Car and Driver April 2016

Sic your dogs on us at: editors@caranddriver.com or join the discussion at: backfires.caranddriver.com ACCORDING TO YOU Your January 10Best issue is the highlight of my magazine year, a 10-course banquet, and I savor every bite. Reading it always makes me want to buy one of the cars, and last year I did: a beautiful black, six-speed, six-cylinder Honda Accord coupe. It is definitely, as you said, “better than it has to be.” TOM DENNISON FAIRFIELD, CONNECTICUT I must remind you esteemed scribes that in 2013, the Mazda 6 finished first and beat the Honda Accord in a comparo. In your latest 10Best list, the Accord makes the grade but not the 6. JIM SMITH MOKENA, ILLINOIS How did the Accord win out over the Mazda 6? The 6 has a better chassis, looks better inside and out, and, unlike…

You’d think that, with oil dipping below $30 a barrel and insatiable consumer demand for vehicles that are ever larger, ever taller, and ever more stuffed, piñata-like, with electronic candy, the world’s automakers would’ve used January’s North American International Auto Show to display nothing but scaleddown Freightliners. While it is true that there was a smattering of new and conceptual trucks, crossovers, and SUVs on the stands at Detroit, their numbers in no way reflected the public’s current ute-buying frenzy. With the exception of the Kia Telluride, a beautiful and blocky love child of the Volvo XC90 and Mercedes-Benz GLS, it was plain that carmakers’ passions don’t run to the crossover. Their wallets, sure. But their hearts? Instead, the carmaker id is fixated on the two-door, the coupé if you’re feeling Frenchy,…

IT’S THE RARE auto executive who is content with sales figures. But Duncan Aldred, the head of Buick and GMC, seems comfortable, if not complacent. Buick set its third straight global record in 2015, with more than 1.2 million sales. It plans to launch seven new products by 2018, with the compact Envision crossover and Cascada convertible set to go on sale imminently [see page 085 for our Cascada first drive]. “People forget,” Aldred says, “that we outsell Audi in the U.S. We outsell Infiniti and Acura. We outsell Lincoln.” Indeed, Buick beat Cadillac by nearly 50,000 sales last year. It’s the fourthbestselling premium brand in the U.S. (You might not consider Buick a premium brand, but GM’s accountants most certainly do.) And Buick achieved that mark with just five vehicles in…

Domestic dogs’ brains are hard-wired to bond with their owners. Levels of the feel-good hormone oxytocin rise in both human and pooch when maintaining eye contact. ALABAMA, THIS AUTHOR’S HUSKY, will jump into a truck bed before the tailgate is even down. Another staffer’s Newfie dances around as if her paws were in a frying pan and runs in circles when she hears the word “ride.” Only dogs seem to love cars as much as humans. There’s little (or no) science investigating why, so we invited the experts to speculate. Dogs experience the world more through scent than sight. Where a human’s nose has up to 5 million olfactory receptors, a dog’s can have up to 300 million. No wonder they like to stick their snoots out the window and into the…

“ALWAYS GET THE BIG ENGINE” your grandpa used to say, typically while unwrapping a Werther’s Original candy and shouting at The Price is Right as it gave away yet another economy model. But in these days of 300-hp four-bangers, is there still value in choosing the bigger engine? ¶ Certainly the answer depends on the car and the carmaker. And so we busied ourselves with the infographic adjacent, an overview of which automaker’s optional horsepower is the cheapest. ¶ We began by compiling the prices and outputs of a selection of available performance vehicles. In the interest of simplifying what is still not a simple data set, we counted only trim levels and optional engines, ignoring performance-enhancing exhausts and other stand-alone power bumps. Then we minimized redundancies whenever two or…

In a fleeting moment of governmental competence, America’s elected officials approved a five-year, $305 billion road-funding plan this past December. The sensible, bipartisan action is known as the Fixing America’s Surface Transportation (FAST) Act. No transportation bill in the past decade has covered more than two years. The bulk of the FAST Act money— $207 billion—will be distributed to states for road and bridge improvements, where the stability of a five-year plan could encourage local authorities to take on more ambitious, longer-term infrastructure programs. But it doesn’t provide much headroom for growth. The Department of Transportation contends that the 11-percent increase in spending from 2016 through 2021, primarily intended to offset inflation, isn’t enough to reduce congestion or keep pace with technology. The Obama administration had originally proposed a 45-percent increase. As…