Inhoudsopgave van December 2019 - Automobile

Tea Ceremony Dating to the ninth century, the formal Japanese tea ceremony—even in modernized form—is a ritualized, highly choreographed art requiring years to master. (Some practitioners achieve the status of takumi.) “The way of tea” (chado) honors harmony, purity, and simplicity. It’s one of Japan’s most revered and influential traditions. Kaiseki Dinner A “haute cuisine” meal of small portions and multiple courses renowned for its meticulous preparation and the masterly aesthetics of its presentation. Like the tea ceremony, it celebrates simplicity, quality, and expertise. Often served at ryokan (traditional Japanese inns). Sashiko Stitching A time-honored form of Japanese quilting often used in martial arts uniforms because of its strength and beauty. Lexus UX chief designer Tetsuo Miki incorporated sashiko patterns into the vehicle’s leather seats. Artwood Available as optional trim…

In the run up to the launch of its first car, the Q45 luxury sedan, Infiniti rolled out an ad campaign featuring serene scenes from nature and flowery essays on its guiding principles, with nary a car to be seen. The idea was sound: Take a head-on approach to brand building by espousing the values that could (and would) make Japanese luxury unique. But instead of creating desire, Infiniti created confusion. John Q. Public didn’t really get the point. Complicating matters, when everyone finally did see the Q45, its styling didn’t exactly garner critical acclaim. It wasn’t quite boxy, and it wasn’t quite swoopy, and its massive chrome oval door handles stood out like—well, like massive chrome oval door handles. Instead of a grille, it had an Infiniti badge the…

WASHINGTON, D.C. PICTURE THIS. A twin-turbo V-8-powered Cadillac roars onto California’s Streets of Willow raceway amid the likes of the latest Porsche 911, all-new Toyota Supra, and the massively hyped mid-engine C8 Corvette. Having just driven the 550-horsepower CT6-V on a stretch of curvy, hilly two-lanes north of the Capital Beltway in the wilds of Maryland, we’re confident it would make its way around the 13-turn, 1.6-mile Willow circuit with the kind of fiery composure that would earn it a 2020 Automobile All-Star award. Finally, another American car that would help provide an antidote to editor-in-chief Mike Floyd’s lament (Editor’s Letter, May 2019) that too few domestic-branded cars and sport utilities are interesting enough to even earn an invite to our annual #noboringcars runoff. But sadly, almost as soon as…

IT’S BLISTERINGLY HOT inside the old Bugatti factory in Campogalliano, Italy, which opened in 1990 only to be mothballed five years later. Romano Artioli, who also briefly owned Lotus, did indeed build what was once the world’s fastest and most extreme sports car at this site. In July, almost 24 years to the day after gatekeeper Ezio Pavesi closed the factory doors for good and became its pro bono part-time caretaker, the Bugatti team returned to the glazed, avant-garde building complex to show off its latest Chiron-based creation. Meet the Bugatti Centodieci concept. The Centodieci (“110” in Italian) pays homage to the EB110, and, looking the part, it made its debut at The Quail event as part of the 2019 Monterey Car Week in California. Bugatti plans 10 copies at…

ROLAND LEONG WAS bored. Bored and cold, despite it being unusually warm for July in England. He was huddled down in his seat on the Thames River tour boat, his personalized racing jacket pulled tight over a bright blue shirt that read, “Hawaii: Where my story begins.” While our fellow tourists marveled at the Tower of London, Leong stayed buried in his phone. I looked over his shoulder to see what could possibly be more interesting than Big Ben and the shining panels of the London Shard. “Head gasket? Blower pressure? EGT?” Leong’s text read. When you’ve spent more than 50 years tuning drag racing cars to faster than 300 mph, perhaps the pace of history feels like just a drag. Leong didn’t want to see the sights; he wanted…

It isn’t always easy to recognize a watershed moment as it happens, but when the Automobile staff first drove the 1990 Lexus LS 400, editor David E. Davis Jr. recognized the significance. “All you guys from Munich, Stuttgart, and Coventry, call your offices,” he wrote in the January 1989 issue. “I’d say the fox is about to find his way into the henhouse.” Although its conservative styling and quiet demeanor led some to dismiss the LS 400 as a glorified Toyota, it proved the Japanese understood what Americans wanted in a luxury car, perhaps even better than Detroit and Stuttgart did—and that they could execute it with the same pedantic attention to detail and quality for which they were known best. “Audi may dismiss it as plastic,” we wrote when…

MONTEREY, CALIFORNIA August 15-17, 2019 RM SOTHEBY’S, GOODING & COMPANY, BONHAMS THE DAY BEFORE the three top-tier auctions began in Monterey, California, this year, the Dow ominously plunged 800 points, leading many to speculate what effect the somewhat volatile stock market would have on collector car values. As it turned out, we saw a large reduction in overall sales this year, but there are other factors at work here. Blame a crowded auction schedule (both Bonhams and Gooding added a day each to their events), many less than top-quality cars, and perhaps too many cars in general. A 25 percent increase in inventory led to a 30 percent drop in total sales (from nearly $311 million in 2018 to $216 million in 2019), and some 76 percent of all cars…

TUCKED AWAY IN the sleepy little Los Angeles suburb of Torrance, American Honda’s headquarters looks like any other office complex in the South Bay area. But nestled within its fenced campus is a walled complex of buildings where the company’s sport/luxury marque, Acura, researches, lays out, and mocks up its bleeding-edge designs and technology—and, occasionally, invites the media in for a secret preview. So it was that we found ourselves in a nondescript gray concrete courtyard, surrounded by high walls, with tape over our phones’ camera lenses, faced with a sleek blue car, talking with Acura chief Jon Ikeda and executive creative director Dave Marek, walking around the car, squatting and standing, searching for a bad angle. What makes this concept so important, you ask? Why all the cloak and…

LEXUS AND INFINITI IT’S HARD TO remember just what a massive impact Lexus and Infiniti had when they appeared in 1989. Until then, luxury cars were either American (read: dated and chintzy) or European (expensive and faulty), and buying one usually meant a forced familiarity with the dealership’s service department. No one at the time thought a credible luxury car was within the skill set of the pragmatic Japanese. Honda’s then-new Acura division, which entered the market in 1986, had done little to dispel that notion, but then the first Lexus and Infiniti cars appeared, and they changed everything. Everything. These were proper luxury flagships: leather lined, V-8 powered, and smooth as silk. They were five figures cheaper than the Europeans, and they worked flawlessly in the days when first-year…

“SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA IS easily the motorist’s paradise over all other places on this mundane sphere. … The matchless climate and the ever-increasing mileage of fine roads, with the endless array of places worth visiting, insure the maximum of service and pleasure to the fortunate owner of a car, regardless of its name-plate or pedigree.”—Thomas Murphy, “On Sunset Highways” (1915). Set against the backdrop of a nascent California, the century-old tome “On Sunset Highways” glorifies the magic of car travel in the days when it was more novelty than necessity. While leafing through it, I became fascinated by Murphy’s fascination with my adopted hometown of Los Angeles and set out to retrace one of his journeys to see how much of the Golden State he depicted back in 1915 still survives.…

A CELEBRATED VOLKSWAGEN ad of the 1960s invited potential customers to “Think Small.” It’s half a century later, and VW, with its hefty Atlas and inflating Tiguan SUVs, plus the ever-growing Passat and Jetta, appears to have pretty much forgotten its own advice. The recent death of the New Beetle was not unexpected, but rumblings about the Golf range in the U.S.—VW might import only the GTI and R models when the next generation, the Mk8, arrives in 2020—more than reinforces the suspicion. It hurts. Of course, most Americans have long since forgotten the then-fledgling German company’s sensible admonition to save money and gas by not driving more car than you need. To, you know, think small. But this was the idea that the dumpy original Beetle drove into the…

THE UNBROKEN DOUBLE yellow lines of the Tail of the Dragon flick left and right and heave and sigh with the topography before disappearing into woodland so dense that even the burning Tennessee sun barely breaks through. Ahead are 11 miles and 318 turns—at least that’s what’s printed on the T-shirts and mugs in the souvenir shop on the other side of the mountain—that should reveal whether the new 2020 Toyota Supra is the real deal. Maybe it’s the stifling heat, or maybe we’re just lucky, but this revered section of U.S. Route 129 is almost spookily quiet. No motorcyclists, no cars … just the Supra and me and a whole lot of solitude. It’s the perfect place to cut through the hype, the hyperbole, the promises, the controversy, and…

“CENTRAL PARIS DRIVERS damn sure don’t ease off much at 4 a.m.,” I think as yet another delivery van comes within inches of me. They simply use the relative lull in traffic to go faster and cut across lanes more sharply. But returning to the site of the Bugatti EB110’s original launch behind the wheel of an EB110 is worth the risk; it’s a photo opportunity you simply can’t turn down. The pucker factor, however, is far past sucking up the seat covers at the mere thought of smashing up the last Bugatti to run at Le Mans. In addition, we have the very last Bugatti factory race car, of any sort, ever. And it’s all happening a day before both cars leave for starring roles at the California launch…