Early in the morning after the lap session for our Tesla vs. Jaguar vs. Alfa Romeo story, I grabbed a couple minutes with Motor Trend staff pro driver Randy Post before he dashed to catch a flight home. Without spoiling Kim Reynolds’ excellent feature, I want to relay just a snippet of our resident racer’s thoughts on Tesla’s new Track mode feature.
“An aggressive full-speed track entrance led to inconsistencies. It wouldn’t always do the same thing. … I go down the straightaway, and I’m heading to a corner, I’m thinking in the back of my mind, I wonder what is going to happen. It was an uneasy feeling.”
What struck me about Randy’s critique of the Model 3’s high-performance mode is that he could have been describing the recent [...]
Thirty-one miles separate home from work, and depending on the hour, that drive can last between 40 minutes and 2 horrific hours in either direction. That’s a lot of me time, and a lot seat time. Besides being great for back roads, the 2018 Honda Civic Type R’s front seats are spectacularly comfortable for boring drives, too—no sore bums here.
For entertainment, I bounce around among various SiriusXM stations. It required about 10 concerted minutes to store those presets because the touchscreen tune button doesn’t have direct input. Either tap, tap, tap that tune button 90 times to go from 28 to 118, or go to the program guide and scroll, scroll, scroll, select, then go to the preset screen to save and repeat. This is the second most frustrating part of the head unit, right behind not having a volume knob (one of the last remaining Hondas to do so). I happily discovered that [...]
The name One for the Mercedes-AMG hypercar formerly known as “Project One” is self-defining—there will not be a second model, says Ola Källenius, member of the Daimler board of management of Daimler AG in charge of group research & Mercedes-Benz cars development. He is also the man who will take over as CEO in May with the retirement of Dieter Zetsche.
“There are no plans for a second. The One is the one,” Kallenius said in an interview with Motor Trend at the Paris Motor Show.
As the One inches closer to production, Mercedes-AMG will not follow the lead of Aston Martin, which has already announced 003, nicknamed “son of Valkyrie,” is coming in late 2021 even though Valkyrie (code-named 001) is not yet in customer hands.
Daimler first showed the Project One prototype a year ago and recently announced its formal name as One.
Källenius says there [...]
Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be, so goes the saying.
Object lesson: Volkswagen’s decision to retire its New Beetle after 20 years on the market. It’s a bit of a shame, but reality bites.
Motor Trend loved the New Beetle, naming it our 1999 Import Car of the Year upon its launch. After the original Bug’s absence from the U.S. market for a couple decades, the modernized version—with styling courtesy of J. Mays and Freeman Thomas—updated the cute Käfer to make it as iconic as the original.
It’s also the only vehicle I’ve driven—out of more than 2,500 to date, many of them showstoppers—where I can say I literally stopped traffic.
Several weeks before it was to go on sale, VW granted me access to a lemon-yellow New Beetle. Sure, there were pictures floating around on this new computer-networking thing called the World Wide Web, but only [...]
We’re in the middle of Rennsport Reunion VI, an over-the-top celebration of everything Porsche that takes place every other year. And while we knew Porsche planned to reveal something new, there was no way we could have predicted it would be a new 935.
That’s right. There’s a new 935, and it’s not a concept. Porsche plans to actually sell it. In honor of Porsche’s 70th anniversary, only 77 will be built, each costing an eye-watering €701,948 (a nod to the year the first Porsche 356 was built). In U.S. dollars, that works out to about $817,000, nearly three times the cost of the 911 GT2 RS it’s based on.
“This spectacular car is a birthday present from Porsche Motorsport to fans all over the world,” said Dr. Frank-Steffen Walliser, Porsche’s vice president of Motorsport and GT Cars, in a statement. [...]
