Car and Driver Aug-15

Sic your dogs on us at: editors@caranddriver.com or join the discussion at: backfres.caranddriver.com APRIL, COME SHE WILL You’re probably my FAVE car magazine. And I get the whole American thing with the Corvette and Mustang—props. But to put a Miata on the cover?! What has gotten into you? CRISTY Z. MILWAUKEE, WISCONSIN SOFT SELL When you met with Mazda during your drive of the MX-5 [“Toy Story,” April 2015], I think they spun out on some of their marketing spin. Did they really say to your face that they’ve “purposely built a bit of initial compliance into the suspension to give the driver an awareness of load transfer during cornering”? You discovered this translates into body squirm during turn-in. Perhaps they should have instead said, “Customers seeking a boulevard convertible with a soft, cushy ride…

I was in a Neoplan Cityliner bus, for one thing. There were 23 of us, not two. And my trip wasn’t a sprint. My family and I went to Eastern Europe to see my fatherin-law’s hometown, Érmihályfalva, Romania, and to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Mauthausen, a quarry on the outskirts of Linz, Austria, that the Nazis turned into a concentration camp. Linz’s rolling and productive farmland, when viewed from inside Mauthausen’s gray stone walls or its pale-green barracks, only amplifies the quiet terror of the complex, a terror that was institutionalized and normalized. But nothing is left of the adjacent Gusen camps except a small memorial museum. There’s now a suburb where Gusen used to be. Buried under it is the Bergkristall secret-tunnel system, which we toured on…

GERMAN CLASS “CSL” stands for “Coupé Sport Leichtbau,” or coupe, sport, lightweight. The original 3.0 CSL had plexiglass windows, an aluminum hood and trunklid, and was more than 400 pounds lighter than the contemporary 3.0 CS. TO MOST AMERICANS, “Batmobile” refers either to a Barris-customized Lincoln concept, Michael Keaton’s neo-gothic jet phallus, or Christian Bale’s Tumbler. But to BMW cognoscenti, Batmobile means the 3.0 CSL, a race car that helped define the brand as the epitome of sportiness in the early 1970s. This spring, at the Concorso d’Eleganza Villa d’Este near Como in northern Italy, the company showed of the 3.0 CSL Hommage concept, a fascinating interpretation of that historic coupe. “The 3.0 CSL is the quintessential BMW icon,” the brand’s chief designer, Karim Habib, tells us. “We dared to reinterpret its spirit.”…

AUTOMAKERS DON’ T JUST DREAM about self-driving, 100-mpg cars; they’re busy creating the technologies to build them—and fling flurries of patents in the process. According to a report by the business-data company Thomson Reuters, automakers, suppliers, and independent inventors doubled their automotive patent applications in a five-year span, from fewer than 18,000 in 2009 to more than 40,000 in 2013. We’re not talking mere perfume dispensers here, rather real advances in powertrain, chassis, safety, inflotainment, and telematics systems. As with most things it does, Toyota is the world leader in total patent flings, with more than double that of any other company except Bosch and Hyundai. The company went nuts on powertrain patenting in 2013 with 1100 flings, an elevenfold increase from ’09. The Germans ruled the development of driver assists…

A FOUNDING MEMBER of the rap group NWA and successful actor and solo performer, O’Shea Jackson Sr. (Ice Cube to you) has always lived in Southern California, where everyone’s lives are rooted in cars and traffic. Now 46, Cube, who trained as an architectural draftsman, has a passion for the region’s design and automotive heritage. And he is one of the producers of a new film about NWA, Straight Outta Compton, which is set to open August 14. C/D: You’ve described Los Angeles freeways as each having its own personality. The 110, for instance, you say has “gangster traffic.” IC: The 110, they just drive aggressive. I don’t know if that’s because they’re coming from downtown or if it’s because it goes right through the ’hood. The 405 isn’t that aggressive even…

TRADEMARK EROSION MAY not impact the environment, but marketers have noted the lexicographical slide of some brand names into generic labels. Kleenex, Band-Aid, Xerox, and Zamboni (yes, other companies make ice-resurfacing equipment) all underwent the transformation, and Honda’s VTEC, or Variable Timing and lift Electronic Control, teeters on the edge of name interchangeability with other variable-valvetiming systems—including some of its own variations on the theme. When Honda started tinkering with VTEC in the early 1980s, it sparked an internal-combustion revolution that spread to nearly every brand. The simplest of the resulting variable-timing systems employ cam phasers, or mechanisms that change the relationship between the crankshaft and the camshaft(s). Phasers provide a range of adjustment, but only for valve timing. VTEC, on the other hand, works in a stair-step fashion, shuttling between…