Let's Ride Out

Saturday, 4 January 2020

VW Says Final Goodbye to Beetle with Touching Tribute Ad

Volkswagen says its final goodbye to the Beetle with a touching tribute video to air on New Year's Eve 2019.

Americans continue to avoid traditional station wagons like an infectious disease, yet they buy the lifted, long-roof Subaru Outback at a considerable clip—roughly 152,000 of the things so far this year.

Compact premium SUVs have become red hot, with virtually every luxury manufacturer now playing in this rapidly growing segment.

This electrifying comparison features two of the best-selling SUV nameplates in the United States, competing in what is arguably the most popular market segment.

It's perhaps best to think of the Mercedes-Benz GLC and BMW X3 as the Honda CR-V and Toyota RAV4 of the luxury SUV world.

Hyundai’s Genesis luxury brand is still pretty green, and its lineup continues to lack an all-important SUV.

Despite the influx of SUVs and crossovers, the compact luxury sports sedan remains a thing.

This comparison test is more than a decade in the making.

Dressed up like Lance Armstrong and pedaling a pricey carbon-fiber road bicycle for all it's worth, a cyclist somehow finds the breath to compliment Aron Meystedt's 25-year-old Toyota Supra.

20,000-Mile Update
With 23,000 miles on the odometer of our long-term 2019 Ram 1500, we remain convinced that this is the ultimate truck for a world where pickups are used as commuters and family haulers.

Tesla Cybertruck's Odd Shape May Deserve This Equally Angular Garage Design

In all the hullabaloo over the Tesla Cybertruck—from the supposedly bulletproof windows to the stainless-steel sheetmetal to the polarizing design—people may forget that the monstrosity is a big truck, albeit one that can hit 60 from a standstill in 2.9 seconds.

"On some nights I still believe that a car with the gas needle on empty can run about fifty more miles if you have the right music very loud on the radio."

Given the EPA's full frontal assault on diesel-powered anything and the exhaustive scrutiny it applies to diesel-engine certification in the wake of Volkswagen's Dieselgate scandal, it's a wonder this oil-burning 2020 Chevrolet Silverado 1500 exists at all.

Ask an enthusiast to name the most iconic Subaru and they're likely to say the WRX.

The 2020 Toyota Avalon TRD is something new, at least for Toyota.

Christopher Bullock couldn't have known his thought was incomplete when, in 1716, he wrote, "'Tis impossible to be sure of anything but death and taxes."

If you just plunked down your Black Card on a 2020 Corvette Z51, heed this warning: Do not challenge a Lamborghini Huracán Evo to a race.

Spawned from Mercedes-Benz's popular GLC-class compact luxury SUV lineup, the high-performance 2020 Mercedes-AMG GLC63 S coupe pegs the absurdity meter in nearly every metric.

The cheapest form of vehicle customization long has been done with a hair dryer and a plastic ruler.

Let's do some free associating. When we say "compact," you say—well, honestly, this is kind of hard to do from inside a magazine.

2020 Audi RS Q8

Ask marketers what’s in a name and you’ll suddenly find yourself in a meeting where you’ll be informed that the future-proofing of a product’s rationalization cycle as it pertains to branding is at its core a consumer call-to-action activation and a mission-focused key-performance indicator factoring SEO key words from the global research of the monetization structure critical to ROI.

The first rule of customer service is that the customer is always right. If that's true, then the world's upmarket car buyers are to blame for the boom of fast SUVs and the decline of the sedans and coupes that usually make for a more rewarding driving experience.

It's an almost winter day in Southern California, and the tourists in their campers have all returned home, so we're sailing along Pacific Coast Highway in the 2020 Nissan Sentra.

The third-generation version of the Toyota Highlander stills sells in the hundreds of thousands annually, which makes the cautious, calculated approach that Toyota took in fully redesigning its mid-size three-row SUV for the 2020 model year rather unsurprising.

Remember when Kia's lineup was a forgettable fleet of cheap transportation? If you can't recall those rental-counter bottom-feeders, trust us, you're not alone.

What do the Apple iPhone 11, Lucky Charms with the new unicorn marshmallows, and the 2020 Ferrari F8 Tributo have in common?

Starting at
$600,000 est.
Overview

Starting at
$225,000 est.
Overview

The one upside to being stuck in a four-hour-long traffic jam is that it gives you more than ample time to think. We were stranded in just such a jam on I-75 in the middle of Ohio cornfields during this comparison test.

That GMC expects more than half of its redesigned 2020 Sierra HD pickups to be sold as top-level crew-cab Denali models tells you something:

The 2020 Toyota Supra Is the Proper Sports Car It Needs to Be

Tetsuya Tada, the 2020 Toyota Supra's chief engineer, can be cagey. He shrewdly avoids being nailed down about the range of the car's electrically assisted variable-ratio steering rack or its engine's peak boost. He won't say if this Supra is quicker around a track than the Porsche 718 Cayman S, which was its primary development benchmark. And he tells a cautious story about the relationship with BMW that allowed this iconic Toyota sports car to exist again, 21 years after the death of the Mark IV Supra.

There are some things nobody needs in this world, and a motorcycle with a huge 2458-cc engine is one of them. That’s what powers the new Triumph Rocket 3 TFC (Triumph Factory Custom), which sets a new record for the largest engine in a production motorcycle.

Engine: 2.5-liter inline-three
MSRP: $29,000
Available: December 2019

For context, Genesis makes a sports sedan, the 10Best Cars–winning G70, with a 2.0-liter four-cylinder engine—that’s 2000 cc of displacement. With a turbocharger, that car produces decent power for moving more than 3500 pounds of metal and leather and driver, with a zero-to-60-mph time of 6.6 seconds at our test track.

The 2011–2016 Ford Fiesta and the 2012–2016 Focus have a dual-clutch automatic transmission that is the subject of a class-action lawsuit and many individual lawsuits.
Nearly two million people who have owned or leased one of the cars with the PowerShift transmission stand to get at least some repayment for their trouble.
The settlement is currently being appealed in federal court.

By now it is a well-publicized issue that Ford's PowerShift dual-clutch automatic transmission has caused problems for owners of several model years of its Fiesta and Focus cars. Now, nearly two million customers stand to get repayment for their trouble in a class-action lawsuit settlement currently before the U.S. Court of Appeals, and it could cost Ford in the billions.

2003 Pontiac Vibe 4-Door For Sale

The Pontiac Vibe steers GM into a new territory of small sport wagons, an area it has largely and perhaps understandably ignored since the Chevy Vega.

2016 Acura ILX A-Spec2016 Acura ILX A-Spec

Anyone who has ever taught middle school will tell you that only the troublemakers are remembered.

2017 Mercedes-Benz E400 Wagon

The Mercedes-Benz E-class wagon—with lineage stretching back to the W123-series cars of the late 1970s—has always exuded an understated classicism.

Like the grizzly bear, wagons are a rare sight in North America. Fortunately, one of the breed remains strong, the Subaru Outback.

Although the FR-S nameplate is dead, euthanized by Toyota along with the whole Scion brand, the vehicle lives on as the 2017 Toyota 86—the same moniker the car has always carried in several markets outside of the United States.

2017 BMW M240i Coupe Automatic

Large automakers have become adept at creating new micro segments, but BMW has managed an uncommon twist: Its M240i is one of the rare cars that competes more closely with its own sibling—the BMW M2—than it does with any external foe.

Mazda is an unusual car company. Its engineers just spent eight years developing a system called G-Vectoring Control that effectively trail-brakes for the driver, ever-so-slightly cutting engine torque on corner entry to transfer load onto the front wheels, thereby improving steering response.

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Saturday, 4 January 2020

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Tuesday, 14 May 2019

Wednesday, 28 March 2018

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Friday, 14 October 2016

Tuesday, 4 October 2016