Autos

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&#...

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...

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 ...

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...

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...

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...

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 ...

A pair of Chevrolet Silverado heavy-duty pickups took center stage on the White House lawn yesterday as part of a theatrical ploy to show off the “burden of regulations,” per CBS News White House correspondent Mark Knoller. Knoller tweeted out a photo of the blue and red Chevy trucks, the former of which carried proverbial—and, well, literal—regulatory weights in its bed.  Where the White House sourced the trucks remains a mystery. MotorTrend reached out to both General Motors and the Office of Management and Budget for clarification to determine if the trucks were supplied by the manufacturer. However, we have yet to receive a concrete answer from either GM or the OMB.  Our colleagues at Jalopnik, though, received word from a GM spokesperson that the company was...