Autos
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New Lego Creator Set Includes Two Classic Porsche 911s for the Price of One
Still holding out for the classic Porsche bubble to burst? We’re afraid you might be waiting for quite a while longer. While prices aren’t as stratospheric as they were a few years ago, it’s still tough to find a serviceable, driver-condition air-cooled 911 for under $30,000. This might be under the national average of prices paid for a new car, but it’s still a chunk to pay for an old garage toy. On the subject of Porsches and toys, Lego just might have the perfect Band-Aid for that 911-sized hole in your driveway. Well, maybe not your driveway, but this new set is sure to zhuzh up your standing desk, at least. As part of Porsche’s ongoing partnership with the Danish toy company, its latest collab sees the brickification of the impact bumper Porsche 911 from ...
The GMC Hummer EV Is Going Rally Racing … Sort Of
GMC announced that it’ll sponsor an entry in the 2021 Extreme E global championship, an all-electric off-road rally, with Chip Ganassi Racing. The racer will wear bodywork that loosely resembles the 2023 GMC Hummer EV SUV, but the vehicle is actually a spec racer called the Spark Odyssey 21. See all 67 photos Like many race series, Extreme E will use spec cars. These are bespoke units built by Spark and are provided to all teams. The teams, such as Chip Ganassi Racing, will be able to customize the appearance to match sponsors or the like, but the mechanical package is fairly standardized. Each Odyssey 21 utilizes a steel tube frame with an integral roll cage and is powered by a 550-hp electric motor. All batteries are produced by Williams Advanced Engineering, according to Spark. Th...
2020 Porsche Cayenne Turbo Coupe First Test: The Sports Car of SUVs
Porsche Cayenne Full Overview The Alfa Romeo Stelvio Quadrifoglio comes close. The BMW X6 M does, too, but no other SUV drives as “small” as the Porsche Cayenne Turbo Coupe does. More than one of our editors who whipped the Cayenne Coupe on sinuous mountain roads listed this as one of its defining qualities. Features editor Christian Seabaugh echoed our group sentiment when he said, “Every Porsche manages to drive similarly, from the 718 on up to the Cayenne Coupe, and it’s a remarkable achievement. This, as silly as it sounds, feels like a 911.” It’s not as if Porsche uses exclusive hardware to build the brilliant Cayenne Turbo Coupe. Its twin-turbo V-8, ZF-sourced eight-speed transmission, and torque-vectoring all-wheel-drive system aren’t unique...
2022 BMW M5 CS First Look: Say Yes to the CS
August 2019. MotorTrend Car of the Year competition. I’m behind the wheel of the Mercedes-AMG GT63S and senior features editor Jonny Lieberman is riding shotgun. As we evaluated the big AMG, I distinctly remember asking him, “where would you ever use all 630 horsepower?” His response was simply, “everywhere.” Clearly, he isn’t the only person who thinks this, because BMW has now given the M5 largely the same amount of grunt. Meet the 2022 BMW M5 CS, now with 627 hp, 553 lb-ft of torque, and way less fat. In simple terms, the new M5 CS is the most powerful BMW to ever hit public roads. But it’s much more than that. BMW claims a 0-62 mph time of 2.9 seconds and a top speed of 190 mph. Not only that, but the M5 also goes on the Atkins diet in its tran...
Kia K900 and Cadenza Discontinued as Sedans Continue Their Decline
Another two sedans bite the dust as the market-wide move to SUVs continues to cut down the remaining four-door holdouts. Add the Kia K900 and Cadenza to the list: Both are dead for 2021, as originally reported by Car and Driver. That said, the shift toward SUVs isn’t new, and the K900—an S-Class-sized bargain luxury sedan—was already essentially a footnote in annual sales figures. The K900 had a steep hill to climb in a segment where brand prestige is a large part of the selling proposition, although anyone able to ignore such considerations found an excellent luxury car for tens of thousands less than its German competition. See all 33 photos The most recent model’s twin-turbo V-6 proved a better powerplant than the previous version’s V-8, and Kia made the ride and handl...
Honda Put a 248K-Mile ’97 CR-V in Its Museum? Yes, and We Drove It
Honda CR-V Full Overview Joy, then puzzlement: That was my reaction when Honda asked if I’d like to drive a vehicle from their semi-secret museum in southern California—and then told me that museum piece was a 1997 Honda CR-V. Okay, I realize it’s been nearly 25 years (cripes, where does the time go?) since the Honda CR-V first hit these shores, and what a seminal game-changer it was. But … a CR-V? In a museum? “Does not compute,” buzzes the 1970s-era computer that is my brain. And that brings me to the present day, with me trying to keep an open mind as I cruise down to Torrance in a latest-and-greatest 2021 Honda CR-V. I pull into the faceless industrial park that conceals Honda’s museum, and there it is: An anonymous ’97 CR-V DX with all-wheel-drive—s...
Dax Shepard’s ’67 Continental: Classic Luxury Meets Stunt Mobile
From the December 2012 issue of Popular Hot Rodding magazine: It’s called “stealing a shot,” a Hollywood term that means shooting commercial footage without a permit. Technically, anytime you whip out a camera in the L.A. Basin with the intent to publish the results (movie, print, interwebs, whatever) for personal gain, you need a permit. We’re about to “steal a shot” on a forlorn stretch of pavement wedged between scrap yards. A few cracks in the pavement are large enough to swallow small children. Broken bits of glass and metal litter the ground. If this were a movie, a car would be spewed from these fissures, a car such as Dax Shepard’s ’67 Lincoln Continental. Like some dark angel’s limo, this pitch-black Conti reeks of m...
This Tacky-Looking Mercedes CLK Is One of AMG’s Rarest Builds
Yikes—another AMG falls victim to the garish grips of the aftermarket. Look at those tacky wheels, Pep Boys’ fender flares, and glued-on rear wing—why couldn’t the owner just leave this poor CLK drop-top alone? I mean— Gotcha. As much as this may look like the work of some tuner shop, this red ‘vert is just as it left the factory back in 2007. If you’ve never seen such a car (even on the mean streets of Malibu or Miami), I’m not surprised—the CLK DTM AMG Cabriolet is one of the rarest and most desirable modern Mercedes-Benz, beating out even the Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren and the Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG Black Series for scarcity. Just 100 coupes and 80 convertibles were made between 2004 and 2006, and the majority of them were sold in the European market (Mercede...
That Time a Racing Legend Endorsed Healing Crystals for Cars
The modern wellness industry has spawned countless online influencers and personalities eager to hawk supposed cures and lifestyle tweaks to millions of fans. But even before the dawn of Instagram, kale smoothies, and chakra cleanses, it was still treacherous for any public figure to hitch their wagon to less-than-scientific methodologies. Case in point: Australian racing legend Peter Brock. For one of Australia’s biggest names in racing, the decision to go full New Age in the late 1980s proved so costly that it not only ended his longtime business partnership with the country’s largest automaker, it almost very nearly killed his motorsports career. But for a brief moment before the wheels came off, Holden performance honcho and multi-time touring car champion Brock had some cr...
Lotus Exige, Evora, and Elise Die, But New Sports Cars Will Rise From Their Ashes
The first of Lotus’s three new sports cars will be called the Type 131, and production will begin by the end of this year at the automaker’s new production plant in Hethel, Norfolk. We all likely remember what happened at the 2010 Paris motor show, which makes skepticism toward this latest news understandable. As a refresher: six new models were promised, and not one came to fruition. The situation Lotus is in now, however, is markedly different from the Dany Bahar-era debacle and flubbed timelines. Lotus’s parent company, Geely, recently poured more than $137 million into the new Hethel production facility. That will create some 250 new jobs on top of the 670 people Lotus has already hired since 2017 (when Geely took over). In other words, Lotus already has the cash, fac...
Ford’s Edsel Was a Loser, but Its 410 V-8 Engine Was Awesome
If you look at any “Worst Cars Ever LOL” lists around the internet (or even in books), you will inevitably find a photo of the Edsel’s schnoz featured prominently. Many remember Ford’s failed marque solely as a failure for sundry reasons, but few remember the details of the Edsel lineup itself. That includes the 410 cubic-inch Edsel-475 V-8 in the top-range Corsair and Citation models, which is worth a few words. See all 5 photos We won’t spend a whole lot of time talking about why the Edsel failed, but the year-long “slam dunk” marketing campaign that anticipated the car’s release flopped. You can read entire books about that if you want, but the engines designed for the Edsel’s 1958 release played a central part in how Ford hoped it w...
Tiny Nissan e-NV200 Camper Concept Is One Cozy Little Van
In the near future, could your adventure van be electric? Seems like it’s going that way. And while its early days yet to get the sort of raw energy density necessary to, say, overland for a month off the grid, a tiny electric camper such as this e-NV200 Winter Camper Concept van might be great for brief excursions in the not-so-remote countryside. See all 9 photos Nissan Europe is exploring this idea with this camperized version of its tiny electric van, which is similar to the NV200 cargo van sold in the United States, except for the fact that it uses a battery-electric drivetrain. Anyone who’s seen one of these things in person can agree that it’s just the right size for smaller commercial vehicle use, but it appears to be a bit claustrophobic for camping duties—as the...
