Car and Driver July 2020

SHINE ON Am I the only one who knows you traded your “Irreverence” for “Incandescence” on the April 2020 cover? Was this an Easter egg for your readers? —Tom SchillingFriday Harbor, WA Oh, boy, you wizards at C/D have pulled off the most awesome April Fools’ joke of the century! “Intelligence. Independence. Incandescence.” This and the pretty green title glimmering at the top. I just checked my expiration date. Count me out. The magazine is worthless to me. I will not resubscribe. —John M. UhelskiCleveland, TN If that’s all it took, color us insouciant—Ed. Great choice on your cover wording: “Incandescence.” Truly le bon mot. It encompasses irreverence but without its anarchistic undertones. Well done. —Don AchesonTwin Falls, ID I was shocked at the lack of irreverence on the April issue. —Chuck GalliherSevern, MD Sure, but you have to admit…

You would do us a great service if you measured turbo lag in road tests. —John Kepler, San Luis Obispo, CA Turbo lag, or the time it takes for a turbocharger to provide meaningful boost to the engine, isn’t something we specifically test. But our rolling-start 5-to-60-mph test should give you a good indication. In that test, we let the car reach a steady 5 mph before stomping the accelerator; then we time how long it takes to get to 60 mph. Cars suffering from turbo lag will take a beat before providing maximum acceleration. In our all-out runs to 60 mph, we largely avoid this lag by employing aggressive launch techniques, such as dumping the clutch in a manual-transmission car or using launch control when available. In turbocharged vehicles, a big…

When writers come to me with a story idea, I often ask them to justify their thesis by asking themselves a question: Why now? Why does this story need to be told today? What’s going on in the world that adds significance to your idea, what makes this piece of information relevant, why should people care right now? And so one might fairly ask the same question of us: Why are we doing an issue on the greatest cars of all time now? Well. First, this whole pandemic thing has shaken up the magazine world quite a bit. We aren’t traveling, we can’t do instrumented testing, and we’re getting mighty sentimental for life before we worried about getting sick from touching a gas pump handle. Beyond coronavirus fears, it feels as though the…

The past few months have upended virtually every plan anyone had made anywhere in the world. By the time you read this, you’ll be at least six weeks further down the road than we are now, which means you might know whether we’re wrong about what we’re about to say or (as we’ve long suspected) we’re geniuses whose every utterance should be heeded. So, with the knowledge that time makes fools of us all, and that pandemics speed the process, we’d like to make a prediction: This is going to be a great year to buy a car. In some ways, this is a simple supply-and-demand argument. March was a brutal month for car sales, which fell by 27 percent across the industry in the first quarter despite slight increases in…

The rest of this issue celebrates the greatest of all time, but this page is devoted to the greatest of right now. Not the greatest cars—10Best and comparison tests cover those. We’re looking at the best parts of our favorite cars. Given (only slightly) better fabricating skills and an unlimited budget, this is how we’d create the perfect modern car. BODY Mid-Size Sedan The Honda Accord makes space for more than enough people and stuff. Anything bigger is extraneous mass and expense. Wait. [Record scratch.] By the time we package a rear-mounted transaxle—we’re going to need a rear-mounted transaxle—we’ll need to bump this up to a wagon to preserve cargo space. ENGINE Ferrari 812 Superfast There is no more melodic, linear, and stupefyingly powerful engine around. Consider: At 5000 rpm, it’s making about 500 horse-power. At…

We won’t complain if this magazine is the only thing you ever read. But in the event that you run through all your back issues or you tire of streaming TV, we’ve compiled some books that should be on every car enthusiast’s shelf. Written by veteran journalists, former executives, and sharp-eyed cultural commentators, these books bring cars and car culture to life, and in doing so, they shed light on why we love this stuff so much. Porsche: Excellence Was Expected by Karl Ludvigsen Some of you will think we’re crazy for putting a four-volume $525 marque history book on this list, but we wouldn’t feel right excluding it; we use it all the time. Our go-to guide for all things Porsche, this collection by automotive historian and former C/D editor Karl Ludvigsen…