cadillac XT5. “When I told my mom we were partnering with Public School,…

GATEWAY CANYONS RESORT Started in: 2004 Location: Gateway, Colorado (near the Utah border) Cars: Bentley Continental GT, Chevrolet Corvete ZR1, Ford GT, Porsche 911, Baja Trophy Truck, etc. Price: $600-$1,800 per night (packages vary) This lavish resort is enticing enough on its own, with breathtaking scenery, sumptuous rooms, and all sorts of outdoor activities, but the best part about the place is that founder John Hendricks, creator of the Discovery Channel, set it up to be a haven for automotive enthusiasts like himself. An on-site auto museum houses an impressive collection, including an ultra-rare Oldsmobile F-88 concept from 1953. A fleet of exotics and supercars is available to rent for a spectacular drive along nearby Highway 141, and you can hit the off-road track to either ride along with a…

EVER NOTICE HOW PRETTY MUCH nothing you hear about cars, oil, and the environment ever turns out to be entirely true? Rather, it often feels as if we’re stuck in a perpetual three-card monte game of incomplete, shifting, and shifty information, with the oil companies dealing and automakers, governments, and media not infrequently standing by as their shills. I was reminded of this recently while in England, where “small government” Tory MPs and the mayor of London were busy proposing a new program to fund the scrapping of diesel cars to cut nitrogen oxide (NOX) emissions by paying owners $3,000 and more to junk oil-burners in favor of something new. Reducing the number of diesel-powered cars on the road is on one level a good idea for the U.K., as…

The Bentayga’s optional clock, the Mulliner Tourbillon by Breitling, checks in at approximately $163,000 based on present dollar-to-euro exchange rates, so Bentley boss Wolfgang Dürheimer isn’t dishing hyperbole when he says, “Luxury doesn’t have any limits. We are defining the segment.” Never mind for the moment that for the same price you could purchase, as just one example, a new Porsche 911 GT3 and have tens of thousands left in your account. Mulliner, Bentley’s in-house custom arm, and Swiss manufacturer Breitling teamed up to create a clock case machined in solid 18-carat gold (rose or white, customer choice of course); its face is available in mother-of-pearl or ebony. The face also features eight 0.36-carat diamond indexes. Our archives do not allow an exhaustive search of vehicle-option costs throughout history, but…

LISBON , PORTUGAL There’s a Mercedes-Benz CLA-Class sedan following us down the highway out of the city, and we can’t help but smile at the coincidence. The 2017 Infiniti Q30 we’re piloting around greater Lisbon is based on the platform that also underpins the CLA (and GLA- and A-Class), but you’d never guess by the way it looks, feels, or drives. The Q30’s body panels and most of its interior are unique to the vehicle, its powertrain and suspension have been retuned by Infiniti engineers, and it’s built at a Nissan factory in the U.K. So while it’s loud and clear (we heard you, Infiniti) that the Q30 is more than just a rebadged Mercedes, the bigger question is whether this new car/hatch/crossover mashup has the combination of style and…

THE PAST 50 YEARS SPAN A period of nine U.S. presidents, the explosion of cable television, the rise and demise of the space shuttle program, and the introduction of the far-reaching technology we call the Internet. They also span Roger Penske’s history of owning race teams, a collection considered the gold standard of motorsports. Old-timers might remember Penske debuting on the national scene as a sportscar driver in 1958, and he would go on to make a pair of Formula 1 starts (at Watkins Glen, 1961-’62). But that was as far as he got; a Leigh (Pennsylvania) University degree helped him realize he would not make a fortune steering machines at breakneck speeds. No, he needed to own those cars, a concept already familiar to him through ownership of a…

Unless you’ve been living under your garage for the past five years, you know we’ve been experiencing yet another boom time in the classic car market. Almost every month brings fresh news of “world record” sales figures. Headlines tout a $50 million Ferrari 250 GTO, $1.4 million for a Porsche 911 Carrera RS 2.7, or a $200,000 Mercedes 190SL. Television bombards you with live collector car auctions from all corners of the U.S. Heck, maybe it’s time to cash in that ’79 rubber-bumper MGB you’ve been sitting on and retire. In these heady days of car collecting, the arrival of a new auction house is no surprise, but the guys at its helm might not be whom you expect. The world knows Leigh and Leslie collectively as the Keno brothers.…

RM SOTHEBY’S AUCTIONS | HERSHEY, PENNSYLVANIA 1951 Mercedes-Benz 170 Da OTP “Police Special” Sold at $30,250 S/N 130139/51 OLIVE GREEN WITH A black cloth top over deep green with black leather interior. 40-hp, 1.8-liter OHV inline-four; four-speed manual transmission. Appears to be original and unrestored, though the paint is of a more recent vintage and in poor to fair shape. The older cloth top is worn. The interior appears to be original; a good bit of this car is preserved and not restored. The odometer shows 43,000 kilometers. THE STORY BEHIND THE SALE: If you are an automobile manufacturer, one thing you can do to make extra money is to sell older models for special purposes. Contemporary manufacturers have been known to produce cars only for rental or fleet use,…

This is a perfect example of what concept cars ought to be: something you’d really like to have once it’s converted into a real car. Mazda’s RX-Vision concept, a sort of cartoon-ideal sports coupe, couldn’t be put into production as shown, but we can certainly wish for it. Indeed, it seems likely we’ll find a car that greatly resembles this in Mazda showrooms one day without too much rationalizing, de-tuning, and bending to practical requirements having taken place. While every square inch of surface will be changed and its proportions altered, no one will care a bit because its desirability will be retained. There’s an excellent precedent: the Dodge Viper. The concept was presented at the Detroit show in 1989, and it made an even stronger impression than the RX…

DESIGN HAS A HUGE INFLUENCE ON THE TYPE OF car I buy (“Editor’s Letter,” January 2016). However, it’s important to make a distinction between “styling” and “design.” As the terms have traditionally been used, “styling” encompasses colors, textures, materials, forms, and other aesthetic aspects of a vehicle, whereas “design” includes styling but also addresses ergonomics, intuitiveness of controls, vehicle dynamics, and any other aspect of a vehicle that affects the quality of the user’s interaction with it. Styling is what grabs us emotionally; design determines how we feel about a vehicle afer living with it for a time. Te Ford GT is gorgeous sculpture (“Design of the Year,” January 2016), but I can only imagine what ingress/egress and rear visibility are like. Te Ford GT represents great styling, not necessarily…

DANA POINT, CALIFORNIA While all of us were busy not noticing, Toyota has been having a lot of success with this whole gas/electric hybrid thing. As of July 2015, the company has sold more than 8 million hybrid vehicles worldwide since 1995, with estimated savings of 58 million tons of C02 emissions, not to mention 5.8 billion gallons of gas. And even though some 1,595,700 examples of the Toyota Prius have been sold in North America since 2000 as of last July, we have been inclined to think of this car as a second-rate transportation pod, something for green geeks. But now that we’ve driven this all-new fourth-generation Prius, our prejudice is finally crumbling. We’re motoring around Orange County, California, the kind of place that likes to pat itself on…

When India’s Tata Motors acquired Jaguar in 2008, hot on the heels of MG Rover’s similarly foreign buyout, there was much dark muttering about yet another venerable British marque falling victim to heartless corporate pirates. But instead of plundering the brand, Tata seems to understand Jaguar’s remarkable history is an asset worth cultivating. As evidence, the long-standing Jaguar Heritage division has expanded into restorations of customer cars, not to mention special projects such as the continuationseries Lightweight E-type project (Automobile, October 2015). In 2014 Jaguar also bought one of Britain’s largest private car collections, mostly to augment its existing fleet of Heritage cars with 140 more classic Jags. Thanks in large part to these additions, Jaguar Heritage has created a gutsy new highperformance program called the Driving Experience. Jaguar is…

OUT HERE AT OUR CALIFORNIA HQ, the Four Seasons fleet was starting to get a little, well, impractical. See, living in the land of sun and fun means having an ideal place to test the sportier vehicles in the fleet. But we needed something capable of hauling more than two people and a couple overnight bags. You know, something a little more rough and ready. Something like the 2016 Land Rover Discovery Sport HSE Luxury. Sure there are larger, more off-road capable, and prestige-y Land Rover models, but the brand’s entry-level Disco Sport hits a sweet spot in the market pricewise. It’s also an appropriate size for tearing around Southern California’s congested highways and twisty back roads. And so it was that one sun-soaked day, a 2016 Discovery Sport HSE…

MARBELLA, SPAIN The passenger’s voice is stern. “Would you drive as hard as this if it was your own vehicle?” No, Bentley chief Wolfgang Dürheimer is not amused as smelly drifts of smoke billow from all four wheelwells. “Better take it to the next village and back for a cool-down drive.” Yessir. The brakes soon begin to recover, and resistance returns to the no-longer-spongy pedal. But there is no smoke without fire, and in this case the fire is lit at random by the 5,379-pound curb weight of Bentley’s first foray into off-road territory. Measuring 202.4 inches long and 87.5 inches wide to the edge of its side mirrors, the Bentayga SUV harbors and consumes plenty of acceleration and deceleration energy. BEYOND 175 MPH, IT IS WITHOUT PEER. THANKS TO…

The only thing surprising about the 2016 Toyota RAV4 Hybrid is that people are surprised to see a hybrid version of a compact sport-utility. But now that the sport-utility has become the official default setting of the Great American Automobile—that is, sport-utes are the majority of sales in the U.S., surpassing conventional sedans— then it’s pretty logical to make a fuel-sipping gas/electric hybrid version of this compact ute, don’t you think? Since every 2016 Toyota RAV4 is powered by a 2.5-liter four-cylinder engine, it has proven no trouble at all to give this package a hybrid powertrain. A 112-hp Atkinson-cycle version of the engine has been matched with an electronically controlled CVT, and a batterypowered 50-kW electric motor pulls you away from stoplights and supplements the engine occasionally. With this…

The taillights of the 2017 Audi R8 V10 Plus suddenly glow red, and I squeeze the front brake lever of the 2015 Ducati 1299 Panigale S superbike so hard that the Duc stands on its nose, squirming uncomfortably a few feet from the back end of the quartermillion-dollar supercar. The Audi’s V-10 barks back to life as its brake lights go dark, and the car dives into a set of switchbacks along a shut-down stretch of Angeles Crest Highway, one of Southern California’s most remarkable two-lane roads. As the Ducati’s rear tire drops back onto the pavement, a sigh of relief slips out before I slide off the black seat and lean into the turn. Just ahead of the Audi, the front tire of a 2015 MV Agusta F4 RC…

When the news broke that the hallowed Cherokee nameplate would be slapped on a crossover destined to see far more mall parking lots than trailheads, Jeep traditionalists howled. How, they asked, could the all-new 2014 Jeep Cherokee, which shares its platform with the Dodge Dart and Chrysler 200, be considered a real Jeep? Would it preserve any semblance of its forebear’s rough and rugged rep? Or were those days gone forever, left to tumble down the hill of history? As it turns out, mainstream consumers aren’t occupied with these sorts of questions. The Cherokee has become one of Jeep’s best-sellers, a driving force behind the brand’s renaissance. With its chunky, purposeful looks and promise of superior off-road prowess, it’s something no other midsize crossover is—a Jeep—whether the old-schoolers like it…

THE INFO YEARS PRODUCED: 1968-1985 I NUMBER SOLD: 170,720 I ORIGINAL PRICE: $3,181 (1968) I VALUE TODAY: $5,656-$8,095 (HAGERTY AVG) Everyone’s got a Fix It Again Tony story. (FIAT, get it?) A sometimes cautionary, often humorous, and always sad tale involving a friend, sibling, or father who brought home a brand-new Fiat decades ago only to be subjected to years of breakdowns, engine fires, and other mishaps until the car finally put the owner and itself out of their mutual misery by rusting into the ground. Such woe-ridden stories have given Fiats their Rodney Dangerfield status in the U.S., where these cars just don’t get no respect. And that’s too bad because, given the direction classic car prices are heading, the Fiat 124 Spider is one of the few honest-to-goodness…