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There’s no rational decision flowchart that lands you here. No one, least of all Daniel Warner, thinks putting a 27-liter tank engine in a Ford Crown Victoria makes a lick of sense. Petty details like logic and reason won’t stop him, though.”It’s not an intelligent choice of engine if you want to have 2500 hp and race. This is more just, I wanted to do this out of pure passion,” Werner told Road & Track in June 2020. Back then it was just a goal. The car was far from operational. A year later, it’s still got some distance to close, but a new YouTube video shows that the engine is now running. The so-called Meteor Interceptor lives. There’s still some distance to close, of course. The Meteor Interceptor has no interior, an incomplete body, and no transmission. The turbochargers are not hooked up to the mighty tank engine, meaning it’s nowhere near its target power output of 2500hp. Given the idle issues, too, the team likely hasn’t sorted the engine programming. But the progress is astounding. The engine design—penned in 1941—featured magneto ignition. Now it’ll have a custom computer-controlled set of injectors capable of supplying it with 24 liters of fuel per minute. Fuel will be exhausted in four minutes at full throttle. Not to worry, though: It will boil its coolant long before that happens.
If he can solve that, big plans lie in wait. Werner told Road & Track that he intends to bring the Meteor Interceptor to the Nürburgring for a lap at the hands of ‘Ring master Misha Charoudin. Asked about the coolant issue, Werner told us the following in an email:”Well it is only at full throttle that we expect this problem, at normal operations it will work fine. And I don’t think that we will be able to have full throttle for so long on the ring anyway :-D”The plan is ridiculous. But nobody pretended it would make any sense in the first place.

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LiveWire, the newly-formed electric subbrand of Harley-Davidson, has just pulled the cover off of the new LiveWire One. An evolution of the previous LiveWire electric motorcycle, this new bike offers up more usability while also carrying an MSRP much friendlier than before. The LiveWire One is slated to start at $21,999, although a federal tax of $2500 will drop the effective purchase price below $20,000 for customers. That is significantly cheaper than Harley’s first LiveWire product, which carried a base price of $29,799. Despite being a more affordable offering, the LiveWire One will provide customers with some advantages over the company’s early effort. Range is now expected to fall around 146 city miles, a marked improvement over the 110 city miles the previous iteration was able to achieve. No highway range estimates were provided, but expect that figure to fall below that 146 mile figure. LiveWire hasn’t shared many technical details about the bike yet, though the range increase is likely the result of an upgraded battery.

Harley-Davidson

Speaking of the battery, charging the LiveWire One from empty to fully juiced will only take 60 minutes with a DC fast-charger. Should you be short on time, LiveWire says a zero-to-80-percent charge can happen in just 45 minutes on the same DC charger. Aside from fast-charging, other key features include a six-axis inertial measurement unit to aid traction control and ABS.

Ordering for the LiveWire One is officially open, although the new brand is taking a bit of an interesting approach. Only 12 dealerships are authorized to sell the new electric bike, all of which are located in California, Texas, or New York. More dealerships are slated to get access to the LiveWire in the future, though no word yet as to where those dealerships will be located. If you simply can’t wait to peek around the LiveWire One, Harley Davidson will unveil the bike in person at the Northern California International Motorcycle Show on July 18. We expect more information about the bike to come available at time, including performance figures and battery specifications.

Harley-Davidson

The LiveWire One is just the first of several electric motorcycles Harley-Davidson is developing at the moment. While still pricey, the company hopes the new electric bike will spearhead its green efforts. There is no need for the V-twin faithful to worry, however, as Harley-Davidson has shown no interest in fully ditching gasoline quite yet. At least for now.

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The Volvo V90, which had been only available by special order, will not be sold in the United States for the 2022 model year.The base variants of the V60, which featured the T5 powertrain, will no longer be available in the U.S. next year.Cross Country versions of both, with body cladding and raised ride height, will stick around, as does the performance plug-in-hybrid version of the V60, the Recharge T8 Polestar.Many of the greatest Volvos have been station wagons, from the dependable 240 to the athletic 850 T-5R estate and its British Touring Car Championship race-car counterpart. Sadly, for 2022, American car buyers will have fewer options when it comes to Volvo’s beautiful wagons—on Thursday, Motor Trend reported that the V90 was getting the axe and then on Friday Roadshow by CNET discovered that base versions of the V60 were being killed off as well.

Volvo

The V90 had been available on a special-order basis, but with dealers not stocking them in showrooms it’s unsurprising to see the wagon fall by the wayside. The handsome V90 was offered in two configurations: the front-wheel-drive T5 was powered by a turbocharged four-cylinder while the more expensive T6 featured both a turbocharger and supercharger, as well as all-wheel drive. The unique T6 powertrain does live on in the V90 Cross Country, a lifted version of the wagon that masquerades as an SUV for added marketability, which Volvo confirmed to CNET will continue to be sold in the United States.

The V60 is also not entirely gone—only the T5 powertrain, which was exclusively front-wheel-drive on the V60, is being discontinued. This means that the V60 Recharged T8 Polestar, a 415-hp plug-in hybrid with the turbocharged and supercharged inline-four, will live on, as will the AWD Cross Country variants, which use the T5 setup. The V90 and base versions of the V60 will be missed, but at least Volvo’s wagon duo will live on in some form.
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Automakers spend fortunes making car commercials to run on the 364 days of the year that the Super Bowl does not. This week, the Window Shop crew answered the challenge of choosing the best commercial and finding a car for sale to match.Road & Track staffer John Pearley Huffman channeled both Joey Capparella’s normcore energy and Tony Quiroga’s love of cream of mushroom soup (gray-on-gray) cars. Starting with Honda’s 2005 “Cog” commercial, he sourced a 2005 Acura TSX. Yes, Honda used its award-winning two-minute spot to advertise the European Accord wagon that never came to the U.S. But Pearley’s TSX, the sedan version of that Euro offering, remains a Window Shop favorite even though it’s an automatic. The 10Best winner with the 2.4-liter four cylinder even earns thoroughly questionable associations with Porsche and Alfa Romeo.

Deputy testing director K.C. Colwell drove back to the 20th century for Lincoln’s 1994 “Raising the Bar” commercial that hawked the Lincoln Mark VIII. The ad probably should have been named “Lowering the Car,” but Colwell found a surprisingly creamy 1995 example—literally—with just 11,500 miles that hadn’t fallen either on hard times or on its air suspension. What the commercial failed to note is that the car that raised the bar helped prematurely end the Lincoln Continental lineup. Senior editor Joey Capparella brought Fargo and The Big Lebowski to Window Shop with his Volkswagen GTI “Unpimp Your Auto” advert from 2006, the ad fronted by a Swedish actor, Peter Stormare, who portrays anything but Swedish characters. Capparella’s four-door 2008 GTI—a slightly racy option for him—has just 15,000 miles, asks $15,000, and begs questions about reliability, German engineering, engine codes, and Window Shop fairness.Contributor Jonathon Ramsey, as usual, took a meandering and international trip before settling on a 2005 Mercedes-Benz E-class commercial about a woman ordering a burger in a library. Because this challenge had no budget, he took the opportunity to indulge in another high-dollar option, this time a 2016 Mercedes-AMG E63 wagon with all its badges in the right places for $69,000 in cash or crypto. The commercial predates the “This is an Arby’s” and “This is a Wendy’s” memes by more than six years, which did nothing to help him sell his pick.Deputy editor Tony Quiroga went back to an ad that time forgot from the Decade of Greed to create the most aggressively American combination of commercial. GM’s “Mine’s Bigger” spot for the 1987 Cadillac Brougham sees two gentlemen arguing over size, one of them taking victory with an extra two inches. Quiroga, who found that very year and model, had a long list of arguments to support his pick. Alas, two inches were worth a lot more in 1987 than they are today, but it seems not everyone got that memo when it came time to vote.

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Car and Driver—that’s us—named the Ford Mustang Mach-E the winner of our inaugural EV of the Year award. The Mach-E faced off against 11 competitors, which represented every on-sale EV we could get our hands on. Over the course of three weeks of testing and evaluating—including a 1000-mile road trip­—the Mach-E offered a rewarding driving experience and usable range at a competitive price. Plus, it looks great. Read our coverage so you can be informed when you tell us why we’re wrong.This Week in SheetmetalToyota released interior photos of the TRD Pro edition of the next-generation Tundra pickup. The pictures show a large center infotainments screen and a few TRD-specific features including a red-trimmed steering wheel and a light bar mounted in the grille. We’ll see the whole truck, including non-TRD models, before the end of the year.Polestar showed a hopped-up prototype of its Polestar 2 at the Goodwood Festival of Speed in England. The prototype has 475 horsepower, 68 hp more than the production 2, and borrows its tires and front brakes from the much pricier Polestar 1. We wouldn’t be surprised to see some elements from the show car trickle down to the for-sale 2.

Lotus

Lotus has unveiled its last gasoline-powered car, the Emira. It’s a Boxster fighter inspired by Lotus’s electric Evija supercar and will come with either a 360-hp AMG-sourced four-cylinder or a 400-hp Toyota V-6. You probably won’t see many on the road, but they’ll be out there starting early next year.Bentley is marching forward with its plan to be fully electric by 2030 with the introduction of the Flying Spur plug-in hybrid. The new Spur will have a Bentley-appropriate 536 hp plus 25 miles of EV range. We don’t know how much this version of Bentley’s sedan will cost, but for reference, the non-plug-in Flying Spur tops out at $219,425.Three’s Company

Stellantis hosted a virtual EV Day this week in which it announced plans to electrify each of its 14 global brands. The big news for Americans was the word that Dodge will build an electric muscle car, which it says will be the first of its kind (as long as no one else beats them to it—Dodge’s EV won’t arrive until 2024). Meanwhile, Ram announced that it too will build a full-size electric pickup, following the internet-breaking launch of the Ford F-150 Lightning and a light-on-details acknowledgment from Chevy that it is working on an EV Silverado. Ram says its EV 1500 will offer a currently unheard-of 500 miles of driving range when it hits the market in 2024. The announcement video showed two other truck-shaped objects covered with drapes, perhaps a hint that Ram is planning to expand its pickup lineup.FSD DayNot to be overshadowed, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said on Twitter that his company’s Full Self Driving (FSD) Beta 9 software will be available for download in California starting at midnight on Friday, though only for Tesla drivers who are already using the previous version of the test software. Musk’s announcement warned drivers to keep in mind that the software is still in beta, which is to say, not a final product, though he says that if all goes well the release could enter its final, public phase within a month.
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Tesla says the FSD software can navigate most driving tasks, including intersections. CJ Moore, who directs Tesla’s Autopilot software program, told officials with the California Department of Motor Vehicles this spring that some of Musk’s claims about fully autonomous Teslas “[do] not match engineering reality.” Decide for yourself whether the eccentric billionaire or the engineer is more reliable. Further ReadingThe Polestar 2 prototype wasn’t the only thing for show at Goodwood this year. One EV concept would filter particulate matter out of the air as it drives, making it carbon negative. Take a look at the exceptionally odd China-bound Airo.If you’re dreading an eventual return to your pre-pandemic commute, here’s some advice from Bloomberg that’s either overly earnest or sneakily satirical.Read in the New York Times about Volkswagen’s decision to sell a 55 percent stake in Bugatti to exotic EV maker Rimac.Or, also in the Times, about the fatal Autopilot-involved crashes that make some people nervous about Tesla’s driver -assistance systems. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) said last month that it will now require automakers to report crashes that involve a car using their advanced driver assistance or self-driving features.

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Jeep released the video below as part of its parent company’s Stellantis EV Day. It shows a two-door Wrangler EV, which looks similar to this year’s Magneto concept, and a four-door model that appears related to the 2017 Safari concept.Part of the video events are dated 2025 and show a two-door Wrangler EV using biometric recognition, peer-to-peer charging, and drone pairing.Later the video shifts to 2030, where the four-door Wrangler EV is seen driving autonomously off-road while the owners lie in the vehicle watching the stars through a panoramic sunroof.On Thursday, at parent company Stellantis’s EV Day event, Jeep declared that it will have an electrified model in every segment it competes in by 2025. Jeep already builds a plug-in-hybrid version of the Wrangler called the 4xe. But according to the company’s statement, the Wrangler will need to morph into an electric vehicle if it is to survive beyond this decade. While Jeep didn’t explicitly debut a Wrangler EV at the event, this detailed video released by the company clearly promises one, along with drone pairing and autonomous off-roading capability.
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The video starts in 2021, following a seemingly always happy couple and their incredibly cute dog as they park and plug in a Wrangler 4xe at a charging station in the wilderness. The timeline then fast-forwards to 2025—now the man is seen proposing while the couple are submerged in a darkened pool and what appears to be an electric Wrangler lurks in the background. This two-door model is painted white with the word “Freedom” emblazoned on the side of the hood. Since Jeep’s new slogan is “Zero Emission Freedom,” the implication is that the vehicle has an electric powertrain. Jeep seems to confirm that with the text “Concept BEV model shown” at the bottom of the screen. This two-door looks strikingly similar to the Magneto, an electric Wrangler concept released at the 2021 Easter Jeep Safari in Moab, Utah, and it may just be the Magneto with new hood graphics.

Jeep

The “2025” portion of the video reveals some interesting upcoming features. First, this future Wrangler is equipped with biometric recognition—in the video, the car recognizes the man’s face, unlocking and starting the Wrangler in advance. The video also shows peer-to-peer charging, with the woman plugging the white Wrangler into a blue model for some extra juice. This segment ends by displaying the future Wrangler’s drone pairing capabilities, with the couple’s drone flying just in front of their Wrangler, providing extra light as they traverse an off-road trail through the night.

Jeep

The video then jumps ahead five years to 2030. Now the couple is seen camping next to a four-door model, which looks similar to the 2017 Safari concept from Moab, with transparent doors and a three-section roof rack. This model is clearly intended to indicate it’s an EV, with “Zero Emission” printed along the side sill. Jeep then shows the Wrangler piloting itself around the off-road trails, much to the surprise of another Jeep owner driving in the other direction, suggesting that the Wrangler will be capable of driving autonomously off-road by 2030. Jeep then promotes flat-seat stargazing, showing the couple lying in the Wrangler watching the skies above as the Jeep drives them to their destination.

Jeep notes at the bottom of the screen that “future models and features may vary,” meaning that the timelines for the Wrangler EV and futuristic technologies seen throughout the video are not promises. Still, the video shows that Jeep is plotting a Wrangler EV, gives us a taste of what it may look like, and previews some neat features that will enhance off-roading in the future.
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Mazda is recalling 260,915 Mazda3 cars from the 2004 through 2007 model years to fix a problem with the logo on the steering wheel’s airbag module.In the event of a crash that causes the driver’s airbag to deploy, the plastic logo may shatter, sending fragments throughout the vehicle and potentially causing injury.The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) said in its report that Mazdas built after June 2006 received improved steering-wheel logos, so they’re not subject to the problem. More than a quarter-million Mazda3 cars are being recalled in the United States to fix a problem with a logo that can shatter in the event of a driver’s airbag deployment. The problem affects cars from 2004 through 2007 model years only and involves the Mazda logo on the steering-wheel airbag module.Mazda issued a statement saying the problem is “due to an improper material specification” that can cause the plastic steering-wheel logo to “become brittle over time.” In mid-2006, the automaker changed to a higher-quality logo that, it says, will not be subject to the problem.In a defect report, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) said Mazda received the first report of an occupant sustaining facial injuries because of this defect in September 2015. Since then there have been eight incidents, all outside the U.S., between then and September 2019, and two lawsuits have been filed inside the U.S. claiming injuries because of the problem.Mazda will replace the airbag module cover on affected vehicles but will not replace the airbag or inflator, NHTSA said. Customers will be notified about the recall starting at the end of August. Meanwhile, owners can check Mazda’s own recall site or the NHTSA recall website for details and to see if their vehicle is involved.

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A Polestar 2 prototype has been revealed at the Goodwood Festival of Speed, showing up with 68 additional ponies for a total of 476 horsepower.The experimental car swipes the Pirelli P Zero Rosso tires and Akebono front brakes from the $156,500 Polestar 1 and the carbon-fiber front strut bar from the Volvo S60 Polestar Engineered.The Öhlins dampers are 30 percent stiffer on the prototype, and Polestar has also tighened the springs by 80 percent up front and 40 percent in back.With a zero-to-60-mph time of 4.1 seconds and 100 mph arriving in 10.5 seconds in our testing, the Polestar 2 is no slouch. Still, Polestar decided to surprise us by bringing an upgraded performance-oriented prototype of its electric hatchback to this year’s Goodwood Festival of Speed.

Polestar

Built on the long range, dual-motor version of the 2, the two motors now churn out a combined 476 horsepower in this example, 68 horsepower more than the standard car. The 2 also gains some attitude thanks to a slightly wider track and a ride height about an inch lower. Under widened fender flares sit 275/30R-21 Pirelli P Zero Rosso tires from the $156,500 Polestar 1, and the prototype also borrows the Polestar 1’s six-piston Akebono front brakes.

This version of the Polestar 2 should also be nimbler, with the springs stiffened by 80 percent up front and 40 percent at the rear and the Öhlins dampers tightened by 30 percent. The 2 prototype also borrows from the Volvo S60 Polestar Engineered, adding its carbon-fiber front suspension strut bar, with a custom rear strut bar built to complement it. Visual changes are minor. Along with the more aggressive stance, there are redesigned front and rear bumpers, and the car is painted in Snow Matte with a Magnesium Matte racing stripe and the number 2 emblazoned on the hood. Polestar suggests that this prototype is just an engineering exercise, but it wouldn’t be too surprising to see some of these updates on a production car down the road.
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