MotorTrend April 2022

Head of Editorial Welcome to our inaugural Performance Vehicle of the Year (PVOTY) issue. A quick history: We’ve awarded our Car of the Year title since 1949. In 1978, we added Truck of the Year and then SUV of the Year in 1999. Alongside Person of the Year, these have been our automotive Of The Year awards for decades. Until now. Why, and why now? It’s instructive to look back at MotorTrend’s old Import Car of the Year. First awarded in 1970, the idea of ICOTY was to finally acknowledge an indisputable truth: Cars from auto manufacturers outside of America were here to stay and should be celebrated, at least for a while. We awarded ICOTY alongside COTY until 1999, when my predecessors decided to fold the former back into the latter…

The first 911 Turbo gave powerful Porsches, especially turbocharged ones, their reputations as widowmakers. In that car, the difference between maximum cornering speed and the engine attempting to pass the front tires is measured in fractions of a mile per hour, and by the time you realize what’s happening, it’s too late to do anything about the speed. Lift, and “you’ll end up backward in a ditch,” folks said. Instead, you work the steering wheel like an actor “driving” in front of a green screen and hope you hold it together until things straighten out, physically and emotionally. Subsequent 964, 993, and 996 generations tamed this tendency with anti-roll bars made of steel rather than cheese, but the laws of physics always lurked. That’s readily apparent from our original review of…

Prior to driving the new 2022 Subaru WRX, I thought back to when I bought a black 2002 WRX wagon. Although the WRX had been on sale in Japan and other markets since 1992, that was the first model year we Yanks could own one. Four years later, I bought another new WRX wagon, a 2006 in World Rally Blue. So I’m a fan and former owner of the brand’s previous efforts in this space. And as fate would have it, I’m in the market for a new car, so am I buying a 2022 Subaru WRX? Let’s find out. For the first time in its history, the WRX has completely unique sheetmetal. But with its wider hood scoop, fatter fender flares, and black plastic cladding, the new WRX still isn’t…

Modern Lamborghini has a habit of milking its series-production cars for all they’re worth to create rebodied and mechanically upgraded limited editions. So it’s not terribly difficult to sometimes take a cynic’s view that the company relishes finding easy ways to tap into its richest clients’ hedge funds or crypto accounts rather than developing truly new machines—the type of cars we might remember as vividly as the ones on which Lamborghini made its name. So we were thrilled to discover the Essenza SCV12 is a long way from being a rebodied and retuned production model. It’s effectively a purpose-built race car, one whose point wasn’t homologation for competition but rather to explore what’s possible when unfettered by racing rules. Lamborghini let us behind its F1-style wheel for 16 laps of Las Vegas…

Electric cars are boring and dumb, and putting an electric motor in a classic car would certainly ruin its character. Right? The Superformance MKIII-E all-electric Shelby Cobra replica says different: It’s fun as hell. Outwardly, the MKIII-E looks like a normal Cobra. Peek inside, though, and something’s up: The oddball rearward-mounted manual shifter is gone, the tachometer goes to 14,000 rpm, and the gauges have logos showing a charging cable circling the car’s silhouette. According to Superformance, this is its quickest Cobra ever, and tuning isn’t even finalized yet. The rear axle is replaced by a Tesla Model S P100D rear motor, and a 31.2-kWh battery pack is fitted to the reworked engine compartment. All in, the MKIII-E is said to be about 100 pounds lighter than Superformance’s 427 V-8 model. The motor…

The wild and wonderful Pininfarina Battista is almost more conversation than car. Creating a visual stringboard of what this almost 1,900-hp, quad-motor hypercar represents for the industry, Italy, Pininfarina, the future, and the past would end up looking like the conspiracy room of a dangerous psychotic. If you’re familiar with the world of exotic cars, you know the Pininfarina name is intimately associated with designing Ferraris. But as the market for hired design houses has all but dried up, new management decided to design its own car on borrowed running gear. The car features a so-called E-Heart that uses two speakers to send a deep, audible resonance through the car, subtly throbbing the sound in a way that can be felt through the seat backs. You’d expect anything with 1,877 hp and…