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PHOTO WILLIAM WALKER
May you live in interesting times” is perhaps the most cutting and cunning insult in the English lexicon. There’s a much more hammer-to-the-nose version in Yiddish—roughly translated as, “May two of your ships come in, and that’s still not enough gold to pay for your operation.” But I digress. If you love cars, specifically sporty, fun-to-drive machines—a.k.a. performance vehicles—we are living in the most interesting times imaginable. However, like the opening quotation, this can be viewed two ways, as both an auspicious opportunity and a straight-up curse.
What does this have to do with cars? Well, we just drove and evaluated 21 of the best new performance machines on the market, and while some dripped with epoch-defining awesomeness, others came up severely short. So it seems quite safe to deem this automotive era “interesting.”
Let’s start with what’s not so promising. Electric performance vehicles. Without consciously intending to do so, I’ve somehow become a large advocate for the electrification of personal transportation. I even went out and purchased one of them newfangled electric trucks. But based on what we collectively experienced during this year’s Performance Vehicle of the Year program, electric cars still lag behind their internally combusting brethren. Nearly 25 percent (five competitors) of the field was electric, yet only one was chosen as a finalist, the Kia EV6 GT. I’m of the minority opinion, but naming it a finalist was a stretch. Yet we thought it was important to bring some sort of EV along to the canyon-carving portion of our program, and the wild Kia was the best option.
As for the gasoline-powered vehicles we evaluated? Friends, this is the golden age of performance. It really, truly is. Please keep in mind that, as with all our Of The Year programs, PVOTY is only concerned with new or significantly updated vehicles, which means last year’s epic winner—the incredible Porsche 911 GT3—wasn’t eligible. Yet it’s still on sale. Also ineligible are cars that weren’t ready in time, such as (for instance) the GT3’s big brother, the new, bonkers GT3 RS. Point being, we had an embarrassment of riches at this year’s competition. The winner notwithstanding, I can think of five other finalists we could have easily selected as this year’s champion. Almost six if I’m to stretch it. That’s unheard of.
Please remember, although this is but year two of PVOTY, we have about a decade of Best Driver’s Car (and before that, Best Handling Car) evaluations under our belts. In the dozen years I’ve participated in these annual sporty car roundups, it almost always comes down to two or three choices, though one year I remember four—Lamborghini Huracán Performante, Porsche 911 GT2 RS, McLaren 720S, and Honda Civic Type R—that all tugged at our heartstrings. But this year was just stacked with talent. Look, I can tell you what won and explain why. But can I as easily tell you why the Porsche 718 Cayman GT4 RS didn’t win? Same for the new Civic Type R, or the McLaren 765LT Spider. And the hot little Toyota hatchback, too. Believe me, it’s not easy.
From the racetrack to the mountains, we were reminded repeatedly why we love cars so damn much. Who would have ever guessed thousands of pounds of metal and plastic and carbon fiber could make the human heart so happy? At one particularly embarrassing moment in the mountains after having a head start from our base camp, I was caught daydreaming in the McLaren by executive editor Mac Morrison driving the Hyundai Elantra N. Perhaps it’s because McLarens are occasions unto themselves, but I was deep in thought reminiscing about adventures I’d had in cars from Woking. Once I saw the Lambo-looking Hyundai in my mirrors, the spell was broken, and the Maca left the Hyundai in its wake. I’m thankful we live in a world filled with cars like the 765LT that can make you dream—and cars like the Hyundai that go incredibly quick and handle amazingly well for entirely affordable prices.
So we ask you to please enjoy our 2023 Performance Vehicle of the Year coverage. Although we can say for sure past competitions featured fewer top contenders, we cannot claim the near-term future will definitely be better, at least in terms of great-to-drive performance vehicles. Electric cars, as this test proves, have come a very long way in a short time, but they still have a long way to go. But I’ll leave you with this: Our winner features the single most powerful naturally aspirated V-8 engine in automotive history, producing 670 snarling hp. The Lucid Air Sapphire, which wasn’t ready in time for this year’s event but should be there next time, features three electric motors, each capable of producing—you guessed it—670 hp. Interesting times, indeed.
The state of the art is (mostly) on fire.
Ken Block, professional rally driver and the driving force behind the Hoonigan brand, died January 2 in a snowmobile crash in Utah. He was 55. The Wasatch County Sheriff’s Office posted to social media that Block was “riding a snowmobile on a steep slope when the snowmobile upended, landing on top of him. He was pronounced deceased at the scene.” The sheriff’s office also shared that Block was alone at the time but had been riding with a group.
Block was a transcendent action sports star who competed in skateboarding, snowboarding, and motocross events. He was also famous for his Gymkhana series of extreme driving videos, and he co-founded the DC Shoes brand. To many of us, Block was that affable guy who wheeled cars in unimaginable ways in cool locations for his Gymkhana
video series. The YouTube clips began in 2008, bringing an intoxicating blend of stunts, driver skill, and whimsy to the automotive world that was blossoming online. The timing was perfect, and Block became a sensation.
Born in Southern California in 1967, Block spent his formative years immersed in surf culture and the budding skateboarding and snowboarding scenes. In 1994, at age 27, he co-founded DC Shoes. By the early 2000s, his passions expanded into the automotive space after a few rallying experiences. Having sold DC to Quiksilver for nearly $100 million in 2004, he found his way into rallying in 2005 with a seat on Vermont SportsCar’s squad, behind the wheel of a prepped Subaru WRX STI competing in the Rally America Championship. His finishes were middling throughout that first season, but he picked up the Rookie of
the Year award. The following year he began his own team with Subaru backing and Travis Pastrana as his teammate, competing in the inaugural rally event at the X Games before joining the World Rally Championship in 2007. His pivot toward rallycross was prescient; although his rally career had yet to take off, his dogged practice led to his biggest break—and the modernization of a space he’d almost single-handedly dominate: Gymkhana. This adaptation of rally driving involves attacking what’s best described as an automotive obstacle course for time. In a 2008 clip uploaded to YouTube with the title “DC Shoes: Ken Block Gymkhana Practice,” Block pilots his WRX STI around a decrepit airfield, the former Marine Corps Air Station El Toro and performs loosely strung-together car stunts, drifting through openings in barriers, spinning the car like a top around a cone, and generally turning his tires into vapor. It was Gymkhana, but adapted for a video audience. A generation of car enthusiasts were hooked. Block continued competing in the X Games and pursuing different action sports while founding the Hoonigan brand and racing division with Ford’s backing in 2010. He kept producing videos, which grew in scope and ambition. The exposure propelled Block and Hoonigan to the forefront of the digital car enthusiast space, landing him built rides from Subaru, Ford, and later Audi for his Gymkhana pursuits and beyond. Block will likely be remembered most for being a fun, thrill-seeking driver with a unique set of skills that, not lining up perfectly with any formal racing series, blended seamlessly with his natural talents for pushing boundaries and creativity to capture car enthusiasts’ imaginations. He rewrote the rules for not only what a car could be capable of but also how a driver could push beyond that—and in bringing all of that fun to a digital audience in original ways, he changed the culture. We ranked Block among the top 50 most influential industry figures in both 2015 and 2017, remarking that “no one can get America more excited about non-NASCAR motorsports than Ken Block.” He is survived by his wife, Lucy, and three children.
Ram’s first all-electric model, the 1500 Revolution pickup, is so bold you might forget it won’t hit the market until 2024, well after most of the competition. The truck is just a concept for now, but the real deal will break cover in a few months with much of the styling and feature set intact. (One confirmed change: The Revolution name will be shortened to Rev.) It lays the rails to Ram’s future with a mission to redefine the pickup segment, CEO Mike Koval Jr. said. “Everything you see from now on will be a direct descendant of this.”
Ram has indeed had a good long look at what other electric trucks have to offer, and Koval spent the past year saying the brand will use its come-from-behind status to top the field in the key areas that matter to buyers: towing and payload, range, and charge time.
The towing and payload numbers remain unknown, but the body-on-frame STLA Frame platform under the truck was designed to provide up to 500 miles from a single charge (eventually; some of the technology isn’t ready yet). For now, the automaker is saying only that the Rev will offer classleading range, which means it should still top 400 miles, the max figure promised by Chevy’s Silverado EV.
It also touts the ability to add up to 100 miles’ worth of juice in about 10 minutes with 800-volt DC fast-charging at up to 350 kW. Like the competition, the Ram will offer the capability to plan and schedule charging at off-peak times, when electricity is cheaper. And the truck can be used to power tools, a home, or other vehicles. Ram also showed a new inductive robot charger called the Ram Charger—a classic name we wish the company used for the truck itself—that
detects whether the vehicle is present as well as its state of charge, and then it aligns itself underneath to deliver electricity.
The designers wanted a look dramatically different from the brand’s ICE trucks and thus went for an appearance both brutal and beautiful—or as head of design Ralph Gilles calls it, “brutiful.” Ram influence is present in the fender flares and accentuated Coke bottle shape, while the truck’s face has animated lights, new RAM badging, and an LED “tuning fork” headlight design.
The cab-forward design is applied to a truck 4.0 inches longer than today’s 1500s, while bed length remains the same. The roof height is lower for better aerodynamics, and the final product will come only as a fourdoor crew cab, the preferred configuration of 80 to 90 percent of buyers, Koval said.
The doors are much more than simple portals, featuring removable speakers, portable battery chargers, and storage compartments that can be heated or cooled as well as hold tow straps or house a first aid kit. The rear-hinged units will give way to conventionally opening doors with B-pillars when the Rev hits dealers, we were told.
The cabin has a removable/slidable center console, and like GM’s electric trucks, the Revolution has a powered midgate that folds into the cabin and features a window that can be lowered. But the Ram goes a step further: Move the first two rows of seats forward via the Ram Track floor-mount system to reveal a third row of seats, a surprise in a pickup. You can take the lower portion of these jump seats and use them outside the truck, as well as remove the front seats and remount them in the tracks backward.
Also cool: the 18-foot-long pass-through that runs from the frunk all the way to the tailgate, to fit objects such as PVC piping and
Late to the party but loaded with wild features.
wood planks. Yes, there is a frunk—a front trunk where an engine would normally be. We don’t have dimensions yet, but it falls between the huge compartment in the F-150 Lightning and the shallower and narrower spaces of the Silverado and GMC Sierra EVs. The Revolution’s frunk also has Ram Track rails, as well as dividers, cupholders, a drain, and four power outlets. The frunk lid is powered and opens and closes via touch. The tailgate is also powered, as are the side and rear steps.
Inside the high-quality, futuristic cabin, the steering wheel has a flat top and collapsible bottom with enhanced hand grips, capacitive controls, digital screens, and an illuminated RAM badge. In this concept’s theoretical Level 3+ autonomous mode, the steering wheel
motors to a horizontal position and then slides into the dash.
The lower interior screen tilts through three positions and can also be removed like a tablet. The driver has an augmented reality head-up display—there is no instrument cluster—while the windshield and roof are one piece of glass that spans the cab. You can swipe to adjust how much light comes in through each quadrant of the roof; similarly, with no sun visors, front occupants can touch and slide on the windshield to set a tint level.
You can ask the truck to “follow me” with Shadow mode, whereby it will automatically tag along behind a person for those times when you need to move a short distance and don’t want to hop back behind the wheel. The truck follows at a safe distance, using sensors
and camera technology to navigate around obstacles like a huge, robotic puppy.
My Day does your trip planning, Smart Home Control turns on the heat and lights in your home while you’re still en route, and Cabin mode sets the mood to be productive, social, relaxed, or party. There is an exterior projector for movie night. Oh, and an app helps measure objects to see if they’ll fit in the truck, saving you from soul-crushing despair.
The STLA Frame architecture was designed for heavy vehicles, and it can accommodate plenty of power for future variants— think 1500 TRX but electric. All-wheel drive is achieved via two electric motors, one in front and one in back, and the Revolution has rear-wheel steering with up to 15 degrees of articulation.
The entire Ram lineup will eventually be electrified; look for a truckload of news throughout the year, Koval said. That includes a future Ram 1500 with a small gas engine to extend the range. For now, we’re told Ram is monitoring reactions to the 1500 EV concept and actively developing some of the truck’s more innovative features, including the third-row seating, flexible cabin layout, and super-long pass-through. Ram may be late to the EV truck fight, but it’s coming well-armed.
Alisa Priddle
Don’t get too excited about those saloon-style doors; they’re structurally feasible, but there will be conventional doors on the production model. Stellantis head of design Ralph Gilles said they were chosen here to help show off the cabin.
FIRST RIDE
Car enthusiasts often point to sound as the reason they’ll never consider an electric car. Others point to range or charge times or EVs’ alleged unsuitability for motorsports because of it. Porsche continues its effort to prove those people wrong. Its Mission R concept demonstrated what its electric GT race car might look like as much as how it can drive, while the new GT4 E-Performance—essentially an electric 718 Cayman GT4—aims to show people how electric racers can actually perform.
We’ve driven the Mission R (March 2022), and Porsche recently gave us the opportunity to ride shotgun in the new electric GT4 with Formula E and IndyCar driver Simona de Silvestro behind the wheel at the company’s Experience Center in Franciacorta, Italy.
Built from the guts of a 718 Cayman GT4 Clubsport, the GT4 E is a bleeding-edge electric competition car. It swaps out the Cayman’s 420-hp flat-six in favor of the Mission R’s front- and rear-axle-mounted motors that produce 1,073 hp in Qualifying mode and 603 hp in range-extending Race mode. The motors are powered by an 82.0kWh battery pack squeezed behind the cabin and in the floor below the passenger seat. The battery, a 900-volt unit like the one found on the latest Formula E race cars, can charge from 5 to 80 percent in just 15 minutes—7.5 minutes quicker than the 800-volt Porsche Taycan. A unique system that loops oil through the batteries, motors, and power electronics keeps things cool, saves weight versus glycol, and helps retain peak performance for half-hour sprint races. The combo makes for a devilishly fun ride.
Our hot lap, as you might expect in a 1,000-hp race car, was brilliant and brutal. The GT4 E-Performance exploded out of pit lane, filling the cabin with a high-pitched
whine from the motors and straight-cut gears. Without gearshifts, the Porsche is smooth in a sense, yet the g’s it’s capable of while accelerating will peel your lips back into a deep smile.
With all-wheel drive and about 3,500 pounds to manage, de Silvestro treated the Cayman a lot like a high-horsepower all-wheel-drive supercar. She would slow for corners early, trail-brake, and start feeding on power midcorner, relying on the front motor to bend physics and yank the car down the next straight. De Silvestro was clearly practiced at it, as she regularly got the GT4 near what sounded like a gear-limited top speed of about 150 mph down each straight.
Despite Porsche’s robust customer motorsports program, for now the GT4 E-Performance is simply a technology demonstrator. The automaker plans to take it and the Mission R on a world tour over the next year, introducing electric race cars to potential owners, teams, tracks, and promoters. Porsche won’t outright say so, but we won’t be surprised if the GT4
E-Performance serves as a test mule for the coming electric 718 Boxster and Cayman production models.
Although some enthusiasts still view electrification like Charlton Heston did gun control, the company isn’t looking at it as an either/or situation. As Porsche puts it, the brand has been incredibly successful racing internal-combustion-powered vehicles for the past 91 years—but it can do things well this new way, too. Christian Seabaugh
Acura recently gave us a brief taste of what may turn out to be the best thing the company has done with a gasoline engine since the original NSX: the upcoming Integra Type S, the performance version of its new-for-2023 hatchback. We were given few specifics, and technical details were as follows: 2.0-liter turbocharged VTEC engine, six-speed manual, limited-slip differential.
This should sound familiar because it applies equally to the 315-hp Civic Type R. That and the fact the regular Integra uses the Civic Si’s powertrain feeds our suspicion that S more or less equals R. Company staffers didn’t come right out and say so, but they did include the CTR in the conversation, saying the Type S is meant to offer a more emotional and road-focused driving experience, as opposed to the track-hound Civic.
Our limited test drive consisted of two laps around the banked oval at Honda’s Tochigi, Japan, R&D center in a camoed prototype limited to 125 mph. We think the camo was largely for dramatic effect; we know what the damn Integra looks like, and the wrap did nothing to hide altered grille openings, flared rocker extensions, a new rear bumper, or the center-mounted triple tailpipes (which differ from the Type R’s in being uniform in size).
Like the Type R, the Type S sounds amazing. It’s quick, too; we thought we’d become jaded by the plethora of 1,000-lb-ft electrics, but the Integra skittered away quickly enough to elicit a swear of surprise. From 60 mph at the top of second gear, the car practically leapt to 125, which we maintained in fifth gear at 6,000 rpm. We noted the absence of road and wind noise, all the better to let us enjoy the engine’s beautiful music. Honda said the latest Integra is engineered to allow maximum aural enjoyment, but this could have been a function of the track’s glasssmooth pavement, as we have experienced quite a bit of road noise in the regular Integra. Unfortunately, the banked oval gave us little opportunity to evaluate ride and handling. The steering felt heavy and sharp, much like the regular Integra, and we really liked the brakes. But we can’t say if the Type S will drive much differently than the Type R, and Acura reps wouldn’t comment on suspension differences. The prototype was equipped with Michelin Sport Pilot 4 S tires; one of our criticisms of the regular version is that it’s only available with all-seasons.
We took every chance we could to change gears, because the six-speed shifter is among the best Honda has ever done—this from the company that does some of the best manual transmissions in the industry. Although the regular Integra is basically the only way to get the Civic Si engine with an automatic, Acura tells us the Type S will be manual only.
The standard Integra’s MSRP is roughly 10 percent more than that of the Civic Si, so if this holds true for the Type S, expect a base price of about $48,500—not a bad deal for a more grown-up version of the Civic Type R. If the production version retains the CTR’s razorsharp edge, it could well turn out to be one of the highlights in Acura history. Aaron Gold
APRIL 1973
PRICE: $0.75
We drove Fiat’s new X1/9 on the Targa Florio: “Assuming it’s reliable, which is likely, there’s nothing on the market near that price that’s as enjoyable and as able.” Well, half right is better than totally wrong.
We called Buick’s new Apollo “the best Nova yet” and reviewed the last new cars costing less than $2,000 (Datsun 1200, Ford Pinto, Honda Civic, and Toyota 1200). For those in a higher tax bracket, we tested America’s velvet tanks—the Cadillac Fleetwood, Imperial LeBaron, and Lincoln Continental Town Car.
APRIL 1993
PRICE: $2.95
We drove a gaggle of concept cars, some pure dreams (Mustang Mach III, Volvo ECC hybrid, and two-stroke Jeep Ecco) and others closer to production (Dodge Viper GTS, Chevy Impala SS, Plymouth Prowler, and Oldsmobile Aurora).
As in ’73, we reviewed the big barges: Chevy Impala, Buick Roadmaster, and Cadillac Fleetwood.
APRIL 2013
PRICE: $4.99
Our cover cars were the new-gen Lexus IS and Infiniti Q50, Japanese sedans poised to take on the Germans. In our comparison tests, the Toyota Avalon bested the Hyundai Azera and Nissan Maxima, while the Ford C-Max proved to be the better hybrid carry-all over the Toyota Prius V.
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“Classic Bel Air”
Our favorite EV startups have all shared a penchant for innovation— from SUVs with falcon-wing doors to trucks with gear tunnels to sedans with 500-plus-hp motors tiny enough to fit in a roll-aboard suitcase. Now comes the Canoo Lifestyle Vehicle (LV), a 21-window retrotastic van with mosh-pit seating, swappable “tophat” bodies, and a truly fresh take on vehicle life-cycle planning.
Simply climbing aboard the Microbusesque LV is a unique experience. The front doors are wide and rectangular, creating open space right where your head usually ducks under an A-pillar. The rear doors are also wide and feature rear-mounted hinges. The rear bench seat is positioned behind the C-pillar, leaving space sufficient for practicing yoga (or fitting a wheelchair ramp). Jump seats can be mounted to the doors; when deployed, their occupants face each other, and unoccupied cushions can serve as ottomans for outboard bench-seaters.
Two more foldable seats live behind each front seat back, for use when stopped. There’s no “dashboard.” A digital speedometer and indicators for the turn signals and drive gear are centered at the base of the windshield. Below this is another window offering a view of what’s immediately in front. (That panel is fixed on the preproduction unit we drove but may one day open to access stowage space ahead of the front occupants’ feet.) Overall visibility is excellent.
A 10.0-inch touchscreen mounts to the driver-side A-pillar to access most secondary functions; the climate controls are arrayed across a slim aluminum cross-car beam, within reach of the passenger. The convective HVAC system relies on circulating air rather than blowing on occupants; as such, no vent registers are visible except along the top of the windshield.
With the wheelbase of a Toyota Prius and by-wire steering featuring a lightning-quick rack (1.2 turns lock to lock),
the LV feels nimble and quick-witted, and the turning circle is crazy tight. The skateboard chassis features patented composite transverse leaf springs of variable cross-section, which keeps the entire suspension low. The LV traverses speed bumps with suppleness, and minimal body lean, squat, and dive suggest a certain sportiness. This isn’t a “forward-control” van, but the upright seating position places the driver’s eyes unusually close to the steering axle.
The rear-mounted 200-pound motor is capable of 350 hp and 304 lb-ft, and Canoo envisions offering outputs as low as 200 hp. It was set to 285 hp for our drive, and in a 4,750-pound vehicle with three people aboard, acceleration was snappy. A future two-motor version with both motors cranked to max output might make for a good muscle van (or truck, as the LV will spawn pickup variants).
We liked the exterior design the moment we saw it. We’re intrigued by the interior layout and look forward to answering questions like: Is occasional footstool comfort for two rear occupants worth making occupants six and seven miserable? Is loading bulky stuff through the back doors easier than loading via the hatch? Is there enough room for reasonable trips with four or more occupants? And we sincerely hope Canoo can stick to its “sub-$50,000” price estimate when retail cars arrive in 2024. Frank
MarkusPRICE $34,750-$49,950 (est)
LAYOUT Rear-motor, RWD, 2-, 5-, or 7-pass, 4-door van
MOTOR 200–350-hp/304-lb-ft permanent-magnet electric
TRANSMISSION 1-speed auto
CURB WEIGHT 4,450-4,750 lb (mfr)
WHEELBASE 112.2 in
L X W X H 174.1 x 74.6 x 72.7 in
0-60 MPH 6.9 sec (mfr est)
EPA FUEL ECON Not yet rated (250-mile range, est)
ON SALE Early 2023 (fleet), 2024 (retail)
A rolling amalgamation of conventiondefying USPs that we pretty much dig.
drove weighed closer to 6,400) and a substantial payload capacity, no composite transverse leaf spring would do, so air springs are used. Unique control arms help increase the ride height and suspension travel, as do the larger 265/65R19 military-spec Goodyear Wrangler tires. The max steering angle is curtailed somewhat, too, though the turning radius remains impressively compact.
The regular-cab pickup body and rear flatbed are made of steel wrapped in carbonKevlar for light-arms bullet resistance. (Mounting the spare tire immediately behind the driver provides extra ballistic protection.) The cab easily accommodates two soldiers fully geared up with quad holsters, and the large, rectangular doors make climbing in and out a breeze. Doors to the gear tunnel double as steps (as they do on a Rivian R1T) that allow an easy two-step climb to the deck. Aviation tie-downs can accept a variety of loads, such as standard construction plywood, seating for eight troops, or a drone launchpad. And naturally, this electric truck features 120- and 240-volt outlets to power equipment.
Canoo is serious about making its skateboard chassis broadly adaptable to widely varying use cases. To prove that point, last July the company won a contract to bid for the U.S. Army’s Commercial Electric Vehicle program, which resulted in what it calls this Light Tactical Vehicle.
Unlike the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle (JLTV) program, which focuses on the next generation of armored all-purpose vehicles, or the Infantry Squad Vehicle (ISV)
program, which seeks a jeeplike battle taxi, the Commercial Electric Vehicle program is designed to help the Army learn how it can incorporate EVs into its fleets. Prior to the prototype’s delivery to the military for testing, we got a chance to take it for a spin.
The vast majority of the Canoo’s chassis parts are the same as those that underpin the Lifestyle Vehicle van, with certain modifications. For example, with a target curb weight of about 5,300 pounds (the prototype we
Its two-motor all-wheel-drive powertrain more than doubles the power output of the Lifestyle Vehicle we sampled, but almost a ton of extra weight and taller tires mean it feels way less quick. Still, it whizzes up to speed silently and swiftly, and it absolutely shares the Lifestyle Vehicle’s nimble feel, courtesy of Canoo’s 1.2-turn by-wire steering. Bumps are absorbed just as smoothly, and air springs ensure this will remain true as payloads increase.
In any situation where stealth is important, such as the Army’s upcoming Electric Scout Vehicle program, there’s no topping the silent, cool running of an electric vehicle. Plus, it emits little to no heat signature, and Canoo’s rounded forms are said to stand out less than square ones when viewed via night-vision glasses.
And as for enduring 20,000 miles per year for a decade with potentially spotty maintenance, as U.S. Army requirements dictate, two electric motors with single-speed gear-reduction transmissions should prove more robust and require far less maintenance than a diesel engine, multispeed automatic transmission, and transfer case.
Given Canoo’s heavy corporate interest in complete life-cycle planning with emphasis on durability, plus its advantage in stealth and general lack of mainstream vehicle manufacturer competition in this program, we’re bullish on Canoo’s chances of landing a military contract for the LTV.
Frank Markus
Lifted, ballistically hardened, and structurally reinforced for potential service.
Previously, you had to wait 30 seconds or more for the car to finish booting up before setting off; now it’s generally ready to go by the time you’ve buckled your seat belt. It still sometimes takes a few seconds to load the navigation system, but the latency between touching a screen and getting a response has been dramatically reduced.
Lucid’s driver assistance systems are similarly updated, but the anti-distraction eye-tracking camera still throws too many false alarms, and the lane departure prevention remains a work in progress. It’s less aggressive, but should you disagree with its decisions, the amount of force required to override the steering inevitably results in jerking the car around in the lane.
The Lucid Air, if you haven’t heard this enough, is an exceptional car. Of course, for more than $100,000, it better be. To date, most of the Airs we’ve driven have been closer to $200,000, as production began with the spendiest versions. But now less expensive, lower-trim Airs like the Touring might make those more costly ones difficult to justify, because the Air Touring is superb.
The major differences between the Touring and top-spec Grand Tourings are in price, range, and output. The Touring starts at $109,050, the Grand Touring at $139,650 ($180,650 if you want the Grand Touring Performance). The Touring goes up to 425 miles on a charge, while Grand Tourings go as far as 516 miles. The Touring delivers a combined 620 hp and 885 lb-ft, the Grand Touring up to 1,050 hp and 921 lb-ft. On paper, the price gap makes sense.
At the test track, however, the deltas are subtler. It helps that the Touring is more than 200 pounds lighter than any other Air we’ve tested, and it hit 60 mph in 3.1 seconds, just 0.1
second slower than the 819-hp Grand Touring and only 0.4 behind the 1,050-hp Grand Touring Performance. In regular driving, you’ll never notice differences that small; compared to most other cars, the Touring pulls crazy hard.
On real roads, it’s a similar story. The Grand Touring Performance is the bestdriving electric sport sedan on the market, and the Touring feels just as quick on short straights, stops just as well, and holds on as tenaciously in the corners. Big, long, highspeed straights are the only places you’ll truly miss the Grand Touring model’s extra horsepower.
The Touring is a bit softer, however. Where the Grand Tourings are serious sport sedans, this car is ever so slightly less composed, moving through more of its suspension travel. It’s athletic and well tuned; it simply feels as if it’s lacking a theoretical Sport package.
Over-the-air updates have mitigated our largest complaint: super-slow software for the Air’s various screens and subsystems.
On the features front, the Touring lacks massaging seats and has a standard solid roof. (Our test car had the optional glass panel included on Grand Tourings.) That’s basically it in terms of deficit. The interior is otherwise just as stylish and crafted from the same high-quality materials. The Touring is as quiet inside, and it’s more spacious because shrinking the battery opens up deeper rear footwells.
Which Lucid Air you should buy mostly comes down to how much you covet having the best of something. If you feel a little “frugal” or aren’t concerned with having the fastest car in the showroom, you’ll drive away happy in an Air Touring.
Scott Evans
2023 Lucid Air Touring
BASE PRICE $109,050
PRICE AS TESTED $128,550
VEHICLE LAYOUT Front- and rear-motor, AWD, 5-pass, 4-door sedan
MOTOR TYPE Permanent-magnet electric
POWER (SAE NET) 310 hp (fr), 310 hp (rr), 620 hp (comb)
TORQUE (SAE NET) 442 (fr), 443 (rr), 885 lb-ft (comb)
TRANSMISSIONS 1-speed automatic
CURB WEIGHT (F/R DIST) 5,027 lb (51/49%)
WHEELBASE 116.5 in
L X W X H 195.9 x 76.2 x 55.4 in
0-60 MPH 3.1 sec
QUARTER MILE 11.2 sec @ 122.7 mph
BRAKING, 60-0 MPH 109 ft
LATERAL ACCELERATION 0.95 g (avg)
MT FIGURE EIGHT 24.2 sec @ 0.83 g (avg)
EPA CITY/HWY/COMB
FUEL ECON 121/120/121 mpg-e
EPA RANGE, COMB 384 miles
ON SALE Now
So good you have to really want a more expensive one.
Planet Earth consumed 25 petawatts of electricity in 2020. That’s 25 hitched to 15 zeros. More than 40 percent of those electrons were routed through electromagnetic machines. Motors. Even modest improvements in electric-motor efficiency could save mankind gigawatts of power. So why do the workaday motors powering every mundane gadget look mostly like they did a half-century ago? Texas-based Infinitum has entered production with a new axial-flux motor design that promises a modest (10 percent) improvement in operational efficiency. But the knock-on effects promise to snowball the cost and energy savings.
Infinitum’s attention grabber is its stator design, which eschews the industry-typical iron or steel armature wrapped in round- or square-section copper wire. In its place, intricate copper conductors are etched on a round, flat epoxy-glass circuit board, forming a stator. The rotors are largely unchanged from standard practice for pancake-style axial-flux motors—magnets fastened to a steel disc. (They can be rare-earth or not, as needs and budget allow.) For any given power rating, this design is 50 percent smaller and lighter and uses 66 percent less copper. The intellectual property is covered by 33 issued and 43 pending patents, and a new factory in Mexico will produce 50,000 small industrial motors in 2023, with plans to triple output next year. At CES 2023, the company unveiled its first traction-motor application suitable for EVs.
Many industrial-application motors are air-cooled, but here the “Aircore” nomenclature refers to the fact there’s no iron in the electromagnetic flux-path, only air. This means cooling air (or oil, in the case of the traction motor) can get right to where the heat is generated. This is far better than cooling a stator via the copper end windings or housing alone, and as a result an Aircore motor can tolerate four to five times the electrical current density of a motor with traditional copper windings. This greatly increases the Aircore motor’s power density. And those heat-loss reductions pretty much account for the operating efficiency improvement.
The initial motor shown at CES features three printed-circuit stators sandwiched by four permanent-magnet disc rotors, and it’s wound for three-phase operation. Cooling oil enters under pressure through the output shaft, flowing axially out to directly cool the copper traces before collecting in a sump at the bottom. As shown, it’s rated for 201 hp continuous, 402 hp peak—and note that superior cooling potentially allows it to sustain peak power longer than other designs could.
Simply switching all the non-traction motors controlling a modern car’s windows, seats, fans, etc. to lighter, more efficient ones promises to compound the traction motor’s efficiency improvement, bettering range and/or reducing battery size by way more than that 10 percent. And here’s a total-cost-of-ownership boon: Infinitum motors are fully serviceable. Bearings, stators, and rotors are all replaceable, greatly extending their useful service life, at the end of which all parts are easily recyclable. (A shocking number of the motors consuming our petawatts are landfilled when they break down.) One more bonus for the life cycle analysts among you: Smaller, lighter motors are cheaper and more CO2 friendly to transport—twice as many of the industrial versions fit in a shipping container.
Talking to the Infinitum team, I recalled related technologies from past columns that may suggest further improvements. The printed-circuit stator naturally lends itself to switchable variable-phase windings that can change from three-phase to 12 or even 18 separate electromagnetic phases to alter the torque/speed characteristics and form sort of a “virtual transmission” as demonstrated by the Chorus Meshcon motor coming soon in WheelTug aircraft nose gear. Lighter stators would seem to make Infinitum motors attractive for in-wheel motor applications, as they can help reduce unsprung mass. This could allow these lighter axial-flux motors to further improve the ride characteristics of Indigo’s Robotic Wheel active suspension first shown at last year’s CES.
Infinitum already has contracts in hand with global trucking and construction-equipment firms, and the Formula E racing series is also looking at the technology. The first traction motors will roll off the assembly line in the third quarter of 2023. Here’s hoping they can help reduce our EVs’ appetite for electrons and thereby partially suppress our global 25-pW appetite for electricity. Q
pressure then gets sprayed and centrifugally flung up between each stator and rotor, removing heat directly from where it’s created—in the printed copper windings.
The printedcircuit stators, shown in green, are key to the dramatic drop in weight, package size, cost, and materials usage. They also help increase the electrical current density and greatly simplify the task of cooling the Infinitum motor.
Kudos to Frank Markus, who is an unsung hero. His column is the one I turn to when I get the latest edition of MotorTrend. There are times when Markus writes things that are above my head, but I always get the gist of his articles. He and Angus MacKenzie put the industry into perspective, which is exactly why yours is the only automotive periodical I still subscribe to. Of course, I enjoy other scribes’ observations and opinions, but Markus deserves special acknowledgment for lifting the hood on many new and intriguing technologies. The auto industry is changing much quicker than anyone imagined, and unlike some others, I embrace an electric future and whatever innovations it brings.
Frank Orienter Rochester, New YorkI was rather surprised by the phantom power used by your R1T as reported in the February long-term test update. Based on your numbers, this phantom power drain is the equivalent of driving an extra 11,000 to 12,000 miles per year. The writer noted temperatures in the 30s, but where I come from, that is the average overnight low over the full year. Is this typical for EVs, or is this unique to Rivian? And is this phantom power accounted for in the various ratings and analyses (energy consumption, emissions generation, cost, etc.) used to evaluate EVs? If not, are these cars potentially consuming and costing double what is advertised for a 12,000-mileper-year driver? And more important, is this phantom power figured into EV adoption’s projected impacts on the grid?
Andrew Field Portage, Wisconsin
Your R1T update in the February issue was appalling! That truck lost 100 miles of range over four days sitting still, and you guys explained it away. If an ICE vehicle had leaked gallons of gas on your garage floor or driveway and almost left you stranded, you would have crucified the company that built it. Shame on you for being EV apologists, and shame on Rivian for allowing such a glaring issue to make it to production.
I own a 2019 Nissan Leaf, and it can sit for days in my near-freezing garage and not lose a single percentage point. It doesn’t have anything like this type of problem. You guys have an obligation to hold every EV manufacturer to the highest standard. Please fairly criticize shoddy products today so we can have even better EVs tomorrow.
The battery drain issue we uncovered with our R1T is a problem unique to Rivian. Since our report, the company has continually (and drastically) reduced these power loss issues via over-the-air updates, though the problem
Our Reader on Location this month is Ken Richards of Grand Junction, Colorado, who’s been on the road with his wife. He writes: “Top o’ the day from the bottom of the planet! My wife and I recently went to our seventh continent, Antarctica, where she took this picture of me with your 2023 New Car issue. I found the born-again DeLorean interesting. Still, I imagine the Hummer SUV would probably be the best vehicle for this environment, if you could charge it.”
If you’d like to be featured in Reader on Location, send a high-resolution picture and a brief summary of your trip to MotorTrend@MotorTrend.com.
still persists. Stay tuned for more on the R1T and other EVs joining our long-term fleet.—Ed.
In your November issue, the Cadillac Lyriq review included the claim that GM shut down hundreds of dealers “unwilling or uninterested in selling EVs.” I believe this mischaracterizes what happened.
ICE to electric is by far the single biggest change in not just the way cars are made and
CORRECTION: In the chart for our December 2022 story on the Ferrari Purosangue, we said the SUV was frontengine, rear-wheel drive. It is in fact front-engine, all-wheel drive.
work but also how they’re serviced. How you service an EV with motors, batteries, cooling systems, etc., is not at all like a gasoline car. You need specialized upgrades in a dealer’s service department and technicians trained in how to handle these vehicles. We’re talking about tens of thousands of dollars, and probably more. [Way more; Ford asked its dealers to invest between $500,000 and $1.2 million.—Ed.]
Particularly in the case of small-town dealers, there may just not be ample space to expand the service departments, and certainly not enough liquid cash on hand to handle the massive upgrades. It’s not being “unwilling or uninterested”—more like not having access to resources. Even before the EV proliferation, I had experience with a small-town dealer that offered excellent service and was thriving. It eventually tore down its own building, built a big new fancy one, and went out of business soon thereafter. My understanding is that the upgrade was something GM wanted it to do.
This is not meant to deride EVs. Rather, it’s to deride finger-pointing and to note there are many more complications than many people realize. So let’s hold a vigil for those casualties and recognize their sacrifice for the EV future.
Russell Gee Via email
I told my engineers, ‘We want the best radar-finding engine this side of the military.’
For civilian users, V1 Gen2 is a break-through on range.”
— Mike Valentine
I’ve heard all the supposed arguments. It seems every time anything even tangentially related to electric cars is published, certain people feel compelled to share their own research. You’ve probably heard it all, too: A Prius is worse for the planet than a Hummer. EVs are coal-powered cars. Electric cars produce more CO2 than internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles. Lithium mining is uniquely bad for the environment. Cobalt mining relies largely on slave labor, if not child slave labor. Actually, that last part is sadly true. But the rest? Lies. And I’m not even going to get into the hypocrisy of posting anti-EV rhetoric from a lithium-ionbattery-powered phone or laptop. The first thing we should talk about is direct versus indirect emissions. Gas-powered vehicles have both direct and indirect emissions, while electric
cars—I’m specifically talking about battery-powered vehicles, or BEVs, but we will just call them EVs—only have indirect emissions. How so? Both types of cars/trucks/SUVs are manufactured, and the process of building cars involves a global manufacturing effort that uses energy from all sorts of sources. This
includes everything from the diesel fuel used to mine and transport metal to the electricity used to manufacture tires. A big knock on EVs is that because most battery production is centered in China, itself a notorious coal-burning country, battery-powered cars begin their service lives with more indirect emissions to their credit.
The above is true. If you take an ICE vehicle and an EV and lock them in a room, by the time the world ends the undriven electric car will have already resulted in more bad stuff than the undriven gas-powered car. But here’s the crazy part: Cars are driven. Wild, I know, but it’s true. The more EVs get driven, the cleaner they get. This last part is especially true if the energy used to power EVs is itself CO2-free. But even if it’s not, EVs still lead to less emissions over time than cars that burn gasoline.
Not so long, it turns out. The New York Times published an article called “E.V.s Start With a Bigger Carbon Footprint. But That Doesn’t Last.” To quote the Gray Lady, “The pollution equation evens out between 1.4 to 1.5 years for sedans, 1.6 to 1.9 years for SUVs and about 1.6 years for pickup trucks, based on the average number of vehicle miles traveled in the United States.” So even if you sign just a two-year lease, by the time you turn in your EV, it has released less CO2 than the equivalent ICE vehicle.
No, it’s not. The Yale School of the Environment conducted a study published by Nature Communications that explains how even with indirect emissions due to battery production, EVs release fewer greenhouse gases over the course of their service lives than ICE vehicles. As one author, Stephanie Weber, said, “The supply chain for combustion vehicles is just so dirty that electric vehicles can’t surpass them, even when you factor in indirect emissions.” This is a comprehensive study you
should read for yourself, but please allow me to single out one thing:
“Taken together, indirect emissions accounted for [approximately] 26% of the 1.5 Gt CO2 caused by the US LDV fleet in 2020.”
Yes, light-duty vehicles in America release 1.5 gigatons of CO2 per year! As terrible as it is to burn coal to produce batteries, nearly three-quarters (about 74 percent) of these CO2 emissions come after the vehicle is built. In other words, about three-quarters of all lightduty vehicle emissions come from the fuel that powers them. Remember, the 26 percent figure is all the indirect emissions for all vehicles—mining the iron, producing the plastics, stitching the fabrics, etc.—not just those from EV batteries, which are but a portion of it.
It’s a bit of a red herring to only focus on the CO2 released by burning coal to make batteries while ignoring the CO2 released by all
the other parts of the manufacturing process. I find it particularly grating when people willfully ignore the CO2 released by drilling, transporting, refining, and yes, even pumping oil/gasoline. Sure, more EVs will mean more batteries, but unlike gasoline, which always has to be burned, battery production can become (and is becoming) greener. Another way to look at it is the energy required to produce an average EV’s battery is equivalent to about 74 gallons of gas.
This is the crazy part. Even if you only ever burned coal to create the electricity to power EVs, that’s still less CO2 than is released by burning gasoline. How is this possible? Simple: efficiency. I beg you to go find Karin Kirk’s article in Yale Climate Connections about the efficiency differences between ICE and EV
propulsion. In simple terms (and the simpler the better for me), she explains how ICE vehicles only send between 16 and 25 percent of the energy created from burning gasoline to the wheels. The other 75 to 84 percent is lost due to inherent inefficiencies. Most of the loss is heat and noise, though about 10 percent is sacrificed to stuff like drivetrain losses, essentially the difference between crank hp and wheel hp. I should point out that diesels are more efficient (30 to 40 percent of the energy created goes toward forward propulsion), but they spew noxious particulates with serious health consequences and still aren’t particularly efficient compared to EVs.
Electric vehicles (eventually) send 87 to 91 percent of the energy in the battery to the wheels. I say “eventually” because 22 percent of that energy needs to be “recaptured” through regenerative braking. Put another
way, 31 to 35 percent of the energy stored in the battery is lost for various reasons, but 22 percent can be regenerated by the “brakes.”
Kirk goes on to say, “Replacing gasoline-powered cars with EVs saves energy, regardless of the energy source used to recharge EVs.”
Please take note of the word “regardless,” as that’s how “coal-powered cars” are in fact cleaner than gas-powered cars. Efficiency: EVs have it, ICE cars don’t.
To summarize, replacing gasoline with coal (which, for the record, is an abysmal idea) would reduce energy usage by 31 percent. Another way to think about it: Right now, Americans use about 9 million barrels of oil a day for our automotive transportation needs. Magically switching to EVs charged via burning coal would result in only needing the equivalent of about 6 million barrels. That’s a big reduction. Replacing gasoline with EVs charged via natural gas would use 48 percent less energy. Green energy (hydro, solar, wind, etc.) instead of gasoline would reduce the amount of energy needed by nearly 75 percent, or 6.7 million barrels of gasoline equivalent, as only 2.3 million barrels equivalent would be needed. That’s massive.
In 2021 the U.S. power grid’s makeup was 38 percent natural gas, 22 percent coal, 20 percent renewables, 19 percent nuclear, and 1 percent other (like petroleum). This means that if all cars in the U.S. were suddenly powered by electricity, at most only 22 percent of them would be fully coal-powered. If you lump nuclear in with renewables because atomic energy produces no CO2 emissions, 39 percent of the grid is emission free. However, coal use is declining. As recently as 2008 America burned more than 1
billion short tons per year. In 2021 it was 501 million short tons. You should also know the percentage of renewable energy is expected to grow. About 22 percent of power in 2022 came from green sources, and projections for 2023 show the figure growing to 24 percent. That will continue to increase.
That’s a massive question beyond the scope of this discussion, but one way to explain it is by what my former colleague Jamie Kitman calls the Scientific Uncertainty Principle. It works like this: Scientists at research institutions discover smoking causes lung cancer. Tobacco companies counter by hiring their own scientists who say the opposite. In the car world, this began with leaded gasoline. Harvard, for instance, said it was a terrible poison. GM and Standard Oil disagreed. Millions of people died with millions more poisoned. Often there’s a profit motive behind the lies, yet sometimes the disinformation comes from culture wars. Sadly, we live in the age of alternative facts; in my view, it’s the latter at play here. I admittedly spend too much time reading comments on stories about this subject, but I find the massive volume of anti-EV hysteria alarming. Then I remember something my father always told me: Truth is a defense. Q
Plastic bags, ballpoint pens, frozen chicken, and the collapse of the Soviet Union. That’s how the screaming madness of a 1,600-hp twin-turbo flat-plane-crank V-8, the brain-melting complexity of a nine-speed transmission with seven tiny clutches, and the space/time warp of hand-built 310-mph hypercars all began. The through line? Christian von Koenigsegg, serial entrepreneur, self-taught engineer, and steadfast lateral thinker.
Christian Erland Harald von Koenigsegg was born in Sweden on July 2, 1972, and grew up near the country’s capital, Stockholm, before being sent to an elite boarding school in the countryside 180 miles west of the city at the age of 14. He knew by then what he wanted to do with his life— he wanted to make cars.
Today, almost 45 years after he first saw it, mention of The Pinchcliffe Grand Prix brings a smile to von Koenigsegg’s face. Made in 1975, this charming Norwegian stop-motion children’s film tells the story of an eccentric bicycle repairman and inventor who builds an equally eccentric car to race a Formula 1 champion who has stolen his engine design.
CHRISTIAN VON KOENIGSEGG HAS BUILT SOME OF THE PLANET’S FASTEST MACHINES.
NOW HE’S WORKING ON A RADICAL FOURSEAT HYBRID THAT DEFIES CONVENTIONAL HYPERCAR WISDOM.
WORDS ANGUS MACKENZIE
“I went to the local cinema with my father, and I remember being totally blown away by it,” recalls von Koenigsegg, who still has a model of the film’s star car, Il Tempo Gigante, (think Chitty Chitty Bang Bang on steroids) on a shelf in his office. “That was my first memory of wanting to build a car. I wanted to be like that bicycle repairman and build that strange wild invention of a car. I started buying car magazines from my weekly allowance, just trying to understand cars from reading and looking at them.”
Von Koenigsegg says he still benefits from this way of thinking, of just looking at details and remembering them, seeing how they’re different and trying to figure out why they’re different. He was, he says, the sort of kid who took apart the family VCR to see how it worked—which it often no longer did once he put it back together. Such natural curiosity, still untrammeled by any subsequent formal engineering training, perhaps explains Koenigsegg’s left-field approach to the art and science of building hypercars. In 1991 and at just 19 years old, he founded the company that today is the holding company and still the major shareholder for Koenigsegg Automotive AB.
“I started that company because I wanted to make some money so I could build cars,” he says. “I just looked at any opportunity I could find, and I found it selling ballpoint pens and plastic bags and frozen chicken, mostly to Estonia [which had just declared independence from the rapidly disintegrating Soviet Union].”
By the time he was 22, von Koenigsegg figured he had made enough money to make his next move. “I’d proven I could be an entrepreneur,” he says. “And I wanted to build cars. I realized it was probably going to take a very long time before I succeeded, but I was young, and I didn’t have any obligations. I thought that if I didn’t do it then, I never would.” It was August 1994.
Six more years passed before the Koenigsegg CC8S was revealed at the Paris auto show. In the interim, Koenigsegg survived on the income from his business, grants from the Swedish Technology Development Board, a bridging loan from his father, who’d sold his own company and retired at the age of 60, and, as the turn of the millennium approached, funds from venture capitalists who’d sniffed the coming burst of the IT bubble and were looking for something interesting to invest in. The CC8S was very much a realization of a boyhood dream, Christian von Koenigsegg’s very own Il Tempo Gigante.
“We didn’t have any engineers,” he says. “A truck driver from the company next door had half an engineering degree and started helping, working nights. He also had a father who was an engineer at Volvo, and we got a drawing table from him, and a book on drawing principles and details and tolerances. I started drawing the suspension. I became a modeler. I modeled the CC8S myself with two other people. We did not have any computers for engineering work until 1997, maybe 1998. By then we’d already built a couple of prototypes.”
No more than 12 people in total worked on the CC8S, von Koenigsegg says, and the first car was delivered to a paying customer in 2002. What’s remarkable about it is that, even 20 years later, the CC8S feels like a proper Lamborghini crusher, not some cobbled-together kit car. The interior is comfortable, the ride is good, and the wraparound windshield—still a Koenigsegg design feature—offers excellent visibility. Powered by a 4.7-liter supercharged engine based on Ford’s Modular V-8, it has a brawny, muscular presence, but it’s light on its feet and still very fast.
Koenigsegg Automotive has built barely more than 250 cars in the 20 years since, but nearly all have set a benchmark of one sort or another. The 806-hp CCR beat the McLaren F1’s production-car top speed record
“1:18-Scale 1932 Ford Lincoln KB” die cast
Car measures an impressive size of 12”L
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Open the butterfly hood to reveal Lincoln’s L-Head V-12 Engine!
• Gleaming showroom finish
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• And over 200 individual parts
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• Bi-folding butterfly hood
• Front & rear “suicide” doors open to reveal magnificent interior detail
The Lincoln KB featured luxurious interiors, expertly judged brightwork, and the last of the Henry Leland-era motors to use the fork and blade connecting rods, an expensive engine that put out 150 horsepower and reached a top speed of 100 mph. A must-have status symbol of the era!
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Today, the Lincoln KB is so valued by collectors that one sold at auction for an incredible $836,000 in 2015. Now, Hamilton proudly presents the Lincoln KB at a more affordable price! This intricately tooled die cast features the unparalelled level of detail Sun Star is known for...all in exacting 1:18 scale.
Presented by Hamilton; Manufactured by Sun Star Models Development Ltd, who holds the license wi th Ford Motor Company
4”W
4”H
in 2005. The 1,017-hp CCXR out-powered the Bugatti Veyron in 2007. The 1,341-hp Agera One:1 was so named because its 1,360 metric horsepower propelled a car weighing just 1,360 kg (2,998 pounds).
Today’s lineup includes the Jesko—named after von Koenigsegg’s father—and the CC850, both of which are powered by the 5.0-liter twin-turbo dry-sumped, flat-plane-crank V-8 designed in-house at Koenigsegg. In the Jesko the engine produces a scarcely believable 1,602 hp and 1,106 lb-ft of torque on E85 (or 1,280 hp if you use pump gas). Smaller turbos in the CC850 mean the engine makes a mere 1,385 hp on E85 fuel (or 1,185 hp on pump gas) and 1,021 lb-ft of torque.
The Jesko and the CC850 also mark a significant step forward in the history of Koenigsegg Automotive. The company is gearing up to build 1.5 times as many cars in the next three years as it has in the past 20. The factory in Ängelholm, built on an old Swedish Air Force base that was once home to a fighter squadron whose Ghost logo can now be found on Koenigsegg cars, is being expanded, along with the workforce.
“We have brought in professionals from companies like Volvo, Tesla, Mercedes, Porsche, Lamborghini,” von Koenigsegg says. “People with the experience of producing cars in higher volume. In total we now have close to 600 people, maybe even more.”
In addition to producing 125 Jeskos, 50 CC850s, and a couple of special one-offs on the order books, von Koenigsegg also plans to launch what is the most radical car he’s ever built, the Gemera. The name comes from an agglomeration of two Swedish words and loosely translates as “give more.” And it certainly looks set to do that.
The Gemera’s two giant gullwing doors mean there are no B-pillars to impede access to a cabin that has room enough to accommodate four NBA players despite it having a wheelbase no longer than a Hyundai Ioniq 5’s and a roofline as low as a Porsche 911’s. Why four seats? “The Gemera is a car to be shared,” says von Koenigsegg,
who as a child helped convince a friend’s father to buy a Lotus Excel rather than a Ferrari or a Porsche because he and his friend wanted to come along for the ride.
However, it’s the hybrid powertrain that truly rips up the hypercar rule book and throws it in the dumpster.
The Gemera has three motors fed by a 15-kWh battery, plus a 2.0-liter turbocharged three-cylinder engine mounted just ahead of the rear axle. The engine has no camshafts; the valves open and close using a system of compressed air and solenoids developed in-house. Its maker claims a stout 592 hp and 443 lb-ft. Total claimed system output is 1,677 hp and 2,581 lb-ft of torque, enough to hurl the Gemera to 60 mph in less than 1.9 seconds on the way to a 248-mph top speed.
Now here’s the left-field bit: The rear-mounted engine drives the front wheels via a torque tube. And there is no transmission. As in the Koenigsegg Regera, a coaxial, hydraulically coupled motor on the output shaft provides drive at lower speeds before the ICE takes over. There’s no differential, either. Clutches on either side of the bevel gear that sends drive to the front wheels allow for slip and torque vectoring. The rear wheels are each driven by their own motor.
“It was a bit of a mind stretch, having the engine in the rear shooting mechanical power forward,” von Koenigsegg says. “But then I started thinking, why is that any different to having the engine in the front of a car and having rear-wheel drive?” Despite the unusual layout, most of the Gemera’s power and torque is still put down via the rear wheels, through the electric motors.
Why have the Gemera’s gas engine behind the cabin? “Packaging,” von Koenigsegg says. “I wanted to make a roomy mid-engine four-seater that looked like a compact two-seater on the outside. No one had really done that before. Why mid-engine? Because of weight distribution and handling and so on, but also because we’re a mid-engine brand.”
The Gemera again illustrates that von Koenigsegg has no conventional sense of where the boundaries are—or of what should and shouldn’t be done when designing an ultra-high-performance car. He agrees: “I always ask the question, ‘Why?’ And when I get an answer, I ask, ‘So why is that?’” It’s a habit that goes back to the 6-year-old kid entranced by Il Tempo Gigante. “I actually got thrown out of the classroom a couple of times because I was always asking, ‘Why?’” he confesses with a smile.
Von Koenigsegg also says he doesn’t see a reason to always do things differently, but if there’s a chance of tackling a challenge in a different way, a better way, then he strives to achieve it. “I could have made my life easier,” he says. “Half of the strangeness we have done would have been enough. But innovation, along with performance and function, is what drives me.”
Gemera
The CC850’s ingenious transmission is effectively both a six-speed manual and a nine-speed automatic.
CATCH THE ACTION ALL SEASON LONG ON
The fratelli Maserati got their automotive start building 2.0-liter grand prix racers for Diatto while overseeing their own spark plug manufacturing business. In 1926, when Diatto suspended racing operations, the brothers started building highly successful Maserati race cars. To improve profits and ensure funding for their racing efforts, the brothers set about adapting their winning 1.5-liter racing engine and chassis for road use in 1941, with the resulting A6 1500 Gran Turismo appearing in 1947.
Today, circumstances are once more forcing Maserati down a new path—this time toward electrification—and the brand will again incorporate motorsports tech on its first production EV. Fittingly, it will be a grand tourer. But rather than adapting a competition car for road use, this time Maserati co-developed a Formula E race car alongside the GranTurismo Folgore (“lightning” in Italian). The racer will run in the ninth e-Prix season in early 2023. The road car arrives later in the year, and we just got a chance to test it out on Maserati’s home track—Autodromo di Modena.
The heart of any racing or performance car is its powertrain, and just as motorsports has always done for combustion engines, Formula E racing development is unlocking new ways to maximize power and minimize energy use. The solutions aren’t always cheap, but big racing budgets and luxury grand-tourer sticker prices can help incubate innovation.
The GranTurismo Folgore employs three motors, designed and built by Maserati. Each arrays 100 permanent magnets in intricate vee formations within the rotors. Note: These are traditional barrel-shaped radial-flux motors, not the pancake-style axial-flux type; none can be declutched, so they’re always powered, and all those magnets make these motors too pricey for mainstream Maserati EVs like the forthcoming Grecale Folgore SUV.
To achieve the same low seating position and leg environment found in the Nettuno V-6-powered GranTurismo (which changes little relative to the previous model), the battery pack fills the center tunnel, expanding into the engine compartment in front and the
area beneath the rear seats in back. Pouch-style batteries comprise 32 modules to form the pack, which is built at Maserati’s Mirafiori factory near Turin. Total capacity is 92.5 kWh, 88.0 of which are usable. The 800-volt pack can be DC fast-charged at 270 kW, taking the battery from 20 to 80 percent in 18 minutes. Level 2 AC charging can be as fast as 22 kW with a 100-amp L2 charger, and an upgrade to 300- or 350-kW fast-charging is anticipated.
TOASWIFT,ELEGANT GRANDTOURING COUPE FOR ITS “LIGHTNING” ELECTRIC SUBBRAND
WORDS FRANK MARKUS
Electrifying Maserati’s halo GT car doesn’t change its essential beauty or 2+2 packaging, and making room for the rearmounted motors only trims its cargo capacity by a scant 1.5 cubic feet.
Each motor gets its own power inverter (to convert DC battery power to AC motor power or vice versa), and Maserati says it will be first to production with these more efficient, costlier Formula E–derived silicon-carbide MOSFET inverters. They play a key role in delivering both the GranTurismo’s power and its comparative efficiency.
All those permanent magnets can handle a lot of electromagnetism to deliver stout torque over a wide rpm range. Each motor can deliver 402 hp and 332 lb-ft of torque to the road. But the battery can only deliver 751 hp total, and then only for 30 seconds of continuous full power. (The system can recover a total of 818 hp of regen braking.) And although the EPA has yet to get its hands on a 2024 GranTurismo Folgore for testing, Maserati expects a 250-mile rating—impressive given the car’s size, long-legged gearing, and lack of a disconnect mechanism for highway cruising (which isn’t a thing in racing).
Top speed is 200 mph, and the car gets there with a single gear ratio by spinning the motors to 17,600 rpm through 6.90:1 gearing in front, 7.20:1 in back. (The difference accommodates
staggered 265/35 20-inch front and 295/30 21-inch rear tires.) Even with such comparatively tall gearing, the battery and motors are stout enough to catapult the Folgore to 60 mph in 2.6 seconds. Keep the accelerator on full bore, and the car hits 124 mph in 8.0 seconds and reaches top speed in 32 seconds—just as the battery begins to reduce power.
Designing the car for both ICE and BEV power from the outset means the only structural differentiation required is in the rockers, central tunnel, trunk floor, and front “engine” compartment. (The Folgore’s is filled with electronics, motors, and batteries, so there’s no frunk storage space.) Suspension links are all identical, and height-adjustable air springs and electrically controlled dampers are standard on all GranTurismos, though
the springs, dampers, and their programming differ between ICE and BEV models.
Our December drive was entirely on the track to avoid Italy’s winter-tire mandate. Pressing the start button summons a deep basso thrum that seems as loud outside as the previous model’s V-8, though Maserati might lower the 107-decibel volume for production. Maserati engineered the sound to incorporate fourth-order V-8 vibes. Inside, the sound becomes more pronounced in the more aggressive drive modes, and it rises and falls as appropriate when driving.
Having the track to ourselves, we started out pretending it was a rural road to sample
the Max Range and (default) GT modes at a leisurely pace. These limit power to a still stout 600 horses—plenty for merging or passing. With full stability control vigilance in force, dynamics are perfectly neutral and benign. Sport and Corsa modes dial back the nannies, and Corsa permits separate fine-tuning of the traction control and rear torque vectoring from neutral to Track to Drift. Our most satisfying drifts occurred in the Track setting, but that may have been because the tires had heated sufficiently to stick better by the time we tried Drift. Regardless, the GranTurismo Folgore proved to be a deft dance partner.
It’s a full-figured one, though. Offering short-trip accommodations for four modestsized adults and providing a 9.5-cubic-foot trunk (only 1.5 cubes smaller than the V-6’s trunk), it’s no surprise the GranTurismo Folgore is about as long and wide as a Jaguar XF (though Maserati says its roof is lower than any other four-seat production EV). And with that big battery, it weighs about 5,000 pounds.
BASE PRICE $200,000 (est)
LAYOUT 1x front- and 2x rear-motor, AWD, 4-pass, 2-door coupe
MOTORS 3x 402-hp/332-lb-ft AC permanent-magnet electric, 751 hp/996 lb-ft (comb)
TRANSMISSIONS 1-speed auto
5,000 lb (mfr)
Because it can route up to 402 hp and 332 lb-ft of torque to either outside rear wheel, it yaws into turns eagerly and hence feels nimbler than its size and mass suggest.
Having the battery weight centralized along the car’s roll center means there’s less inertial roll resistance, which can inhibit full-floorbattery cars’ willingness to turn into corners.
Braking is by wire, with regen levels controllable via paddles in four steps that range from mimicking the combustion GranTurismo’s coasting deceleration rate to full one-pedal driving. The calibration seemed faultless, with no discernible transition from regen to friction. Coming off the straights, the 15.0-inch front/13.8-inch rear steel Brembo brakes never evinced a hint of fade.
The car we sampled had a Folgore-only interior, rendered in a stunning Wedgwood blue and ivory two-tone featuring a pattern of radiating rays embossed in the leather. The inserts were an Alcantara-like material called Econyl, made from recycled fishnets to help clean up the oceans (currying favor with Neptune, whose trident adorns all Maseratis). The center console is finished in matte carbon-fiber weave with copper strands. The double-screen central display, borrowed from the Grecale SUV, places infotainment above the transmission shift buttons with another screen beneath for climate and other systems. The Dodge SRT gang surely helped program the upper screen, as there are myriad performance gauges, a drag-racing screen, and more—all rendered in Maserati fonts.
Folgore is a comfortable, relaxed continent crosser (DC fast charger network permitting), very much in the vein of a Bentley Continental. It’s gorgeous inside and out, and it manages to feel like $200,000 well spent. We look forward to spending more time in the Folgore as we approach its third-quarter 2023 U.S. launch.
The 2024 Maserati GranTurismo
The simulator’s graphics depicted the track accurately, but our rookie driver had trouble sensing speed and braking force. This resulted in some virtual crashes that afforded interesting views of the scenery behind some fencing.
Much of the development work on both this GranTurismo and the MC20 supercar was conducted prior to the construction of a single prototype, using the advanced dynamic simulator at the Maserati Innovation Lab. The company swears the lap times generated here were matched by the same pro driver in an actual car running the same calibrations.
The sim rig perches a realistic cockpit atop a six-axis lateral motion unit to generate acceleration, braking, and cornering g loads. Three angled actuators add pitch, dive, and roll, and five more shakers contribute higher-frequency powertrain and chassis vibrations. Then there are a five-point harness and seat-cushion bladders that help sustain the impression of acceleration and braking events that may last longer than there’s physical room to simulate via moving the cockpit.
Naturally, there’s a seamless 270-degree screen onto which photorealistic high-resolution graphics are projected, and vehicle and powertrain sounds are piped in. After lapping for real all morning on Maserati’s
home track, the Autodromo di Modena, the team loaded the programming for it and the 2024 GranTurismo Folgore into the simulator, and I tried it for maybe a dozen laps.
My hat is off to the Maserati driving aces who could divine chassis tuning changes in this environment, because while the cornering forces—especially in the tightest turns—felt quasi-realistic, I couldn’t sense acceleration and braking performance accurately enough to gauge my speed using visual cues alone. As a result, I braked way too heavily into every turn on my first few laps. Later braking then resulted in spins and crashes I (thankfully) never experienced on the real circuit. Simulators all struggle to align physical motion your inner ear senses with the visual information your eyes take in, which frequently results in kinetosis (motion sickness), so the fact this noob lasted so long without barfing impressed the locals.
This simulation rig has been in use since 2013, and two more static simulators at the MIL help provide hardware-in-the-loop development of various chassis and driver assist systems, as well as the user interface.
That five-point harness isn’t there for safety; it tightens in an effort to telegraph the sensation of braking g-forces that would otherwise exceed the simulator’s capacity.
GAS? ELECTRIC? TURBO OR NO? THERE’S MORE THAN ONE WAY TO LIGHT UP A ROAD AS ONE OF THE WORLD’S BEST PERFORMANCE CARS.
car has terminal understeer or a propensity to snap oversteer. Our chosen track offers run-off areas, after all. Better to find out here how dynamically competent a vehicle is before taking it to a challenging mountain road.
The real world would instead be the final arbiter. Sure, a car might prove it drives well on a perfect surface in a controlled environment, but is it also good enough to handle bad pavement? Debris in the road? Rapidly changing light and temperature conditions? A car that’s only good on the track is useless to most owners. The winner of this award has to be able to do everything.
Creating a new award and the massive program behind it is a double-edged sword. Our other Of The Year programs are pretty locked in. We have standard tests and procedures, established venues, staff with years of institutional knowledge and experience, and long-standing criteria. Performance Vehicle of the Year remains a bit different.
It’s not just new venues and alternate weighting of our key criteria. In only its second year, we still don’t know what the absolute best format is yet. Like any other OTY, it begins with instrumented testing on the ultimate closed course: an automotive proving ground. But rather than beginning our subjective evaluations there, as we do with other OTYs, or on real-world roads, as we did last year, this year we headed straight to the track.
No, this isn’t Track Car of the Year. But a racetrack is a more controlled environment than a public street. It’s a place for going fast in supercars, yes, but it’s also somewhere you can toss around a high-performance SUV safely. It’s a place where you can test each vehicle’s limits and start to tease out strengths and weaknesses. It’s a much safer venue than a road—even a closed one—for learning if a
PVOTY, more than any other event, makes the bosses nervous. Yeah, there’s always the chance something gets damaged off-road during SUV of the Year or Truck of the Year, but PVOTY ups the ante with high speeds and extremely expensive cars. It has all the makings of a hell of a story or a financial headache—but not this year.
Not because we didn’t go fast (we did) and not because none of the cars was expensive (the McLaren stickered for $490,810), but because our judges took their jobs seriously and kept their driving clean. No one stuffed a car. No one spun out. No one admitted to even dropping a wheel, though the dirt and rocks that turned up at the apex of Turn 4 didn’t get there by themselves. There were a lot of ways this whole thing could’ve gone literally sideways, but it didn’t. The closest we came to that sort of drama was when a laughing Mac Morrison returned to the pits in the GR Corolla: The car thought it had crashed thanks to braking and midcorner g loads, and it automatically contacted Toyota Safety Connect to report a driver likely in need of assistance.
Not that the circumstances set us up for success. The night before this whole shindig was fixin’ to kick off, an unseasonably early storm hit Southern California. The rain
stopped before sunrise, but it still left us with a cold, wet circuit. Thankfully, Willow Springs International Raceway is located in the high desert where humidity is a foreign concept; the Streets of Willow track we’d be tearing around dried quickly.
Our EV charging solution moved far less quickly. Renewable Innovations had intended to get us a hydrogen-powered fast-charging station installed conveniently in the back of a semi trailer, but it was unable to procure a sufficient amount of hydrogen to power it. Instead, the company sent its solar-powered rig, which can charge four cars simultaneously but only at Level 2 speeds (same as plugging into your dryer outlet at home). It meant we had to keep our five EVs on the chargers constantly when not being hot-lapped and occasionally send the most depleted of them off-site to a public fast charger. But it worked.
That’s not to say no cars broke after two days of repeated on-track running. After we concluded our hot-lapping, we jumped in the loosest and/or most powerful cars to do some drifting for the cameras because we know how much y’all like to see cars sliding sideways. Everything we do, we do it for you.
Drifting, like lapping, can be hard on a car. Exhibit A occurred when the Lamborghini suddenly went into limp mode. We called out a technician, who diagnosed an apparently rare and unusual sensor failure in the rear steering system. Thus ensued a great number of phone calls, text messages, DMs, and emails as we sorted out a replacement car on extremely
ANGELES CREST HIGHWAY WORDS SCOTT EVANS PHOTOGRAPHY MT STAFFWe run the Streets of Willow counterclockwise, backward from its standard configuration but just as much fun and a bit safer.
short notice. If you notice the Huracán Tecnica magically changes colors in the pictures featured in this package, that’s why.
With that hiccup sorted, we got to the real stressful stuff: fighting over which cars ought to be finalists. Typically at an Of The Year program, most judges are on the same page. There’s often an outlier with a different impression, but this year’s field provoked an unusually varied array of opinions.
Several highly opinionated professional critics sharing differing thoughts on the same cars has a way of making these discussions take even longer than normal, but we got there. We even forgave each other our wildest takes on certain vehicles. Mostly.
The list culled, it was time to hit the mountain. As you’ll recall, there had been a storm three days prior. Thankfully, the snow that fell was already relegated to the road shoulders and was disappearing quickly, but overnight temperatures were still low enough to convert the runoff in the road to ice.
This is still Southern California, though, so once the sun was up, temperatures rose quickly enough the ice wasn’t a serious issue. It did, however, make for a late start as we waited for the road to warm.
Our plan had called for Renewable Innovations to truck the charging trailer up the mountain with us, but with only one electric car making it through to the finalist round, we decided it wasn’t worth the hassle.
As with the racetrack, there’s other work to be done out on the real-world roads beyond
just driving the cars quickly. The best photos and videos require controlled environments and careful coordination. Closing the road is equally important for filming as it is for safe high-speed driving. We’re not greedy, though. We only close it intermittently; it’s a public road in a national forest, after all. Folks want to go hiking, or in the case of some local teens, watch us film from a distance.
Of course, it’s always the end of the last day when something gets damaged. We’d cleared all the rocks from the road in the section where we drove our evaluation loops, but Angeles Crest Highway is more than 60 miles end to end. We were at the east end, and most folks live closer to the west, so naturally we took the fun way home. This resulted in a blown tire on the Civic Type R, a busted transmission cooler line on a support vehicle, and a damaged radiator on the AMG SL 63, all caused by unsighted rocks in the road in the dark. Still, driving west into a fantastic sunset on one of the best driving roads in the world with zero traffic was a thrill.
Driving complete, we came to the only part of an OTY that’s more difficult than choosing finalists: choosing a winner. Arguments were made. Debates were had. Incredulous rhetorical questions were asked. Ridiculous analogies were proffered. Honor was impugned. Blood feuds were born. All the usual stuff. At the end, we had our 2023 Performance Vehicle of the Year—by one stinkin’ vote.
At this time of year, the desert goes from cold to (reasonably) comfortable in a flash.
The PVOTY program can wear out tires in a hurry. Our friends at ZipTire were there to help. QUICK REVERSAL
enough, the 5,124-pound SUV will drift. Mind your tires, though. As we noted in a comparison test against the Porsche Cayenne Turbo GT (February 2023), the DBX707 could use a set of more aggressive tires. There’s also a difficult-tocategorize specialness to the DBX707. Call it an elusive X-factor; we just like it. “The Aston is super cool,” executive editor Mac Morrison said. Editorial operations boss Mike Floyd noted the “raging baritone of this monster SUV is pretty darn special.” Mexico editor Miguel Cortina simply said, “This is a great, great-driving SUV.” Evans liked it even more: “This thing absolutely lives up to the hype. It’s the best performance SUV I’ve ever driven.” That’s some high praise. So what’s the downside?
CONS Big and heavy • Needs more tire
• Steering ratio should be quicker
The DBX707 accomplished the near impossible by eliciting feelings of happiness and joy from nearly all our judges. This is no easy task, we assure you. Unanimity is the rarest of occurrences at MotorTrend (we can’t even agree on where shift paddles should be mounted—wheel or steering column?), so getting six of seven judges to feel roughly the same about any vehicle is an accomplishment in and of itself.
The 2023 season just turned out to be one of those embarrassment-of-riches years, where we could only bring along so many finalists. To put it into tournament poker terms, the DBX707 bubbled. Had we selected a 10th finalist, this Aston SUV would have been it.
We love the output available here. Displacing just 4.0 liters and fed by two turbochargers, the AMG-sourced, Aston-tuned V-8 kicks out 697 hp and 663 lb-ft of torque. That’s more power than anything present save for the AMG
Base Price/As Tested $239,086/$292,186
Vehicle Layout Front-engine, AWD, 5-pass, 4-door SUV
Engine, Transmission 4.0L twin-turbo direct-injected DOHC 32-valve 90-degree V-8, 9-speed automatic
Power (SAE Net) 697 hp @ 6,000 rpm
Torque (SAE Net) 663 lb-ft @ 4,500 rpm
Curb Weight (F/R Dist) 5,124 lb (53/47%)
Wheelbase 120.5 in
L x W x H 198.4 x 78.7 x 54.1–67.9 in Accel, 0-60 mph 3.1 sec
Quarter Mile 11.4 sec @ 121.6 mph
Braking, 60-0 mph 102 ft
Lateral Acceleration 0.98 g (avg)
MT Figure Eight 24.1 sec @ 0.83 g (avg)
EPA City/Hwy/Comb 15/20/17 mpg
EPA Range, Comb 383 miles
On Sale Now
EQS and the McLaren 765LT Spider. Hell, yeah. The torque curve is Oklahoma flat, and as such, this engine pulls all the way to the we-wish-it-were-a-tick-higher redline. Our kingdom for 7,500 rpm. Still, the mighty mill works flawlessly with the AMG-sourced ninespeed wet-clutch transmission. Oh, did we mention the sound? We love how it growls.
The judging team thought the DBX707 was noticeably drivemode dependent. “Sport is the correct mode for track driving,” features editor Scott Evans said. “Sport Plus is a super-fun drift mode. It’s great sliding this thing around, but you’re much slower through every single corner because you’re always managing the rear end with the throttle. In Sport mode the power going to the front makes the car much more neutral and much better at going around a track quickly.” Yes, friends, if you’re willing/skilled
Technical director and Old Man Buzzkill himself Frank Markus popped in with a big, icy-cold bucket of reality: “Fun to drive, but I end up asking myself, does the world really need a car that is this powerful and sits this high?
I suppose buyers will answer that question, but I don’t think its performance is spectacular enough to beat the many proper low-slung performance vehicles we’ve gathered here.” Yeah, OK, fine, we feel that. The DBX707 is sublime as far as performance SUVs go, and most of us were having too much fun to care about body type, but in the end, it’s still “just” an SUV.
Jonny Lieberman PROS Big power • Fun to drive (for an SUV) • Has an X-factor 2023 ASTON MARTIN DBX707own, mostly thanks to a loose setup that made it (almost too) easy to kick the tail out and slide through corners. Several judges loved the xDrive system’s propensity for sending engine torque to the rear axle, with technical director Frank Markus noting how it makes the BMW “feel properly rear-wheel drive,” even if it wasn’t the quickest or cleanest way around the track.
The forgiving suspension’s well-sorted damping reminded several judges of BMWs of yore, with Mexico editor Miguel Cortina lamenting that “every BMW’s suspension should behave this way.” Other recent BMW bugaboos have been addressed, as well, with steering that isn’t needlessly heavy, even in the Sport and Sport Plus drive modes.
PROS Sweet, powerful inline-six • Good value • Some of the old BMW magic shines through
CONS Weighty for its size • Feels like a rear-drive car, so why not just have RWD? • Tougher to love when the 230i is so good
The BMW M240i not making it to the finalist round at Performance Vehicle of the Year is what happens when you have too much of a good thing. Not only was this year’s field unusually stacked, but the sixcylinder 2 Series is also squeezed even within its own lineup by both the four-cylinder 230i and the upcoming M2, which is shaping up to be an absolutely monumental performance car.
On paper, the M240i presents as the maximal 2 Series coupe available today—again, until the new M2 arrives—with a 382-hp turbocharged inline-six effectively shared with the Z4 and Toyota Supra, rear-biased xDrive all-wheel drive, and a sprinkling
of M Performance goodies (such as beefier brakes and a sportier suspension tune) that are optional on the 230i. The 3.0-liter I-6 cooks the M240i to 60 mph in only 4.0 seconds, and 19-inch summer performance tires help the coupe
2022 BMW M240i xDRIVE COUPE
Base Price/As Tested $50,895/$60,645
Vehicle Layout Front-engine, AWD, 4-pass, 2-door coupe
Engine, Transmission 3.0L turbo direct-injected DOHC 24-valve I-6, 8-speed automatic
Power (SAE Net) 382 hp @ 5,800 rpm
Torque (SAE Net) 369 lb-ft @ 1,800 rpm
Curb Weight (F/R Dist) 3,876 lb (53/47%)
Wheelbase 107.9 in
L x W x H 179.4 x 72.4 x 55.3 in Accel, 0-60 mph 4.0 sec
Quarter Mile 12.4 sec @ 112.1 mph
Braking, 60-0 mph 103 ft
Lateral Acceleration 0.98 g (avg)
MT Figure Eight 24.4 sec @ 0.80 g (avg)
EPA City/Hwy/Comb 23/32/26 mpg
EPA Range, Comb 356 miles
On Sale Now
stick to the skidpad for 0.98 g and stop from 60 mph in 103 feet.
Yes, it’s quicker, grippier, and stoppier than the M Sport package 230i. It also feels a whole lot heavier. At 3,876 pounds, it is a lot heavier—332 pounds heavier— thanks to its standard xDrive all-wheel drive (though a reardrive model arrives for 2023). The 230i is available in lighter, perkier rear-drive form. Therefore, around the track, the six-cylinder 2 Series feels softer, with fluid but ultimately rather doughy responses to steering inputs.
Judged against our PVOTY criteria, the M240i can lean hard on its value (it starts at an entirely reasonable $50,895) and performance of intended function. This isn’t supposed to be a hardcore track animal; that’s the M2’s job. It’s a swift, comfortable, and fun daily driver, and in our new criterion of driver confidence and engagement, the M240i held its
But, darn it all, that just brings us back to the 230i, which is an even better value at $38,395 to start while being arguably more fun on the track and street with the M Sport package and its limited-slip
rear differential. In the end, the 2 Series that competed at PVOTY proved fun if slightly anodyne. Other performance cars delivered more overtly spicy experiences, so although the M240i didn’t make our finalist cut, it’s far from a bad car. After all, the 2 Series Coupe was a Car of the Year finalist, where this two-door’s wellrounded goodness shone brighter.
Alexander Stoklosaseat belt tensioners at any sort of aggressive maneuver.
One loud dissenter who cut through the chorus of road-course negativity was technical director Frank Markus, who found the G80 to be surprisingly lively at Streets of Willow. “It’s more performanceoriented than it looks,” he said. “Even if no one will ever consider bringing it to a track day, it should prove an entertaining dance partner on roads like Tail of the Dragon.” Markus even went so far as to say the G80 “earned its place” at an event stacked with so much hot and exotic machinery more suitable for pavementscorching.
PROS Solid looks • Quality interior • Relatively quick
CONS Needs more sport • Too much body roll • Slow steering
If your kid participates in sports, they’ve probably gotten one or two of these in recent years: the participation award. The “you played” medal. Don’t get us wrong, we get why it’s important to positively affirm. If we were giving away something similar at this year’s Performance Vehicle of the Year, the G80 3.5T would have gone home with one.
Let’s start by checking off the good stuff. The G80 in its 3.5T guise comes with standard AWD, and its 3.5-liter twin-turbo V-6 has more than a fair amount of grunt, rated at 375 hp and 391 lb-ft of torque routed through an eight-speed automatic. The combination is enough to move the Genesis to 60 mph in a brisk
5.0 seconds. In our dynamic tests it also performed decently, with a 0.97 g average skidpad number, a respectable figure-eight run, and a 106-foot stop from 60 mph.
In case you hadn’t noticed, we’re big fans of the Genesis
2022 GENESIS G80 3.5T AWD (SPORT PRESTIGE)
Base Price/As Tested $66,345/$72,920
Vehicle Layout Front-engine, AWD, 5-pass, 4-door sedan
Engine, Transmission 3.5L twin-turbo port- and direct-injected DOHC 24-valve 60-degree V-6, 8-speed automatic
Power (SAE Net) 375 hp @ 5,800 rpm
Torque (SAE Net) 391 lb-ft @ 1,300 rpm
Curb Weight (F/R Dist) 4,489 lb (53/47%)
Wheelbase 118.5 in
L x W x H 196.7 x 75.8 x 57.7 in Accel, 0-60 mph 5.0 sec
Quarter Mile 13.4 sec @ 106.4 mph
Braking, 60-0 mph 106 ft
Lateral Acceleration 0.97 g (avg)
MT Figure Eight 24.8 sec @ 0.77 g (avg)
EPA City/Hwy/Comb 17/26/20 mpg
EPA Range, Comb 386 miles
brand in general, and the G80 3.5T shares many attributes we’ve found attractive in other Genesis models, including its well-appointed cabin loaded with upscale amenities, overall attractive looks, and road manners in line with the best that competing luxury brands have to offer.
Therein lies the rub with the Genesis G80—this is a luxury car first and a sport sedan second, and no amount of Sport Prestige (the car’s trim level) can change that, not even an electronically controlled suspension with sport tuning and rear-wheel steering (part of a $6,300 package). Quite frankly, it has no business being at the track other than stopping by to see real sports cars run, and it showed.
Judges were unsparing in their criticism, noting excessive body roll, lack of proper tires, and slow steering. The car also had an annoying tendency to yank its
The debate over whether we should have even invited it aside, the G80 participated, and although it didn’t exactly garner much praise for how well it handled itself on the track save from Markus, it endured a proper flogging by the judges and kept on going. For that alone, it earned its participation trophy.
“It’s a nice-driving car in the real world, just not a true performance vehicle,” noted executive editor Mac Morrison, who summed up how most judges felt about the G80. “But it’s certainly a solid, sporty-ish luxury all-wheel-drive sedan.” Mike Floyd
PROS 516 lb-ft of torque • Fast-charging technology
• Sharp styling inside and out
CONS Only 235 miles of range • Needs better tires
• Not a great overall performer
After evaluating the Genesis GV60 Performance during our 2023 SUV of the Year competition, we approached the first all-electric SUV from Genesis with a different mindset for our Performance Vehicle of the Year event. Given the GV60 has impressive horsepower and torque numbers and the word “Performance” in the top-tier trim’s name, we were hoping for some, you know, all-around performance. But after a couple of laps around Streets of Willow, we realized it’s best enjoyed in a straight line.
“I honestly expected more from this car,” features editor Scott Evans said. “I thought this was supposed to be pretty darn sporty, but it’s not there yet.”
When pushed hard around the track, the GV60 exhibited significant body roll, and most judges complained about the seat belt tensioner squeezing during even moderately aggressive cornering. The judges also took issue with
Base Price/As Tested $69,345/$70,885
Vehicle Layout Front-/rear-motor, AWD, 5-pass, 4-door SUV
Motors, Transmissions Permanent-magnet electric, 1-speed automatic
Power (SAE Net) 216 hp (front), 216 hp (rear), 429 hp (comb)
Torque (SAE Net) 258 lb-ft (front), 258 lb-ft (rear); 516 lb-ft (comb)
Curb Weight (F/R Dist) 4,863 lb (50/50%)
Wheelbase 114.2 in
L x W x H 177.8 x 77.4 x 62.6 in
Accel, 0-60 mph 3.6 sec
Quarter Mile 12.1 sec @ 113.2 mph
Braking, 60-0 mph 127 ft
Lateral Acceleration 0.85 g (avg)
MT Figure Eight 26.9 sec @ 0.63 g (avg)
EPA City/Hwy/Comb 97/82/90 mpg-e
EPA Range, Comb 235 miles
On Sale Now
the Michelin Primacy tires, which often squealed for mercy and lacked the grip a performance SUV should deliver. To be fair, that’s on Genesis, not Michelin, as the Primacies aren’t track-focused rubber. “The tires noticeably went away by the third lap,” technical director Frank Markus said.
Its powertrain, however, makes up for some of its dynamic shortcomings. With a 77.4-kWh battery pack that delivers juice to two motors mounted front and rear, the GV60 Performance delivers a healthy 429 hp and 516 lb-ft of torque. That’s enough power to send the electric SUV from 0 to 60 mph in just 3.6 seconds, an impressive number considering its 4,863pound curb weight (thanks in part to the battery). That straight-line performance and instant power pleased some of our judges. “I definitely like this car, and the power and performance are great within its segment,” Markus said.
Press the green Boost button on the steering wheel, and power increases to 483 hp for 10 seconds, according to Genesis. Although this makes the GV60 more fun on a straightaway, editors had a hard time noticing the difference on the turn-heavy Streets of Willow track. “The power is great, though I’m underwhelmed by the boost button,” Evans said. “It doesn’t seem to do much. It’s very quick in a straight line, and with some more chassis work this could be a really good performance electric SUV.”
Too bad the Boost button can’t also increase range, which at 235 miles to a charge is below what some of the newest EVs on the market can deliver. But on the plus side, when it gets low on power the GV60’s quick-charging capability— from 15 to 80 percent charge in about 18 minutes at a 350-kW DC fast charger—is duly impressive.
Ultimately, the GV60 fell short of the finalist round. We appreciated its design and straight-line performance, yet we were disappointed by its overall handling prowess. And for any vehicle to truly compete at PVOTY, it needs to prove its mettle on the track. The GV60 is a good first attempt by Genesis, but in the future we hope its engineers can develop a variant that’s far more agile and fun to drive when the going gets twisty.
Miguel Cortinalater, it’s just going to understeer, and there’s not a lot you can do about it. You can stand on the throttle, let the limited-slip differential do its thing, and kind of drive through it so long as you have no sympathy for the front tires. Or you could just back off.
Once you hit this plateau, it’s only a matter of time before you start to get a bit bored with the car. Sure, the Kona N is a bundle of fun up to its limit, but after that, you can’t help but think: Well, that was neat, but now what?
• Reasonably practical
CONS Torque steer • Its performance plateaus too soon
• The Elantra N exists
As a driving enthusiast, you may wonder what the future holds as the market goes all-in on SUVs. The answer, it turns out, is to dress up the classic hot hatchback as an SUV. Sure, it’s a little taller and its center of gravity is a little higher, but throw the right speed parts at it, and guess what? The formula still works. Enter the 2022 Hyundai Kona N, the surprise hit of our Performance Vehicle of the Year competition.
“Expectations grossly exceeded,” technical director Frank Markus said. Senior features editor Jonny Lieberman called it “surprisingly capable, surprisingly competent,” and “just a good, honest performance car.”
2022 HYUNDAI KONA N
Despite riding on an entirely different platform and being slightly taller and heavier, the Kona N successfully channels the spirit of the even more fun Elantra N sedan. The engine is potent, the
Base Price/As Tested $35,495/$35,895
Vehicle Layout Front-engine, FWD, 5-pass, 4-door SUV
Engine, Transmission 2.0L turbo direct-injected DOHC 16-valve I-4, 8-speed twin-clutch auto
Power (SAE Net) 276 hp @ 5,500 rpm
Torque (SAE Net) 289 lb-ft @ 2,100 rpm
Curb Weight (F/R Dist) 3,342 lb (64/36%)
Wheelbase 102.4 in
L x W x H 165.9 x 70.9 x 61.6 in Accel, 0-60 mph 5.3 sec
Quarter Mile 13.9 sec @ 101.1 mph
Braking, 60-0 mph 115 ft
Lateral Acceleration 0.94 g (avg)
MT Figure Eight 25.1 sec @ 0.73 g (avg)
EPA City/Hwy/Comb 20/27/23 mpg
EPA Range, Comb 304 miles
On Sale Now
transmission knows exactly what gear to be in and switches to it immediately, and the chassis is equal parts grippy and playful.
Driven one way, it grips up and lets you carry a surprising amount of speed through corners. Driven another, it’ll unload the rear end and rotate just enough for you to point the nose at the apex. Either way, it burbles and pops and even torque steers like an old Mazdaspeed 3, constantly reminding how much like an SUV it isn’t. “You’re paying for the engine here,” Mexico editor Miguel Cortina said, “and that’s what stands out.”
The Kona N’s “problem” is simply that it runs out of capability well before you do. There comes a point when you realize nothing you can do will make it go any quicker. The chassis doesn’t have any more to give, and driving it harder just exacerbates its weaknesses. Sooner rather than
Not helping the Kona N’s case is the Elantra N sitting next to it in the showroom. That car is slightly cheaper, it’s slightly quicker, and it handles better. Critically, the Elantra N is also more playful at its limit and encourages you to keep trying different techniques to make it go around a corner quicker.
For those looking for a new and different hot-hatch experience or who simply prefer SUVs to sedans and traditional
hatchbacks, the Hyundai Kona N offers a fun but limited new option. It fills an interesting white space in the market, and there’s no denying the Kona N is entertaining. It just doesn’t have the performance peak necessary to keep us hooked.
Scott Evans
PROS Hot hatch in an SUV body • Fantastic engine
car’s suspension and brakes can’t cash the checks the AMG branding is writing.
The regular EQS’ strange self-relocating brake pedal makes an unfortunate appearance here. It automatically moves the pedal in concert with the level of motor energy regeneration, so when you go to press it yourself, it’s already depressed to match the regen’s deceleration rate. You can turn this off by opting for zero regen, but the less sentient pedal that remains is hard to modulate.
CONS Looks more puffy than athletic • Not remotely track-ready
•
It’s strange to describe something capable of 0–60 mph in 3.0 seconds, an 11.4-second quarter mile, and 0.95 g of lateral acceleration as anything but sporty. This is Performance Vehicle of the Year, after all! Those stats would seem to qualify it as a strong contender. But that they were generated by the Mercedes-AMG EQS is something of a funky surprise, like watching your dog somehow paw food into their mouth using a fork and knife. Indeed, this AMG feels like little more than a more powerful version of the EQS 580, the mightiest regular EQS. It’s all the more baffling when you consider its 751 hp and 752 lb-ft of torque beat the EQS 580 by 235 hp and 121 lb-ft.
(Peak power in the AMG is unlocked via Race Start launch control; the rest of the time you get 649 hp and 700 lb-ft.) The EQS offsets its enticing-sounding AMG power upgrade with its 5,923-pound curb weight, though.
2022 MERCEDES-AMG EQS 4MATIC+ SEDAN
Base Price/As Tested $149,300/$162,110
Vehicle Layout Front-/rear-motor, AWD, 5-pass, 4-door sedan Motors, Transmissions Permanent-magnet electric, 1-speed automatic Power (SAE Net) 751 hp
Torque (SAE Net) 752 lb-ft
Curb Weight (F/R Dist) 5,923 lb (50/50%)
Wheelbase 126.4 in
L x W x H 205.3 x 75.8 x 59.8 in Accel, 0-60 mph 3.0 sec
Quarter Mile 11.4 sec @ 118.1 mph
Braking, 60-0 mph 111 ft
Lateral Acceleration 0.95 g (avg)
MT Figure Eight 24.2 sec @ 0.82 g (avg)
EPA City/Hwy/Comb 76/78/77 mpg-e
EPA Range, Comb 277 miles
So this is a three-ton luxury pod that comes across as a three-ton luxury pod pretty much all the time. Technical director Frank Markus noted how the EQS “just feels gigantic and somewhat lumbering.” Some blame goes to the tall cowl and high-ish seating position, as occupants are perched atop the floor-mounted battery. And although it’s unlikely any owner will ever don a helmet inside theirs, senior features editor Jonny Lieberman wants them to know about the “weird feeling of your helmeted head bobbling so close to a glass roof.”
Things go especially awry once the circular thing the driver grips needs to be spun. Or, as features editor Scott Evans put it, the car “can’t turn, can’t stop, can’t keep from dragging its door handles on the ground.” Joke’s on Evans— the door handles automatically retract into the body when the EQS is in motion. More to the point, the
In a rare bright spot, the steering is feelsome and accurate. But actions at the wheel produce roll, dive, squat, and inconsistent transitions from understeer to oversteer—that is, unless you drive like executive editor Mac Morrison, who had a ball leveraging the colossal mass and floppy turn-in to drifty effect by hucking the thing into corners with no sympathy for the tires. But any car can be overdriven, and even when pushed beyond its limits, the EQS is only somewhat amusing, like one of those mobilized sofas.
Our judges agreed this AMG adds welcome starch to the overly cushy EQS sedan, imbuing it with more of a classic German luxury sedan feel, but it would be more in its element bombing down a fast, winding highway. However, the AMG convinced no one it deserved to be a finalist.
Alexander Stoklosablown it and are about to get a load of understeer; make a mental note to reduce your speed further for that turn the next time around. Drive through more flowing corners, though, and the AMG presents a different story. “Everything, including the front-end grip, is really good up until then,” features editor Scott Evans said.
PROS Great V-8 engine • Strong straight-line performance
• Relatively nimble handling
CONS Dislikes slow corners • Transmission tuning • Stiff ride even in Comfort mode
We’d looked forward to the new SL-Class’ arrival, and our Performance Vehicle of the Year program represented another bite at the apple, in particular the AMG SL 63 4Matic+. We already tested this version—there’s a lesser SL 55, too—as part of our 2023 Car of the Year program, and it returned for further review as a PVOTY contender. Ultimately, after running it around Streets of Willow, we found it to be the same mixed bag as before.
The new SL63’s all-wheel drive (an SL first) and thundering twin-turbo V-8 make for smashing off-the-line performance, as expected, and that’s a strong selling point to a lot of people.
When it comes to cornering quickly, however, we discovered a bit of a disjointed personality.
As technical director Frank Markus noted, you need to deactivate stability control—something not everyone is comfortable with
2022 MERCEDES-AMG SL 63 4MATIC+
Base Price/As Tested $182,250/$208,085*
Vehicle Layout Front-engine, AWD, 4-pass, 2-door convertible
Engine, Transmission 4.0L twin-turbo direct-injected DOHC 32-valve 90-degree V-8, 9-speed automatic
Power (SAE Net) 577 hp @ 5,500 rpm
Torque (SAE Net) 590 lb-ft @ 2,500 rpm
Curb Weight (F/R Dist) 4,239 lb (54/46%)
Wheelbase 106.3 in
L x W x H 185.2 x 75.4 x 53.5 in
Accel, 0-60 mph 3.1 sec
Quarter Mile 11.3 sec @ 124.0 mph
Braking, 60-0 mph 105 ft
Lateral Acceleration 1.03 g (avg)
MT Figure Eight 23.6 sec @ 0.87 g (avg)
EPA City/Hwy/Comb 14/21/16 mpg
EPA Range, Comb 296 miles
On Sale Now
in the real world—to access the Master dynamics mode before the car comes alive. “Suddenly it was willing to play,” he said of the rear end that was now happy to rotate and slide. “But the performance in this vehicle is not as accessible as it is in many of the other most fun cars out here. You have to drive it much more maniacally and switch off the safety nets to really feel like you’re driving the car.”
Once you do so, the SL 63 puts a smile on your face, with its eight-cylinder roaring and the chassis reasonably responsive for a car of this bulk and mass. Our judges’ biggest dynamic gripe concerned slow corners, where the SL63 unsurprisingly struggles thanks to its overall weight and how those pounds are distributed. One semi-workaround we discovered is to use the ABS as an indicator. If you brake hard into a slow corner and sense the antilock system activate, you know you’ve
Evans and other judges raised another point—also related to slow-speed events— that frustrated our team: The gearbox wouldn’t downshift to a low enough gear and wouldn’t always hold a gear during steady-state cornering. “The automatic shifting program in Race mode is pretty good,” he said. “But it doesn’t know what to do with tight corners and is usually a gear too high, so you really need to manually downshift it in those instances.”
That’s a shame, as the engine and transmission are otherwise highlights. Considering how new the seventh-gen car is, we’re optimistic Mercedes and AMG have plenty of unexplored bandwidth. “I expected to enjoy the new SL much more than I did,” senior features editor Jonny Lieberman said.
The rest of our judges agreed.
Mac Morrison
settings. Perhaps there’s a setup that could bias more bite toward the front, encouraging the car to rotate more eagerly in the corners, but as delivered it struck us as the Volvo of performance cars—safe, buttoned-down, taking no risks. And although the cornering and braking figures were strong, we wished the steering wheel and brake pedal shared a bit more info with the driver.
• Looks the business
CONS Squishy and unsupportive seats • Lifeless steering and brake feel • Overly introverted
Polestar produced a one-off Goodwood Hillclimb special, internally nicknamed “the Beast,” and then decided to make 270 more or less identical copies of that car, perhaps 47 of which will make it to the U.S. So this may have been the rarest vehicle competing in our annual performance vehicle smackdown. But perhaps as a reflection of the brand’s stoic Scandinavian roots, we found the Polestar 2 BST Edition 270’s mien to be anything but beastly.
Performance is undeniably amped up relative to the standard Polestar 2, with software tweaks boosting its dual-motor drivetrain’s power and torque from 408 hp and 487 lb-ft to 476 horses and 502 lb-ft. The chassis is lowered
an inch, the springs stiffened 20 percent, and damping is upgraded to a set of racing-spec Öhlins BST Edition two-way adjustable dampers with additional front reservoirs. Topping it all off is a set of 245/35-series 21-inch Pirelli
2023 POLESTAR 2 (BST EDITION 270)
Base Price/As Tested $76,900/$77,900
Vehicle Layout Front-/rear-motor, AWD, 5-pass, 4-door hatch
Motors, Transmissions Permanent-magnet electric, 1-speed automatic
Power (SAE Net) 476 hp
Torque (SAE Net) 502 lb-ft
Curb Weight (F/R Dist) 4,743 lb (51/49%)
Wheelbase 107.7 in
L x W x H 181.3 x 71.2 x 57.0 in
Accel, 0-60 mph 3.9 sec
Quarter Mile 12.2 sec @ 115.5 mph
Braking, 60-0 mph 106 ft
Lateral Acceleration 0.96 g (avg)
MT Figure Eight 24.2 sec @ 0.80 g (avg)
EPA City/Hwy/Comb 98/91/96 mpg-e
EPA Range, Comb 247 miles
On Sale Early 2023
P Zero (PZ4) HL tires developed for this car. This all earns the BST engineering excellence points in a package that still ranks as the most efficient vehicle here, with EPA ratings of 98/91/96 mpg-e.
This setup generated a comparatively impressive figureeight lap of 24.2 seconds at 0.80 average g. That ranks it as our 11th best EV ever, behind mostly Teslas and Taycans. Most credit goes to those Pirelli tires and strong, fade-free Brembo brakes (with golden calipers!). But when the BST is generating its 0.96 g of max lateral grip, the driver is hanging on for dear life in seats with squishy bolsters designed for comfy cruising—not terrorizing a track. “If this thing had better seats, I could get even more out of it,” features editor Scott Evans said. It’s a problem compounded by the tall seating position.
We didn’t fiddle with the manually adjustable Öhlins damper
Most of us drove the Polestar back to back with the similarly tall, also electric, vastly more fun Kia EV6 GT. Evans longed to mix and match the Kia’s power, torque, and joie de drift with the Polestar’s vastly stickier Pirelli tires. But as things sat, we mostly agreed with deputy editor Alexander Stoklosa, who found the BST “sporty-ish, but nothing about the drive lingers with you—certainly not like the EV6 GT.” Senior features editor Jonny Lieberman was less kind. “The BST 270 leaves me not only wanting more but also actively wondering, ‘What’s the point?’”
Driven by itself or alongside lesser 2s, the Polestar 2 BST Edition 270 no doubt impresses, but amid a field of the very hottest new vehicles across the price and performance spectrum, it feels slightly timid and introverted—all of which fatally undermined the car in our all-important performance of intended function criterion. A beastlier Polestar 2, no doubt. But it’s not really a beast. Frank Markus
of physical buttons heightens a futuristic vibe that jibes with the synthetic powertrain noise— which deputy editor Alexander Stoklosa found to provide useful feedback on the track. He also appreciated only having to press two virtual buttons to achieve max-attack mode: Sport+ and the one for ESC. In this mode, he noted: “There is seemingly no regen at all—you drive it like a normal Porsche. Want brakes? Hit them with your foot.” But senior features editor Jonny Lieberman described said pedal as the Taycan’s dynamic weak spot: “They stop fine—105 feet from 60 mph—but they feel lousy, as if you’re breaking something by getting on them.”
PROS Porsche-appropriate performance • Perfect power apportionment
• Wears the 911 look well
CONS Brake feel • All-touchscreen secondary controls
• Insufficiently visceral driving experience
Physics is the problem with the Taycan GTS. A tire’s mechanical grip is simply the product of its coefficient of friction times the normal force pressing it to the pavement. When both are crazy high, your 5,127-pound car on staggered-width, low-profile 21-inch Pirelli P Zero NF0 tires corners like it’s on rails. That analogy is generally applied as high praise, but it can also equate the driving experience with that of commuting on the Amtrak Acela. Don’t get us wrong, we regard the new Taycan GTS as the sweet spot in the Taycan lineup, between the entry models and the bonkers Turbos, with features editor Scott Evans describing it as “less serious and more playful
than the other Taycans I’ve driven.”
But with curb weights ranging from 4,860 to 5,221 pounds, Taycans are the least inherently playful cars Porsche makes—especially when driven on public roads, where you really shouldn’t disable the
2022 PORSCHE TAYCAN GTS
Base Price/As Tested $135,550/$168,680
Vehicle Layout Front-/rear-motor, AWD, 4-pass, 4-door sedan Motors, Transmissions Permanent-magnet electric, 1-speed (front), 2-speed (rear) automatic
Power (SAE Net) 590 hp
Torque (SAE Net) 626 lb-ft
Curb Weight (F/R Dist) 5,157 lb (49/51%)
Wheelbase 114.2 in
L x W x H 195.4 x 77.4 x 54.4 in Accel, 0-60 mph 3.2 sec
Quarter Mile 11.4 sec @ 123.7 mph
Braking, 60-0 mph 105 ft
Lateral Acceleration 1.02 g (avg)
MT Figure Eight 23.6 sec @ 0.83 g (avg)
EPA City/Hwy/Comb 83/83/82 mpg-e
EPA Range, Comb 246 miles
stability controls. The lateral grip, figure-eight time, and stopping distances are all virtually identical to those of the Turbo S model, with 0–60 and quarter-mile times down by about a second.
The safety nannies go about their business imperceptibly as you hurtle through a series of esses before diving into a hairpin on the brakes. This becomes evident when you switch them off on a closed track and discover the level of late-braking, acceleratorjabbing aggression required to get this beast sliding at all. As Evans noted, “It wants to be driven neutrally on the ideal conventional line—not trying to screw around.” And perhaps to discourage fiddling with the stability control, Porsche secreted its virtual “button” on the instrument cluster screen where, for many, it’s obscured by the steering wheel.
Giving the 911-look interior an all-touchscreen interface devoid
Porsche earns points for engineering excellence with its two-motor powertrain’s two-speed rear transaxle and the adept way the system apportions torque, which Stoklosa likened to a good rear-biased mechanical AWD system, making it “the
best-tuned dual-motor EV here.” It also scores design points for successfully adapting 911 cues to a four-door form. And many will argue the GTS occupies a value sweet spot. But the criterion that really makes or breaks any PVOTY contender is performance of intended function, and it’s here where the Taycan GTS failed to wow enough judges to make the finalist cut. Frank Markus
• Plenty of room
CONS New but feels old • Weak brakes • Needs more power
The WRX proved to be a tricky competitor at this year’s PVOTY competition. The thing is flawed—in both obvious and not so obvious ways. Yet it’s difficult to dismiss a performance car that’s so darn lovable. It’s like hating your favorite shirt because it’s gone out of style. A few years ago, New York Times food critic Pete Wells caused a stir by dissing Brooklyn’s venerable chop house, Peter Luger. He argued Luger had lost it: “After I’ve paid, there is the unshakable sense that I’ve been scammed.” I counter—and a recent trip confirmed—that Luger’s steaks are what they’ve always been. Same is true of the new WRX.
Let’s talk about all the good stuff. “Feels like an animal exiting
2022
corners at the top of a gear, like it’s reared back on its haunches and clawing with its front tires to leap off the corner,” features editor Scott Evans said. There is something delightful, dare we say classic, about the way the newest
Base Price/As Tested $39,240/$39,240
Vehicle Layout Front-engine, AWD, 5-pass, 4-door sedan
Engine, Transmission 2.4L turbo direct-injected DOHC 16-valve flat-4, 6-speed manual
Power (SAE Net) 271 hp @ 5,600 rpm
Torque (SAE Net) 258 lb-ft @ 2,000 rpm
Curb Weight (F/R Dist) 3,400 lb (60/40%)
Wheelbase 105.2 in
L x W x H 183.8 x 71.9 x 57.8 in Accel, 0-60 mph 5.9 sec
Quarter Mile 14.2 sec @ 98.2 mph
Braking, 60-0 mph 112 ft
Lateral Acceleration 0.96 g (avg)
MT Figure Eight 24.8 sec @ 0.75 g (avg)
EPA City/Hwy/Comb 19/26/22 mpg
EPA Range, Comb 365 miles
On Sale Now
WRX can still impress a driver willing to push. There’s a great deal of goodness baked right into the chassis, and the quick steering can exploit this goodness, just like WRXs have been able to do for more than two decades. The shift throws are too long, but every once in a while, a downshift feels like what you imagine yanking a drift car’s handbrake feels like. Then all is forgiven.
The main bad stuff essentially comes down to the WRX’s brakes and how they are simply not up to snuff. The whole stoppage strategy needs a rethink; executive editor Mac Morrison encountered massive brake fade at the end of a long straight, forcing him to cruise far through the (thankfully) paved runoff area. “I wasn’t even going that hard,” he swore afterward. The tires could be stickier. Many of us don’t like how the new WRX looks. The interior is pretty meh for a $39,000 car. Most crucially, the
competition has passed the WRX by. As Mexico editor Miguel Cortina commented, “I don’t see why anyone would get the WRX over an Elantra N.” It’s a fair point.
As I noted during our first drive of the new WRX, “essentially carryover numbers seems like an odd strategy for a performance car.” I cut the WRX’s lack of thrust a break at the time because we believed a new WRX STI was on the way, rumored to put out more than 400 hp. (There will be no new STI. Oops.) Most of us liked how quickly the engine revved, but we wish it revved higher and had a shift light or any indication you hit redline.
If we were in charge of things at Subaru, we’d call this car the WRX Classic—and would have released a more powerful STI variant. If you sit blindfolded in this sedan, you’ll think you are in a 2016 WRX. Maybe even a 2006 WRX. As Morrison said to no one in particular, “Am I crazy to say that of all the new cars on sale today, the WRX is the one that feels most like its original U.S.-
market predecessor from 20 years ago?” Nope. In a way, that’s no terrible thing, except for the fact the rest of the performance car world has moved on. There’s not enough power, not enough sizzle, and not nearly enough brakes. The Toyota GR Corolla steals this Subaru’s lunch money. We mostly all enjoyed driving the WRX, but not nearly enough to think of it as a finalist.
Jonny Lieberman
flailing at the steering wheel in this car,” Markus said. “If it broke loose, it broke loose spectacularly, requiring big handfuls of opposite lock.”
Despite the less than effusive praise from the judges, we’ve been pretty big fans of the Supra in general. At our 2020 Car of the Year competition, the then-new Supra made a splash, moving to the finalist round thanks to its attention-grabbing looks, value, and overall handling. But this time around at Performance Vehicle of the Year, with the Supra not, er, performing as well as we hoped, it was a different story. “I’m glad Toyota is making incremental improvements to the Supra,” Evans said. “It’s better than it’s ever been, but it’s still not as good a driver’s car as it could be.”
CONS Handling issues on the track • Too tail happy
• Makes the driver work too much
Since its launch in 2019, the Toyota GR Supra has undergone numerous updates. First came the addition of a four-cylinder engine, then the six-cylinder got a decent power bump, and now the automaker has introduced a six-speed manual to pair with the 3.0-liter I-6. We tend to get excited whenever a manual becomes available, as the option is increasingly in danger of extinction. But after spending some time behind the wheel of the manual GR Supra, we started asking ourselves whether its new three-pedal option makes the Toyota sports car any better. Opinions were mixed at best. Although most editors praised Toyota for adding the manual
2023
option, there wasn’t exactly widespread agreement that the gearbox enhanced the car in any real way. But talk of the manual’s operation was soon overshadowed by how the Supra performed around Streets of Willow. “The
Base Price/As Tested $59,440/$62,280
Vehicle Layout Front-engine, RWD, 2-pass, 2-door hatchback
Engine, Transmission 3.0L turbo direct-injected DOHC 24-valve I-6, 6-speed manual
Power (SAE Net) 382 hp @ 5,800 rpm
Torque (SAE Net) 368 lb-ft @ 1,800 rpm
Curb Weight (F/R Dist) 3,342 lb (52/48%)
Wheelbase 97.2 in
L x W x H 172.5 x 73.0 x 50.9 in
Accel, 0-60 mph 4.3 sec
Quarter Mile 12.8 sec @ 114.0 mph
Braking, 60-0 mph 100 ft
Lateral Acceleration 1.07 g (avg)
MT Figure Eight 23.7 sec @ 0.82 g (avg)
EPA City/Hwy/Comb 19/27/21 mpg
EPA Range, Comb 288 miles
On Sale Now
same Supra issues abound, including its propensity to rotate even when you don’t really want it to, that the driver sits on the rear axle (don’t love that), and the BMW-ness of it all,” deputy editor Alexander Stoklosa said.
Like Stoklosa, most judges weren’t exactly enamored with the Supra’s on-track behavior. Technical director Frank Markus noted the car had “relatively high handling limits but didn’t telegraph them to the driver very well.” Its tail-happy demeanor was also called out as a concern. “I know they wanted it to be drifty,” features editor Scott Evans said, “but it really affects how much you can push this car.”
Some sports cars are easier than others to drive aggressively on a track, especially a tight, turn-heavy layout like Streets, and simply put, several judges had a hard time managing the Toyota’s idiosyncrasies. “I was constantly
Make no mistake, we’re big fans of having another manual option on the market. And yes, the GR Supra is a fine sports car for attacking local canyon roads or as a daily commuter—regard-
less of how you shift its gears. But in the end the Supra didn’t do enough to elevate itself to finalist status despite its new threepedal setup.
Senior features editor and resident Supra curmudgeon Jonny Lieberman didn’t mince words: “It feels like a Toyota Supra with a six-speed manual. An averagefeeling sports car with an average manual.” Miguel Cortina
PROS Finally, a manual • Punchy inline-six • Great exhaust note TOYOTA GR SUPRA (A91 MT)
PROS Rambunctious handling • Unique engine
• Fun torque-split modes
CONS Lake of brake pedal feel
• Laughable pricing
• Tight cabin
The RS 3 is one of the most characterful Audis you can buy today, right up there with the V-10 R8 supercar. Where other Audi models are famously cold, executed beautifully but with a sterile detachment to their moves, the hottest A3 sedan is white-hot. This spicy ball of spätzle ditches the turbo I-4 engines of lesser A3s for a 401-hp 2.5-liter turbocharged I-5 and backs it up with torquevectoring AWD and sticky tires.
It’s little wonder, then, why our judges voted the RS 3 as a finalist, though it entered with a few reservations. For one, its price is absurd, as if Audi poured some digits on a table and let a toddler rearrange them—presto, you end up with our lizard-green test car’s $75,045
2022 AUDI RS 3
sticker. Sans $15,000 in options, the bare-bones RS 3 still costs $59,995. For a subcompact luxury sedan? Is it that good?
When you first slide behind the wheel, that number will be ringing in your ears like a lingering mortar
Base Price/As Tested $59,995/$75,045
Vehicle Layout Front-engine, AWD, 5-pass, 4-door sedan
Engine, Transmission 2.5L turbo direct-injected DOHC 20-valve I-5, 7-speed twin-clutch auto
Power (SAE Net) 401 hp @ 6,500 rpm
Torque (SAE Net) 369 lb-ft @ 3,500 rpm
Curb Weight (F/R Dist) 3,589 lb (58/42%)
Wheelbase 103.6 in
L x W x H 178.8 x 72.9 x 55.6 in Accel, 0-60 mph 3.7 sec
Quarter Mile 12.3 sec @ 112.7 mph
Braking, 60-0 mph 97 ft
Lateral Acceleration 1.08 g (avg)
MT Figure Eight 23.4 sec @ 0.85 g (avg)
EPA City/Hwy/Comb 20/29/23 mpg
EPA Range, Comb 334 miles
unusual concession to help tame potential torque steer and improve handling. RS 3 drivers can also take advantage of a number of drive modes to adjust the car’s handling attitude. Sport mode is standard perk-me-up stuff, while RS Performance tilts the torque split toward the rear, helping to better vector the little car around corners under throttle. Torque Rear mode is the de facto rear-drive setting (it can send up to 100 percent of rearwheel torque to the outside wheel) that’s best employed for hooning or on really tight tracks where some rear slip angles might help you scoot around corners better.
blast. And it’ll keep on ringing, because when you scan the interior, you’ll need to peer closely to spot anything sufficiently upscale. Its angular design motif is interesting, and the front seats are well-bolstered and comfortable, but materials quality is lacking— even at the entry-level A3’s $40,000 price point. In addition, the cabin is so small that average-height drivers will sit nearly behind the B-pillar, exaggerating the Lilliput syndrome.
There isn’t another car like the RS 3, though, so perhaps the price won’t deter four-ring fanatics. BMW’s hottest 2 Series, the M2, is a rear-drive, two-door coupe. Mercedes-AMG soon will be without its A45 or CLA45, as both are going the way of the dodo.
Much like in the previous RS 3, the furious five makes aggressive snorting sounds and yanks the sedan around with aplomb. Audi fits wider tires to the front, an
We sampled the RS 3 on both its standard summer tires and optional hardcore Pirelli Trofeo R rubber, the latter of which raises the car’s handling limits noticeably. If you plan to track this Audi, go for the R’s; if not, enjoy the looser setup afforded by the less grippy tires at lower speeds on the street.
No matter where you drive the RS 3, though, you’ll put up with
the dual-clutch transmission’s lazy automatic mode, as well as a soggy brake pedal; stopping power is beyond reproach, but you must step hard on the overripe avocado of a pedal to access it. As a performance machine with a clear focus on rowdy, all-wheeldrive fun, the RS 3 is without peer— but mostly because nothing even similar costs so damn much.
Alexander Stoklosathese corners.” Morrison echoed the sentiment. “The amount of grip it has and the way it puts the power down is outstanding,” he said. “It turns into corners so confidently with nice rotation, hangs on, and just goes.” Editors also praised its braking power, lauded its gearshift action, and dug its Formula 1–style shift lights as part of the car’s R+ mode.
outstanding • Plenty powerful • Excellent seats
CONS Jouncy road ride • Tame exterior style
• Some frustrating settings
There are far more powerful cars. Cars with more exotic and expressive styling. Cars that feature what’s considered a better configuration. But none of that matters when the new Civic Type R blazes its way around a track and decimates performance car expectations.
Everything we loved about the previous Civic Type R, the first such model to reach our shores, has been reinforced and built upon for the redesigned 2023 version. The new car is boosted in the horsepower and torque departments, but not dramatically so. Yet none of our Performance Vehicle of the Year judges complained, because sheer power isn’t what the CTR is about. “I know some people are
sad Honda didn’t give it a lot more power, but the engine is so well matched to this chassis,” features editor Scott Evans said. “I don’t know that the experience would be materially better with lots more horsepower.”
2023 HONDA CIVIC TYPE R
Base Price/As Tested $43,990/$44,385
Vehicle Layout Front-engine, FWD, 4-pass, 4-door hatchback
Engine, Transmission 2.0L turbo direct-injected DOHC 16-valve I-4, 6-speed manual
Power (SAE Net) 315 hp @ 6,500 rpm
Torque (SAE Net) 310 lb-ft @ 2,600 rpm
Curb Weight (F/R Dist) 3,165 lb (62/38%)
Wheelbase 107.7 in
L x W x H 180.9 x 74.4 x 55.4 in Accel, 0-60 mph 5.3 sec
Quarter Mile 13.9 sec @ 104.2 mph
Braking, 60-0 mph 104 ft
Lateral Acceleration 1.03 g (avg)
MT Figure Eight 24.5 sec @ 0.76 g (avg)
EPA City/Hwy/Comb 22/28/24 mpg
EPA Range, Comb 297 miles
On Sale Now
Similarly, no one mentioned that the Type R’s front-drive setup isn’t ideal for a performance car, or that the majority of its weight sits over the front axle. It simply doesn’t matter because it’s that good.
Executive editor Mac Morrison did have this to say about its driveline orientation: “It’s easily the greatest front-wheel-drive performance car I’ve ever driven.”
The Civic Type R did its best work at the track, with judges calling out its almost supernatural ability to stick to the tarmac, aided in part by its Michelin Pilot Sport 4S summer tires. This subjective observation was backed up by its incredibly impressive 1.03 g skidpad number during instrumented testing.
“The cornering speeds you can carry with this car without losing any grip or generating any tire noise are just staggering,” Evans said. “I can’t believe how fast this little hatch is through some of
Based on its performance at Streets of Willow, it was an absolute given the Type R would move on to the finalist round. Out on the open road, some judges were a smidge less enamored with the car’s ride, with a few reporting vertical motions that had them bouncing around in the driver’s seat. (The seat itself is one of the best performance-oriented thrones in existence.) Another gripe involved the ridiculous amount of hoops you have to jump through to turn off the rev-matching feature.
But those were minor issues. The judges’ biggest debates concerning the new Type R were
whether the improvements to its power, ride, and handling were too evolutionary and whether its more restrained exterior styling represented a step forward or backward. Sometimes, the thinnest of margins separate winning and losing, and despite the Type R’s incredible Performance Vehicle of the Year showing, the judges ultimately leaned ever so slightly in a different direction.
Mike Floyd
nonexistent rear-end grip, you start chucking it into corners—no trail brake needed—and once you’re confident in your vector, even before the apex, just gas it. The front diff lets you just hammer on the car through corners, staying on throttle where other front-wheel-drive cars would wash out.”
PROS Absurdly fun to drive • Available with a manual
• Did you see the price?
CONS Mixed opinions on the manual • Really likes to oversteer
• The Civic Type R exists
Just when it felt like the days of the sport compact car were numbered, along came Hyundai. A brand with no significant motorsports or performance vehicle history in the U.S. showed up with a new subbrand and a trio of impressively dynamic budget cars ready to take on the old guard, and the Elantra N leads the charge. Stop a moment and take stock. Here’s a compact sedan with an overboosted motor, a limited-slip differential, and electronically adjustable dampers, one that comes with a manual or a dual-clutch automatic and retails for as little as $33,245. As editorial operations director Mike Floyd
put it, the Elantra N is “more fun than it has any right to be.”
The sentiment was universal. Technical director Frank Markus called it “a fun little beastie” and a “red-hot bargain.” Senior features editor Jonny Lieberman
2022 HYUNDAI ELANTRA N (6M; DCT)
Base Price/As Tested $33,245/$33,245; $34,745/$34,745
Vehicle Layout Front-engine, FWD, 5-pass, 4-door sedan
Engine, Transmission 2.0L turbo direct-injected DOHC 16-valve I-4, 6-speed manual; 8-speed twin-clutch auto
Power (SAE Net) 276 hp @ 5,500 rpm*
Torque (SAE Net) 289 lb-ft @ 2,100 rpm
Curb Weight (F/R Dist) 3,208 lb (63/37%); 3,296 lb (64/36%)
Wheelbase 107.2 in
L x W x H 184.1 x 71.9 x 55.7 in
Accel, 0-60 mph 5.9; 5.1 sec
Quarter Mile 14.4 sec @ 100.1 mph; 13.7 sec @ 103.9 mph
Braking, 60-0 mph 110; 108 ft
Lateral Acceleration 1.00; 0.97 g (avg)
MT Figure Eight 25.0 sec @ 0.74 g (avg); 24.9 sec @ 0.75 g (avg)
EPA City/Hwy/Comb 22/31/25; 20/30/23 mpg
EPA Range, Comb 310; 285 miles
On Sale Now
hp
20 seconds
said much the same thing, naming it “without question the surprise of the finalist round” and a “stonecold performance bargain.” Mexico editor Miguel Cortina said it’s “magnificent to drive” and “everything you want and need at a price you can afford.”
The trick is learning to drive it. On the street, you really have to drive it like you stole it to get the dopamine rush. We’d recommend you do so with stability control turned on, in at least its Sport setting. On the track, every judge quickly discovered the Elantra N’s propensity for lift-throttle oversteer. Come into a tight corner fast, stand on the brakes, then release the brake and turn, and you’re pretty much guaranteed to slide. And not with an insignificant amount of rotation, either. The rear end full-on comes around.
Deputy editor Alexander Stoklosa laid it all out: “At the point you acclimate to the
As fun as that is, it does not make for a perfect sport compact. Remember we mentioned it comes with a manual? Opinions varied on that device, to say the least. Some editors found it made the car more fun and engaging, but the majority thought the manual car handled worse than the DCT version we also had on hand and that the pedal spacing wasn’t great. Everyone seemed to like the transmission itself well enough, just not the way it was integrated into the rest of the car.
The strongest headwinds facing the Elantra N aren’t technical, though. They’re the
Honda Civic Type R and the wild new Toyota GR Corolla. Luckily for Hyundai, its car is the cheapest of the bunch, but that may not be enough given those two have the hardware and driving thrills to justify their price tags.
Scott Evans
CONS Sloppy dynamics • Limited range • Awkward interior controls
To date, there aren’t a lot of EVs on the market you can point to and call flat-out fun. The kind of car you bound out of after a couple of laps on the track and cackle about how entertaining it was to chuck around. Yes, there are higher-horsepower, more dynamically proficient, and more technologically advanced all-electric machines out there, but the 2023 Kia EV6 GT is a car that combines high levels of those attributes in one truly riotous package.
Of course, the EV6 GT still has plenty of muscle, to the tune of 576 horsepower and 545 lb-ft of torque combined from its front and rear electric motors. This slick-looking compact crossover scorches the
dragstrip at 3.2 seconds from 0 to 60 mph and sprints through the quarter mile in 11.4 seconds at 121.0 mph.
So it’s quick enough, but how does it get around the track? In a word: slideways. If you want to
Base Price/As Tested $62,695/$62,695
Vehicle Layout Front-/rear-motor, AWD, 5-pass, 4-door SUV
Engine, Transmission Permanent-magnet electric, 1-speed automatic
Power (SAE Net) 214 hp (fr), 362 hp (rr); 576 hp (comb)
Torque (SAE Net) 258 lb-ft (fr est), 287 lb-ft (rr est); 545 lb-ft (comb)
Curb Weight (F/R Dist) 4,790 lb (49/51%)
Wheelbase 114.2 in
L x W x H 184.8 x 74.4 x 60.8 in
Accel, 0-60 mph 3.2 sec
Quarter Mile 11.4 sec @ 121.0 mph
Braking, 60-0 mph 114 ft
Lateral Acceleration 0.87 g (avg)
MT Figure Eight 25.1 sec @ 0.77 g (avg)
EPA City/Hwy/Comb 84/74/79 mpg-e
EPA Range, Comb 206 miles
On Sale Now
sashay around a road course, you certainly can. “It’s a drift machine—so much fun,” executive editor Mac Morrison said. “Looking for the most fun lap, I was just driving it sideways, rotating it, working on car control, and it’s absolutely beautiful, this car.”
Several editors echoed Morrison’s comments during their time behind the wheel on the Streets of Willow. “This car is a set of tires away from potential greatness,” features editor Scott Evans said. Technical director Frank Markus said, “It’s just big, huge bagfuls of fun.” There’s the F-word again.
Those are the kind of sentiments that led to the EV6 GT making it to our Performance Vehicle of the Year finalist round—the first EV to get this far. Still, the Kia wasn’t perfect at the track. Some judges felt its tail-happiness was a little too much at times, and that even so it would still occasionally understeer through corners. Its dynamic
performance numbers bore out those observations to a certain extent, as the EV6 GT wasn’t exactly a superstar through our handling tests. It put too many smiles on too many faces, though, not to come along with us on our Angeles Crest road route.
There, some judges thought its ride and handling balance were set up even better for real-world driving. “This is a very comfortable vehicle, yet it comes alive when you start pushing it,” deputy editor Alexander Stoklosa said. “It’s not as precise as the best German cars, but I like that it has a frisky nature, well-damped bump absorption, and reasonably tight body control for what is essentially a compact SUV.”
Additional comments flowed regarding the Kia’s handsome styling inside and out, its aggressive stance that exudes performance, and how its interior quality befits its near $63,000 price tag. Despite the positive vibes, however, more than one
judge thought the EV6 GT needed a little more polish and body control to make it to the top of the PVOTY podium. But this all-electric Kia electrified our drivers in a way few vehicles did at this year’s event. “This is a car that’s going to convince more than a few people that EVs are fun,” Evans said.
Mike Floyd PROS Huge power • Drift monster • Fun, fun, funMarkus said, though it’s definitely a click behind the STO’s aeroassisted amazingness. “The limits are so high that mere hack journalists like me can’t really probe them safely.” Morrison and others disagree. Unless you don’t think a racetrack is safe.
CONS Funky brakes on the street • Tires hate the cold
• Not an STO, is it?
The Huracán Tecnica follows in the footsteps of Huracáns that came before it. The wilder, less practical STO wowed us last year at the inaugural PVOTY competition and finished second, and the Performante and the Evo won our now-deceased sports/supercar event, Best Driver’s Car. Rest assured the Tecnica was a no-brainer finalist at this year’s showdown, though a few flaws kept it out of the top spot. Still, what a thing!
The Tecnica takes most of what’s exceptional about the STO (full power, rear drive, incredible tires, excellent steering and suspension tuning) and makes the car more livable. The STO’s advanced aerodynamics, like the
frunk-space-eating air extractors, are gone. Instead, a medium-sized opening under the front hood swallows a weekend bag, and you can opt for more comfortable thrones. We’ve jokingly referred
2023 LAMBORGHINI HURACÁN LP 640-2
Base Price/As Tested $244,795/$332,095
Vehicle Layout Mid-engine, RWD, 2-pass, 2-door coupe
Engine, Transmission 5.2L port- and direct-injected DOHC 40-valve 90-degree V-10, 7-speed twin-clutch auto
Power (SAE Net) 630 hp @ 8,000 rpm
Torque (SAE Net) 417 lb-ft @ 6,500 rpm
Curb Weight (F/R Dist) 3,470 lb (41/59%)
Wheelbase 103.2 in
L x W x H 179.8 x 76.1 x 45.9 in Accel, 0-60 mph 2.8 sec
Quarter Mile 10.6 sec @ 134.5 mph
Braking, 60-0 mph 96 ft
Lateral Acceleration 1.09 g (avg)
MT Figure Eight 22.6 sec @ 0.94 g (avg)
EPA City/Hwy/Comb 13/18/15 mpg
EPA Range, Comb 317 miles On Sale Now
to the Tecnica as the STO Touring, a riff on Porsche’s GT3 Touring. Although both the Tecnica and the actual Touring lose the boy racer wings, the two Porsches are functionally and mechanically identical, whereas the STO’s performance envelope is somewhat higher.
That said, the Tecnica still rocks. “On the backstretch headed down to the reverse-bowl corner, I saw 128 mph in the Cayman, 129 in the Z06, 139 in the Huracán, and 145 in the McLaren.” That’s from executive editor Mac Morrison, making the point that on the track, the 631-hp Lambo clocked a full 10 mph faster than the by-thenumbers-mightier 670-hp Z06/ Z07. It wasn’t far off the McLaren and its two turbochargers, either. It’s difficult to explain just how ballistic this Lamborghini is, so here’s hoping you get to experience the thrust one day. The grip is “insane,” technical director Frank
So why isn’t the Huracán our winner? It’s the little things— critique by 1,000 cuts. Features editor Scott Evans thought the ride was too stiff in Corsa mode. Mexico editor Miguel Cortina had a difficult time seeing out of it (and he’s tall). Many judges hated the transmission’s sluggish behavior in Strada mode, and Corsa mode—the one you want on the track—makes using the paddles mandatory. “I don’t need the extra ‘driving engagement’ of shifting myself on a racetrack when I’m concentrating on lapping quickly,” Morrison said. The brakes were also way too grabby on the street.
All of that said, in our hearts most of us are with editorial operations director Mike Floyd. “There’s something about the Lambo that just makes me feel alive like no other car in this field does,” he said. “It’s the wailing V-10’s high redline, the darty steering that communicates every little input, the stupendous brakes, and the lightning-responsive transmission. What a car.” Amen, brother.
Jonny Liebermanthe mountain, the car’s dynamics garnered praise from every staffer.
PROS Thrilling driving experience • Striking, aero-centric design
• Explosive sound
CONS Thin, hard seats • Compact cabin • Eye-wateringly expensive
Strap yourself into the 2022 McLaren 765LT Spider as we did, and you’ll quickly forget about its $490,810 as-tested price tag. In fact, you’ll want to pawn all your belongings and sell your house just so you can keep driving it. Few cars deliver an experience like the 765LT Spider, and even fewer impress our editors like this car does.
“The level of performance, control, confidence, and precision the McLaren offers up is on another level, in another league, from another planet,” senior features editor Jonny Lieberman said. Corner after corner—whether you’re on a track or your favorite canyon road—the 765LT Spider will let you push harder and harder as
you accumulate more time behind its wheel; this kind of confidence in a supercar is notable. “Lap after lap,” deputy editor Alexander Stoklosa said, “I found myself getting rapidly comfortable behind the wheel.”
The 765LT Spider was electrifying on Streets of Willow. “It’s easily on another performance
Base Price/As Tested
$389,700/$490,810
Vehicle Layout Mid-engine, RWD, 2-pass, 2-door convertible
Engine, Transmission 4.0L twin-turbo port-injected DOHC 32-valve 90-degree V-8, 7-speed twin-clutch auto
Power (SAE Net) 755 hp @ 7,500 rpm
Torque (SAE Net) 590 lb-ft @ 5,500 rpm
Curb Weight (F/R Dist) 3,223 lb (41/59%)
Wheelbase 105.0 in
L x W x H 181.0 x 76.0 x 47.0 in
Accel, 0-60 mph 2.9 sec
Quarter Mile 10.3 sec @ 142.6 mph
Braking, 60-0 mph 93 ft
Lateral Acceleration 1.17 g (avg)
MT Figure Eight 21.8 sec @ 1.01 g (avg)
EPA City/Hwy/Comb 14/18/16 mpg
EPA Range, Comb 304 miles
plane than anything else here,” executive editor Mac Morrison said. “Such a race car feel from all of its inputs and reactions. I just kept smiling as I drove it.” The mix of its power, suspension and steering feel, and the way it sounds will raise your hairs as adrenaline pounds through your veins. With Track mode on, the shifts are harsh but quick, and the steering feels razor sharp. Said director of editorial ops Mike Floyd: “It takes on any set of obstacles in its path and obliterates them.”
On the Angeles Crest Highway finalist loop, the McLaren inspired even more confidence. The twisty mountain road was no challenge for the 765LT; instead, it allowed the car to showcase its fantastic aerodynamics, grip, and handling. “The grossly reduced mass makes everything feel so much more immediate: acceleration, braking, and turning,” technical director Frank Markus said. Up and down
But not everything is Goldilocks, especially when compared against our criteria. Although every editor talked wistfully about its performance and handling, most judges complained about its tight cabin. Despite the car’s wide body, the interior is cozy at best, and because everything was developed around a weightsavings strategy, there are no comfort features. “Twice I got in a hot car, hit automatic climate and 69 degrees, and nothing happened,” Markus said. “I had to hit a button marked ‘quick cool.’ Why on earth should I have to do that when it’s set to automatic?” Stoklosa questioned McLaren’s decision on designing seats for the average American, not leaner folks. “I felt like a jump rope—the two ends were supported (butt and shoulders), but the middle was just kind of flopping about,” he said.
And then comes value. At $490,810, it’s hard to justify the
price. Despite its fantastic driving abilities, almost every judge had trouble digesting its high cost.
So although we loved the way the car handled on the track and on public roads, it’s far from perfect. Still, the McLaren 765LT Spider is one of the best driver’s cars on the market right now.
Miguel Cortinalimit, well, may god have mercy on your tinnitus. Combine the rock festival soundtrack with the empirical performance and amazing feel from the driver’s seat, and Porsche has created one of the most enjoyable, experiential driver’s cars of all time.
value • Ride not as comfortable as some others
The 718 Cayman GT4 RS, like the Honda Civic Type R, could have easily been our Performance Vehicle of the Year, but it simply didn’t land at the very top of each judge’s ballot in this incredibly close competition. Regardless, the hottest factory-built Cayman to date delivers driving thrills that had everyone talking as they climbed from the cockpit. With its inherently advantageous mid-engine balance now combined with the 911 GT3’s 4.0-liter flat-six and more grip compared to the standard GT4, the handling limits are what serious drivers dream of. Helping the dynamics, too, are less weight, bigger brakes, wider track widths, more rear camber, 220 pounds
of aerodynamic downforce, a mechanically locking rear differential, and torque vectoring that helps to turn the car as soon as you breathe on the steering wheel.
“This car is a teacher. This car is a coach. This car is a friend. This
2023 PORSCHE 718 CAYMAN GT4 RS
Base Price/As Tested $151,850/$195,100
Vehicle Layout Mid-engine, RWD, 2-pass, 2-door hatchback
Engine, Transmission 4.0L direct-injected DOHC 24-valve flat-6, 7-speed twin-clutch auto
Power (SAE Net) 493 hp @ 8,400 rpm
Torque (SAE Net) 331 lb-ft @ 6,250 rpm
Curb Weight (F/R Dist) 3,232 lb (44/56%)
Wheelbase 97.8 in
L x W x H 175.4 x 71.7 x 49.9 in
Accel, 0-60 mph 2.9 sec
Quarter Mile 11.0 sec @ 125.8 mph
Braking, 60-0 mph 96 ft
Lateral Acceleration 1.15 g (avg)
MT Figure Eight 22.3 sec @ 0.94 g (avg)
EPA City/Hwy/Comb 15/19/16 mpg
EPA Range, Comb 270 miles
On Sale Now
car is a classroom. The more you drive it hard, the more you learn and the better you get,” features editor Scott Evans said. “Such grip! Such poise! It never, ever puts a wheel wrong. Whereas some of the cars here remind you you’re not a race driver and you might not have what it takes to extract everything they have, this one makes you feel like you could win a championship today. It’s the best driving partner you could ask for. Porsche should’ve done this a decade ago.”
Or as senior features editor Jonny Lieberman said more succinctly: “Just a wow of a car.”
Exactly. The GT4 RS’ air intakes run from the quarter windows and just over your shoulders down into the cover-free engine located just behind you. This setup results in an oh-my-freaking-Ferdinand scream that has to be heard to be believed, and if you keep your foot in it all the way to the 9,000-rpm
So why didn’t it win? Some judges dinged it on value, especially because Porsche requires you spend $13,250 on the Weissach pack (effectively a visual upgrade kit) before it allows you to drop another $15,640 for lightweight forged magnesium wheels that actually bring improved performance. Others thought that for all its fun and ability, it’s simply the result of Porsche combining a bunch of excellent but existing parts rather than breaking any new ground. Most found the ride quality at lower speeds and daily livability inferior to those of the Corvette
Z06. And finally—shockingly, to some evaluators—more than one of our crew members complained the car is just too loud. We won’t name names, but some of us are getting old. Decibels be damned, that’s something precisely no one will ever claim about the overall experience of driving the 718 Cayman GT4 RS quickly on a racetrack or fun road.
Mac Morrison
Our editors had a few constructive criticisms. Several complained about pedal placement for heel-toe maneuvers (noting the iMT rev-matching function worked perfectly), and although we generally like the brake feel and stopping power, several of us experienced vibration that suggests the rotors were overheating after prolonged hard use. And the low-beam headlamp pattern puts a dark notch in the middle of the lane.
The tiny triple makes a surprising snarl and decent torque, though its powerband is fairly narrow, so tighter tracks may require more shifting. At least the digital gauge cluster’s horizontal tachometer that flashes an upshift warning is easily noted via peripheral vision.
PROS Playful demeanor • Confident on-limit handling
• Feels like something special
CONS Pedal placement • Narrow powerband
• Brakes warp when hot
For this GR Corolla to show up at our event alongside a McLaren, a Lamborghini, and a Corvette Z06 and be referred to as “exotic” gives you some idea of just how special the latest offering from Toyota’s Gazoo Racing tuning arm is. “It has that exotic sense you get from only a few cars on the market today,” editorial ops director Mike Floyd said, “what with the wild fender bulges, aggressive front and rear fascias, funky I-3, and its programmable AWD.”
It surprised and delighted our editors, especially senior features editor Jonny Lieberman. “From expecting disappointment to having the mighty GR Corolla be one of my top three vehicles—color me incredibly impressed,” he said.
“While it was pretty good on the track, it came alive in the canyons. Beyond the spec sheet, this little thing fizzes good-car vibes. I was impressed by how much the steering and cornering changed when the torque split was fiddled
Base Price/As Tested $43,995/$43,995
Vehicle Layout Front-engine, AWD, 5-pass, 4-door hatchback
Engine, Transmission 1.6L turbo port- and direct-injected DOHC 12-valve I-3, 6-speed manual
Power (SAE Net) 300 hp @ 6,500 rpm
Torque (SAE Net) 273 lb-ft @ 3,000 rpm
Curb Weight (F/R Dist) 3,261 lb (58/42%)
Wheelbase 103.9 in
L x W x H 173.6 x 72.8 x 57.2 in Accel, 0-60 mph 5.4 sec
Quarter Mile 13.7 sec @ 100.1 mph
Braking, 60-0 mph 108 ft
Lateral Acceleration 0.96 g (avg)
MT Figure Eight 24.9 sec @ 0.74 g (avg)
EPA City/Hwy/Comb
mpg
with.” Most of us felt 60/40 (front/ rear) was safest, 30/70 most fun, and 50/50 for the best lap times. By the end of the week, Lieberman was threatening to buy one.
Features editor Scott Evans was also a fan. “It’s seriously playful,” he said. “It has that lightness and eagerness to turn and willingness to be adjusted under heavy cornering that makes it playful, but with a serious edge. It won’t get loose and goof around under you; it’s gonna stick, and it’s gonna go.” Credit the chassis’ combination of stiff jounce and softer rebound that keeps the tires pressed to the road so midcorner bumps can’t upset the chassis. And the spring and damper setup avoids the vertical pogoing that plagued both the Honda Civic Type R and Hyundai Elantra N on certain surfaces. Several editors reported feeling confident exploring the Toyota’s high limits after just a few corners of acclimation.
There’s an undeniable giantslayer aspect to the GR Corolla, which helped it score big in most of our criteria—especially performance of intended function, driver confidence/engagement, and value. Where it suffered a bit was
by comparison with the other hot hatch in this competition—the Honda Civic Type R. For similar money, that car trades some short-wheelbase AWD playfulness for higher absolute handling limits, greater comfort, and superior refinement. Our team remained split on which of these two was the most desirable, which may have knocked them both out of the winner’s circle.
Frank Markus
By now you’re probably tired of the “Corvette-as-underdog” story. For nearly 70 years, America’s sports car traded on its “value”—affordable pricing that more often than not begat cheaply executed interiors and tacky design aimed at, let’s face it, Middle American old guys. It was a car designed in Michigan and built in Kentucky, and it looked the part; never mind it was capable of performance equal to or near some of the world’s most pedigreed sports cars.
Often head-scratching compromises didn’t just happen to the Corvette like some act of God, like a flood or a tornado or plague of locusts—they were intentional. General Motors wanted the car to be attainable and able to swallow golf clubs. In other words, here’s your world-beating power and handling—hope you can stand floppy seats and funny glue smells, and the ass is huge because, you know, “Fore!”
That paradigm took a hard left turn with the C8 generation’s arrival for 2020. The ultimate versions of the previous Corvette having reached the mountaintop of
front-engine, rear-wheel-drive performance, the time finally came to relocate the engine to a more “exotic” midship location. Chevrolet’s engineers could finally unlock a new level of ’Vette capability. And they did.
Even the base 455-hp C8 played ding-dong ditch on supercars’ doorbells. It finally had a price-appropriate interior, a lowish bar for a car that starts at $60,000 but a huge step forward nonetheless. We promptly named it our 2020 Car of the Year, declaring, “Never before has so much four-wheeled exoticism been attainable for so little money.” It still fit a set of golf clubs in the back, but for the Corvette a page had begun to turn.
With the new Z06 layering an additional 200-some hp, extra aerodynamic work, and a racier focus onto the Stingray’s winning formula, let’s throw all that value talk out the window and try a thought exercise. Dissociate the Z06 from decades of Corvette baggage (good and bad), and ask yourself: Can a 670-hp mid-engine supercar possibly be considered an underdog? Should it be? In a testing session shared with a nearly halfmillion-dollar McLaren 765LT Spider,
the Corvette Z06 set our all-time figure-eight lap record—scooting the 500 feet between two 200-foot skidpad circles quicker than any vehicle we’ve tested—only to see its fresh record broken by a fraction of a second by that same McLaren. At 2.8 seconds to 60 mph, the Corvette Z06 was quickest in this year’s PVOTY field, while its 1.16 g lateral grip and 95-foot stop from 60 mph were second-best. The Chevy is no underdog—it’s in benchmark territory for ultimate production car performance. That is but one big reason it is our 2023 Performance Vehicle of the Year.
If you caught the second season of The White Lotus, HBO’s deliciously voyeuristic descent into deeply conflicted vacationers’ tortured stays at a Sicilian luxury resort, you probably caught yourself cranking the volume a little louder during the opening credits. The title song is perfectly sequenced with the camera’s panning across scenes of a classical renaissance-style fresco, the bouncy, operatic melody building in intensity before the bridge, when the viewer’s gaze flits
NO LONGER JUST A BANG-FOR-BUCK STAR, THE CORVETTE Z06 IS OUR 2023 PERFORMANCE VEHICLE OF THE YEAR
rapidly between suddenly disturbing and carnal details and the soundtrack unravels into mania, the music expanding and adopting shrieking urgency.
The credit sequence’s sensory overload is the closest mainstream analogue to how the Z06’s new 5.5-liter V-8 engine introduces itself. Installed in what looks a lot like the regular Corvette with some carbon-fiber doodads stuck on here and there, it begins its surprise when you thumb the starter button. The engine
awakens with an unsettling crack before falling into a tense hum. Blip the throttle, and the revs leap like the digital tachometer had a seizure. That was only a toe’s worth of gas; what if you … press the pedal all the way?
Confusing thoughts and questions begin flashing in your mind quicker than you can reconcile. This is a Chevy, right? But it’s belting out a Ferrari’s soundtrack, sending a tingle through the steering wheel and pedals as the revs climb. And climb. And just keep on climbing like the entirety of Italy’s sports car heritage is free-soloing El Capitan. Your eyes dart around, looking for something grounding. OK, there are heated and cooled seats. The OnStar emergency button sticks out like seeing one of those “Help, I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!” alarms for the elderly around a coed’s neck at a midnight rave. But that sound! What is happening?
Almost entirely on its own, the Z06’s dual-overhead-cam 32-valve
CONFUSING THOUGHTS AND QUESTIONS FLASH IN YOUR MIND QUICKER THAN YOU CAN RECONCILE. THIS IS A CHEVY, RIGHT?
flat-plane-crankshaft LT6 V-8 elevates the Corvette to parity with the supercars whose performance it has long come close to matching. Its noise is as exotic as its spec sheet, and it is the most powerful naturally aspirated production V-8 ever. Not for the price, not for an American car—of all time.
Developed alongside a competition version for Corvette Racing’s endurance-series contenders and with nary a pushrod, the V-8 spins up 670 hp at 8,400 rpm and 460 lb-ft at 6,300. Without the racing version’s required restrictor plates, Z06 owners enjoy 150 hp more than Corvette Racing’s pro drivers do.
In a hint at the rest of the Z06’s capabilities, six scavenging pumps for the dry-sump oiling system ensure even pickup and can handle 1.16 g of uninterrupted lateral acceleration. Forged aluminum pistons weigh 8 percent less than those in the old Z06’s LS7 V-8, and the titanium connecting rods are 21 percent lighter, slashing rotating mass and helping the engine rev to its 8,600-rpm redline quicker than any other Corvette in history. Credit also goes to the flat-plane crankshaft, which spaces the rods at 180 degrees instead of 90, as in a cross-plane design. You hear this change as much as you feel it, the new 1-4-3-8-7-6-5-2 firing order wailing through a new centerexit exhaust that makes a shorter run to the ’Vette’s tail. Besides 21 percent less back pressure than the old Z06, the exhaust’s “parabolic reflector” tips direct some of the V-8’s noise back at the cabin.
We could run the Engineering Excellence category for the entirety of this story and not cover every last iota of the Z06’s jaw-dropping tech advancements—or even that engine—so we’ll roll the rest into this one. This Corvette simply performs the way a mid-engine supercar should. Longtime strengths are retained and improved upon here. In its Tour drive mode, the Z06’s suspension is all-day comfortable. With the hatches battened down in Track mode, it’s stiffer but won’t shake the head covers off those golf clubs.
Yet here is a car capable of stopping from 60 mph in 99 feet and generating 1.10 g on our skidpad on its weakest tires, Michelin Pilot Sport 4S rubber. Upgrading to the Z07 performance package and the available carbonfiber wheels wrapped in Pilot Sport Cup 2Rs shortens the stopping distance to 95 feet and ups the average skidpad grip to 1.16 g. That the Z07-equipped Z06 ripped up our figure-eight course neck and neck with the McLaren 765LT Spider shows its abilities need no qualification.
New category! Having learned a thing or two after our inaugural PVOTY last year, we decided Safety is a difficult-to-back-up metric for certain cars that make up a good chunk of the field. Safety organizations like NHTSA and IIHS seldom test all the vehicles we invite, and without crash data, evaluating safety regresses to a performative comparison of available features such as automated emergency braking and monitoring tech.
So for PVOTY, we’ve swapped our usual Safety criterion for Driver Confidence and
Engagement. This can encompass passive safety, as a car you feel comfortable with at or near the limit will be a friendlier partner during an emergency maneuver; mostly, though, this category delivers a complementary dimension on Performance of Intended Function. These are all sporty, performance-focused vehicles—how much so determines the outcome of that original category. How the driver perceives that functionality and can exploit it—this is our new Driver Confidence and Engagement criterion.
The Corvette nails this. Intimidating though it may seem, the Z06 is genuinely approachable in ways many other cars of this ilk, let alone past mega-power ’Vettes, are not. Available grip—and remember, there’s a lot of it—seems boundless, goading you into ever higher cornering speeds. GM’s Performance Traction Management (PTM) system offers precise adjustments to the electronic safety net. As you grow more comfortable with the car, you can peel away layers of this backup
bit by bit, or simply jump in and feel like a hero with PTM’s transparent hand keeping you carbon-fiber side up.
Most of the Z06’s superficial design advancement is owed, really, to the 2020 Corvette Stingray and its switch to a mid-engine layout. The Z06 doesn’t build much on the C8’s visuals, though the $8,995 Z07 package’s carbon-fiber aerodynamic add-ons and the $9,995 carbon-fiber wheels subtly amp up its curbside presence.
Instead, the Z06 upgrades open up and take advantage of more of the new mid-engine format’s promise. The weight balance swings to 40 percent front, 60 percent rear, from the old Z06’s 50/50. This has less of an effect on the Z06’s total objective performance figures, which are only a hair or two better than the C7’s, and more on their repeatability. Where before the old Z06 relied heavily on and eventually ran out of tire, the C8 beats less on its
If you think Corvettes look tacky, we have bad news: The Z06 looks pretty much the same. Carbon-fiber dress-up bits help, though.
Michelins. You can lap this car over and over and see little performance drop-off, much as you can in Porsche’s track specials. And remember that record-setting figure-eight lap time?
Layout aside, the other design advances are subtle. Those optional carbon wheels push the boundaries of the type, with a daring one-piece, five-spoke design leaving lots of unsupported airspace between the hub and the rim. In total, the lightweight wheels save 41 pounds and, believe us, sharpen the steering like a honing steel. You will notice a difference between the turn-in performances of Z06s with these wheels and without, and to be clear, steering the forged aluminum wheels doesn’t drunkenly heave the Corvette’s nose into corners. The rest of the carbon-fiber trim pieces deliver up to 734 pounds of downforce at 186 mph (372 pounds more than the non-Z07), ensuring the Corvette keeps glued to the pavement at higher speeds and further upping its turn-in ferocity.
Measuring efficiency by miles per gallon, the Z06 and its $2,600 (and up) gas guzzler tax looks of a different time, at least compared to a number of this year’s PVOTY contenders. Opt for the Z07 package’s carbon aero pieces, and the EPA fuel economy estimates drop by 2 mpg on the highway (drag!) and 1 mpg combined, to 19 and 14 mpg. Every Z06 is estimated at only 12 mpg in the city. Those figures trail a regular 6.2-liter Corvette’s by several mpg. Yet they fall right in the ballpark of the McLaren 765LT’s 14/18/16 city/highway/ combined. Ditto the Lamborghini Huracán’s 13/18/15 figures. Point is, it’s on the same level as other vehicles of this type and this performance.
And is it not efficiency that allows the Z06 to make 670 hp without turbos or superchargers, beating the also naturally breathing Lambo’s 630 ponies? Or that it turns gasoline and air into a crescendo of decibels as well as or better than the greatest non-turbo engines in history—Porsche’s Mezger-design flat-six in the 911 GT3 included?
You won’t ever need to plug it in or worry you won’t make it where you’re headed because it’ll run out of battery, either. We make this backward-looking argument not in ignorance of technology’s advance but rather in celebration of what this engine achieves.
This is an era-capping engine, perhaps the last and likely the best naturally aspirated American V-8. It’s earned a dig or two at EVs and their infrastructural hurdles, not to mention their utter lack of thrilling noise.
Does all of this unqualified praise have you feeling unglued like a delaminated sliver of Chevy’s finest fiberglass? Need “buts” or an “it’s good—for the price” to feel like the natural order of things remains intact? We have none to offer. The Z06 tosses aside the value crutch leaned on by its predecessors. Sure, it is objectively less expensive than, say, a space shuttle—or the 765LT or Huracán, blue-chip, 600-hp-plus mid-engine supercars. That isn’t why it won.
But because this is an Of The Year category, here are some numbers. The Z06 coupe starts at $110,290 including its guzzler penalty. (The drop top is $7,500 more.) Pile on every performance option, which you can shovel onto even the entry-level 1LZ trim level— including the Z07 package (which includes Brembo carbon-ceramic brake rotors) and required carbon-fiber aero package (add $1,000 for bare finish), plus the carbon-fiber wheels (again, add $2,000 for unpainted) and Michelin Pilot Sport Cup 2R tires, and the cheapest max-performance Z06 runs $138,175 all-in. A base 911 GT3? $172,450, which is almost 10 grand more than the fairly loaded Z06 3LZ we tested. The McLaren 765LT, which this Corvette effectively matches in certain performance parameters despite weighing more and making 85 fewer hp? Try $389,700 before options, which took our PVOTY contender to $490,810. You get the idea.
Chevy could charge more. For the first time ever, a Corvette teems with the kind of special sauce that makes the car seem worth it regardless of price, a sense of total desirability, the feeling nothing was left on the table. Last year, the Porsche 911 GT3 took home our Performance Vehicle of the Year award after putting on a master class in that sort of gotta-have-it magic. How fitting that the Corvette, the 911’s longtime nemesis, should break through and take over the award by leveraging the same strength. Q
DRIVETRAIN LAYOUT Mid-engine, RWD
ENGINE TYPE Direct-injected DOHC 32-valve 90-degree V-8, alum block/heads
DISPLACEMENT 5,500cc/335.6 cu in
COMPRESSION RATIO 12.5:1
POWER (SAE NET) 670 hp @ 8,400 rpm
TORQUE (SAE NET) 460 lb-ft @ 6,300 rpm
REDLINE 8,500 rpm
WEIGHT TO POWER 5.5 lb/hp
TRANSMISSION 8-speed twin-clutch auto
AXLE/FINAL DRIVE RATIO 5.56:1/1.83:1
SUSPENSION, FRONT; REAR Control arms, coil springs, adj shocks, anti-roll bar; control arms, coil springs, adj shocks, anti-roll bar
STEERING RATIO 15.7:1
TURNS LOCK TO LOCK 2.5
BRAKES, F; R 15.7-in vented, drilled carbon-ceramic disc; 15.4-in vented, drilled carbon-ceramic disc
WHEELS, F; R 10.0 x 20-in; 11.0 x 21-in carbon fiber
TIRES, F; R 275/30R20 97Y; 345/25R21 104Y Michelin Pilot Sport Cup 2R
INFO
BASE PRICE $132,540
PRICE AS TESTED $164,805
AIRBAGS 4: Dual front, front side/ head
BASIC WARRANTY 3 years/36,000 miles
POWERTRAIN WARRANTY 5 years/60,000 miles
ROADSIDE ASSISTANCE 5 years/60,000 miles
FUEL CAPACITY 18.5 gal
EPA CITY/HWY/COMB ECON 12/19/14 mpg
EPA RANGE, COMB 259 miles
RECOMMENDED FUEL Unleaded premium ON SALE Now
DOES AMERICA’S SPORTS CAR FINALLY HAVE WHAT IT TAKES TO BE CONSIDERED AMERICA’S SUPERCAR?
WORDS FRANK MARKUS PHOTOGRAPHY BRANDON LIM
The high-end supercar segment is a little like Formula 1 racing—it’s a club that doesn’t include many Americans. Of the nearly 800 drivers who’ve ever competed in the series, only about 7 percent have been Americans, and a pitiful number of them have won many races, with the last to do so being Italian-born Mario Andretti—in 1978. Perhaps not coincidentally, of all the hyper- and supercars available globally, just a meager handful are built here in pickuptruckland— mostly at boutique shops like Hennessey, Scuderia Cameron Glickenhaus, and SSC North America—and sold mostly for seven-figure prices.
Into the breach comes the 2023 Chevrolet Corvette Z06 with the Z07 package from the decidedly un-boutique house of General Motors, seemingly meeting all the qualifications for membership in the fraternal order of supercars. Should buyers contemplating purchase of an Olde World supercar from the likes of McLaren (eight F1 constructors’ championships) or Lamborghini (seven GT3 championships) also kick the tires of the mid-engine Corvette Z06, developed by Corvette Racing (eight Le Mans class wins)? To find out, we rounded up a Z06 and two of the hottest new supercars available—the 2022 McLaren 765LT Spider and the 2023 Lamborghini Huracán LP 640-2
Tecnica—and spent a week flogging them in our initiation trials. We need to state right here at the top that these cars enjoy much parity of performance but not price, as the cost difference between each is roughly the price of this Corvette. Unlike PVOTY (pg. 38), however, here we’re dropping our six criteria used to level the Of The Year field; we’re searching for the best pure supercar, full stop.
The Corvette Stingray and Z51 are dynamically brilliant, but their pushrod muscle car engine precludes them from supercar consideration. So Chevy tapped its Corvette
Racing team partners Pratt & Miller for assistance co-developing a road car engine alongside its GT Le Mans competition powerplant. Together, they developed what seemed impossible: a 5.5-liter naturally aspirated flatplane-crankshaft V-8 that doesn’t shake itself to pieces. Without racing-series-mandated intake restrictor plates, it churns out 670 hp at 8,400 rpm and 460 lb-ft at 6,300 rpm, ranking it as the world’s largest and most powerful V-8 of this configuration. And prior to road car production, the design survived three grueling years of endurance racing. The icing on the cake is its delightful engine bark, which sounds like a Ferrari 458’s tenor aria being sung by a barrel-chested baritone—much more supercar than muscle car.
Lamborghini’s high-strung 5.2-liter V-10 produces almost precisely as many horses per liter as the Corvette but fewer lb-ft, and it feels noticeably less torquey. But oh, what a joyful noise those 631 horses and 417 lb-ft make! Extremely exotic and far more mellifluous than most production 10-bangers—think Lexus LFA as opposed to Dodge Viper V-10 sound. And it makes a lot of it.
McLaren’s wee 4.0-liter V-8 leans on two twin-scroll turbos to deliver 56 percent more
horsepower and 80 percent more torque per liter than the two naturally aspirated engines can manage. And as the top-dog offering in McLaren’s mid-tier “supercar” lineup, it produces a whopping 755 horses’ worth of power and 590 lb-ft torque. Drop the hammer in any corner exit, and the shove against your back feels considerably stronger than that of the free breathers, but the engine sound is vastly less pleasing.
Combustion-powered supercars mostly use twin-clutch automatic transmissions, and each of these cars puts its own spin on the concept. Lamborghini’s Doppia Frizione and McLaren’s Seamless Shift Gearbox (both built by Graziano) employ seven ratios, while the Corvette’s Tremec ’box features eight. That’s because the Corvette aims for both 0–60 bragging rights at the low end and quiet cruising with decent highway fuel economy at the top end. Hence it features the shortest first gear ratio (by 3–7 percent) and the tallest top gear ratio (by 42–84 percent). The Lamborghini gets the closest and most evenly spaced ratios, designed to maximize leverage across the entire speed range and to hit its 200-mph top speed at redline. (The Corvette’s eighth gear could theoretically hit 370 mph in a vacuum.) The McLaren’s gearing slots somewhere in between, imperiously disinterested in 60-mph sprinting, comfort, noise, or fuel economy.
Each offers automatic and paddle-actuated manual shifting, with paddles mounted to the wheel on the Corvette and 765LT and to the steering column on the Huracán. The Corvette’s automatic shift strategy is most ideally pegged to the drive modes, with Track mode being the most aggressive at holding gears or preemptively downshifting, prompting features editor Scott Evans to declare: “They’ve cracked the Porsche PDK code. This transmission shifts as well as any Porsche I have driven.”
The McLaren gearbox was nearly as astute and also permits auto shifting in all drive modes. In the Lamborghini’s top Corsa mode, there’s no automatic shift option, but at least its shift-warning system is brighter and more obvious than the one in the Chevy’s head-up display, and it’s arguably more comprehensible for some people than the McLaren’s three-segment green-red-blue F1-style indicator system. However, Evans found fault with the Lamborghini’s shift “quality” in Corsa mode, which he likened to “a shovel to the back of the head.”
This particular Corvette contending for supercardom comes fully optioned with the Z07 Ultimate Performance package ($8,995), which buys slightly stiffer springs, unique tuning of the Magnetic Ride Control suspension, and carbon-ceramic brakes and Michelin Pilot Sport Cup 2R tires. Its $11,995 carbon-fiber wheels shave about 10 pounds of both unsprung mass and rotational inertia per corner. Finally, there’s $10,495 worth of carbon-fiber aero enhancements, including a high wing, dive planes, and a more aggressive splitter, diffuser, and ground effects. (Note, skinflints can shave
$2K off both those latter prices with painted instead of visible-weave carbon.) But the Corvette’s structure is still mostly aluminum, and our 3LZ test model is decked out with lots of creature comforts, so it weighs the most of this trio by 216 to 463 pounds.
Meanwhile, our Tecnica slots into the reardrive Lamborghini Huracán lineup between the EVO and STO performance versions, with its suspension softened a bit and its aero downforce and drag reduced slightly relative to the most extreme STO model. It shares that version’s rear-wheel steering and Bridgestone Potenza Race tires, however.
The carbon-tub McLaren is by far the lightest and most extreme car here, with its titanium exhaust and thinner, lighter glazing on the windshield and side/rear glass paring away precious ounces. The Spider’s roof mechanism adds 130 pounds without altering the structural rigidity, but tuning revisions to the Spider’s hydraulically cross-linked suspension actually improve the car’s overall behavior, potentially making this the preferable version even if you don’t lower the top. The splitter and rear wing create substantial downforce, and the wing flips up nearly
vertical when braking for added stability. Brakes are borrowed from the mighty Senna, and lightweight forged wheels are shod in Pirelli P Zero Trofeo R tires.
We doubt supercar owners drag race their cars often, but each of these machines comes equipped with launch control just in case. The Corvette and Lamborghini systems dumped the clutch at about 4,500 rpm, while the torquier McLaren only dialed up 3,000
revs. The Corvette alone benefited from a pre-launch burnout to warm and soften the treads. It should be noted that testing the Lamborghini triggered an Apple Watch noise warning, so you might want to wear ear plugs on track days.
The Corvette’s gearing gambit pays off with the quickest sprint to 60 mph (2.8 seconds, a tenth ahead of the others), but taller gearing from there on blunts the Z06’s acceleration enough to let the others pull away from 80 mph on up. By the quarter mile, the Huracán is 0.2 second ahead, the McLaren 0.5, with trap speeds telling the real weight-to-power story—the McLaren hits 142.6 mph, the Lambo 134.5, and the heavier, aero-drag-bedeviled Chevy just 128.2.
You’d expect three mid-engine cars with 40/60-ish percent weight distribution and carbon brakes averaging 15 inches in diameter all around to stop similarly, and you’d be
right: They each need 93–96 feet to stop from 60 mph. But here again the braking systems demonstrate unique personalities.
The McLaren’s pedal barely moves, but response to pressure is linear and predictable, and our team quickly acclimated to the system’s seemingly bottomless reserves of whoa. By contrast, senior features editor Jonny Lieberman described the Lamborghini’s non-linear brakes as its fatal flaw. “Up in the canyons, the fact that there’s almost no travel whatsoever kills the experience,” he said. “Jumpy is the best way to describe it.”
Meanwhile, the Corvette’s stoppers felt plenty linear, but their brake-by-wire pedal-force transducer lacked feedback, disappointing executive editor Mac Morrison. “I had to figure out my braking distances and the amount of available retardation force almost entirely by vision alone rather than a normal combination of vision and feel,” he said.
The Corvette’s brakes were the only ones to squeal upon initial application, which can sap psychological confidence. But there’s no debating their capability, which is even more impressive from 100 mph, where the Corvette stops in just 252 feet—2 feet shorter than the 463-pound-lighter McLaren with its Senna stoppers and air brake (254 feet) and 6 feet better than the Lamborghini (258 feet).
When the track starts to turn, seven generations of front-engine Corvettes really came up short relative to supercars. They could generate a competitive lap time or lateral grip number but only by leaning heavily on the tires, causing lap times to plunge as rubber heated up and wore down.
The C8 Corvette’s inherent eagerness to turn allows the Z06 to maintain a competitive pace longer—especially with the Z07 and Aero packages. In fact, our Z06/Z07’s acceleration, braking, and stout 1.16 g (average) lateral grip number on the skidpad helped it string together MotorTrend’s second-best figure-eight-course performance ever: 21.9 seconds at 0.99 average g. If you already read our PVOTY story, you know number one is this very McLaren 765LT Spider, which managed 1.17 g (average) lateral grip on the skidpad and charged harder out of the corners to finish its figure-eight lap 0.05 second ahead of the ’Vette, in 21.8 seconds at 1.01 g average. The comparatively lumbering Lambo’s 22.6-second, 0.94 g lap ranks way down in 31st place.
In the case of all three cars, these numbers accurately represent what they are like to drive on the road and on the track. Our “accomplished amateur” editors all reported building confidence surprisingly quickly and easily in both the McLaren and Corvette on the Streets of Willow road course, swiftly
If you ever happen to find yourself behind any of these cars on a twisting road, enjoy the view while you can. Don’t expect them to stay within sight for long.
developing trust in each car’s exceptionally high cornering and braking limits, with each communicating grip levels clearly and behaving reassuringly at the limit.
This was a welcome surprise in the McLaren Spider. Its fixed-roof sibling has struck us as a bit too extreme, but Lieberman lauded the softened front-end spring rates and damping for making this “one of the best cars I’ve ever driven on the street—up there with Paganis and Bugattis, for millions of dollars less.”
Meanwhile, the Huracán’s Corsa mode damping was deemed too extreme for anything but pristine pavement, and many
felt it just seemed less confident and planted than its STO sibling, let alone these other two high-limit smooth operators.
The cockpits contribute to driver confidence, too, with the McLaren’s canopy-style windshield affording the best visibility, its wheel and pedals positioned ideally, and its hard-shell seat and shoulder wings resisting the most extreme lateral forces. By contrast, the Lambo is difficult to see out of in any direction, and its cramped footwell compromised the driving position for some. The Corvette strikes a reasonable middle ground with good visibility, the most comfortable seating, and reasonably placed controls.
Chevy also enhances the driving fun with features like a g-meter in Sport mode’s head-up display, which retains peak g figures long enough for the driver to note them after the road straightens out, and a performance data recorder that captures video of a track session or back road run, overlaid with speed, tach, g-meter data, and more for subsequent study or to share with friends.
There’s only one car here that sane adults would contemplate driving for more than an hour or so in the real world, and it’s the Corvette. Its Tour mode is far and away the quietest and most comfortable by several orders of magnitude, its comfy seats are heated and cooled, you can hear and enjoy its Bose sound system, and there’s room to carry up to 12.6 cubic feet of luggage.
The Lamborghini interior looks the most upscale exotic, but the din at highway speeds is (perhaps literally) deafening, and the frunk can barely accommodate a helmet. As for the McLaren, comfort was obviously absent on its designers’ priorities list. Its seat
becomes a borderline torture device about 10 minutes after the lateral g forces subside, controls for things like the cruise control and mirror switches are inscrutable, the Bowers & Wilkins sound system is hopelessly outmatched by the V-8, and the “automatic climate control” simply isn’t.
Our week with these three cars suggests the Corvette does indeed have the chops to run with the supercar crowd. We wish its design was a bit less busy and juvenile, and we hope an over-the-air update might improve its brake feel, but the car’s dynamics and visceral appeal earn it legit supercar status as far as we’re concerned. To wit: It earns a solid second-place finish among these two establishment players. So yes, we’re crowning the McLaren the superior supercar, owing to its mesospheric performance limits and the ease with which we mere mortals were able to probe them. Nevertheless, it’s time to let the Corvette’s supercar-club initiation commence at track days, rallies, and cars & coffee events everywhere.
3RD PLACE
2023 LAMBORGHINI HURACÁN
LP 640-2 TECNICA
PROS
• Exotic design
• Natural V-10 power
• Killer engine note CONS
• Grabby brakes
• Transmission shift strategy/harshness
• Obscenely loud
VERDICT
Changes made to the STO reduce performance more than they improve livability, compromising its supercar mission.
2ND PLACE
2023 CHEVROLET CORVETTE Z06 (Z07) PROS
• Approachable supercar dynamics
• Exotic engine
• Corvette comfort CONS
• Wooden brake feel
• Study-hall styling
• Could lose 200 pounds VERDICT
America’s sports car—in Z06/Z07 guise—is now America’s supercar.
1ST PLACE
2022 MCLAREN 765LT SPIDER PROS
• Spaceship style
• Stellar steering/brake feel
• Can-Am sucker-car grip CONS
• Spanish inquisition seat
• Obtuse ergonomics
• Truckish engine note VERDICT
A hypercar at supercar pricing.
THE MCLAREN IS THE SUPERIOR SUPERCAR, OWING TO ITS MESOSPHERIC PERFORMANCE LIMITS.
POWERTRAIN/CHASSIS
2022 McLaren
765LT Spider
DRIVETRAIN LAYOUT Mid-engine,RWDMid-engine,RWDMid-engine,RWD
TYPE Direct-injectedDOHC32-valve 90-degreeV-8,alumblock/heads
Port-anddirect-injectedDOHC40-valve 90-degreeV-10,alumblock/heads
Twin-turboport-injectedDOHC32-valve 90-degreeV-8,alumblock/heads
SUSPENSION, FRONT; REAR Controlarms,coilsprings,adj shocks,anti-rollbar;controlarms, coilsprings,adjshocks,anti-rollbar
Controlarms,coilsprings,adjshocks, anti-rollbar;controlarms,coilsprings, adjshocks,anti-rollbar
STEERING RATIO 15.7:113.4:1
TURNS LOCK TO LOCK
BRAKES, F; R 15.7-invented,drilledcarbonceramicdisc;15.4-invented,drilled carbon-ceramicdisc
15.0-invented,drilledcarbon-ceramic disc;14.0-invented,drilledcarbonceramicdisc
Controlarms,coilsprings,adjshocks,adj anti-rollsystem;controlarms,coilsprings, adjshocks,adjanti-rollsystem
15.4-invented,drilledcarbon-ceramicdisc; 15.0-invented,drilledcarbon-ceramicdisc
WHEELS, F; R 10.0x20-in;13.0x21-incarbonfiber8.5x20-in;11.0x20-inforgedaluminum9.0x19-in;11.0x20-inforgedaluminum
TIRES, F; R 275/30R2097Y;345/25R21104Y MichelinPilotSportCup2RZP 245/30R2090Y;305/30R20103Y BridgestonePotenzaRace 245/35R1993Y;305/30R20103Y PirelliPZeroTrofeoRMC1
POWERTRAIN WARRANTY 5years/60,000miles3years/unlimitedmiles3years/unlimitedmiles
ROADSIDE ASSISTANCE 5years/60,000miles3years/unlimitedmiles3years/unlimitedmiles
Base Price $69,269 As Tested $80,889
For a huge swath of Americans, their first experience with an electric vehicle won’t be behind the wheel of a Tesla, Rivian, or even a Ford Mustang Mach-E. It’ll be with the battery-powered version of America’s bestselling vehicle: the Ford F-150 Lightning electric pickup truck.
And the Lightning has inspired every bit as much demand as its liquid-fueled sibling. In the two days following the F-150 Lightning’s May 2021 reveal, more than 44,500 parties plunked down a refundable $100 deposit to reserve their electric F-150. We were one of them.
By December, Ford had nearly 200,000 reservations—so many that it had to roll 2022 reservations into 2023. One year, five months, one week, and one day after the reveal, our 2022 Ford F-150 Lightning Lariat—the first long-term test vehicle MotorTrend has ever purchased—finally arrived. Just in time, too, as we have big plans for our new electric pickup truck.
Even today, most new cars are bought off a dealer’s lot, but buying our Lightning was different than the typical purchase experience. After placing our initial reservation on Ford’s website, we began to do what would become familiar: wait. About a year after placing our reservation, in June 2022, we were invited to select our dealer, spec out our truck, and put down another nonrefundable $500 deposit for our order. To a well-equipped Lightning XLT we added the larger 131.0-kWh Extended Range battery pack—a 33.0-kWh upgrade over the Standard Range battery; the bigger battery
also increases the horsepower output of the standard dual-motor all-wheel-drive system from 452 to 580. (Torque stays flat at a dieselshaming 775 lb-ft.) The big battery increases the rated range from 230 miles to 320 miles.
A few days later, our dealer, the world-famous Galpin Ford, reached out to let us know it had received more than 1,200 reservations, but Ford had only allocated Galpin 90 Lightning orders. Unfortunately for us, Ford hadn’t selected our order to be built among that group. Galpin then kindly moved our reservation over to a 2023 Lightning while putting us on the waitlist for a 2022 truck if one of its approved reservations fell through.
A short five days later, we lucked out: Some late Lightning Lariat allocation slots opened, and we were offered the opportunity to convert our 2023 XLT order to a 2022 Lariat. We jumped at the chance despite it being a more expensive trim, and we specced out our new truck. We kept to the spirit of our initial XLT order, opting for the Extended Range battery pack, the Tow Technology and Max Tow packages, a spray-in bedliner,
Lariat
“For the next few years, we’ll answer every pressing question about Ford’s electric pickup.”
Christian Seabaugh
and rubber floormats. Our total out-the-door price was $80,889. (It’s a good thing we ordered when we did; later price hikes meant our truck would soon sticker for $89,639.)
Then we waited again. On July 21, 2022, we finally received an email notifying us our 2022 F-150 Lightning Lariat was scheduled for production at Ford’s Rouge Electric Vehicle Center assembly facility. A few weeks later, we were assigned a VIN, and production
began. Then we waited some more; thanks to the global chip shortage, it took another 47 days for our F-150 to roll off the line.
Then a shipping crunch delayed our F-150 Lightning’s West Coast arrival by another month, until just before Halloween. Although this was little more than an inconvenience for us (we’d hoped to throw our Lightning into our Truck of the Year testing; instead, two other Lightnings competed and took home the Calipers), were we purchasing the truck as a regular owner, the long delay almost surely would have been a huge hassle. That goes double if we were turning in a leased vehicle or trying to sell a daily driver.
Despite the untraditional buying process, the handoff was typical. We were half expecting a long discussion about charging, but instead we got just the basics: the difference between Level 2 and Level 3 charging, how to schedule charges via the infotainment system, and how to set a DC charge limit. We suspect that information would be more than sufficient for all but the greenest EV drivers.
Was the long wait worth it? In a word: Yes. As we finally took delivery and meandered our handsome Atlas Blue Lightning (a color now discontinued for 2023) back toward our El Segundo headquarters, we couldn’t help but think ahead to all the things we hope to accomplish with our electric pickup over the next few years. Yes, years. Plural.
We typically keep vehicles in our longterm fleet for a year of testing and approximately 20,000 miles, but we intend to hang on to our Lightning Lariat for much longer than that. Why? Well, for starters, there’s a good chance the Lightning becomes one of the bestselling EVs in the country, and we’re curious to see how well this electric pickup’s batteries and powertrain hold up over years of hard testing, towing, and use.
We’re also eager to see if electrification makes the world’s bestselling pickup truck better than the gas and diesel versions, both as a tool to get work done and as personal transport. As such, look for charging, payload, and towing tests; road-trip reports; off-road expeditions; DIY projects; and our truck to be dispatched to our Detroit office to test most of the foregoing in a colder climate.
I’m eager to see how the first electric long-term test vehicle in my care fits into family life, both in the day-to-day and on long journeys. In other words, we plan to use our Lightning just like the average American pickup buyer does: for literally everything.
Service Life 6 months/10,258 miles
Average Fuel Econ 19.7 mpg
Unresolved problems
None
Maintenance cost $208.21 (oil change, inspection, tire rotation)
Normal wear $0
Base price $54,195 As tested $64,670
EPA City/Hwy/Comb fuel econ 19/25/21 mpg
Do you remember Hyundai’s “Smaht Pahk” Super Bowl commercial? It featured Massachusetts-born actors Chris Evans and John Krasinski, Saturday Night Live alum Rachel Dratch, and Boston Red Sox Hall of Famer David “Big Papi” Ortiz, and it was probably the funniest car commercial of 2020. The star of the show was the 2020 Hyundai Sonata, parking itself in a tight spot. But what does that have to do with our long-term GV70? Well, our SUV of the Year comes with the same remote parking assist feature as the Sonata, and after almost six months of living with it, we haven’t found much use for the system.
Besides showing your friends the cool feature of turning on the GV70 remotely and then having it move backward or forward without a driver, there are few use cases for this capability. In the time I’ve driven the car, I only had to use it once (sort of). I parked on the street next to a few bushes that got in the way of opening the front passenger door, so when my date and I got back to the car, I moved the GV70 forward with the remote until it cleared the bushes and I could open the door for her. I could’ve gotten into the Genesis and moved it myself, but it was a good opportunity to naturally show off what it can do, even if it did take longer to activate the feature than moving the car myself.
I could see myself using the remote park assist feature for a tight parking spot, but I’d probably just look for a place where I could park and get out easily (unless that spot was the only open one in the lot). In other words, this is a nice feature to have, but, it’s one that isn’t as useful as you might think.
“Remote smart park assist is a fun party trick, but it’s not very useful.”
Miguel Cortina
Service Life 11 months/13,714 miles
Average Fuel Econ
I’ve noticed the older I get, the more weekends become a time for chores and projects and less about actually resting and recuperating. It sucks. But every once in a while, the calendar is miraculously free and clear, and vehicles like the Defender 110 really help make the most of those rare days. Faced with a free Saturday, my wife and I decided to load up the pups and make a beach day out of it.
Oceano Dunes, about 200 miles north of Los Angeles, is one of the few beaches in the state civilians can drive on. Rex, our 8-year-old beagle-dachshund mix, is a regular road warrior, but this four-hour stint would be the longest drive Rosie, our 11-month-old German shepherd mix, had experienced since we scooped her up from a rescue. Still traumatized from living in a dumpster on the other side of the border, Rosie’s first ride with us was marked by her utter refusal to get into the car and her attempt to bail out on the way back home.
Despite the rocky start, Rosie quickly made herself at home in the back of the Land Rover. With a massive greenhouse and spacious back seat, she spent the first hour of the trip window-surfing before settling into a nap, while 25-pound Rex made himself comfortable sleeping on top of the Defender’s jump seat. Up front, my wife and I cranked up the stereo and took advantage of the now-wireless Apple
If you’re considering the XC40 T5 for your next car but wish it were more eco-friendly, you’re in luck. The P8 Recharge, an all-electric variant sitting above the gas-powered T4 and T5 in the powertrain lineup, should be on your list if your goal is zero-emissions travel.
Recently, a P8 Recharge arrived at MotorTrend headquarters, which gave us a chance to stage a miniature comparison between our longtermer and the electric variant. Here are a few takeaways:
Visual differences between the T5 and P8 are minimal. The P8 features a solid, body-color-matching grille and unique 19- or 20-inch wheels. The base T4 and T5 both have standard 18-inch wheels. Otherwise, you’ll have trouble seeing any differences.
CarPlay capability; the cabin, already noisy due to the gear carrier and expedition roof rack, had only gotten louder since we fit the roof ladder. Looking cool has its costs.
We arrived at the beach just past sunrise and slotted ourselves into a long line of pickups, Jeeps, Subarus, and the odd minivan or two. Thinking back to when I beached a Rivian R1T at the tail end of our Trans-America Trail expedition a year earlier, I made sure to ask about the conditions on the sand. “You’ll be fine,” the park ranger said while looking over our Defender’s snorkel and all-terrains. “Not so sure about them, though,” as she gestured toward the Toyota Sienna behind me.
Reassured, I pulled past the gate into the parking lot to air down the Defender’s tires. I normally avoid airing down unless it’s absolutely necessary, but the Land Rover’s relatively high 47/50 psi front/rear recommended air pressure coupled with how easy the new onboard air compressor is to operate was motivation enough. I quickly connected the air compressor to each wheel, twisted the dial to drop the pressure to 35 psi, and let it deflate each tire. After confirmation of dropped pressures on the digital dash, we lowered the rear windows to allow the dogs to take their waist gunner positions and hit the beach.
One of the things I love most about driving the Defender is how seamlessly the Auto Terrain Response 2 mode and full-time fourwheel-drive system transition between different surfaces, and that proved to be the case here. The sand at Oceano Dunes varies greatly— it’s soft, silty, and almost desertlike up near the dunes, it gets harder, firmer, and rutted toward the middle of the beach, and it’s soft and wet (duh) down by the waterline. No matter where we were, the Defender’s behavior was faultless. In the few soft sections where we started to sink, all it needed was a little extra throttle while four-wheel drive and Terrain Response sorted things out.
After exploring for a bit and putting the Defender through its paces, we finally found a secluded spot and made it our base camp for the day. Rosie had never been to a beach before, and she looked unsure of the sand between her toes and the loud ocean waves. But after watching Rex howl into the wind, dig after sand crabs, and chase the receding waves, she quickly got the hang of things. Meanwhile, my wife and I made ourselves at home picnicking out of the Defender’s cargo area.
After a few hours, we made our way back to the park entrance, aired up, and pointed the Defender’s nose back toward home. Sunday would no doubt be filled with all the responsibilities we shirked, yet we were thankful for the brief respite made worry-free by our Defender’s baked-in capability.
We have no complaints about our T5’s peppy turbo-four engine. That said, the P8’s electric powertrain is a hoot with its smooth and quick acceleration. In our testing, the P8 sprinted to 60 mph in 4.2 seconds, 2.0 seconds quicker than our T5. The T5 has a slight edge when it comes to ride quality, likely because its 19-inch wheels and taller sidewalls soak up the bumps better than the P8’s 20-inch wheels and lower-profile tires.
The infotainment system provides a notable difference inside. Volvo has begun rolling out its new Google-based system in new or updated vehicles like the P8 Recharge. We’ve found the Sensus system in our T5 to be more than adequate, but after spending a few days in the P8, the Google system is clearly superior. It loads quicker, and using voice commands is surprisingly intuitive and intuitive.
If you’re set on an XC40 and are torn between the gas and electric models, you’re in for a tough choice, assuming the extra $14,000 for the EV is no object. Powertrain and infotainment aside, they’re quite similar. (For 2023, Volvo updated the T5, now called the B5, as a mild hybrid.) The gas-powered XC40 is among the best competitors in its class, but in a few crucial ways, the P8 Recharge is even better.
“The Defender is great for when you want to leave all responsibilities (and pavement) behind.” Christian Seabaugh
“Sometimes the choice to go electric is easy. But Volvo gives consumers much to consider.” Erick Ayapana
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“A (second) year on the Hydrogen Highway with Toyota’s Mirai shows there are still bumps in the road.”
Aaron Gold
Base Price $50,495 As Tested $52,330
Service Life 13 mo/13,822 mi
Average Fuel Econ 67.8 mpg-e
With so many battery electric vehicles (BEVs) hitting the market in recent years, we wanted to check in with the newest hydrogen fuel cell electric vehicles (FCEVs), cars that use a hydrogen fuel cell stack instead of a battery to produce electricity. Have the cars and the infrastructure improved in the five years since we last ran a long-term FCEV? We arranged to spend a year with the freshly redesigned Mirai to find out.
I was chosen as the Mirai’s custodian because I fit Toyota’s customer profile: someone who wants an EV but can’t install a charger at home. Toyota pitches the Mirai as an electric car that is fueled rather than charged, just like a gasoline car and nearly as quickly. We chose a Mirai XLE in Supersonic Red and began driving.
Our Mirai clocked up just 13,882 miles during its year with us. Why so few? First, the nation’s hydrogen infrastructure is still minuscule. Very nearly all (53) of America’s 54 hydrogen stations are in California (the 54th is in Hawaii), and most are clustered around California’s most populous regions. With few stations between or beyond, the Mirai is more of a homebody than a long-distance traveler. Second, I was still working from home. And third, given the unreliability of the fueling network, a lot of staffers were understandably
OPTIONS Advanced Technology package ($1,410: bird’s-eye view cameras, f/r parking assist w/ automated braking, front seat foot Illumination), premium paint ($425)
Problem Areas None
Total Fuel Cost $0 ($2,996 spent against the $15,000 fueling-cost debit card included with purchase or lease)
Maintenance Cost $0 (2x inspection, tire rotation; in-cabin air filter)
Normal Wear $14.99 (wiper blade)
3-Year Residual Value* $21,000 (40%) Recalls Stability control system update
*IntelliChoice data; assumes 42,000 miles at the end of three years.
based on the same platform as the Lexus LS, and it feels more like a Lexus than a Toyota. Believe it or not, this is an area where a lot of EVs get it wrong: With no engine providing a background thrum, road and wind noise can seem disproportionately loud in an electric car. Not so in the Mirai.
One surprising area that drew complaints was interior space. It’s a big car—as long as a Toyota Avalon and an inch wider—but the occupants share the interior with the fuel tanks, the largest of which lives under the broad center console, with the next-biggest under the rear seat. At 5-foot-6, I never found the Mirai particularly cramped, but my 6-foot friends found it awkward to get in and out of. Given the car’s exterior size, they were surprised by how tight the interior felt.
reluctant to trust their transportation prospects to hydrogen. So most of the year it was just me and the Mirai, which suited me just fine—I became a big fan of the car.
Those who did drive it were almost universal in their praise, primarily for the Mirai’s hushed and refined demeanor, which was my favorite aspect, as well. The Mirai is
For me, the biggest issue was range: Toyota promises 402 miles for the XLE (357 for the nicer Limited, which weighs more and has a different wheel/tire combo). Still, even with moderate speeds—my little-old-lady driving habits are one reason I was picked for this assignment—I averaged 331 miles of range per tank (a figure we arrived at by adding the mileage traveled prior to each fill-up to the indicated range remaining). Even allowing for an alleged 20-mile reserve when the range hits 0, that’s significantly less than 402.
That’s not entirely the car’s fault, because the hydrogen fuel stations we used didn’t always deliver a full tank (hydrogen is a gas, so fuel level is determined by pressure; you can’t top off as you can with liquid fuel). Still, in the 72 times we fueled up, there were only three occasions when we left the station with the trip computer showing 350 miles of range or better, with a best-ever fill of 359. Using our aforementioned formula to calculate actual range, our best tank yielded 374 miles.
Of course, all this would be less of an issue if the hydrogen fueling infrastructure were a little more developed. Our loan coincided with a gaggle of new stations being opened by a company called True Zero, something
we took as a promising sign. It wasn’t. We’ve documented the issues before. Suffice it to say, station reliability was our biggest pain point. For the first few months, we found that if one station went down, cars would flock to nearby stations, and they in turn would run out of fuel or drop from the strain of constant use. We saw days when half the stations in California—and thus the country—were out of commission. That said, we saw significant infrastructure improvements over the course of the year. True Zero tripled the capacity of many of its stations, and for the last three months of our loan, I rarely encountered stations that were out of fuel.
Although the cost of hydrogen varied broadly from station to station, it rarely changed; when gas prices spiked, hydrogen didn’t. A typical fill cost $45 to $50, not that it matters, as every Mirai comes with a $15,000 prepaid fuel card. We spent a total of $2,996.37 on fuel, which means our fuel card would last about five years.
What about maintenance? Only a handful of Toyota dealerships sell and service FCEVs, and finding a list is nearly impossible. One Toyota dealership listed the Mirai on its service page and actually let me book an appointment—then called the day before to say it didn’t actually service Mirais.
I prefer to try different dealerships, but I wound up at Santa Monica Toyota for the Mirai’s 5,000- and 10,000-mile services, which
consist primarily of inspections and tire rotation. As they were with our 2016 Mirai, costs were covered under Toyota’s threeyear complimentary service plan. Our only out-of-pocket cost was a new driver-side wiper blade at $14.99. Incidentally, back when we had the 2016 Mirai, the service department used to ask us about our fueling experiences. That didn’t happen with our 2021; perhaps Toyota has heard enough negative feedback that it knows not to ask?
So how does our latest trip on the hydrogen highway compare to our first? No question, the Mirai is improved, particularly in the areas of looks but also in terms of luxury and chassis dynamics. Everyone who drove our Mirai agreed it’s a lovely car … at least when it had full hydrogen tanks.
Does the FCEV have a future? I think it does, though perhaps not as a passenger car. Even with a mature fueling infrastructure, hydrogen-powered vehicles would still face the cramped-interior problem; those big tanks need to go somewhere. The rapid refueling of a hydrogen vehicle certainly beats the pants off state-of-the-art BEV charging, though I expect we’ll see advances in battery tech to change that equation. Where hydrogen may have a brighter future is heavy trucks. Think about the size of battery it would take to move an 80,000pound truck a thousand miles. Hydrogen tanks and a fuel cell stack are significantly smaller and lighter.
Then again, fuel cell trucking would require a nationwide network of stations, which would go a long way toward solving our biggest problem with the Mirai—and that would make life with this very pleasant car infinitely more pleasant.
POWERTRAIN/CHASSIS
DRIVETRAIN LAYOUT
SUSPENSION,
miles
2 years/25,000 miles FUEL CAPACITY 12.3 lb liquid hydrogen + 1.24-kWh battery
EPA CITY/HWY/COMB ECON 76/71/74 mpg-e
EPA RANGE, COMB 402 miles
RECOMMENDED FUEL 700-bar hydrogen gas
ON SALE Now
Tesla is a story stock. It trades higher or lower based on the story that CEO Elon Musk and other Tesla enthusiasts spread about the company’s potential to completely take over the global auto, energy, technology, and transportation industries in the long term.” So wrote Wall Street pundit Wayne Duggan back in 2021, when Tesla was on its way to becoming the world’s first trillion-dollar automaker.
As this is written, Tesla stock, which peaked at $407.36 in November 2021, is trading at little more than $100. In the final three months of 2022, more than $660 billion was wiped off the value of an automaker that was once breathlessly compared with trillion-dollar tech giants Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Facebook. True, all big tech stocks have had a bumpy ride recently. But Tesla’s collapse has been breathtaking.
Much of the market’s infatuation with Tesla has been rooted in the idea that Musk is a different sort of tech titan. The other guys develop software and provide services. Musk makes things, futuristic things such as cars that don’t need gas and rockets that can land back on earth—a real-life Tony Stark.
But the Twitter fiasco has revealed the feet of clay in the Iron Man suit. Put simply, Musk’s tenure as CEO of the social media company for which he engineered a $44 billion takeover last October has proven an unmitigated disaster. Twitter, which in 2021 lost $221 million, is now on track to lose $4 billion a year as advertisers flee a platform whose billionaire boss seems intent on using it to play out an increasingly bizarre psychodrama.
Twitter’s capricious and queasily divisive Musk seems nothing like the clever and inventive entrepreneur who made electric vehicles cool. More crucially, the distracted Musk doesn’t appear that interested in Tesla anymore. That’s not a story investors want to hear, and the collateral damage has been real. However, it could be argued that even at around $100 a share, Tesla is still overvalued. Here’s why.
Analysts have calculated automakers are spending more than half a trillion dollars this decade on new EVs that will hit the market by 2030. But Tesla’s product pipeline looks
desperately bare for an automaker that still began 2023 ostensibly worth more than twice as much as Toyota, more than four times as much as Mercedes-Benz, and seven times as much as General Motors.
Tesla now has one of the oldest EV lineups of any automaker, and there’s no sign of replacements for vehicles that, despite their still impressive performance and range, are starting to look stale and boring, and whose build quality and after-sales service doesn’t reflect their luxury positioning. The long-awaited Cybertruck might appear later this year, and there’s vague talk of a smaller, cheaper Tesla arriving in 2024 or 2025. But these will be the first Teslas in history to enter market segments where rival automakers already offer genuine alternatives. Tesla’s tech is no longer cutting-edge, either. Legacy automakers and startups such as Lucid are spending billions developing new generations of cheaper, more efficient motors and higher-performing battery chemistries that will threaten Tesla’s performance and range advantage and put pressure on the company’s cost structure. Although safe and functional Level 2+ and even Level 3 autonomous systems are now available from other automakers, Tesla’s endlessly hyped Full Self-Driving system, a $15,000 option, remains an unreliable work in progress, years after Musk said owners would be able to use it to earn up to $30,000 a year employing their cars as robotaxis.
In the past, Musk’s slick storytelling may have convinced investors and markets Tesla was a sexy Silicon Valley tech company, a fast-moving disruptor poised to upend an industry more than 100 years old. And Tesla has profited hugely from its first-mover advantage over the past decade. But today it looks increasingly like a regular automaker that’s simply not investing and innovating enough, in the hardware or the software, to create vehicles that will excite customers during the next 10 years.
On that basis, Tesla’s certainly not worth more than Toyota. Indeed, it’s probably not worth more than Mercedes-Benz, or even, perhaps, more than General Motors. That’s the real story.
In the months following Elon Musk’s Twitter acquisition, Tesla stock lost nearly 2/3 of its worth. With new competition from legacy automakers and startups alike, it might still be overvalued.
Money
Tesla is worth a fraction of its peak.
THE NEIGHBOR KID’S
5 TH GRADE GRADUATION
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