Motor News

Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced late Sunday the Model S Plaid+, the most potent version of the car’s upcoming performance-oriented tri-motor “Plaid” variant, will not make it to production.
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In a series of tweets, Musk announced the Model S Plaid+ had been canceled because there’s “no need” for it in the lineup, claiming the regular Plaid model is “just so good.” The Model S Plaid+ was set to be the most capable car from Tesla yet. The company never released exact specifications, but said it would have over 1100 horsepower, be quicker than the regular Plaid model, and have more range—520 miles on a single charge versus just 390 miles for the standard Plaid model.

Musk sent a follow-up tweet promising the regular Plaid model will still do zero t0 60 in under two seconds (Tesla’s site claims an exact 0-60 of 1.99 seconds). Horsepower is set at 1020, and the quarter-mile comes in a claimed 9.23 seconds at 155 mph. So while it won’t have the range, the standard Plaid should still be a rocket ship. Tesla originally priced the Model S Plaid+ at $139,990 before hiking it up to $149,990 in March. Pricing for the regular Plaid model will start at $119,900 before any EV incentives or options. According to Tesla’s configurator, deliveries should start sometime in June.

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Ford builds the Mustang at two plants, with the gas model being made in Michigan and the electric Mach-E coming from Mexico.So far in 2021, the production numbers are clear: 27,816 Mach-Es and 26,089 gas-powered Mustangs.The ICE Mustang still outsells the Mach-E by around 3 to 1 in the U.S., but that’s not the case in EV-forward places like Norway. If you’re looking for yet one more sign that the automotive industry is making a shift to electric vehicles, look no further than Ford’s 2021 production numbers. So far this year, Ford has built more electric Mustang Mach-E crossovers than gas-powered Mustang coupe and convertible models.Ford builds vehicles with the Mustang name in two locations. Gas-powered Mustang two-doors are made at the Flat Rock Assembly Plant in Michigan. The electric Mustang Mach-E crossover is built at the Cuautitlan Stamping and Assembly Plant in Mexico. As first reported by Bloomberg, through the end of May, Ford built 27,816 Mach-Es and 26,089 standard Mustangs. The Mach-E was introduced last year, so this is the first time Ford has made more electric than gas ones.

These are global production figures, not sales numbers, of course. But Ford is seeing strong Mach-E sales in other countries, especially Norway, which has long been a leader in EV sales thanks to strong government incentives. Those incentives helped the Mach-E become the best-selling vehicle in Norway May, which was the first full month the EV was available there. The Mach-E sold 1384 units in Norway last month, about 10 percent of all vehicles sold there. Second and third place were held by plug-in vehicles as well, with the Toyota RAV4 hybrid and the Skoda Enyaq taking second and third place, respectively.In the U.S., Ford sold 1945 electrified Mustangs and 4436 gas-powered ones in May. For the first five months of 2020, Ford sold 10,510 Mach-Es and 29,710 gas-powered Mustangs. In California, which has the strongest EV support laws in the U.S., one out of every four Mustangs sold last month was a Mach-E. No matter where the Mach-E is being offered, Ford said the Mustang Mach-E “is essentially selling as soon as it hits dealer showrooms,” given the short, 10-day average turn time.”We are really excited about the success that we are having with our launch of the all-new Mustang Mach-E, not just here in America, but globally too,” a Ford sales analyst, Erich Merkle, told Bloomberg in an emailed statement. “To be fair, please keep in mind that Mustang and Flat Rock have been impacted by outside factors, which has been the semiconductor chip shortage.”Whatever the causes are for Ford to build more plug-in Mustangs than gas-powered ponies, this likely won’t be the last time this happens. Ford has made strong claims about it electrified future, and plans to offer 40 electrified vehicles globally by 2022, with 16 of those fully electric and the other 24 being plug-in hybrids. Ford’s EV plans are strong in Europe, where Ford expects all of its passenger vehicles to be all-electric by 2030.
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The 2022 Ford Maverick will debut tomorrow at 6 a.m. ET on Ford’s YouTube channel and social media outlets. The Maverick is a new small pickup truck that will slot in below the mid-size Ranger in Ford’s lineup. It will go on sale in the fall, and we expect it to be priced well below the Ranger.Ford is unveiling its new compact pickup truck tomorrow, Tuesday, June 8, at 6 a.m. ET, and it will go on sale in the fall. You’ll be able to watch the debut live on Ford’s YouTube channel or its social media outlets in the morning.

Ford released a teaser video for the new pickup last week, and we spotted a hybrid badge on the tailgate. We also expect the Escape’s 250-hp turbocharged 2.0-liter four-cylinder to be an option, since the Maverick will share a platform with it and the new Bronco Sport crossover. It’ll have a unibody construction rather than the Ranger’s body-on-frame structure and compete with the Honda Ridgeline and upcoming Hyundai Santa Cruz.

The new truck will be built alongside the Bronco Sport at Ford’s plant in Hermosillo, Mexico, and arrive in the fall.We’ll know more early tomorrow morning, but if you’re not an early riser, check back here for all the details on the 2022 Ford Maverick.
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Depending on how you calculate used-car prices, values have gone up 30 percent from a year ago, or 17 percent just since January, according to figures collected by the website CarGurus.Eleven brands are up more than 30 percent year over year, including Ram, Aston Martin, and Ford.Electric vehicles have also seen rapid increases so far in 2021, and that’s before the Tesla Model 3 really hits the used market, according to used EV sales tracker Recurrent.If you pay any attention to used-car discussions on social media these days, it will be no surprise to you that prices have been climbing precipitously. According to numbers collected by CarGurus, the price for the average used car is up almost 30 percent today compared to where it was last year. That’s even higher than the number calculated by iSeeCars in April, which showed that used-car prices increased 16.8 percent that month compared to April 2020. CBS reported a 17 percent increase in used car prices since January.

When you combine the federal government’s stimulus checks with the end of the pandemic coming into view and a distinct lack of new cars on the marketplace, these numbers sure start to make sense. But not every brand’s used-car prices are climbing at the same rate, and it’s notable that no one is doing better than a brand that hasn’t sold a new car since 2010. If you just look at the past 90 days, Saturn has seen its price values climb up 25.95 percent, as The Drive also noted. That puts the defunct GM brand at the top of that particular chart, followed by the other big climbers, which are Smart (up 22.2 percent in the past three months), Ford (20.6), Hyundai (20.5) and Kia (20.1). The rise in Saturn and Smart prices can partly be explained by their low starting points, but it’s nonetheless worth noting as just one more weird impact of the times we’re living in.

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There are 11 brands in CarGurus’ data set that have seen used car prices go up more than 30 percent, year over year. The list is led by Ram (up 40.5 percent), followed by Aston Martin (38.1), Ford (38.7), GMC (37.9), Chevrolet (37.3), Dodge (36.4), VW (35.1), Lincoln (32.9), Toyota (30.5), and Hyundai and Kia (both 30.1). The CarGurus tool also lets you see how much the particular model you want has increased in price. So, for instance, the average price of a 2018 Volkswagen Atlas is up 14 percent, while the average price of a 2018 Ford Escape is up 24 percent year over year.Used-EV Sales Have Their Own RhythmThe brand with the lowest year-over-year price increase is Tesla, at just under 6 percent. But that doesn’t mean used-EV sales aren’t doing well. Recurrent, which tracks EV prices, found that they have been rising and rising over the past 90 days. Month-over-month increases were 1.1 percent in March, 2.6 percent in April, and 5.1 percent in May.”Used-EV prices are increasing at an accelerating rate over the past 90 days,” Recurrent CEO Scott Case told Car and Driver. “We believe that this represents a shift in consumer preferences on top of inflation, driven by greater comfort with EV technology.”Case also made a prediction about where used EV prices go from here, which is that Tesla is about to make a big move.”This is the last time the Model 3 won’t be in the top used seller position for years to come,” he said. “The Model 3 is about to turn three and start coming off lease in droves.”
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Looking to make some early summer plans? R&T Crew, the kids club by Road & Track, is teaming up with Crayola Experience for the month of June to offer exciting new attractions at their five locations throughout the country including: Chandler, AZEaston, PA Mall of America, MN Orlando, FLPlano TXBring your family and friends to any Crayola Experience location and take part in race-themed crafts like designing your ultimate dream car, testing your car trivia knowledge, taking photo ops at a race-themed photo-booth, and so much more. Plus, all month long, Crayola Experience is offering the Road & Track community 20 percent off admission tickets using the discount code: RTCREW. PURCHASE TICKETS Not near a Crayola Experience location? No problem. Crayola Experience Home Adventure kits ship hands-on fun straight to your doorstep. Each kit is filled with Crayola supplies with easy-to-follow instructions. For the month of June, Crayola Experience will also be offering the Road & Track community 20 percent off Home Adventure kits using the same code: RTCREW. LEARN MOREStock up on activities and experiences to prepare for a jam-packed summer. The fun doesn’t stop with a kid-friendly duo like R&T Crew and Crayola Experience—be sure to sign your little ones up for R&T Crew, geared towards kids who love cars OR anything that moves, and get first-to-know updates on exciting collaborations like this in the future!JOIN THE CLUB This content was provided by the Road & Track marketing team.

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The 1970s brought us platform shoes, Swedish supergroup ABBA, and, worst of all, emission-choked vehicles with barely any horsepower. Given the suspect reliability, indifferent construction, and giant 5-mph bumpers that cars of this era had, it’s not surprising that the automotive world has since dubbed this period the malaise era. But we’re here to prove that it wasn’t all bad. Armed with a $45,000 budget, the Window Shop folks set out to find the best of that decade. Spoiler alert: If you’re hoping to see opera windows, you may be disappointed.Contributor Jonathon Ramsey selects an elegant and early Datsun 240Z that sends a few of us swooning. Light, fun to drive, and relatively reliable for the period, this Datsun is the great-grandfather of the 370Z. No less popular is senior editor Elana Scherr’s 1978 Ford F-150. While it’s festooned with period accessories, including racy mud flaps and a CB radio, the mechanical bits are sound. The emissions equipment is intact, too, with one device that looks like a can of beans. The shag-like carpet protecting the bed gives us the heebie-jeebies—not to be confused with the Bee Gees—but we’re more concerned by the Playboy bunny gunsights on the hood.John Pearley Huffman, now a Road & Track staffer, makes a choice similar to Scherr’s. His ’78 F-250—which rides on a massive 155-inch wheelbase—is so good, that Pearley freezes up in response to the love thrown his way. Deputy testing director K.C. Colwell finds one of the most beautiful cars to come out of the ’70s: the Alfa Romeo GTV. His candidate loses points when we discover that it has a salvage title. The crew also brings up that the car’s design dates to the ’60s, so can you really call it a car of the ’70s? Deputy editor and host Tony Quiroga finds a manual BMW 528i from 1979 that costs a mere $14,900 and hits 60 in 8.3 seconds, but no one seems to be on board with his pick. Their loss.

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We got a demonstration of Toyota and Lexus’s new Teammate driver-assistance system.It allows for hands-free driving on certain freeways.Teammate will be offered in the U.S. this fall on the 2022 Lexus LS500h. Nothing reveals Toyota’s conservative approach to self-driving technology more than the name it has given its first advanced Level 2 system. Unlike automakers that describe their systems as super or some sort of automatic pilot, Toyota and Lexus have gone with a quieter name: Teammate.

That doesn’t mean this driver-assistance system isn’t as capable as Cadillac’s SuperCruise, for example, but it does hint at how careful Toyota is being as it slowly introduces cars that can (barely, for now) drive themselves. Similar to GM’s SuperCruise and Ford’s upcoming BlueCruise, Toyota’s new system allows for extended periods of hands-free driving on limited-access highways. When Teammate debuts in the U.S. market in select 2022 Lexus LS500h models with all-wheel drive this fall, it will have two components: Advanced Drive and Advanced Park. We were able to test the driving portion of the system during near Toyota’s North American headquarters in Plano, Texas. How It WorksActivating Advanced Drive is similar to engaging cruise control. When the car is on a limited-access highway—the only kinds of roads it can operate on for now—the driver information screen briefly displays “Vehicle Position Initializing.” Then, once positioned, the “Radar Ready” message in the driver information screen changes to say “Advanced Drive Ready.” Then the display completely changes to show digital representations of the surrounding traffic. It also notifies the the driver to either hold the steering wheel (if there’s a grey color scheme) or to go hands-free (when the screen turns blue).

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As the name suggests, Teammate is constantly checking in with the human driver to make sure they are paying attention and ready to take control of the vehicle again. The colors on the screen are the most obvious signal, but a voice also announces when certain things turn on or off. If you input a destination, the navigation system joins the team to provide countdown counters on the screen when, for example, you’re a few miles away from your exit, giving you plenty of time to switch back to being a driver again. There are audible, visual and physical indicators to tell you when to take control, with the seat belt tugging your torso as a last resort to get your attention. It all takes some getting used to.”I don’t know if it’s a full re-learning,” Derek Caveney, executive engineer for Toyota Motor North America R&D, who helped develop the system, told C/D. “But it is a system where you’re becoming more of a supervisor rather than an operator.”In non-emergency situations, Teammate targets a minimum four-second handover time for when the driver has to resume control. “That type of transition, we believe, is very safe and allows the driver to become reengaged fully before having to be in control,” he said.

Toyota believes that this reengagement is important. If you’re not actively driving, your mind can wander. This is why Advanced Drive will not allow the driver to go hands-free indefinitely. At some point in its operation—Caveney wouldn’t be more precise than to say that the upper limit is “tens of minutes”—Teammate will ask the driver to grab hold of the wheel again for a few seconds before going back to hands-free mode.

Lexus

“The idea there is we can’t really understand the mental state of the driver,” he said. “We can see their visual state, where they’re looking, … but we don’t know what they’re thinking, so we ask them to touch the steering wheel just to make sure that they’re aware of the warning we’re giving them, so we can build that relationship between the car and the driver.”Getting the car to automatically change lanes on a somewhat busy Texas highway requires more than just moving the turn signal. Even when operating in hands-free mode, the car requires you to glance at the side mirrors to confirm that there’s nothing in the way if you want the car to shift lanes. The system of course has its own sensors, but it wants your human input as well. Lots of Hardware The first iteration of Teammate uses a suite of eight cameras and five radars, plus a laser, to gather information. Some of these sensors are shared with conventional driver-assistance technologies. There are three forward-facing camera packages: a stereo camera to calculate distance, a mono camera to look for lane markers and a telescopic lens that looks to the horizon for other vehicles, and also four panoramic cameras on the sides to also scan for lane markers. The eighth camera is the infrared lens that sits above the steering column and monitors the driver.

Lexus

The five radar sensors include a long-range, forward-facing radar and four short-range radar sensors on the corners for object detection. There is also a forward-facing laser to detect vehicles and road signs. The prototype vehicles available for testing also had laser sensors on the side and rear of the vehicle, which are helping Toyota determine if it needs to include more laser sensors in the production model in order to get object detection right. Some Quirks We NoticedThere are still some quirks in how the car displays this information that we’d like to see changed. On the driver information screen, Teammate displays icons of nearby vehicles in front of you and to the side (it even differentiates between sedans and larger vehicles). The heads-up display, though, only displays an icon for a vehicle in your lane, and we think that’s a mistake.”We are trying to keep the HUD as simple as possible, yet also conveying the right amount of information to the driver” Caveney said. “We believe the side information wasn’t as essential on the HUD.”

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At this point, you can’t adjust the distance you’d prefer to stay away from vehicles on your side, the way you can with vehicles ahead of you with adaptive cruise control. There’s also not much you can do if you don’t like the way Teammate communicates with you. The Advanced Drive voice commands will always come through the speakers at a preset volume (unlike navigation voice commands, which can be turned on or off and have volume adjustments). There is a setting within the Advanced Drive settings menu that will quiet your music or podcasts when an Advanced Drive voice command is issued, but that’s about it. There’s still time before Toyota lets Teammate loose in the world, and over-the-air updates could bring changes later on, but for now, it’s not without its quirks. It doesn’t work while wearing a mask, for example, because it uses your nose and the points of your mouth to identify head position.Overall, Teammate and Advanced Drive will deliver what they promise. No one is claiming these cars can drive themselves. But they do provide much of what competitors are offering in this space, and that should be enough to score Toyota and Lexus vehicles equipped with this technology a few more points in some consumers’ minds. Game on.
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The Aston Martin specialty firm Nicholas Mee & Co. is selling the trio of mid-1960s Aston Martin Vantage cars shown here, presenting them at the London Concours this weekend.The three Vantages include a coupe, a convertible, and the rarest of all, a shooting brake.The trio of Astons will be sold as a package deal and could fetch more than $5 million.Here’s an offer that even James Bond himself would struggle to afford. Britain’s most famous secret agent has been issued an Aston Martin DB5 at various points throughout his well-documented career. But although 007’s cars received extensive, lethal modifications, he never got one of the ultra-rare Vantage models, which received brawnier engines. Nor did he get to drive either a convertible DB5, or one of the very few shooting brake station wagons, in any of his cinematic outings.But you can, if you have the small matter of $5.6 million to $7.8 million at current exchange rates—and space in one of your garages for a trio of original DB5 Vantages, one in each body style. The Vantage coupe is rare enough, one of just 40 right-hand-drive examples to be built in period. The convertible is even less commonly spotted, being one of just five such Vantages made. And the shooting brake is a genuine one-off, the only car that left the company’s factory in Newport Pagnell with the combination of the longroof body—reportedly designed to accommodate chairman David Brown’s gun dogs and polo equipment—and the Vantage upgrades. If that’s not worth $7.8 million, then what is?

While Vantage versions didn’t get any chassis upgrades and will therefore drive with the same charming imprecision as the regular DB5, they did receive more power thanks to the fitment of a high compression cylinder head and altered cam timing. This took the output of their six cylinder engines to 325 horsepower, a 43-hp improvement over the regular DB5, and was claimed to cut the zero-to-6o-mph time to just 6.5 seconds. By the standards of the early Sixties, those figures are at least as impressive as a 1000-hp output and a 2.0-second zero-to-hero would be these days.

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The cars are being sold by Nicholas Mee & Co., a well-known Aston Martin specialist in the U.K., and are described as having been freshly restored, so let’s hope that anyone interested likes the colors they are finished in: Caribbean Pearl Blue for the convertible, Californian Sage for the shooting brake, and—not especially original—Bond-appropriate Silver Birch for the coupe. Our favorite detail is actually on the wagon: look closely to see the twin wipers that sweep its sizable rear screen.The cars will be shown together at the London Concours event next week but will only be sold as a lot.
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