Inhoudsopgave van March/April 2019 - Automobile

Automobile’s editors have chosen the BMW 8 Series coupe as our 2019 Design of the Year. There are multiple reasons for our selection, not least of which: In a year when all manufacturers tended to focus their efforts on an industry-wide consensual design approach, concentrating sales efforts on SUVs and reducing the diversity of passenger car designs, an in-your-face car like this stands out. Big, powerful, stylish coupes are wonderful things, traditionally pretty much the summit of any upper-level manufacturer’s product range. They’re even more impressive than convertibles on identical platforms because they’re always stiffer, lighter, and more crashworthy as well—not that anyone worries about such things in this market segment. Big, powerful, stylish coupes are also slightly puzzling. They’re not usually space-efficient, their rear seats are not often particularly…

ANYTHING THAT REDUCES THE TIME IN REALIZING A PROJECT IS HIGHLY VALUABLE. THE FIRST STEPS ARE TYPICALLY TRANSFORMING THE DESIGNER’S THOUGHTS INTO SOMETHING THAT CAN BE SHARED WITH OTHERS. LAST YEAR I attended the Unity AutoTech Summit, the single most interesting automotive event I’ve experienced in the past decade or two. No, it wasn’t an auto show; those manifestations of the long-ago past are not exceptionally relevant anymore, regardless of how many cars show up for the first time in those public settings rather than in online reveals, as is now common. Our awareness of Unity’s event came in the form of an unremarkable email invitation, one of many that turn up regularly, from a company I’d never heard of, for an event with “a focus on VR design and…

SINTRA, PORTUGAL BLAME SOCIAL MEDIA for allowing humanity the opportunity to develop some of its worst traits into habits. One of those traits is the tendency to declare things we like to be the “best evar!” and the things we don’t like as much to be “the werk of the devil.” Unfortunately, this tweet-friendly sense of polarizing snark has no direct relationship to the grayscale world of matter and consequences we all share. Fortunately, all you have to do to escape this hell of our collective creation is put down your phone, grab the keys to something like the 2019 BMW Z4, and go for a drive. Although any car would theoretically do—we did ask you to put your phone down, right?—the new Z4 is an especially good choice for…

SINTRA, PORTUGAL LISTEN TO BMW enthusiasts and the collective opinion of automotive media in recent years, and a common refrain emerges: Specifically, only a handful of great BMWs come from the post-2000 era, the company has lost its way, etc. ad nauseam. Fortunately, you don’t have to be a BMW fan to love the all-new 2019 8 Series, especially so in M850i xDrive guise. You just have to enjoy great cars. Built on the same basic formula that made the original 8 Series a cult hit (gorgeous looks, lots of power, and a big dash of “dynamism”) and despite the lack of a V-12, the new car is no pretender to the name—a fact made thrillingly clear the first time you fire up the 4.4-liter twin-turbo V-8 and unleash its…

I WAS LAST HERE IN 1992. THEN IT WAS THE 4.0-LITER INLINE-SIX WITH A THREE-SPEED AUTOMATIC; TODAY IT’S A 3.6-LITER V-6 WITH AN EIGHT-SPEED AUTOMATIC.  IN THE YEAR 49 B.C., emperor Julius Caesar led his troops across the Rubicon River into Italy, an egregious act of aggression that caused much peeing of pants among Roman senators, who fled rather than face the civil war Caesar’s act was sure to incite. “The die is cast,” Caesar said shortly after drying off, thus coining one of two phrases that resulted from his actions. The other: “crossing the Rubicon,” which has come to mean, according to Dictonary.com, “to commit oneself irrevocably,” perhaps to the point of no return. That’s a good attitude to have when you climb into a Jeep to tackle the…

BECAUSE THIS IS our annual design issue, let’s talk about design. Or let’s talk about it as it pertains to the car launch prelaunch we attended at the Plymouth, Michigan, headquarters of Rivian—an electric vehicle startup founded in 2009. In other words, so long ago. But now, some 10 years on, here finally standing before us is Rivian’s first production model, the R1T, a high-riding, full-sized, electric, crew-cab, all-wheel-drive pickup with a claimed 0-60 time of less than 3 seconds, the ability to ford streams and excel off-road, and a claimed range between charges as high as 400 miles, though presumably not when towing to its maximum 10,000-pound capability. Rivian’s truck is not set to deliver until late 2019 at the earliest, but it’s here today for us to inspect,…

The past year has been, frankly, a bit of a disappointment in design terms. If there were numerous handsome, well-executed products presented to the market, they were all distressingly similar and notably lacking in imagination and innovation. Many of the contenders for our 2019 Automobile Design of the Year trophy have points of similarity, entirely too many of them to our tastes: long hoods; virtually vertical grilles to allow for those hood lengths; notably oversized inlets at the lower front corners, swept back for reduced drag; horizontally oriented headlamp assemblies; thin trapezoidal air inlets under their six-faceted main grille frames; sculpting along the sills and on the body sides; and so on through a long list of details. It’s almost as though all the involved manufacturers’ design departments were issued…

 BASED NEAR AMSTERDAM, Ruben Ooms is a noted Dutch illustrator and concept and storyboard artist who studied at the Amsterdam Graphic School and Estor Studio School. Ooms spends the bulk of his work time collaborating with advertising agencies and film studios but also executes concept sketches and renderings for custom car builders and super-yacht architects. He works primarily in digital mediums, but he rediscovered paint and brushes when he started pinstriping, lettering, and sign painting. Jobs for traditional automakers including Renault, BMW, and VW have given Ooms exposure to contemporary vehicles, and one look at his portfolio site (rubenooms.com) will tell you that depicting cars and car culture are among his primary passions. Recently, Ooms set his skills and imagination in a direction that caught our attention: How would today’s…

AUTÓDROMO DO ESTORIL, PORTUGAL THE SUN SHINES, but the Estoril racetrack is still wet from heavy rain the night before. Jörg Weidinger, racer and test driver for BMW’s M division, doesn’t seem to have noticed. We’re in a prototype of the upcoming 2020 BMW M8, and it is flying—cutting shapes on the way into some corners where Weidinger wants to demonstrate the fun side of the M xDrive all-wheel-drive system, hooked up and driving hard out of others to showcase the excellent traction it affords. The sheer speed is impressive, but the real surprise is just how much more aggressive and responsive the car feels compared to the M5 Competition package we sampled just a few minutes earlier. The M8, which BMW will launch in the second quarter of 2019,…

Breathtaking. Beautiful. Shocking. Revolutionary. All of these words, in one language or another, were likely uttered by automotive pundits visiting Lamborghini’s display during the 1966 Geneva auto show, where the marque revealed its finished Miura to the world. The car’s sleek, muscular lines and mid-mounted engine placement were unlike anything seen before on a road car and borrowed heavily from the motorsports world. Today, we know the Miura as the world’s first supercar, setting the scene for the contemporary hypercars with performance far exceeding what was once thought possible. Back in 1965, though, young Americans were protesting the Vietnam War, as many working-class Italians protested what they deemed unfair labor practices in Italy’s booming industrial plants. Strikes were commonplace, but despite the odds, self-made tractor manufacturer Ferruccio Lamborghini had founded…

WE DON’T KNOW when the autonomous vehicle revolution will start, how it will look, or what to expect—apart from a tangled mess of red tape and legalese—but we know it will inspire change, like any worthwhile revolution. In the case of the automotive interior, it’s not difficult to imagine the metamorphosis it will soon undergo will be its most dramatic since inception. “The traditional automotive interior is built around the driver and the steering wheel for the best possible control and view of the vehicle’s surroundings,” Klaus Bischoff, Volkswagen’s executive director of design, says. “The autonomous interior, however, is based on the passenger’s needs. … The autonomous interior gives passengers time to do what they want while getting where they want to go.” Manufacturers and suppliers are on the scent,…

The Rubicon Trail hosts multiple off-road events each year, but the two best known and most popular are the Jeep Jamboree and the Jeepers Jamboree. Yes, despite their so-similar names, they are two separate events. The Jeep Jamboree is smaller, shorter, and more exclusive, and it encourages families. The Jeepers Jamboree offers more of an “adult atmosphere” and allows non-Jeep vehicles, including Toyota Land Cruisers, Toyota trucks, Suzuki Samurais, International Harvester Scouts, and pre-1979 Ford Broncos. Jeep Jamboree, however, requires that you drive a 1987–2019 Jeep Wrangler, with older Jeeps or non-Wrangler models requiring prior approval. Prices per person are about $400 to $500 and include different amenities. The Jeepers Jamboree is typically in July; the Jeep Jamboree is in August. You can register online. Make sure you do so…

THE YEAR 2018 was not a great one for concept cars. We hoped for radical breakthroughs to show up at the long-running Paris auto show in the fall, but it didn’t happen. An uninspiring pastiche of a 50-year-old Italian coachwork design from Peugeot for a future electric car was seriously disappointing, however nicely done. A totally forgettable set of boring boxes from Citroën and some self-driving nightmares with square wheels (or at least square wheel covers) from Renault clearly demonstrated we’re not likely to see a DS-19 style and tech revolution from the City of Light for a long time—if ever again. We seem just as far from the outrageous but rational excesses of the Bertone Aerodinamica Technica BAT series in the ’50s or the gloriously over-the-top “dream cars” from…

LOOK FOR THE squiggliest line on the navigation screen, and go there. It’s a great system for finding a road worthy of testing a new sports car—a road where you can prod and poke a vehicle into revealing its strengths and weaknesses. The car on this day is the seventh generation of BMW’s most important sedan, the 3 Series. Considering this car’s historical pertinence, the road itself is doubly important. The nav-system squiggle reveals itself in real life as a single lane of asphalt gouged into a mountainside. It is open to two-way traffic but offers few pullouts and zero guardrails; a poorly placed tire will drop you into the abyss. The four-cylinder 330i sails up the switchbacks and quickly demonstrates that worries about misplaced wheels are unnecessary. The chassis…

BMW’S RECENT M6 GTLM-class race car was essentially a maxed-out GT3 car; its roots were in the M6 GT3—a customer-spec racer designed for gentlemen drivers—whereas the new M8 GTE is a pure race car, designed without compromise. It has already raced at Le Mans and will compete in this year’s IMSA WeatherTech Sports Car Championship in North America, and it features much better aero efficiency, greater stability, and more sophisticated electronics; it should be easier to drive as a result. But that does little to calm your nerves when the night before your test drive, rain is lashing the Estoril circuit. I’m not going to break any lap records regardless, but there’s a huge sense of responsibility here. The basic numbers aren’t particularly wild in these strange times when even…

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA December 8, 2018 THERE’S NO DOUBT Los Angeles is a premier hub of popular car culture, and the Petersen Automotive Museum has just that on display all year round. When RM Sotheby’s (which keeps a Southern California office) announced an auction at the Petersen, we were only surprised it hadn’t been done sooner. The sale felt more like an automotive holiday party than an auction, with many well-known local enthusiasts in the room to socialize rather than to buy a car, yet plenty of vehicles did in fact find new homes. In all, 54 of the 68 vehicles offered were sold, yielding a 79 percent sell-through rate and more than $39 million in total sales. Here are eight cars that caught our eye. 1 1971 Lamborghini Miura…