Table of contents for April 2017 in Automobile

VOLUME 3 2 . NO. 1 . APRIL 2017 E VERY MONTH, HECK, EVERY DAY, THERE’S another story (like this one) about the coming Brave New Autonomous World. Automakers have been breathlessly announcing self-driving cars they claim are five years or fewer away—or even earlier if you’re Tesla and Elon Musk. Just look, all the cool brands are doing it! They’ll delight us with their ability to somehow make traffic jams and crashes go away. We’ll all be able to tune in, turn on, and tune out, take a nap, network, and most importantly shop—all while the car whisks us without drama to our destination. Much of the latest news about the glorious, human-driverless future came during the recent annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. This year more…

I t’s tense inside Faraday Future’s SoCal headquarters as anxious employees hurriedly yank on any and all loose strings they fifind, preparing for the global debut of Faraday’s fifirst car, the FF 91, at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. Or maybe everyone is tense because their CEO just jumped ship, not long after a slew of other senior executives defected. Or maybe it’s the pile of past-due bills the company is supposedly sitting on. Every facet of Faraday Future is in contentious flflux. Even as construction of a $1.8 billion, state-of-the-art manufacturing facility on the edge of Sin City continues, most insiders say this start-up tech company is a stillborn effffort, ambitious beyond its abilities. Faraday Future is backed by Chinese billionaire and founder of tech company…

S ome six decades ago Chrysler unleashed a batch of dramatically different 1957 models that made its General Motors and Ford rivals seem shockingly old and tired. An advertising tagline for its volume seller, Plymouth, summed up the situation nicely, suggesting Chrysler was three years ahead of the industry: Suddenly, it’s 1960! I’m reminded of that history because on fifirst sight of the 2018 Lexus LS, I immediately thought, “Suddenly, it’s 1957!” At first glance this big, powerful modern car reminded me of a 1957 Buick Roadmaster. Not because of any specific details, obviously. But both cars are strongly assertive, their grilles complex assemblages of an enormous number of discrete pieces, far bigger than necessary for cooling the mechanisms behind them but impressive in their massive presence. And, of course,…

I LOVE AUTOMOBILE, BUT THE JANUARY ISSUE was not so favorable. It had articles on some pretty high-end vehicles, specialty vehicles, concept cars, vehicle designers, and even classic cars. But where was the average man’s car? The closest thing to it was the 2016 Fiat 500X on page 98, and even that’s a bit of a stretch for an average car. I love the magazine. Just don’t forget the average guy. PAUL C. NATION Columbia, Tennessee I don’t understand people who complain about car magazines that focus on exotics. This is precisely why I buy them: to read about cars I can’t afford and will probably never even see in the flesh. I would buy Consumer Reports if I wanted to read about boring, practical, average appliances. WAYNE RIMMINGTON Port Dover,…

g reg Foutz is trying to make me vomit. I’m certain of it. He seems nice enough. An easy smile is always half a second from his lips. He doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who’d suggest a heavy Italian meal the night before whipping the 2017 Ford Raptor around California’s Lake Elsinore Motorsports Park, but here we are. We’ve spent the morning turning lap after lap, jumping and sliding the fresh bruiser around the Lucas Oil Off Road Racing Series course, as my innards leap from my throat to the floor and back again. Being accustomed to the lateral forces of a track day, I know how to read the line on a tarmac circuit and brace for the coming stress, but this is different. It’s omnidirectional. Foutz…

SAM POSEY is 72 years old and as colorful as ever. As if to prove it, when we catch up with the race-car driver, Formula 1 commentator, and author of “The Mudge Pond Express,” one of the 1970s most-gripping racing autobiographies, he’s padding around his studio in Sharon, Connecticut, with an easel and a multihued array of oil paints at the ready. At the opposite end of the highceiling barn-cum-studio—designed, like everything else on the property, by Posey, who did the landscaping as well—we see where his wife, artist Ellen Griesedieck, has been assembling the American Mural Project, a 3D collaboration of artists from around the country she’s directing that honors the American worker. When unveiled later this year, expect it to be the world’s largest piece of interactive indoor…

General Motors’ Pontiac division was knocked out more than six years ago, but the city of Pontiac, Michigan, has a fresh contender, a new headliner called the M1 Concourse. Featuring a mixed-use road course, private garages, and event space, the facility has hyped up the Detroit area’s motorsports clubs, manufacturers, dealers, and garden-variety gearheads. Built on the 87-acre ruins of a GM factory and envisioned originally as a car condominium complex for metro Detroit’s thriving culture of classic and performance automotive collectors, M1 Concourse evolved quickly under the watch of founder and CEO Brad Oleshansky. The ambitious project now includes a 1.5-mile racetrack and skidpad and plans for expansive retail and restaurant facilities. “Metro Detroit is the center of automotive culture, and we clearly are answering a need,” says M1…

T hey called them berserkers. Named for the Old Norse word “berserkir,” or “bear shirt,” these hatchets-for-hire terrorized first-millennium Iceland. After whipping themselves into a vein-popping rage, they would scythe furiously through their foes, apparently unable to feel fear or pain. True to their name, they rejected chain-mail armor in favor of fighting in bear skins. Almost a thousand years have passed since the berserkers went extinct, but their spirit lives on. Nomex has replaced bear skins, but the fearlessness and aggression remain. Their new enemy? Gravity. Welcome to the world of Formula Offroad, where unhinged Icelanders attack otherworldly volcanic terrain—and scuba-worthy water—with homebuilt, 1,000-plus horsepower 4x4s in an all-out scrap for the national title. I’m in Hella on the island’s south coast for the fifirst round of the 2016…

Suave, sporty, but compromised W hen Land Rover called to schedule a pickup date our Four Seasons 2016 Land Rover Discovery Sport, it was hard to believe a year had passed since we took delivery of the little Disco. We’d eagerly anticipated its arrival, with excitement toward the possibilities for adventure the Land Rover’s offff-road capability promised. First impressions of Land Rover’s smallest offffering were good. Virtually the entire staffff was a fan of the sharp, contemporary exterior styling with its distinctive LED headlights and bold-yetelegant lines. The Discovery was a perfect fifit in Los Angeles traffiffic, and it garnered more than its share of attention on freeways, in parking lots, and at trailheads. Our creative director Darren Scott, a man who knows a thing or two about aesthetics, went…

C hange is hard. It’s human nature to cling to the familiar even as the world around you constantly shifts. But building cars is a sink-or-swim game, punishing the obsolescent to the watery grave of history. Then there’s Morgan. The quirky Malvern, U.K.-based outfifit builds British man-of-wars compared to the advanced nuclear submarines on the road today, cobbling together wood-framed sports cars by hand the same way it has since the fifirst four-wheeled Morgan hit the streets in 1936. That fifirst four-wheeler, the Morgan 4/4, has been in nearcontinuous production for 80 years. To this day it has remained a lightweight, open-top sports car with the engine up front sending power to the rear wheels with a hand-built ash body. Even for British sports car loyalists used to the quirky…

VOLKSWAGEN HAS taken a good hard look in the mirror. With at least six battery-electric vehicles planned to bow by 2025, the company is at what it sees as a pivotal redefinition of the brand. VW gave us our first glimpse at its electric future with the I.D. hatchback concept at the Paris show last fall, and the picture of what’s to come is even clearer aftfter the arrival of the I.D. Buzz microbus concept at the Detroit auto show in January. VW design chief Klaus Bischoffff boiled down his philosophy for three key pillars that are top of mind at the manufacturer. “Simple, sophisticated, and difffferent,” he told us. “We want to reignite the soul of the brand.” For the vehicles to come based on VW’s modular electric platform…

T HE SHIMMERING SAGE OF THE Showroom, this magazine’s old friend, Sheldon Sandler—a former Wall Street CPA turned broker of huge car dealership sales—recently invited us to a fancy golf club in affluent Princeton, New Jersey, where his company, Bel Air Partners, hosted a conference on the future of the dealership. Attendees were prosperous car dealers, respected industry analysts, and even the president of a major auto company’s finance arm. So yeah, I went. As someone who does most of his thinking about cars and the industries that make and support them from behind the wheel of a car, a day spent with Sandler and friends was going to be an education of sorts for me. Car dealers live where the rubber meets the bank account and the consumer credit…

T hree Lamborghinis spear fast through France at 160 mph. One, the Countach, with its 375-horsepower, 4.0-liter V-12, could go faster. But its driver remains in the convoy with the Silhouette and Urraco; their 250-hp, 3.0-liter V-8s are flat out. The cars, each painted a bronze gold, glisten in the early sun of this pristine fall morning and gobble up the miles. It’s a quiet Sunday, and they slice through the long, lazy curves of the A6 Autoroute du Soleil as it climbs through the soft hills of the Côte-d’Or northwest of Beaune. A lonely Renault, Simca, or Ford occasionally looms ahead. The Lamborghinis leave them lost in a different time. The police won’t bother the Lamborghini drivers. This is October 1976, and France has yet to introduce autoroute speed…

ONCE THE UNDISPUTED king of accessible performance, the BMW M3/M4 has gotten lumpier and more complicated with every generation. Add to that stellar competition from the likes of the Cadillac ATS-V and Mercedes-AMG C63 S, and BMW’s long-held place as the alpha dog of the sports-car pack has been under threat. But from deep within BMW M, a new favorite child has risen—the BMW M2—a car that’s poised to assume its place alongside the limited-run 1 Series M as one of BMW’s most treasured M models of the modern era. The progenitor of the M2 was the BMW M235i, a car we named an Automobile All-Star in 2015 and later evaluated thoroughly during a Four Seasons test. It handily earned a glowing five-star rating, with editors hailing it as the…

1966 Ferrari 275 GTB/6C Alloy Sold at $3,655,120 S/N 08311 RED OVER BLACK. 3.3-liter, 305-hp, SOHC V-12. 5-speed manual transmission. One owner since 1980, repainted in the late ’70s in its current color from original black. The fifirst built of just seven “long nose,” six-carburetor, alloy-bodied, torquetube 275s in existence. Recently serviced and said to be ready to use. A very special car. THE STORY BEHIND THE SALE: The Duemila Ruote (“two-thousand wheels” in Italian) sale in Milan, Italy, was a special opportunity for RM Sotheby’s having secured the rights to auction offff the largest private automobile collection (including boats, bikes, and motorcycles) ever sold at a single venue. The Italian owner of these vehicles has been brought up on charges that he improperly used money tied to his family’s…