Autos
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This Lifted, Safari-Style Toyota Corolla AE86 In Ironman Livery Gives Zero Trucks
We recently wrote about a safari-style Porsche 911, a lifted and off-road-ready sports car. Think of it as an speed-addled, desert-racing truck, minus the truck part. We love safari takes on cars—practically anything is a set of knobby tires, some raised ride height, and maybe a light bar or two away from nailing the look. Or maybe we’re suffering from pandemic cabin fever, and are wound up by these safaris’ seeming unbound sense of adventure. Definitely. And @track_hype, who shared these images with us, is throwing gasoline on our cabin’s wood stove with this Toyota Corolla AE86 rocking a vintage-style Ivan Stewart Toyota off-road racing livery. This is safari hotness on a whole ‘nutha level. The designer takes the theme to its extreme with a convincing load-o...
McLaren F1 Designer Gordon Murray Thinks His Cosworth GMA Is the World’s Best V-12
Gordon Murray thinks the Cosworth GMA V12 will be one of the most iconic engines of all time. The ultra-light, ultra-compact, naturally aspirated V-12, developed by Britain’s Cosworth Engineering to Murray’s precise specification, will power a pure, driver-focused, lightweight three-passenger hypercar called the T.50, a car designed to be the successor to his ground-breaking McLaren F1 that rocked the 1990s. The Gordon Murray Automotive (GMA) T.50 will make its public debut on August 4. But GMA has released a wealth of detail on the extraordinary engine that will power it. We brushed the surface of the engine’s magic recently, but consider this the deep dive. Murray wanted a 12-cylinder engine for the T.50 from the outset. “To be truly remarkable, an engine nee...
2020 Honda Civic Si HPT Sedan Long-Term Arrival
Sometimes in this line of work, there’s that one car you just never seem to drive. Not some million-dollar exotic no one else will drive, either, but something totally normal and common. For me, that bogey always seems to be a Honda Civic. The universe has made a sudden course correction because I’m now responsible for our 2020 Honda Civic Si HPT Sedan for the next few months. In keeping with the pattern, though, I won’t be driving this one a full year. Let’s see what we have to work with then. It’s a short and sweet list, but it requires a little decoding. The Si is Honda’s storied mid-tier performance sub-brand, focused more on handling and driver involvement than raw power. In this case, it means the turbocharged 1.5-liter I-4 has been tuned up from 1...
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 ...
