Autos
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2021 Mercedes-AMG GLA 35 First Drive Review: AMG All the Things?
AMG all the things! Mercedes-Benz product planners have been in the grip of AMG mania for the best part of a decade now. Once, the storied AMG badge was only applied to a handful of suitably enhanced Mercedes vehicles. Now it seems almost anything with the three-pointed star is a candidate for an AMG makeover: more horsepower, more noise, stiffer suspension, bigger wheels and tires, all served with a soupçon of menace and carbon fiber. It’s proven a highly successful formula, with premium-priced AMG models now accounting for 12 percent of all U.S. Mercedes sales. But the 2021 Mercedes-AMG GLA 35 proves that buying the badge doesn’t necessarily mean you’re buying a better Benz. The GLA 35 is, of course, being pitched as the hot version of the redesigned 2021 GLA 250 and 25...
This Dakar-Style Porsche 911 Can Tackle Steep Driveways, Actual Deserts
The go-(almost)-anywhere Porsche 911 “safari” trend is in full swing, and we’ve seen concept from Gemballa, Ruf, and many others. Now Delta4x4 of Germany is getting into the action with this customer commission, visualized here and due to be built in 2021. The car is a 992-generation Porsche 911 Carrera 4S, and the customer’s wish is to drive straight to Dakar from his home in southern Germany. To do that, this car will need a bit of help on the rough patches. This is a mission the 911—and its 4×4 953 and 959 siblings—have famously done before. And so, too, has Delta4x4, albeit with a much lower profile. In 1982, the company prepared a Suzuki Jimny and completed the Paris to Dakar race in it—no small feat, even if it doesn’t rise to the level of Porsche&#...
Lamborghini Aventador SVJ Xago Edition Is a Hectare of Hexagons
We live in a virtual world, and Lamborghini is celebrating this new reality with a very rare special edition with a name as weird as the one Elon Musk assigned to his kid on Twitter. Limited to ten customers who personalize their car virtually, the Lamborghini Aventador SVJ Xago Edition is easier to pronounce and features a hexagon-heavy design theme inside and out. A fading hexagonal motif joins the fading hexagonal name (“Xago” is just, well, the middle part of the word “hexagon”) and is splashed prominently across the sides of the Aventador, for starters. Why hexagons? Lamborghini apparently took inspiration from “the hexagon cloud shapes at the North Pole on the planet Saturn and the strength of the hexagon in nature.” This “hexagonita” p...
Iconic Dean Moon “Moonburst” Dragster Found After 43 Years in Storage
Around 1980, Michael Lightbourn spotted an odd, enclosed car trailer off to the side of a cotton farm on the outskirts of Fabens, Texas. He eventually met the owner, Bob Kimpel, who unlocked the trailer’s door and let Lightbourn peek inside. There, he eyeballed the back of a single-seat, tube-frame race car that stretched 188 inches as it ran toward the trailer’s nose. Kimpel explained this old race car was named “Moonburst” and had been featured in an issue of HOT ROD magazine; it was also spun from famed hot-rodder and racer Dean Moon’s shop—if you somehow don’t know the name, you definitely know the Mooneyes logo. Feeling the sense of awe and wonder that comes with uncovering buried treasure, Lightbourn was eager to buy. Kimpel didn’t want ...
Listen to the Sweet Snarl of Hennessey’s C8 Corvette Exhaust System
If a 12,000-hp Corvette sounds a bit like overkill, then Hennessey has another delectable C8 upgrade for you. Hennessey Performance has introduced a new exhaust system that boosts output on the eighth-gen Corvette and gives the sports car an even sweeter soundtrack. In the video below, Hennessey walks customers through the kit’s somewhat involving installation process. While the tuner recommends taking the parts to a professional auto tech for installation, expert assemblers can certainly DIY the upgrade if they have a few tools on hand. Made of 100 percent stainless steel, the exhaust upgrade adds 21 hp and 19 lb-ft of torque to the Corvette’s mid-mounted V-8 engine. Top speed is 205 mph, according to Hennessey. The upgrade also sheds 10 pounds from the regular Corvette’...
Ford Maverick Compact Pickup About to Enter Danger Zone—Its Tailgate Has Leaked
Back in May, a legit-looking rendering of an apparently small pickup truck tailgate with the name “Maverick” stamped on it began circulating around the web. Even though the CAD (computer-aided design) rendering looked real enough, we weren’t ready to go all-in on the theory that Ford’s upcoming compact truck would be called Ford Maverick (other names, such as Courier, seemed just as likely). Now, we’re a bit more convinced, as that exact CAD design appears to have made it to the pre-production prototype stage. In a photo leaked to Motor1 by an anonymous source, you can clearly see that same tailgate design we saw a couple of month back, only now it’s stamped into an honest-to-goodness metal tailgate skin. The font matches what we’ve ...
2022 Ford Bronco Raptor: What We Know (Plus, What It’ll Look Like)
See all 202 photos What Is a Ford Bronco Raptor? Unlike the regular Ford Bronco’s off-road-enhanced trim levels, such as the Black Diamond and Badlands, which are geared toward traditional rock crawling and clod-busting, the Raptor has a higher-speed mission. The closest Bronco that Ford’s shown may be the Wildtrak model, but the Raptor will take that trim’s abilities to the next level. Expect reworked suspension components designed for plenty of wheel travel and high-speed bump absorption—basically, the chassis will be set up to perform Baja racing-that ought to allow the Bronco Raptor to bound across the open desert. There also will be a more powerful, likely larger, engine option than the twin-turbocharged 2.7-liter EcoBoost V-6 that tops the run-of-the-mill BroncoR...
Oh, No! Honda Accord Drops Manual Transmission for 2021
One of our favorite aspects of the excellent Honda Accord sedan is no more. Honda confirmed to MotorTrend that the Accord’s available six-speed manual transmission has been discontinued, a decision highlighted at the end of Honda’s press materials for its 2021 lineup (which also includes major news for the Civic). In fact, the stick-shift Honda quietly went out of production in December of 2019, but the move went unnoticed because those already-built models are still circulating among dealers. The Accord has long been associated with the manual transmission, and folks on our side of the business might even go so far as to claim credit for its continued availability—the midsize Honda sedan’s penchant for winning awards is due in no small part to its see...
Comparison Test: Is the VF Engineering Lamborghini Huracán Performante Better Than the Stock Version?
Years ago, I was driving in a car with John Hennessey on the drag strip behind his shop, located just west of Houston, Texas. The car was a then-new 2014 Porsche 991.1 Turbo S that I was in the process of driving across the country. I’d been racing against one of John’s huge-horsepower Cadillac CTS-V Coupes, and after about 20 battles (the AWD Porsche kept winning) I gave him a ride in the Turbo S. At the end of the strip I asked John if his company tunes Porsche Turbos like this one. He replied that he’d tune anything. Then I asked why on earth would anyone bother tuning such a ridiculously quick car. “Well Jonny,” he began in his infectious, homey drawl. “Two buddies buy the same car. One of them’s got to be faster than the other guy. It’s ...
Honda Stops Civic Si, Drops Civic Coupe, and Shuts Down Fit for 2021
Honda has announced changes to its lineup for 2021, some of which we’ve been expecting for a while—while some that are a bit of a surprise. The big news surrounds the Honda Civic, which is at the end of its current lifecycle. There’s an all-new 2022 Civic on the way, and so Honda is rearranging its compact-car stalwart’s lineup a bit in advance of that debut. But the Civic Si won’t hang around. It’s on pause—Honda’s very clear that it will return for the 2022 model year, but there won’t be a 2021. What’s not coming back is the Civic Coupe. The official word today is that the Civic Coupe will conclude production at the end of the 2020 model year. This shouldn’t be surprising—coupes are disappearing throughout the segment, and Civic was o...
Can This Dump Truck Do Wheelstands? And Why Would Someone Try?
It’s a 1950 Ford F-6 two-ton dump truck that does wheelies, and no one planned any of it. The Roadkill project truck known as Stubby Bob started with a surprise in episode 44 when Mike Finnegan bought the truck off a farm as a gag. We then shortened the wheelbase from 158 to 104 inches for no apparent reason and walked away from it when the brakes didn’t work well enough for a road trip. The truck carries a supercharged big-block Chevy aft of the cab and drives the rear wheels through a Gearstar 4L80E transmission and an antique boat V-drive we scored off the coolest dude ever, Slim at Slim’s Fab Farm, home of rad choppers and wheelstanding vintage vans. In one of our favorite episodes, we threw this all together and created the world’s most unlikely and treacherous...
Not So Ferrari Friday: Check Out This Wrecked Ferrari F40
It can happen to the best of us. You’re just lounging around one Friday afternoon and think to yourself, “you know what? I think I’ll take the Ferrari F40 for a spin.” As you do. Sadly, for this poor owner, Ferrari Friday was quite literally wrecked. It happened in Queensland, Australia and videos and photos of the crash quickly made the rounds on the internet. The damage is extensive, and it looks like there isn’t a single body panel that was left intact. According to The Drive, the owner was taking the car on one final shakedown before putting the car up for sale the very next day. Apparently, it was the first time the car had been driven in five years, and old tires are probably part of the reason for the crash. Driving anything on old rubber is a bad ...
