Why not treat those who very much want to live the three-pedal life? Still, the base 2022 Mini Cooper is a great all-around subcompact, and any enthusiast would get a kick out of putting it through its paces on a winding mountain road.
The 2022 Lexus RC F Fuji Speedway Edition is an all-around excellent sports car for its power, handling, solid inputs, and exclusivity.
When you think about driving along the mountain roads of southern California, your brain immediately fixates on images of Lotus Elises and Porsche Boxsters as potential quick-footed dance partners for a day of driving fun. But in reality, any car with nimble steering, a taught suspension, and a bit of pep in its step can give similar pleasures. Take our 2010 Mazda3, for example. We spent many hours throwing it through a seemingly endless series of back-and-forth, left-and-right turns, and walked away feeling quite satisfied. The previous generation 3 was seriously fun in these conditions. We’re happy to report that the new car is too.
The obvious comparisons surrounding the all-new 2010 Chevrolet Camaro pit the reconstituted pony car against the Mustang and Challenger. Well duh. We submit, however, that the obvious overlooks something right before your eyes; a Camaro versus Camaro face off.
We had a chance to drive several Hyundai Genesis Coupes this week at Hyundai’s launch event outside of Las Vegas. Our summary: The Genesis Coupe is both intriguing and confusing; kind of like a girlfriend you probably had once (or have now).
Two market segments in particular have been decimated by the Great Recession. First, the Bentley-Ferrari-Porsche 911 area has effectively been castrated in the past six months. Second, there are the smaller two-seater premium Euro roadsters we all love so well in the best of times: Porsche Boxster, Mercedes SLK, Audi TT Roadster, and BMW Z4. For these little guys, emasculation similes do not suffice.
America would really like this car. The BMW 1-Series is a fantastic little creature, and we like it so much that it earned the honor of being one of our favorite cars in 2008. Furthermore, the American automotive marketplace is in dire need of more fuel-efficient vehicles, and we’re slowly starting to see clean diesel cars trickle into our pond from BMW, Mercedes-Benz, and Volkswagen. Looking past the oil-burning powerplant, the 1-Series hatchback configuration is incredibly more useful than the lonely coupe and convertible options that we have currently. Americans are finally starting to warm up to the idea of hatchbacks and small wagons—it’s now a well-known fact that SUVs are not the only useful tool for $200 grocery loads. What’s more, we think America would find much more to like about a small, useful five-door than the seemingly unnecessary BMW X6 or even the upcoming 5-Series GT, which don’t provide much in the way of space or utility, and carry ultra-premium price points.
Downshifting from third into second for an especially tight right-hander, Nissan’s 370Z makes a soaring, rev-matching howl that radiates through the desert like thrown-stone ripples in a quiet pool. It’s the sort of bellicose and randy whine that alerts motor-minded schoolboys to prick up their ears, setting the would-be racer’s heart to flutter. The uninitiated might assume that the sonorous growl of a lone sports car in the desert may simply evaporate into the vast distance, but our tour of the stark, southern Nevada moonscape in the newest Z proved that to be untrue, with the hard scrabble surfaces acting more like an echo chamber for the roaring V-6 and a sonic lodestar for anyone within earshot.
It’s no secret that we American automotive journalists are anxiously awaiting the arrival of BMW’s new U.S.-spec diesel offerings, the 335d and X5 xDrive35d. In the meantime, however, the folks at Honeywell (who specialize in turbo technologies) provided us with a Euro-spec X5 3.0d for a week in order for us to experience BMW’s current diesel offerings.
When General Motors introduced the first Chevrolet Cobalt SS for 2005, it was praised within the sport compact scene for its supercharged power and relatively cheap price point, though the car didn’t really have the overall refinement to make it something extra special. Thus, Chevy has gone back to the drawing board and come up with something it can really be proud of. This latest addition to the Cobalt lineup was tuned and tested on Germany’s Nürburgring and finally has the power and poise to be taken seriously as a true performance car.
While the second-generation Ford Focus debuted last year, FoMoCo has gone and given the car some tasteful updates for the 2009 model year. A revised front end, larger wheels, and some minor chassis tweaks are enough to make this new Focus a bit better than last year’s car, though it might struggle when faced with the best of the import competition. Still, we were pretty pleased with our Focus’ behavior during its two-week stay in our test fleet.
For one reason or another, the Winding Road and NextAutos fleet has been graced with a whole lot of Mustangs over the past few months. Whether it be a simple GT, a stock Shelby, or a tuned up Roush, we’ve driven them all. However, nothing seems to compare to our latest Mustang iteration: the Saleen Dark Horse. This car boasts 620 horsepower, 600 pound-feet of torque, and a sub-four-second zero-to-sixty time, making it the baddest Mustang we’ve driven to date. Still, with a limited production run of only twenty-five cars, the Dark Horse will only be experienced by a select few, and we’re happy to have been part of that lucky group.
The Range Rover Sport is a vehicle that can go anywhere, do anything, and look trendy in the process. No, it’s not going to win any awards in within the Green crowd, but for the consumers who actually pay out for one of these (especially in Supercharged trim), it won’t matter. In our week with the Range Rover Sport, we found it to have more than ample performance, relatively good handling (for an SUV), and a pretty luxurious interior.
When any manufacturer, but particularly an industry titan like Toyota, rolls out a new vehicle that they say is “in a new class”, well, the hairs on any journalist’s neck stand up a bit. That was certainly the case as we listened to Toyota’s executives and engineers roll out the new Venza. But after a couple of days of driving it, talking to Toyota about it, and reviewing the data, we think they have a point. It’s a subtle point, but a point nonetheless.
Since the dawn of the Shelby GT500 in 2007, the exclusive, supercharged Mustang experience is no longer just for the dedicated enthusiasts willing to shell out some extra cash to aftermarket performance manufacturers. Ford now offers 500 horsepower right from the factory, and with the Shelby’s starting price of around $43,000, some enthusiasts might find it hard to justify shelling out $56,000 for a Roush BlackJack—a special edition of the company’s Stage 3 treatment limited to just 100 cars for 2009. But for those who aren’t battling in a horsepower war, we think the Roush offers a bolder appearance and a bit more driving pleasure. Conveniently, it just so happened that we had a GT500 in our test fleet during the same week that we tested the BlackJack, and after driving them back-to-back, some of us would rather have the Roush, regardless of price.
The Mazda RX-8 continues to have us puzzled as to why more of these aren’t on the road. No, the rotary engine isn’t four-season friendly, and neither is the car’s rear-wheel-drive, but when the weather is right, the RX-8 really shines. For 2009, a re-worked exterior sports a slightly more aggressive fascia, and while our Grand Touring model doesn’t have all of the beefy visual add-ons found on the R3 (a new model for ’09), we still had a lot of fun throwing this Mazda into bends and revving the twin-rotor engine way up past 8000 rpm.
Over the past couple of years, we’ve noticed a trend that more and more performance cars are steering away from traditional manual transmissions in favor of high-tech dual-clutch setups. For 2008, the top-dollar Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution MR features a six-speed paddle-shift transmission, and while some of us would rather have a stick and a third pedal, there’s no denying that this tranny is really, really good. Still, at nearly $41,000, some of us would rather just stick with the softer Evo GSR, which has the same performance specs but at a lower cost.
Badge engineering. This is the common practice in the automotive industry of taking a vehicle designed for one brand, and tweaking to work for another. But is this a good thing or a bad thing? We all know examples of the Chevy that is also a Pontiac or a Ford that is also a Mercury with little but trim differences. That cynical approach to marketing has led to a tarnished reputation for badge-engineering, among the pundits at least. The term even sounds pejorative.
The Hummer H3 is an interesting vehicle to drive in light of our nation’s fuel crisis. Off-road enthusiasts and Hummer loyalists appreciate the H3’s off-road capability and style, but the H3 is becoming tougher and tougher to see to new consumers and the automotive press alike. Our test car’s sticker price is just a notch below the $40,000 mark, and while that might seem like a bargain to some, we’d search elsewhere for our SUV needs.
The new Ford Flex arrives into our market at a time when consumers are downsizing from their large SUVs but still need room for the spouse, kids, dogs, etc. The retro-wagon styling of the Flex may steer some customers away, but we rather liked the styling of our Limited AWD test car. Inside, plush materials and high-tech gadgets make this family-hauler a real win. Overall, the Flex proved to be a big step forward for the Ford Motor Company and we hope their future products go in this direction, as well.
As recently as just a few years ago, Volkswagen sold a wide range of diesel vehicles in the States. In fact, the company has a long history of selling oil-burners in the U.S. that dates back to the 1970s. These models were slowly jettisoned throughout the years due to stricter emissions laws, and by 2007, the Touareg V-10 was the only diesel Volkswagen that Americans could buy. However, in light of today’s higher fuel prices, the automaker is once again getting serious about broadening its turbo-diesel offerings in the States.