Motor News

The 2021 Kia Rio has revised styling and newly available features.
The sedan model starts at $17,015 and the hatchback starts at $17,955.
It’s on sale at U.S. dealerships now.
An updated version of the Kia Rio subcompact has arrived in the U.S. with a slightly freshened look and new features. It starts $200 higher than before, at $17,015, and is still available in sedan and hatchback body styles. It’s one of the cheapest cars on the market, and even comes in under $20,000 fully loaded.

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The front and rear bumpers are reshaped, and new 15-inch wheels and LED headlights are available as options. Inside, there’s a larger 8.0-inch touchscreen standard across the board that now offers wireless Apple CarPlay and Android Auto capabilities. Kia hasn’t released photos of the U.S. model’s interior yet, but the Europe-spec car gives a good indication of what it’ll look like.

Kia

Kia

The sedan comes in LX and S ($17,655) trim levels, while the hatchback comes in S trim ($17,955) only. An $1800 tech package is now available for the S that includes automatic climate control, proximity-key entry, a few driver-assistance features, and the aforementioned LED headlights and 15-inch wheels. All Rios come standard with a 1.6-liter inline-four with 120 horsepower and a continuously variable automatic transmission. It’s rated at 36 mpg combined by the EPA.
The 2021 Kia Rio is already arriving at dealerships now.
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In every episode of Window Shop, the C/D crew seems to unearth some new controversy. This week, the explosive issue at hand is what exactly constitutes an automotive guilty pleasure.
Host Tony Quiroga asserts it’s a vehicle that embodies all the attributes one usually eschews in a vehicle but somehow still inspires affection—and then embarrassment. He is wrong, probably.
John Pearley Huffman, a C/D contributor and the creator of this half-baked challenge, proposes that a guilty pleasure is any car, truck, van, paraglider, or sleigh that when shown to others, inspires reactions along the lines of “What the hell are you smoking?” Think socially unacceptable machines that one loves, often just for the sheer joy of knowing no one else does. He may be on to something.
This week’s crew also includes ace contributor Jonathon Ramsey, who chooses something Italian that definitely fits Pearley’s definition of WTF-ness. He is therefore mercilessly pilloried but withstands the abuse with dignity.
Youthful but really kind of getting old, senior news editor Joey Capparella goes against his personal brand by advocating for something huge, thirsty, and American. Bless his soul, as this indicates his inevitable progression into middle age.
Deputy testing director K.C. Colwell brings his sense of law and order and justice to the question. His choice? The Jeep Grand Cherokee SRT8, a rugged steed of intimidation with 420 horsepower. Of course, owning one would mean devoting his children’s college fund to satiating its thirst.
Pearley selects a fine piece of German engineering cruelly overlooked and scorned by the public. It’s a perfect choice, and every viewer will dive into its deep pool of awesomeness.
Quiroga adds something, too. We talk through our picks. Someone wins—or “wins.” Whatever.
So, tune in, subscribe, like us, and generously contribute your comments. It’s Window Shop with Car and Driver, the very heart of the soulless internet.

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Plug and Charge is a new way of automating payment for EV charging, bringing Tesla-style convenience to people who drive something other than Teslas—for instance, the 2021 Ford Mustang Mach-E.
The Plug and Charge protocol tells the charging station what kind of EV you’re plugging in and conveniently bills you.
We were inadvertently among the first U.S. drivers to try it out earlier in December.
Suppose every time you went to buy gas, you needed a phone app or an RFID fob—and you had to be pre-enrolled with the brand. Drive in, validate the pump, and then learn how much you’d pay for your gasoline. No fob or app? You’d have to call a toll-free number to provide credit-card info over the phone.
That’s pretty much how electric-car charging works today, for everyone but Tesla drivers. Some EV drivers carry up to six swipe cards, fobs, or phone apps for different networks along their travel routes.

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There’s a better way—and as early as 2012, Tesla showed the U.S. how to do it. You just drive in, plug in to charge, and any billing happens on the back end. That’s how it should be, and the company’s high-speed Supercharger network now lets you drive a Tesla almost anywhere in the lower 48 states.
Like Apple, though, Tesla has the advantage of a closed ecosystem: Only Teslas can charge at Tesla Supercharger sites. The company controls both sides of the transaction. Eight years later, the rest of the EV world—dozens of separate EVs, all of which may charge on dozens of different networks—has started to catch up.

The author’s test Mustang Mach-E at the charging site.
John Voelcker

Accidental Pioneer
Entirely by accident, I may have been the first civilian in the U.S. to experience the future of EV charging. Earlier in December, I drove 480 miles in four days showing a 2021 Ford Mustang Mach-E test car to friends and EV drivers. On one trip, I stopped at an Electrify America DC fast-charging station. The machine told me to plug in first, so I inserted its 150-kW–capable connector into the charge port on the Mach-E’s left front fender.
Lo and behold: I watched the machine quickly identify the car, validate the charge, and start the current flowing. No fob, no app, no toll-free number to call.
The magic behind this mundane transaction is the Plug and Charge protocol, which identifies an EV to a charging station. The charging network then validates the car with its maker, which provides billing information that starts the charging.
The system I used, all software invisible to me, is similar (but not identical) to a European Plug and Charge protocol already in use by drivers of several EVs on the pan-European Ionity network and others. Half a dozen car brands funded Ionity to make long-distance EV travel practical and seamless through more than a dozen European countries.
Plugging in a car and having it charge automatically doesn’t sound like much, but the software integration and validation to make it happen are surprisingly complex. Electrify America, for instance, tests dozens of charging stations for compatibility with dozens of the latest electric cars—including prototype EVs in camouflage brought in closed trailers to its test labs in Vienna, Virginia.
Plug and Charge is rolling out in the newest generations of EVs sold in the U.S. The Mustang Mach-E and the 2021 Porsche Taycan both started shipping to dealers during December. I guess it’s possible some Taycan owner beat me by a day or two, and, if so, I bet that person was just as pleased with the newfound simplicity as I am.
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Ford put out a video of a prototype electric F-150 doing winter testing in the snow, drifting and doing donuts.
The driver of the prototype put the dual electric motors to work as the power was routed to all four wheels.
The electric F-150 is still a year and a half away, due by mid-2022.
We’re roughly a year and half away from the first battery-electric F-150, and Ford is set on spending that time showing that an electric F-150 can do everything a gas-powered F-150 can do. And now that we have snow on the ground in much of the northern U.S., Ford brought an electric F-150 prototype into a fresh blanket of snow to test it and show what it’s capable of.
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Between long drifts and donuts, the electric F-150 gets quite the workout in the snow—and if it weren’t for the decal on the side of the truck saying otherwise, there wouldn’t be any way to know it wasn’t a gas-powered truck. In the video, the dual electric motors are working hard to route power to every tire, and the driver looks to be pulling all possible power. Ford says that the electric F-150 will produce more horsepower and torque than any other F-150 and also claims it will have the fastest acceleration of any F-150 on the market.
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Last year, Ford had the electric F-150 pull a million-pound load, one which contained 42 F-150s in rail cars. Aside from this stunt, Ford hasn’t released much information in the way of specifications, including towing or payload capabilities, the size of the battery, or expected range. As we get closer to the production date of the electric F-150, that information is expected.
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