MotorTrend October 2021

Surprise! Why you should trust our Buyer’s Guide more than anyone’s. Hey, can you keep a secret? No? Great! Tell everyone you know: MotorTrend’s Buyer’s Guide is excellent. Once you’ve consumed the best automotive videos, features, news, first drives, and tests around, stick around for a top-class Buyer’s Guide experience. After you’ve perused the new car info in this issue, explore your buying options further at MotorTrend.com/cars—the only online Buyer’s Guide created by MotorTrend’s expert editors. Passion is everything. We care deeply about cars and where this industry is headed. Passion informs everything we do, from the unparalleled way we conduct our annual Car/Truck/SUV of the Year competitions, to the way we write, to the design of our online Buyer’s Guide. It’s why we can help better than anyone with your new…

Thumb the start button. Whirrrr … whomp! The ground shakes as 7.3 liters of naturally aspirated Aston Martin V-12 explode to life before settling down to a busy idle, baritone menace rumbling from the bazooka-caliber side pipes. Cinch the four-point seat belt and clench the steering yoke with your right hand. Depress the clutch and shove the chunky wood-topped shifter into first. The Aston Martin Victor’s barely controlled violence is visceral, the driver always intimately engaged. Yep, the Aston Martin Victor is a modern supercar like no other. That’s not simply because there is but one Victor on the planet, or that there will only ever be one Victor on the planet. It’s not because its wealthy Belgian owner paid Aston Martin about $5 million to build it just for him. Rather, it’s…

It’s a golden age for off-roaders, and even Lexus is happy to play in the dirt. Meet the one-off J201, an LX 570 massively customized by renowned adventurers and vehicle builders Expedition Overland. The idea was to create an OEM+ overlander—think subtle as opposed to SEMA. That OEM+ thinking is evident in the slim roof rack with lockable bins and in the custom front upper control arms and rear lower track arms for increased articulation. It’s there, too, in the Magnuson TVS1900 supercharger, which bumps ye olde 5.7-liter V-8 from 383 horsepower and 403 lb-ft of torque to a beefy 550 hp and 550 lb-ft. The integration is so seamless—it looks factory under the hood—you wonder why this exact setup isn’t standard on all LX 570s. The factory rear bumper and aggressive…

50 OCTOBER 1971 PRICE: $0.75 If you held this issue 50 years ago, it was our New Car Buyer’s Guide just like the issue you’re holding today. Our cover car was the wonderfully French 1972 Citroën SM. This car would go on to be our first ever foreign-made Car of the Year, winning in 1972. More recently, we featured it as our best Car of the Year from the ’70s in our 2019 70th Anniversary Edition issue. 30 OCTOBER 1991 PRICE: $2.95 Just like this October 2021 issue you’re reading right now, it was New Car Buyer’s Guide time in October 1991. Inside this packed edition, we looked at all the upcoming cars for the 1992 model year and road-tested a handful of ’90s legends, including the GMC Typhoon performance SUV, the SUV sibling of the Syclone…

France readies a Li-Fi line for last-meters internet connectivity Ever heard of Li-Fi? I hadn’t, nor had several future-looking car-nerd pals I mentioned it to. But the tech is coming soon to phones, tablets, and infrastructure, so savvy auto companies are integrating it into their next-generation products now. Li-Fi stands for Light Fidelity and is to Wi-Fi (Wireless Fidelity) as lidar is to radar. That is, Li-Fi uses light to do what Wi-Fi uses radio waves to do: provide “last meters” over-the-air delivery of internet service from a router to a user’s computer, handheld device, or other internet-connected gizmo. There are many benefits and a few drawbacks. Data transmission is speed-of-light speedy, so the time it takes for messages to go back and forth (latency) is vastly lower than with Wi-Fi (0.5 millisecond…

We Aim to Cover It All “Lions and tigers and … bunny rabbits? Oh my! Mid-engines and Bugatti Chirons and … minivans? Oh my! After reading the August issue, I just want to say I hope you don’t ever let anyone accuse you of not covering all the automotive bases. Bill Craft Hollister, Missouri Eye of the Beholder You folks make me laugh sometimes. You’ve said the 2021 Corvette Stingray’s design looks dated—the same car that, in my experience, causes everyone to say, “Wow, what the hell is that?” every time it drives past. I also crack up when you dump on the front of the new BMW M3 or the looks of a Honda Civic Type R. What’s the point of even commenting? Some people love it, some people hate it. I love the…