Table of contents for April 2016 in Automobile

I’ve always liked Volvos despite their clunky appearance, and I have owned several including, half a century ago, what was the fastest Volvo in the world. True, it required a Ford 289 V-8 heart transplant, but the basic car was more than strong enough to allow doubling its power safely. Solidity and safety have long been Volvo touchstones, though quality seemed to decline somewhat during the last Ford ownership years. Now backed by Chinese capital, Volvo’s engineers and designers have begun a rational consolidation program in which models will be based on simplified platforms with similar mechanical packages. Given that Volvo once had four-, five-, six-, and eightcylinder engines sourced from Ford, Renault, Yamaha, and even diesels from VW at the same time as well as multiple in-house designs, this…

YOUR INTERVIEW WITH LAMBORGHINI TEST DRIVER Valentino Balboni and his history with the Miura (“Where Are Tey Now?” February 2016) brought to mind my own first experience with the model. It was the mid-1970s, and a friend of my father had come to tell him about the car he’d recently purchased in Italy and driven across Nevada to Salt Lake City. My jaw dropped as he described the Lamborghini Miura that had been the pace car at that year’s F1 race in Monaco. Tree days later, Mr. Kemp gave me a Balboni-style ride in the gleaming white Miura. A nearby section of freeway had just been completed, but while it wasn’t yet open to traffic, Mr. K had me move a couple of sawhorses to the side so we could…

Thirty years ago, when Automobile’s first subscribers received the long-awaited debut issue in their mailboxes, these are the two cars they saw first. As disparate as they were similar, the 1985 Ferrari 308 QV and 1986 Toyota MR2 both strove for the same goal: to deliver driving excitement. The difference was how they went about it. For the cover story, David E. Davis Jr. wanted to know how a cut-rate Japanese sports car built almost entirely from econobox parts-bin bits competed against a thoroughbred Italian with an engine drawing from Formula 1 experience. It was a valid question, especially if you couldn’t swing the near-$60,000 price tag for the latter, and it remains interesting today. We see these cars together for the first time at Chateau Julien, the photo location…

After thousands of images taken on hundreds of assignments, the idea of choosing my favorite image after all these years is daunting. I contributed to Automobile even before it was a magazine, when founding editor David E. Davis Jr. asked me to help create a promotional road-trip piece by shooting a British sports car in Wales, the land of his ancestors. I can’t quite remember why the car he chose for this was a Panther Kallista, a kind of horrifying Morgan Plus 4 replica with an aluminum body. My most memorable picture, I think, is this 1955 Maserati 300S being admired by a young Italian woman with her bicycle. It was taken in a piazza in Brescia, Italy, shortly before my friend Mark Gillies (then Automobile’s executive editor) and I…

The thrill of the jet age came and went with a whoosh. Just as swiftly as subsonic travel signaled the dawn of futurist glamour, its rose-colored promise slipped away, supplanting silvery, cloud-piercing dreams with the reality of cramped airliners and mass transportation. Decades after the fall, I’m pinned to the seat of an Aero L-39 Albatros by six times my body weight, climbing 12,000 feet above Central California’s sprawling vineyards on a clear autumn morning. The blood in my cranium wants to drain to my extremities as the jet pulls a loop; when the needle-nosed aircraft finally settles back into a level, horizon-bound trajectory, six other L-39s maintain locked-in positions in my peripheral vision, two of them within an arm’s reach of my plane’s surprisingly short wingspan. They stay tight…

The Deep Dive GEORG KACHER’S 30 YEARS / GEAR: NOW AND THEN CUMBERFORD / ANTOINE / KITMAN / LETTERS 14 . AUTOMOBILEMAG.COM . 04 . 2016 Driven: Best Regular Sports Car: FERRARI 550 MARANELLO Not yet Botoxed like the 575M, available exclusively with a click-clack manual transmission, the creamiest $100K-plus slide powered by a 12-cylinder engine, this is the F12 of the ’90s. Welcome to my secret dreams and disasters department, wherein I've taken the occasion of Automobile's 30th anniversary to catalog my personal list of best and worst cars I've not only driven during the past four decades in this business, but also the ones I've owned. In other words, 30 years of automotive euphoria and depression, as seen through a pair of glasses from a 6-foot-8-inch vantage point…

L AMBORGHINI HURACÁN LP 580-2 CELEBRATING 30 YEARS 2016 LAMBORGHINI HURACÁN L P 580-2 DOHA, QATAR Thwack, thwack! Chunks of rubber fly off the track and smack the windshield as the speedometer indicates 160 mph. No damage, and I continue to follow race driver Giacomo Barri into the braking zone, paddling away at the dual-clutch transmission, exhaust crackling. Off the brakes, turn hard right, and the sticky Pirellis grip. From the apex to beyond the exit, the throttle helps to direct the nose, the chassis always on alert to the imminence of oversteer. This is the 2016 Lamborghini Huracán LP 580-2, the new rear-wheel-drive variant in the lineup. It’s lighter by about 73 pounds, slightly less powerful, and less expensive than the all-wheel-drive Huracán LP 610-4. To preserve the hierarchy,…

Editor Floyd’s commitment to “hang our hat on telling compelling stories around design” in his January column brought a number of thoughtful letters from readers, several of them making distinctions between styling— how things look—and design—how things work. Reader Ken Schory said the Ford GT Design of the Year is “gorgeous sculpture” and “represents great styling, not necessarily great design.” I think its styling is very good, but it is also great design, especially if the complex airflow works in practice. This fundamental notion of denigrating styling and emphasizing engineering in design has arisen repeatedly in Automobile’s first 30 years. Both aspects are vitally important to car creation. Everyone tries to make both beauty and function better than they were before, and if some projects and some protagonists are more…

SOUND FROM EIGHT-TRACK players to Bluetooth, 10 watts to 1,000 or more, tinny tweeters to Kevlarwound speakers, and ACDelco to Bowers & Wilkins, automakers’ audio offerings have evolved impressively throughout the years. Your music library is now a just tap away in the cloud, ready to stream through digitally enhanced, amazing sound systems developed in conjunction with leading audio specialists. For luxury brands especially, how you kick out your jams has become an ever bigger selling point. Cadillac partnered with Bose to create a system called Panaray (see page 68), which is set to make its debut in the new CT6. Lincoln is rolling out its new Revel system, as is Acura with its Krell setup. And, of course, the Bentleys and Benzes of the world have been in the…

GTI AND M X-5 MIATA GTI AND MX-5 / FOUR SEASONS: BEST AND WORST ACURA INTEGRA / AUCTIONS / P.J. O’ROURKE The sky is falling for car enthusiasts, or so the doomsayers would have you believe. There are plenty of warning signs. Tighter emissions laws are killing big-displacement engines; speed cameras and radar guns threaten our proclivity for driving quickly; fewer youngsters today learn to drive or even buy cars; and self-driving vehicles are real. But it isn’t time to panic just yet, because Mazda’s MX-5 Miata and Volkswagen’s Golf GTI are alive and better than ever. No other vehicles have exemplified our “No Boring Cars” mantra as consistently during the past three decades, earning spots as some of Automobile’s most-awarded, best-reviewed cars in our history. Their story arcs are…

An appearance for grown-ups but a soul for street racers I’m sitting on a curb here in L.A. and eating a cheeseburger topped with pastrami as tough-looking vatos cycle through the unmarked marijuana dispensary next door. Next to me is a two-door 1986 Acura Integra. When Jean Jennings (then Lindamood) got behind the wheel of a freshly minted version of this car for the first issue of Automobile back in 1986, she made it sound like a dream ride for cross-country motoring as she drove along picturesque California Highway 1. But today this Integra seems better suited to L.A.’s gritty cityscape, parked as it is between a sun-faded Tiburon and a clapped-out Tercel. Some 30 years ago, our readers were dumbfounded by the idea of a Honda Civic wearing Euro-style…

LONG BEFORE I STARTED bloviating for a living, senior staffers at Automobile’s home base in Ann Arbor, the Paris of southeastern Michigan, had identified yours truly—Brooklynborn with a strong backwash of Jersey— as voluble, over-opinionated, and curmudgeonly beyond his (then) tender gearhead years. Which they weren’t always necessarily happy about. But it somehow led them to conclude I was columnist material. It also gave the magazine’s former copy chief, the sainted Laura Sky Brown, an idea for the name of my column: Noise, Vibration & Harshness, or as the engineers call it, NVH. With moments to spare before going to press, it was as fine a suggestion of a column name as there could ever be, and I remain eternally grateful. Why, if I were to pay Laura a penny…

David E. Davis Jr. often recalled for us those first few days in 1955 soon after his arrival in California from Detroit. He would speed through the darkened streets of Los Angeles at midnight to pick up his wife from her job as an American Airlines reservations clerk. The sound of his MG’s straight-pipe exhaust booming in the concrete canyons filled him with exhilaration at having reached the heart of what it meant to drive a sports car and live the life it offered. It was a feeling he thought all car enthusiasts wanted to share, he said. As much as anything, this experience in that faraway time was the moment when he created Automobile Magazine. David E. (1930-2011) is gone now, of course, but when you read the collection…

AUTOMOBILE AND THE WORLD 1986 AUTOMOBILE AND THE WORLD 2016 BIGGEST SCANDAL! Accusations against Audi about sudden acceleration, made on “60 Minutes” on Nov. 23, 1986 / Volkswagen diesel scandal, in which company engineers are accused of writing computer code to allow cars to pass emissions tests The Automotive World 1986/early 2016: Best-selling car: Chevrolet Celebrity/Toyota Camry Best-selling truck: Ford F-150/Ford F-150 Total domestic vehicle sales: 8.2 million/17.4 million (2015) 1986 TANDY 600 $1,599 1986 NINTENDO $89.95 DAVID E. DAVIS JR. showed up in downtown Dallas with a briefcase full of Automobile magazines, that first one with the Toyota MR2 and Ferrari 308 on the cover. He was there to see me. In 1986, I was the swinging dick of automotive journalism in Dallas, Texas. David E. was the swinging…

SOUND “I believed it would be possible to produce better sound in an automobile than in the home.” -Amar G. Bose, Automobile, November 1998 With tire roar, wind noise, and an engine rumbling in the background, you might think a car is a horrible environment to enjoy a high-end audio system. But back in the 1980s, Amar G. Bose—yes, that Bose—believed car interiors were better for accurate sound reproduction than, say, a living room. In 1979 Bose approached General Motors about creating a sound system for a Cadillac Seville, developing a high-quality aural solution in just 90 days. GM soon approved production of the setup, which debuted in the ’83 Seville. The $895 option was a hefty expenditure for a car that cost less than $22,000, but it proved that…

THEN (1986) VS. NOW (2016) | BY DAVE KINNEY 1965 Ford Mustang 1986: $15,600 2016: $40,700 THE STORY BEHIND 30 YEARS OF RISING PRICES Since Automobile was founded 30 years ago, the auction landscape for classic cars has changed dramatically. With a few exceptions, the auction companies, venues, and the most popular cars are different, and the buyers and sellers have changed as well. Perhaps the most important change is something you might not think about anymore: cable television. Though auctions were a spectator sport even three decades ago, the broadcast of auctions has caused the collectible car market to explode. An auction is now reality TV, amped up with personalities, frenzied bidding, big money, and all kinds of bad behavior. And here is something else to think about. The…