Initially it sounds ridiculous to compare the Model S Plaid and Charger—and maybe it’s the g forces talking—but they have a lot more in common than you probably think (aside from the fact we’ve actually compared them before). For starters, both are full-size American four-door sedans. The Charger went into production in 2011, the Model

Combustion engines won’t completely disappear any time soon, if ever. Certain transportation tasks or operating environments simply don’t lend themselves to battery– or hydrogen-powered electric propulsion. A century and a half of research and development has greatly increased the efficiency of combustion engines, and engineers have loads of additional tricks up their sleeves that promise

Driving the new 2021 Ford Bronco Sport is an exercise in explaining what it is and, equally important, what it isn’t. The new Bronco Sport is many things—off-road-capable, great to drive, and well designed—but what it isn’t is the Ford Bronco. I couldn’t drive anywhere in the Bronco Sport without hearing one of the following

Value has long been a hallmark for Toyotas, and their features-per-dollar appeal increases as Toyota Safety Sense (or TSS for short) technologies spread across the automaker’s lineup. Toyota Safety Sense bundles modern driver aids and automated safety systems. These features help ease the work you do behind the wheel and can intervene in dangerous road

Who hasn’t been stuck seething at an interminable red light with zero cross traffic? When this happened one time too many to Uriel Katz, he co-founded Israel-based, Palo Alto, California-headquartered tech startup NoTraffic in 2017. The company claims its cloud- and artificial-intelligence-based traffic control system can halve rush-hour times in dense urban areas, reduce annual

MotorTrend in 2012 teamed with the world’s preeminent real-world on-road emissions testing company—U.K.-based Emissions Analytics—and began emissions-testing many vehicles that pass through our revolving test fleet. Our prime motivation was to measure real-world fuel economy, which we’ve reported in many of our vehicle evaluations as Real MPG. But because Emissions Analytics’ proprietary EQUA testing procedure

“Platform sharing.” Sharing anything suggests altruism or ecological benevolence. Sharing an automotive platform or architecture therefore seems like a good thing, while the closely related phrase, “badge engineering,” is loaded with negative baggage. A Cadillac Cimarron was a cynically badge-engineered Chevy Cavalier unworthy of its wreath and crest, while we’re all thrilled that the fun-loving

Many men have tried to improve Ford. In the modern era, few have had the luxury of sitting back and watching the hits and the money roll in. The latest man in the big Ford CEO chair is automotive industry veteran Jim Farley. Ford has a history of choosing leaders from within who climbed the

I’ve subscribed to the theory that “hydrogen is the fuel of the future (and always will be)” for most of my 30 years on this beat, but a confluence of recent developments suggests maybe we’re nearing a tipping point for the universe’s smallest known molecule. Accelerated development of fuel cells for use in heavy-duty trucking

It’s one thing to build a nation. It’s something else to maintain it. The sorry state of America’s roads and bridges is a case in point. The most recent report by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) suggests 43 percent of the more than 4 million miles of America’s public roadways is in poor

Welcome, tiny percentage of MotorTrend readers who actually read the editor’s monthly musings! Man, are you in for a treat. You’ve probably already noticed something’s different, not quite right. Or … is it so wrong that it couldn’t be more right? What tipped you off? My warm, gentlemanly greeting? Or was it my devil-may-care style

Oh dear. How did we get from there to here? I’m wracking my brain trying to think of a worse dreams-to-reality ratio than what Mercedes did by going from the incredible Vision EQS Concept to the actual EQS. The Lincoln Continental from a few years back, which began as the answer to, “What Would Don

If you’re in the market for a performance-oriented three-row SUV with mainstream badge on its rump, your options are disappointingly limited—there’s the Dodge Durango SRT and the Ford Explorer ST. That’s it. But making choices is hard, and you make enough of them every day, anyway: What’s for dinner? What time should I get up

Ahead of the Mobil 1 Twelve Hours of Sebring this weekend, think back to 1964, when Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase “the medium is the message.” Four years later Colin Chapman, the English engineer and owner of Team Lotus, convinced Imperial Tobacco to part ways with £85,000. With the deal secured, Chapman prior

Virtual CES 2021 sucked as much as Virtual Everything Else did, but compelling news broke regarding lidar and autonomous driving. I’m not dialed in enough to sort lidar hype from heroics, so I connected with Tom Jellicoe, an optics expert at the Technology Partnership, a U.K.-based consultancy. Jellicoe was kind enough to Cambridge-mastersplain these latest

When Donald Trump was elected president four years ago, MotorTrend wrote a critical analysis of what the Trump administration would mean for our way of transport. Republican-leaning readers dared me to deliberate this issue in a similarly critical manner the next time a Democrat resided in the Oval Office. I shall not disappoint. “Corvette Joe”

General Motors has now sold more than a million engines with Dynamic Fuel Management. This riff on cylinder deactivation can shut off any and all cylinders in the V-8 engines powering everything from Chevy Silverado pickups to Cadillac Escalade SUVs. This concept, developed by Tula Technologies and which we covered in depth a few years

According to Malcolm Gladwell’s “10,000 hours” rule, we aren’t born prodigies. We don’t have an innate sense of car control at speed as we first get behind the wheel. But put in enough time, and you can get pretty darn talented. MotorTrend’s four junior staffers are decent drivers, but we wanted to push their envelopes

The automotive industry pundits. Analysts. Tech bloggers. Fellow car journalists. They chided, they derided, they scolded. How could MotorTrend have gotten it so wrong? The idea that Apple would outsource the manufacturing of a self-driving electric vehicle, rather than build a proper car for actual drivers? What daftness. This magazine’s June 2016 cover story, “Hello.

MotorTrend is the number one automotive media destination in the world for a reason: We know what we’re doing. You already know that, though. You’ve trusted us and other brands in the MotorTrend family—such as HOT ROD, Four Wheeler, and Roadkill—for more than 70 years. You’ve also trusted Dax Shepard, Rob Corddry, and Jethro Bovingdon to

Update: This article was originally published on April 14, 2016, and has been updated to include updated market information, as well as information recently reported by Reuters that Apple plans to produce a car by 2024. It’s a moment we’ve all had with an Apple product. When the ordinary awkwardness between you and an electronic device

Michael Faraday discovered solid electrolytes in the 1830s, and the solid-state battery has promised to be the Next Big Electrical Thing almost ever since. The idea frequently makes news that I resist reporting because, to borrow a baseball metaphor, these battery “batters” too often start their home run trot before realizing it’s just a fly

Being so damn tall makes it hard to drive sports cars. There are some I simply can’t physically get inside. That’s one reason why I love the Ford Mustang—it easily fits my 6-foot-10 frame. So, I had to find out if the Mustang Mach-E could match its coupe counterpart’s surprising spaciousness during its stay in our stables. 2021

Look out, the emissions police may soon be coming for your tires and brakes. Now that most noxious fumes and hazardous particulate matter have been cleansed from exhaust pipes, global regulatory agencies that monitor those nasty 2.5-10.0-micron particles that can lodge in your lungs and irritate your eyes, nose, and throat are zeroing in on

Life is awash in sports metaphors. A struggling automaker might be behind the eight ball and throw a Hail Mary with a desperate product launch—which can result in a home run or getting put down for the count. (And yes, I know I’m mixing billiards, football, baseball, and boxing metaphors here.) These clichés are thrown

Quick, look at the picture above. Which of these Volvos is a car, and which is the truck? The Volvo on the left is the V60 Polestar, a fizzing family hauler with 415 hp and 494 lb-ft coursing through its 2.0-liter turbo-four engine and e-motors. It has 5.4 inches of ground clearance and gets 28/33

For the first time in my decade-long tenure at MotorTrend, I began the Car of the Year finalist debate—the one where we pick the winner—having no idea what car would win. In my heart of hearts, I wanted the electric Porsche Taycan to emerge victorious, mostly because the air quality from the seemingly eternal fires

Elon Musk’s original Tesla Roadster used a two-speed transmission. It proved problematic, so he dropped the extra ratio and still delivered cars and SUVs capable of both brutal acceleration and license-endangering top speeds. So, who needs multiple gears? Gearing an electric motor to deliver strong launch torque and then spinning it fast enough for autobahn

NHTSA has been noodling on adding an offset car crash test to its New Car Assessment Program (NCAP) for half a decade. I first discussed what is currently being referred to as the Frontal Oblique test in a 2016 “Technologue.” It involves striking a stationary test vehicle at a 15-degree angle with a moving deformable

You’d think that how we sit in cars wouldn’t be a thing to debate about. You get in, move the seat and steering wheel around, and off you go. But what’s the right way to find your perfect driving position? “Before track driving, I adjust everything to what feels a bit too close. The padding