• Here’s a clever 1960s solution to last-mile mobility: A fizzy little 53cc motorbike that folds up into its own carrying case for portability.• Often mistakenly thought to be part of Subaru’s history, this scooter has roots in early Nissan heritage and Hitachi aircraft.• This Bring a Trailer auction ends January 15.There’s a childlike wonder to folding mobility, be it Honda’s Motocompo scooter, the WWII British paratrooper Welbike, or even Mazda’s ill-fated suitcase car. Up for auction this week on Bring a Trailer—which, like Car and Driver, is part of Hearst Autos—is a combination barstool and minibike, straight out of the 1960s, with some pint-size two-stroke fun that packs up into its own carrying case.Bring a TrailerBring a TrailerIt’s a Go-Devil (not to be confused with the early four-cylinder Jeep engine of the same name). With a bright-red exposed frame, a 53cc two-stroke single-piston engine, and 5-inch wheels, it’s pocket-size hilarity that folds up into a little cube. Store it in your trunk and, when you’re ready to use it, unfold it, pull-start the engine, and go zipping around the paddock or parking lot with the kind of grin you haven’t felt since borrowing a friend’s minibike on your tenth birthday.Bring a TrailerThe Fuji Go-Devil is a not-infrequent listing on Bring A Trailer. This example is the seventh such scooter to cross the BaT block in the past year, but it is a pretty exceptional one, featuring fresh powdercoating, new seat foam, new tires, and new wheel bearings. It’s ready to roll.Go-Devils were exported to North America from Japan from 1964 to 1967. Because the company that manufactured them was called Fuji Motors, there is a tendency to conflate its origins with Fuji Heavy Industries, the parent company of Subaru. Indeed, at the same time the folding Go-Devil was being made, FHI was producing the Fuji Rabbit, one of the first Japanese scooters able to approach 60 mph. The Fuji Rabbit resembles a duck crossed with a Vespa and is unrelated to the Go-Devil.Instead, to dig up the Go-Devil’s parentage, we have to delve back into the primordial soup of Japan’s bubble-car era. As in postwar Germany, many former aircraft manufacturers turned to the production of tiny proto-cars, designed to sip fuel in an era of rationed gasoline.One such manufacturer was the Hitachi aircraft company, which built engines for wartime trainers and bombers. Forced to shift its efforts to peacetime mobility, Hitachi Aviation changed its name to Tokyo Gas and Electric Manufacturing Company, and it started building 60cc engines for various applications, including motorcycles. At the same time, a former subsidiary of Nissan called Fuji Motors had lucrative contracts for refurbishing and repairing the vehicles of the U.S. occupying forces. The two companies merged. Engines were provided to outside motorcycle companies and also used in the in-house brands FMC and Gasuden.Fuji CabinBrendan McAleerFlying FeatherBrendan McAleerOne of the best-known automotive products of Fuji Motors is the wonky little Fuji Cabin, which looks like someone fitted wheels to one of Gru’s Minions. Penned by the oft-overlooked Ryuichi Tomiya, an early Nissan designer sometimes called the “Leonardo da Vinci of Japan,” the Fuji Cabin was tiny and cleverly constructed but not ultimately a success. Consider it a cousin to the BMW Isetta or Messerschmitt Kabinenroller, but one that never got off the ground.Tomiya had designed Nissans before WWII and was a contemporary and friend of Yutaka Katayama, the “Mr. K.” of Datsun 240Z fame. Before the Cabin, the two had collaborated on a very light prototype car called The Flying Feather, considered an early indication of Katayama’s forward thinking.To come back to the Go-Devil, its scooter heritage is thus tied to a thoroughly inventive period in Japanese automotive history, long before the government moved to consolidate a constellation of car companies into a handful of mega-conglomerates. In the mid-1960s, FMC and Gasuden were a household (in Japan, anyway) supplier of small two-stroke engines for chainsaws, scooters, and all manner of applications. FMC/Gasuden was eventually snapped up by the heavy equipment manufacturer Komastu, and the motorcycle engine department was spun out and much later acquired by Husqvarna. So, the Go-Devil has nothing to do with Subaru but is fascinating in its own right. As a product, it is fun to ride, folds away, and is a wonderful conversation piece. It’s also a link to a time in Japanese automotive history when innovators were just throwing things at the wall and seeing what stuck. More

Back in 1909, in the contested Alsatian French/German border town of Molsheim, the erudite artisans of the Milanese Bugatti family—son Ettore, backed by father Carlo—acquired a factory to begin producing their namesake automobiles. Engineered and designed to be the fastest and the loveliest cars in the world, intended to compete with Bentleys on the track and Rolls-Royces at the opera, Bugattis earned a name that soon became synonymous with speed, beauty, and exclusivity.

Bugatti Automobiles

This position was cultivated through the careful and early use of advertising, marketing, and promotional film materials, touting the cars’ careful construction and racing success. To further impress the aristocrats and nouveau riches in his demographic crosshairs, in 1928, company founder Ettore Bugatti purchased a mid-19th century Château adjoining his factory. Here, he entertained investors, hosted dinners and events, and met with clients to spec forthcoming cars and hand over their finished vehicles. He even fielded solicitous visits from prospective buyers.

“A story I’ve heard is that a potential customer once arrived in a taxi because his car would not start—it was cold out and the customer did not have a heated garage,” said Luigi Galli, the brand’s heritage and certification specialist, who toured us around the Château and its grounds, owned again by Bugatti since the marque’s 1998 revival as part of the VW Group. “And Ettore Bugatti would not sell the man a car, and said something like, ‘If you do not have a heated garage, perhaps you cannot afford a Bugatti.'”The Château serves much the same functions now. Brand club meetings and anniversary celebrations are held on the grounds. Customers meet with designers to configure, reconfigure, and take delivery of their seven- or eight-figure hypercars. And private luncheons and dinners are served. However, the majority of the fiscal vetting takes place elsewhere. “We meet with customers here who are in touch with our dealers,” Galli said. “Our dealers must make sure the customer is ready.”

Bugatti Automobiles

Because it was (and remains) a long trip to Molsheim, back in the day, visitors often spent the night in one of the Château’s lavishly decorated rooms. (Members of the Bugatti family also designed and produced opulent furniture.) But now, things have changed. The Château lacks accommodations. The first floor features a single ballroom-sized space containing historical displays and exhibits. And the upstairs levels are similarly open, occupied by the brand’s sales, statistical analysis, and heritage teams.

Michael Shaffer

Michael Shaffer

During our exclusive visit to the grounds, we spent the night on the front lawn in a geodesic plastic glamping tent. It was furnished with branded objects from the Bugatti Home Collection—including cashmere blankets, weighty leather chairs, and scented candles—as well as items decidedly not from the Bugatti Home Collection, such as a pair of portable air conditioners defeating the stifling European heatwave, and a bottle of French whiskey we nicked from the greenhouse after a game of billiards on a $300,000 Bugatti-branded pool table. This temporary setup reflects the fact that contemporary Bugatti clients do not desire, or require, local overnight accommodations. “Our customers are busy, so they either fly their jet into the Strasbourg airport or land their helicopter on a pad we have on-site—it’s very noisy, but you get used to it,” Galli said. They usually arrive around 9:00 am, are chauffeured to the premises, enjoy a test drive, meet with the designers in the configuration rooms to spec their cars, and then are served lunch in one of the renovated historical outbuildings. After four or five hours, they depart. (Because we know you want to know, Porsche Panamera sedans were previously used as airport shuttles, but have recently been supplanted by Cayenne SUVs. “They have more space,” Galli said. Still, some customers from Dubai prefer to bring in their own vans.)When partaking of a test drive—as we did, blasting around Molsheim in a black-over-caramel Chiron Super Sport—clients are paired with a professional driver. Riding right seat during our dalliance was Andy Wallace, a Le Mans, Daytona, and Sebring-winning racer, and the man who famously piloted a Chiron to over 300 mph on a closed circuit. Though the folks who buy Bugattis tend to own dozens of other extreme vehicles, they may still be unaccustomed to driving a car with the Chiron’s outrageous power, and capacity for placing that power on the roadway.“They get out on these roads, and they drive too fast,” Wallace said, laughing, as we plowed through the vineyards, roundabouts, and plane tree-lined allees that dot the local countryside. “And then, if I take them on a track, they drive too slow.” We can relate. The Chiron’s capabilities—which make a 777 at takeoff feel comparatively sluggish—confound automotive logic.

Enes Kucevic Photography

The grounds also host Bugatti’s heritage collection. This includes a diminutive Type 35 racecar in classic French Blue, a Brobdingnagian two-tone eight-figure Type 41 (Royale) with bulletproof windows and a 12.3-liter straight-8, a supercharged dark-blue Type 51 racer (which we had the good fortune of driving LINK), and a teensy Type 56 one-off, an electric car that Ettore built in 1931 to drive around the factory and hound his workers. “He used to ride a horse,” Galli said, “but it was too noisy and they could hear him coming, and had time to stop messing around.”The original Bugatti factory, which is just 1000 feet from the Château, is now owned by a company that produces components for the aviation industry. But when VW purchased the brand, in the late 90s, it constructed a state-of-the-art atelier on site. Clients can stop by the spotless, silent, brightly lit space when they visit and witness the progress of their, and other venal oligarchs’, extortionate vehicles. “Nothing is manufactured here, it is all just assembled,” Wallace said, as he led us on a tour.

Bugatti Automobiles

Michael Shaffer

Every component seems made of something superlative and unobtainable, like Finnish glass, Austrian bull-hide, or 3-D printed titanium. The assembly tolerances are so tight that the actions of each worker are monitored by Bluetooth-enabled tools. Torque settings and usernames are uploaded to the cloud, so if an exhaust hanger comes undone at 250 mph, Bugatti knows just who to blame. “When customers visit, they’re allowed to put in a screw,” Wallace said. “But as soon as they leave, we back it right back out again and put it in properly.” The Château and its grounds weren’t always quite this lovely. When the Nazis invaded France in 1940, the Alsace region was among the first to fall. The Bugatti Château and factory were occupied by the Germans, and the site was used to produce componentry for the war effort. “The Nazis destroyed many cars for parts, for munitions,” Galli said. The Bugatti family fled to Paris. But, according to Galli, because Ettore Bugatti had never renounced his Italian citizenship, and his factory fell into the hands of the Germans, he was prosecuted after the war as an Axis collaborator. Whether there was any truth to this, we cannot confirm, but after years of legal effort, he was eventually exonerated. He died almost immediately afterward.Bugatti’s heirs attempted to develop cars in the post-war era, but the efforts came to naught, and the company went bankrupt in 1957. Its sad remains were acquired by the ravaged bones of Hispano Suiza, but that company soon expired as well. Once the Château exited private ownership, and no one was paying taxes on or maintaining it, the property reverted to the local municipality. “It was owned by the village and was completely abandoned,” Galli said. “There were homeless people living in it.” When VW acquired the Bugatti brand and purchased the Château, there wasn’t even a floor inside. A gut renovation brought it up to its current standard, but the neighborhood isn’t exactly exclusive. A McDonald’s sits just outside the gates.Recently, Croatian electric supercar startup Rimac purchased a controlling stake in Bugatti and is constructing a factory and modern campus for the merged Bugatti-Rimac marque outside of Zagreb. Coincidentally, there is a castle on the grounds of this property, and it is being converted into a client experience center, modeled very much on Ettore’s original concept, and the extant brand’s contemporary one. Before we finished our conversation, we asked Galli if his heritage collection and these activities will be moving to Croatia to join the workings of its new battery-powered overlords. His face contorted like a cartoon character who had just drunk a liter of lemon juice. “Bugatti is in Molsheim,” he said. “Bugatti will always be in Molsheim.”

Enes Kucevic Photography

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A Connecticut dealer just sold a brand-new Lotus Evora S coupe after having it in stock for seven years.
We’re calling this the oldest new car sold in the U.S. Prove us wrong! The 2014 model now has an expired warranty, and it was sold for $20,000 under sticker.
Don’t worry, dealer Steve Plona’s got other Lotus cars for sale, including the next-oldest: a 2018 Evora 400.
Steve Plona just sold a new Lotus Evora—and it took him only seven years to do it.
Omitting the last Lexus LFA that’s presumably still out there, this 2014 Evora S 2+2 was unofficially the oldest new car for sale in America until a few days ago. How on earth could a $90,000 sports car sit unsold in Connecticut, a state brimming with wealthy sports-car owners, under three U.S. presidents? Forget a moment that it’s a new Lotus—an obscurity that doesn’t quite age like a good French champagne—and instead picture this white-on-black coupe as one man’s quiet dissent.
“It was a protest to some schemes of the pricing people had,” said Plona, general manager for Secor Lotus in New London. “I think it’s an undervalued brand.”

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The buyer was an Elise owner from Long Island, New York, who claimed the car for about $70,000, he said. The factory warranty is expired. The tires, engine oil, and battery are original. But that sounds worse than it is. Plona said he plugged in a trickle charger, overfilled the tires to avoid rot, and changed all fluids except for the synthetic oil, which he kept for the new owner to change out at the 1000-mile engine break-in. Every so often, Plona would take the Evora out from climate-controlled storage to let it run. The odometer clocked less than 100 miles.

Secor Lotus

“There were a lot of dealers that were deeply discounting those cars,” he said. “I thought that was hurting the brand.”

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2020 Lotus Evora GT

Plona’s discount, seven years on, is roughly what many Lotus dealers were doling out in 2014. Steep depreciation and a near-invisible presence have made modern life hard for Lotus dealers. Yet the U.S. is the company’s number-two market behind Germany, and North America is the number-one region. Lotus sales were great in 2020—a couple hundred, according to Plona—and so were his dealership sales: seven, both new and used.

Secor Lotus

It’s not like Lotus the company has been in a hurry. The Evora’s door card shows a December 2013 build date, noting the airbag exemption that would expire shortly after. Lotus didn’t install a passenger airbag with a child sensor in time, so it stopped importing cars into the U.S. for an entire year. In 2014, we asked then CEO Jean-Marc Gales about this little problem, who “insisted there is enough inventory of ’14-spec Evoras to meet demand until the new model arrives.” Lord, was Gales right.
When the Evora debuted in 2010, Lotus was on top of the world supplying Tesla with Elise bodies. The British automaker soon promised a five-car lineup and made music producer Swizz Beatz a vice-president. Then the world fell. The company’s board fired the CEO and went without one for nearly two years. Its two prime cars, the Elise and Exige, failed to meet U.S. emissions and safety rules. They left the U.S. in 2011 and only returned five years later as track-only specials. Chinese automaker Geely bought Lotus from a Malaysian investment group in 2017 and now promises a 2000-hp electric hypercar.
“People in the know, they know what the brand is and its storied past,” Plona said. But there aren’t many, which means Plona will happily valet cars for service—one customer lives more than 100 miles away in Massachusetts—and keep those people from buying a Porsche.
Plona’s devotion to customers and refusal to underprice might make him this country’s staunchest Lotus advocate, or maybe he’s just the rare car salesman who exercises patience. He loves the Evora. He’s got seven new GT models in stock, and already he’s on to the next long game: a 2018 Evora 400 in custom Red Velvet paint. Perhaps it might be yours in another few years.

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Hyundai has revealed the global version of the new Elantra N high-performance sedan. U.S. specs will be shared at the New York auto show next month. It’s powered by a turbocharged 2.0-liter four-cylinder engine that produces 286 horsepower with an N Grin Shift overboost function. The 2022 Elantra N should arrive in the U.S. by the end of the year or early next year starting at around $30,000.Hyundai is pushing its high-performance N subbrand into more relevance with the new Elantra N. It joins the Veloster N hatchback and Kona N crossover in the Korean automaker’s lineup as the first full-blown N sedan model. The car you see here is the global version of the Elantra N, but Hyundai confirmed it’s coming to the U.S. and that we will learn more about the car that’s headed stateside when it makes its North American debut in August at the New York auto show.
All three existing N models share a turbocharged 2.0-liter four-cylinder engine that produces 276 horsepower and 289 pound-feet of torque in the Elantra N under normal operation. It’s available with either a six-speed manual or eight-speed dual-clutch automatic gearbox. An overboost function (only on DCT-equipped cars) provides an extra 10 horsepower for 20 seconds and is engaged via a button on the steering wheel. Elantra Ns with the dual-clutch come with a launch control function, and Hyundai claims a zero-to-62 mph time of 5.3 seconds with a top speed of 155 mph. Like the other N models, it has a variable exhaust system, but Elantra N models add a virtual engine sound with three adjustable settings.

The Elantra N comes with an electronically controlled limited-slip differential and an independent rear suspension like the less powerful N-Line model (base Elantra models use a torsion beam in the rear). N models also use an integrated drive axle that is stiffer and lighter than a conventional drive axle. They get 19-inch wheels wrapped in 245/35 Michelin Pilot Sport 4S tires and 14.2-inch rotors.
The Elantra N’s digital gauge cluster displays oil and coolant temps, torque, and boost pressure. And, like the new Kona N, there’s an N mode lap timer integrated into the infotainment that can be linked to a mobile app, too. Optional N bucket seats add a lit-up N emblem in the headrest. The Elantra N should arrive in the U.S. by the end of the year or early next year, and we expect it to start at around $30,000.
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More than 11,000 BMW iX xDrive50 and iX M60 from 2022 through 2024 model years are under recall due to a cruise control software error. Documents filed with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) explain that the driver can inadvertently hit the cruise control button and activate the system. BMW will notify owners starting July 28. BMW of North America has issued a recall for approximately 11,180 iX xDrive50 and iX M60 electric SUVs because of a potential safety concern involving the cruise control.According to BMW, when turning the steering wheel at low speed, the driver is at risk of inadvertently contacting the cruise control button. This complication could lead to unexpected acceleration or deceleration, although the cruise control icon will become visible and the driver can deactivate the system by either braking or pressing the cruise control on/off button. BMWSeparately, more than 14,000 BMW EVs, including about 5000 iX SUVs, were recalled earlier this year over a problem with short-circuiting in the high-voltage battery, as well as a few dozen 2022 iX EVs for a problem with battery manufacturing that could allow debris to enter the battery. In both cases, BMW issued Stop Drive orders until the problems could be fixed under recall.For the current issue, BMW will begin notifying vehicle owners in July about the need for a software update. In the meantime, iX owners can check the NHTSA recalls website to see if their vehicle is included in the recall.Other Recent RecallsSummer Editorial InternAlessandra Kaestner, a Chicago native, has always been interested in journalism. She remembers listening to NPR every day before school with her parents and trying to race her dad to get the New York Times from the front door. Alessandra continued her passion for journalism by working at her university’s newspaper during her first year and into her sophomore year: the Cornell Daily Sun. She is majoring in psychology and philosophy and wants to explore law and journalism. Although she does not have a lot of background in the world of cars, Alessandra is interested in expanding her knowledge and gaining experience. She could not be more excited to work with so many talented people at Car and Driver. More