Car and Driver March 2017

DOWN TO THE ’MARO Am I the only person who noticed the poorly Photoshopped image of the underside of the new 2017 Chevy Camaro ZL1 [“Ballistic Leaf Blower,” December 2016]? The lift arm on the left side of the picture is completely disconnected. The pics are shot from different angles and don’t line up. —Jeff Schleede Spencerport, NY The picture of the ZL1 up on the lift, on page 047, looks a bit weird. The left-rear swing arm appears to be, well, you look at it. —Jerry Allen Charlotte, NC We couldn’t get the whole ZL1 underside in one shot without distorting the details, so we did it in three and tried to make the splits obvious. It worked!—Ed. I’m a huge Chevy fan (own two Camaros currently), and the last time I was moved to…

How come vehicles in the U.S. are almost always equipped with allseason tires? Even the high-performance cars get all-season tires. Why aren’t these equipped with summer (or three-season) tires? I can imagine the reason for the North and Midwest is the cold, wet, and snowy weather, but I noticed that the cars in the warmer regions, such as California and Florida, also come with all-seasons. For performance cars, it defeats the purpose, or maybe there is a grand plan behind all this. When I ask owners or car dealers, nobody seems to know. —Marc van Sprang Brussels, Belgium All-season tires are largely a North American phenomenon. Audi product management says: “Our U.S. customers expect to drive their Audi in all weather conditions without the added complexities involved with owning a second set of tires.…

You hear a lot these days about “car sharing,” the vehicle-usage model that allows people in a network to borrow cars as they need them. It’s the part of the post-ownership society that sounds most to me like a psychological substitution for wife swapping. But car sharing promises to increase per-vehicle efficiency, as the typical car or truck spends around 95 percent of its life just sitting around. Here at Car and Driver, we’ve been running our own car-sharing pilot program for well on to six decades. It’s called the “car board,” and it allows editors to sign themselves out in a different car each night, depending on what’s in our lot. While successful in many regards—who doesn’t want to spend an evening in a new Lamborghini Huracán?—it is also a…

JAPAN IS A UNIQUE PLACE. Where the Japanese see a delightful bowl of raw sea urchin and salmon roe, most Westerners see a slimy pile of bug and guts. And for the really fancy meals, you take your shoes off and sit on the floor. It’s understandable, then, that Toyota strove for familiarity with the first-generation LS400, which introduced the Lexus brand to the world in 1989. It was, in the words of one company representative, an attempt to “out-German the Germans.” In pursuit of this goal, Lexus went so far as to mimic the processes and chemicals used to treat leather in European tanneries to ensure that its interior smelled “right.” However, 28 years later, Lexus is now intent on distinguishing Japanese luxury from its European forms, and it’s betting…

*Participated in a program for low-volume carmakers that allowed a portion of its production to adhere to alternate standards **Calculations are weighted according to vehicle life cycle. Rounding may cause some discrepancy with totals. LOST AMID THE PRE-ELECTION furor over Pussygate, #podestaemails, Russian hacking, and all the fake news in America’s Facebook feed was the auto industry’s greenhouse- gas report card for 2015. Issued in early November 2016, it was unsurprisingly good. Carmakers are now collectively fourfor- four in exceeding the EPA’s de facto fuel-economy targets since they took effect for the 2012 model year. Then why, you might ask, did Auto Alliance, a trade group representing most of the automakers, fire off a letter to President-elect Trump just two days after the election, bemoaning its regulatory plight? Not to be confused with…

NO ONE HAS EVER understeered their way to driving glory. In addition to being the enemy of driving pleasure, understeer, if potent enough, has the magical ability to reshape the front end of your car. It’s bad. Pendulum turns and left-foot braking, practices common in the world of low-grip driving, also happen to be understeer’s greatest foes. This test measures the effectiveness of those techniques. The goal, in this case, is to destabilize the chassis and point the drive wheels in the desired direction, allowing earlier throttle application and faster exit speed than is achievable using conventional road-racing techniques. Or so goes the theory. Tim O’Neil, winner of five U.S. and North American rally championships and founder of the Team O’Neil Rally School, says there are multiple benefits of left-foot braking. High…