Car Reviews

Bronco love so far is proving to be unconditional. But expanding the family and attaching the Bronco name to a crossover cousin of the Ford Escape raised hackles from the start. The 2021 Ford Bronco Sport compact SUV has a lot more to prove and a lot of hearts to win over. But Ford planned for the Bronco Sport to be a more rugged, squared-off counterpart to the more car-like Escape, with the latter’s sculpted sides and tapered roofline designed to appeal to the city driver. And while the Escape and Bronco Sport share the same new car-based, front-wheel-drive architecture and about 80 percent of their parts, engineers gave the Bronco Sport standard all-wheel drive and added serious off-road features to further differentiate the two SUVs. It was with deep curiosity that I climbed into ...

Ram engineers apparently just unlocked useful fragments of a Ram SRT-10’s DNA from a chunk of amber to clone their first truly redonk performance pickup in 15 years. Either that or the broadcast sprinkler that’s been hosing down FCA’s product lineup with 6.2-liter supercharged Hemis finally pointed at Ram. Either way, look out; the 2021 Ram 1500 TRX (say T-Rex) is about to bust out of its safety cage. Taking a page from drag racing’s “Snake” and “Mongoose,” TRX calls to mind the natural predator of its primary off-road competitor. Because as Jurassic Park taught us (incorrectly), Tyrannosaurus Rexes lunched on Velociraptors back in the day. Frankly, we fret that this new TRX, powered by a 702-hp, 650-lb-ft supercharged V-8, might not fee...

Cars require untold numbers of engineers to go from paper to sheet metal, so it always seems unfair to lay the success or failure of one at the foot of just one of them. That’s the nature of leadership, though. You take the win or the loss. Albert Biermann didn’t personally choose the parts and calibrations that make the 2020 Hyundai Sonata N Line drive like it does, but his philosophy has been so faithfully executed in the way it drives that it’s impossible not to recognize his influence. Biermann, as it has been extensively reported, is a veteran of BMW. Before his hiring at Hyundai, it would have been hyperbole to compare the way a Sonata drives to a BMW because that wasn’t what Hyundai was going for, but now, things are different. Now, the new Sonata has a distinctly Germanic feel, and...

The first thing to know about the Lincoln Continental Coach Door Edition and how it’s made is that the process shares next to nothing with stretching a Lincoln MKT for bachelor party duty. This factory stretch was completely designed and engineered in-house at Lincoln with input and collaboration from Cabot Coach Builders, a firm certified by Lincoln as a Qualified Vehicle Modifier more than 30 years ago. And most of the parts used in its construction are produced by Lincoln and shipped to Haverhill, Massachusetts, where Cabot performs the “operation.” Making the Cut Fully assembled Continental Black Label cars are shipped to Cabot, where the cut and slice are performed. The roof gets cut just about 5 inches aft of where the B-pillar structure meets the roof rails—right about where you see...

With the recent reveal of the 2021 Mercedes-AMG GT Black Series, we thought now would be a great time to revisit the AMG GT’s legendary predecessor. From our April 1957 issue, here’s our First Test of the legendary Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR. Every time Daimler-Benz returns to racing, success is achieved by a single-minded  concentration of effort and resources, giving the appearance of inevitability. The cars, which open up new perspectives in design for high performance, are retired to places in the Daimler-Benz museum at Untertürkheim, and it is a rare occasion when the opportunity arises to study a design in detail. In the case of the famous World Championship Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR, the veil has been lifted. In the spring of 1956, a few of us sat in the sun outside the elegant Schloss Solit...

For most automotive designers, taking their CEO through a design review can be a fraught process. The auto industry is mostly run by accountants and engineers, number crunchers who rely on systems and processes to produce something that sells on emotion. Polestar design director Max Missoni has a slightly different challenge, however: His boss, Polestar CEO Thomas Ingenlath, is himself a designer. When Ingenlath left Volkswagen to become head of Volvo design in 2012, he brought with him to Sweden the Austrian-born Missoni, who’d worked for the German automaker since graduating from London’s Royal College of Art in 2002. Missoni was made vice president of exterior design for Volvo in 2014, and in 2018 he became Polestar’s design director after Ingenlath was made CEO of the premium electric ...

During the rollout of the 2020 Lincoln Continental Coach Door Edition Coach Door Edition, the press has fallen all over itself comparing the car to the midcentury modern JFK “suicide-door” fourth-gen Continentals. But 334,345 of those cars were mass-produced by Lincoln in Wixom, Michigan. No, the modern Continental Coach Door Edition deserves to be compared with classic Lincolns dating back to the earliest days of the brand. Did you know in that era Lincoln offered more custom bodies in its catalog than any other American manufacturer? Ugly cars designed by Henry Leland’s milliner brother-in-law, Angus Woodbridge, were killing his nascent brand. (Ladies hats are very different from cars; who knew?) So as soon as Henry Ford bought Lincoln and ousted the Lelands, his design-oriented son Edse...

There’s an even more manic version of the Mercedes-AMG GLA coming: The Mercedes-AMG GLA 45, with 382 hp and 354 lb-ft of torque, will join the GLA 35 in U.S. Mercedes dealerships before the end of the year. Pricing has year to be announced, but don’t expect much change from $55,000. And what does paying something like $8,000 more than you would for the GLA 35 buy you? It buys you the world’s most powerful 2.0-liter production engine, for a start. Codenamed M139, and each hand-built by an AMG technician in Affalterbach, it makes its 382 hp at 6,500 rpm, with the 354 lb-ft of torque available from 4,750 to 5,000 rpm, enough to clip 0.7 second from the GLA 35’s 5.0-second zero-to-60 acceleration time. Although identical in terms of bore and stroke to the turbocharged f...

Ford’s coming after Jeep, aiming the big Bronco directly at the Wrangler and Wrangler Unlimited. But which of Jeep’s three front-drive-based models is the closest rival for Ford’s Escape-based Bronco Sport? Let’s examine what we currently know or surmise about the Bronco Sport’s size, price, performance, and capability and find the closest Jeep match. Size-Wise—Exterior In terms of exterior wheelbase and length dimensions, Jeep’s Compass is the closest match to the Bronco Sport, at 103.8 and 173.0 inches, respectively, to Bronco Sport’s 105.1 and 172.7. The Renegade is considerably shorter (101.2/166.6), and the Cherokee is longer (107.1/182.0). But in striving for that boxy mien, the Ford measures taller than any of the above, at 67.9 inches for t...

We’ve examined how Ford’s truncated, tallened, and toughened-up Escape compares against Jeep’s Renegade, Compass, and Cherokee; now let’s size the 2021 Ford Bronco Sport up against the wider compact SUV competitive set. Bear in mind that the Escape is primarily tasked with broad-market appeal, so its offerings span a wider price, performance, and capability spectrum. The Bronco Sport is more focused on enabling adventure travel, but it’s not the only one on this list with such a focus. So how does it stack up? 2021 Ford Bronco Sport Inner People Space vs. the Competition Tall buyers will delight in the class-leading front and rear headroom afforded by the all-new 2021 Ford Bronco Sport’s tall, safari-stepped boxy roofline. Front legroom is also among the...

“Trailblazer” doesn’t have to be a literal term. We talk about figurative trailblazers all the time, people or products that do things differently or break a glass ceiling. Although the 2021 Chevrolet Trailblazer may be an new product for the brand, it competes in an established segment, and both the marketing around our “Activ” trim level tester and the history behind the Trailblazer name suggest Chevrolet meant the literal definition. Let’s put it to the test, then. The original Trailblazer (and the Trailblazer trim level for the compact S-10 Blazer that preceded it) was a truck-based, body-on-frame SUV with proper four-wheel drive and a six- or eight-cylinder engine. The all-new model is a car-based, unibody crossover with two different turbocharged t...

Maybe you’d rather not cop to the retro craze that’s so hot right now, but understanding the importance of the 2003 Ford Mustang Mach 1 requires an appreciation of history. Think back some 30 years ago, when big-blocks ruled the strip, long before street racing included nitrous-injected sport compacts. We’ve tested the Mach before, but it’s now available with an automatic transmission. We felt it was worth a run down the 1320. All time-machine cues are present: Front and rear spoilers? Check. Magnum-style wheels? Check. Shaker hood scoop? Oh, yeah. Open the hood to see the wall-to-wall 4.6-liter, four-valve per cylinder, DOHC Ford V-8 (think Boss 429). Output is 305 horsepower at 5800 rpm and 320 lb-ft of torque at 4200 rpm. There’s a choice of transmissions: ...