Back in our December 1969 issue, we ran a story highlighting Ford and Chevrolet’s skunk works effort to develop new mid-engine supercars. With both automakers now finally offering mid-engine sports cars to the public, the Ford GT and the 2020 MotorTrend Car of The Year-winning 2020 Chevrolet Corvette, we thought it’d be fun to dive back into this old magazine story.
Detroit’s in the grip of mid-engine mania. Again, there’s said to be a mid-engine Corvette in the works, for 1972 or perhaps ’73. Ford may force Chevy’s hand with a new mid-engine machine to compete head-on with the invincible ’Vette and, even if Dearborn defers building its own, they recently signed a deal with Alessandro de Tomaso, maker of one of today’s finest mid-engine sports cars, to Ford-power all future Mangustas and construct styling prototypes. American Motors has shown its slick AMX/2 and is rumored to be readying it for production, with the help [...]
Ford has finally dropped a truckload of detailed information about its new-for-2021 F-150 pickup. How much does the 2021 Ford F-150 tow? How much can it haul? How powerful are its engines? We now have the maximum payload and towing capacities for each of the F-150’s six available powertrains, along with how much power each one makes. Let’s go through the lot, step by step:
The 2021 F-150 offers six powertrains: A 3.3-liter V-6, a twin-turbo 2.7-liter EcoBoost V-6, a twin-turbo 3.5-liter EcoBoost V-6, a gasoline-electric hybrid based around the aforementioned 3.5-liter six (dubbed PowerBoost), a turbo-diesel [...]
It was supposed to be a flight of fancy. A vision quest, a commitment car, and a bunch of other adjectives, all of which led Polestar to go so far as to forgo calling its Precept show car a “concept.” Despite this, Polestar is now sending the well-received, low-slung electric sedan into production at a new plant in China. Expected name: Polestar 4.
Polestar, the electric performance vehicle brand jointly owned by Volvo Car Group and Zhejiang Geely Holding, is still fledging. The first offering in 2017, appropriately named the Polestar 1, was a plug-in hybrid grand touring coupe. But the brand’s mandate soon became all-electric cars only, and to that end, the 2021 Polestar 2 arrives as a battery-electric sedan that delivers 408 hp, 487-lb-ft of torque, and a targeted range of 275 miles. In short, it’s charged and ready to take on the Tesla Model 3 and Model Y.
There are plans to [...]
Audi adds a more rakish sibling to the Q5 model line for 2021. Dubbed the Q5 Sportback, the latest iteration of the brand’s compact crossover takes on the BMW X4 and Mercedes-Benz GLC-Class Coupe.
Like its competition, the Q5 Sportback trades cargo space for style. Whereas today’s Q5 sports 23.1 cubic feet of space aft of its rear seatback, the Sportback offers just 18.0 cubes. That’s on par with the Bimmer and Merc, which provide 17.7 and 18.5 cubic feet of space with all seats in place. Fold the Sportback’s rear seats down and its cargo hold expands to 52.3 cubic feet, a sum that bests the X4’s and GLC’s and nearly matches that of the current Q5’s 53.1-cubic-foot space.
The Honda CR-V is so common today, its numbers so thick on the ground in most places, that you’ve probably never stopped to consider what the compact crossover’s name means—or that it means anything at all. As a standout member of a mostly drab segment, the Honda’s name could just be the same old alphanumeric mumbo-jumbo applied to any number of modern vehicles. But did you know that it actually means “Comfortable Runabout Vehicle”? The funky name reflects the newness of what the CR-V represented back in the mid-1990s: there literally wasn’t a term for what it was, so Honda made one up.
Among the first of a new kind of in-between vehicles (not quite a car, but not quite an SUV), the Honda, and others like it, would sometimes be called “soft-roaders” before eventually going by the “crossover” name. Whatever you call them, the CR-V was on the vanguard of a rapidly proliferating number [...]
