First Drives

One of my oldest friends had bid farewell to her husband just weeks prior as he deployed overseas. They’d packed up the apartment in Miami and shipped most of it back to our hometown on California’s Central Coast with the help of the Air Force, but her, the kids, and her car needed to get across the country in the middle of the pandemic. They’d considered flying, but between the health risks and the cost of both plane tickets and shipping the car, she elected to drive. Two kids under seven, a 7-year-old Ford Escape, and 2,500 miles: What could go wrong? “You’re gonna laugh, but we busted another hose,” read the Facebook Messenger notification on my lock screen. Uh oh. Time to mount a rescue expedition. I hope the 2021 Chevrolet Trailblazer in my driveway...

Everything about the Polaris Slingshot invites a reaction. What it is, what it looks like, who buys one, and how they accessorize it all produce hot takes made for a Twitter world. It’s fitting, then, that I finally found the words to describe my feelings about the Slingshot on Twitter. Author, journalist, and photographer Linda Tirado shared a piece of advice. She was talking about something much more important than a car review, but the great thing about wisdom is you can apply it to all sorts of situations. “Know who you want to be and then you never have to decide how to live,” she wrote. That’s the Slingshot. It defies categorization except unto itself. It knows exactly what it wants to be. Where some look at it and find confusion, driving it clarifies. It exis...

Since its 2017 debut, 13,000 individually numbered Honda Civic Type Rs have found their way into enthusiasts’ embraces. We lived with a 2018 “CTR” for a year and didn’t want to give it back. A mild update occurred in 2019, but for 2020, substantive changes make our favorite hot hatch even better. To answer your first question: “Does the 2020 Civic Type R get a boost in power?” No, the 2.0-liter turbo-four makes the same 306 horsepower and 295 lb-ft, which is plenty. Yet the no-options singular-trim CTR gets a modest $695 price increase over last year, but that nets a host of hard- and software upgrades and an additional, exclusive Boost Blue paint job. Magic Carpet: the 2020 Civic Type R’s adaptive dampers See all 89 photos Honda reports that the s...