Autos

There are many electric SUVs rushing the market right now, with more coming later this year. So far on the electric vehicle front, we haven’t seen much from Honda—SUV-shaped or otherwise—until now. The automaker is debuting a sleek electric SUV concept at the Beijing Motor Show, the SUV e: Concept, not long after having discontinued the only EV it sold in the U.S. , the Clarity. If it wasn’t for the badge on the show vehicle’s nose, we’d have no idea it is a Honda. The concept features a long, squared-off hood, exaggerated wheels, and extremely thin headlights and taillights, cues we haven’t arranged on this premium a shape on other vehicles from the brand. And it doesn’t seem to take much, if any, inspiration from the Honda e, the cute new retro-fu...

Jump in your time machine children, because it’s time to head all the back to the year 2017. A specially modified version of the Dodge Challenger Hellcat—called the Demon—ran the quarter-mile in 9.7 seconds. Yes, it had pizza-cutter front wheels, was missing three seats, drank 100-octane race gas, ran on a prepped drag surface, and took advantage of a weather phenomenon called “mineshaft air” (where the barometer drops to the pressure you’d see 650 feet below sea level). Dodge achieved this result exactly once (an engineer I spoke with who was there said it was a non-repeatable number—he knows because he tried) and never bothered to hand out a single press car so that any sort of third-party could verify the claim. Still, ask everyone on the internet what the quicke...

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 targ...

Ford’s official Twitter account kicked out two significant revelations about the 2021 Bronco SUV today: First, it’ll offer a huge 37-inch tire option from the factory, and second, the available “Lightning Blue” paint color will be limited to Launch Edition models. Besides turning the spotlight back to the Bronco after its big reveal in July and before its on-sale date early next year, the tweets filled in some more pieces of the production 4×4’s puzzle for excited fans eager for more info. Seriously, the Bronco’s Getting a 37-Inch Tire Option? The tire-related Bronco tweet blares: “Testing 37-inch hooves!” alongside a picture of what appears to be a camouflaged prototype of the Raptor/Warthog high-performance version. Ford isn’...

Buying a new Ferrari is obviously a special experience, but there are always well-heeled folks who think even ticking all the option boxes or selecting a unique paint color aren’t enough to set their car apart from other buyers’. Because of this, bespoke bodywork has become a big business, albeit not in terms of volume but rather money and prestige. Take the recently unveiled and very outrageous Aston Martin Victor, which is very much in this vein, as well as 10 V-12 Ferraris since 2009—a roster that now includes this one-of-one, 812 Superfast-based Ferrari Omologata custom creation. See all 11 photos Of course, for decades, custom bodywork was the norm rather than the exception for rarified European sports and luxury cars, and several coachbuilding outfits might body the same ...

BMW is in hot water for its sales reporting tactics. The Security and Exchange Commission entered into a settlement with the automaker. BMW will pay $18 million for inflating sales numbers in the U.S. from 2015 to 2019. According to a release sent out by the SEC this week, BMW kept a reserve of unreported retail sales that it used to reach company targets, ignoring when the sales actually happened. The agency also says BMW paid dealers to erroneously label vehicles as loaners or demonstrators so they could count them as sold. BMW reported the misleading sales information while going on to raise $18 billion from investors in corporate bond offerings. “Companies accessing U.S. markets to raise capital have an obligation to provide accurate information to investors,” said Ste...

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...