Car and Driver Oct-14

Sic your dogs on us at: editors@caranddriver.com or join the discussion at: backfires.caranddriver.com THIRTYSOMETHING The cover blurb on the July issue says "30 Cars Under $30K." You only have 29. No. 22 doesn't count. If you don't know the difference between a car and a pickup truck, perhaps it's time to change the name of the magazine. This is especially puzzling considering all the articles you've published touting station wagons over SUVs. So … an SUV is a truck but a pickup truck is a car? JERRY BARRAX JR. SHERMAN, TEXAS THE BIG 3-OH Why is a 15.3-second quarter-mile in a Jeep Wrangler Willys ["All-American Boy," July 2014] like "the haste of a freight train," when a few pages earlier a Fiat Abarth is 15.7 and the Mini and the Ford are 15.1? The Jeep could have…

Towing companies are A NECESSARY EVIL when it comes to parking enforcement and property repossession. But in the Google Earth we now inhabit, tow trucks do more than just yank cars out of loading zones. They use license-plate readers (LPRs) to assemble a detailed profile of where your car will be and when. That's an unnecessary evil. Plate readers have long been a tool of law enforcement, and police officers swear by them for tracking stolen cars and apprehending dangerous criminals. But private companies, such as repo crews, also photograph millions of plates a day, with scanners mounted on tow trucks and even on purpose-built camera cars whose sole mission is to drive around and collect plate scans. Each scan is GPS-tagged and stamped with the date and time, feeding a…

You might HAVE EXPECTED looming fuel-economy regulations to spell the end of crossovers and SUVs. But consumers love their stilted wagons, and those regulations are driving such a rapid pace of innovation that automakers are feeling free to bring to market more crossovers, not fewer. Like the monsters in the latest Godzilla movie, the genre is feeding off the very radiation that should be killing it. We've long since given up screaming into the wind about the superiority of station wagons over rolling bricks. To force ourselves to be okay with the crossover takeover, we've come up with the most convoluted justification for them we can muster: The beauty of a hatched vehicle is in the practicality afforded by its gaping rear portal. But if space matters, then so does space efficiency—the…

When bored, horses often chomp down on a fence post and suck air. One theory holds that this gives them a buzz. Another holds that this is baloney. But whether or not horses get lit, horsepower certainly can. And that is the purpose of a pedal tavern. Known by a variety of names, a pedal tavern is a multi-rider bike built around a bar. The HandleBar, in Indianapolis, runs a fleet of four bikes, each a PedalPub, which is a brand imported from the Netherlands and claimed to be the original bar bike. Ten pedalers sit around the perimeter, and there are spots for six passengers and one (presumably sober) driver. Many places forbid imbibing while pedaling, but PedalPubs run in 28 cities around the U.S.—including Indianapolis, which has no open-container…

We know that EVERY BURNOUT results in at least one angry bystander because science tells us that every action generates an equal and opposite reaction. Newton's Third Law also states that the torque that propels your car creates a reactionary force that acts on the Earth's surface. Geologically speaking, you're insignificant, and that force is minuscule. But what if we launched every car on the planet, all at once? Could a coordinated effort to accelerate every car extant, in the same direction at the same instant, substantially alter the speed of the Earth's rotation? If you're at the equator, the Earth's 24-hour revolution means you're moving at a linear speed of roughly 1070 mph, but this number isn't constant. The 2011 earthquake in Japan redistributed enough mass to shorten the day…

When you need a potent engine or a sturdy gearbox for your fantasy supercar, Ricardo should be your first call. This U.K.-based engineering firm has roots reaching back more than a century and branches that cover Europe, Russia, Asia, and the U.S. of A. Ricardo's expertise can be found across the industry [see below]. Among its recent projects is the HyBoost, a Ford Focus fitted with an electrically driven supercharger. Ricardo built this HyBoost with two goals in mind: topping Toyota Prius fuel efficiency while skirting the cost, bulk, and weight of the Prius's two electric motor/generators and battery pack. The experiment is a timely one—every carmaker sees 2025's 54.5-mpg CAFE requirement looming, and most need help meeting it. To create the HyBoost, Ricardo replaced the original 1.6-liter four-cylinder engine with a…