Well well well: More evidence that people still want to buy new cars, they just don’t want to pay an arm, a leg, and their firstborn for them. Kia just set an all-time monthly sales record in August with 83,798 cars sold, putting the budget-ish Korean brand on track to hit record annual sales for the fourth year in a row.

As the overall market has been under pressure this year, and continued high gas prices have reordered household budgets, Kia’s success seems to come down to mainly two things: price and hybrids. Kia has a total of seven models that still start under $30,000, and every one except the Niro Hybrid saw sales increase over last August—but even that one is still pacing ahead of 2025 year-to-date. Meanwhile, its cumulative hybrid sales in August practically doubled (+99%) over last year, with the Sportage Hybrid up 40%, the Sorento Hybrid up 22%, and the Carnival Hybrid up 15%.

And as some car companies have observed, sedans may be down, but they’re certainly not out. The K4 and K5 together moved over 20,000 units (though K4 hatchback sales weren’t broken out), together outselling the Seltos and Sorento crossovers. The middle-ground Sportage is still Kia’s top selling model with 18,723 sold, but the K4 is actually beating the Telluride, which many people would tell you is the model most responsible for Kia’s mindshare this decade, in both August and 2026 YTD sales.

Also keep in mind that neither the K4 or K5 are offered with hybrid powertrains in America; if Kia makes that happen, as buyers have been asking, it would definitely unlock a higher ceiling.

Another thing to keep an eye on: no surprise that Kia’s full EV sales are all down, because last August is when buyers were rushing to grab one before the federal tax credit expired. But the EV9 is still tracking well on the year, and the sub-$30K EV3 is just going on sale now. It could very well be that even in this environment, a brand like Kia can still make EVs work by following the K-shaped market with the pricey EV9 and the cheapo EV3. That would leave the EV6 in no-man’s land, which might be why its sales are down significantly.

The full breakdown by model is below. It is worth noting that Kia still trails Hyundai and stalwarts like Honda and Toyota, and most brands have moved away from monthly reports, so we won’t see the full picture until the end of the quarter. But at this point, Kia is handily outselling Mazda and Subaru.

Got a tip? Send us a note: tips@thedrive.com

The post Kia Is on Fire appeared first on The Drive.

If you want proof that imagination is a muscle, just look at Porsche’s Sonderwunsch program that relaunched in 2021 to build factory one-off cars for absurdly rich people. It started small with a custom liveried Porsche 911 GT3 for the 1985 24 Hours of Le Mans winner Paolo Barilla. Then it moved on to more complex projects like the 993 Speedster and the 997 Classic Club Coupe. And now, those magic elves are revealing their most ambitious work yet: the Flachbau RS, a modern 911 slantnose built on the bones of a 2018 911 GT2 RS.

Commissioned by a mystery customer in Europe at a cost of several million dollars, the Flachbau RS is far more than a restomod. I’m not sure what you’d call it, exactly; it’s an eight-year-old car meticulously torn apart, re-engineered, and reassembled with contemporary aerodynamics, a low-tech caged interior, and that iconic front end calling back to the original 911 Flachbau from the 1980s.

Over the last three years, a strike team comprised of designers, engineers, and other fun nerds from Porsche, Manthey, and Weissach worked to realize the lucky customer’s vision for a street-legal homage to the 935/78 race car known as Moby Dick, which itself was the inspiration for the original Flachbau that was sold in extremely limited numbers between 1982 and 1989.

The customer requested that they leave the powertrain alone—smart move when we’re talking about a 3.8 liter twin-turbo flat-six making 700 horsepower and 553 lb-ft of torque—but everything else was up for reimagining. Fortunately for him, Porsche was able to tap longtime designer Grant Larson, who also penned the modern 935 concept the company showed off at Rennsport Reunion in 2018, to finalize the vision for the Flachbau RS just before his retirement last year.

Starting at the front, the sloping, louvered fenders necessitated a new bumper and splitter, new super-slim headlights, and even redesigning the fuel filler mechanism to fit. Manthey also pitched in on the front-end aero with additional canards and underbody elements.

Inside, the cabin retains some of the donor car’s original red and black colorway and carbon fiber trim, but much of it has been stripped out. That includes the entire infotainment and sound system—where there was once a screen in the dash, there’s now a leather-lined storage cubby. Nice. Sound deadening and insulation were thrown out wherever possible, leaving gleaming painted metal all over the place. Even the wiring harness was left exposed. All that lightened the car by 70 pounds compared to a stock GT2 RS, which was already a bantamweight fighter.

At the back, the giant wing with its S-shaped mounts has three different configurations to step up downforce all the way to 1,221 pounds over the rear axle at the car’s top speed of 211 mph. It’s patented too, so don’t go try and copy it. Because the customer wanted it to be street legal, and it’s technically a factory product, Porsche had to go through the usual validation and homologation steps it would for any model, including building multiple test cars, virtual crash testing, wind tunnel sessions, endurance tests, extensive vibration tests for the rear wing, and 50 laps on the Nurburgring—where our spy photographer captured one of the test cars last August.

And yes, that road legal requirement is also why Porsche couldn’t go full 1980s and give it pop-up headlights. Alas.

While it’s unfortunate that those spy photos or the preceding Flachbau trademark Porsche filed earlier last year didn’t herald the return of a production 911 slantnose, it’s still a sight to see how the company is dialing up the crazy in the Sonderwunsch division. I know they’ll be one of my first calls if when I hit the Powerball jackpot.

Got a tip? Send us a note: tips@thedrive.com

The post The Iconic 911 Slantnose Returns as the Insane Porsche Flachbau RS appeared first on The Drive.

There was much ado last year when the current Porsche 911 rolled into its mid-cycle 992.2 update and dropped stick shifts from the base Carrera model, the S, and the GTS. It felt like an existential moment—if Porsche of all brands is starting to give up, how far behind could the rest of the auto industry be in letting three-pedal setups fade to black? Who knows. What we do know is that today, Stuttgart is taking a step back towards the light by reintroducing the manual transmission to the 2027 Porsche 911 Carrera S.

Borrowing the six-speed manual from the “entry-level” Carrera T, the 911 Carrera S with MT Package (actual name) also adds a batch of extra standard features on top of the normal Carrera S. You get rear-axle steering, the Sport Chrono package, a retuned exhaust with titanium tips, center lock wheels, PASM sport suspension, and of course, that sweet walnut shift knob Porsche’s been rocking lately. Coupe or cabriolet, the choice is yours.

The lighter center lock wheels shave 17 pounds of unsprung mass and help the manual Carrera S coupe clock in at 3,327 pounds, just 11 pounds more than the Carrera T. It’s rear-wheel-drive only, and it’ll also be exclusive to North America when deliveries begin at the end of the year. Yes, this is one of those rare cases where we get the manual and the rest of the world doesn’t. Thank the thousands of 911 buyers on this continent who specced their cars with stick shifts at rates far higher than Europe this decade.

As we pointed out when the 992.2 S debuted last year with a significant power bump to 473 horsepower and 390 lb-ft of torque from its twin-turbo 3.0L flat-six, the 911 Carrera S is now basically the 992.1 GTS. Same brakes and everything. Now that the GTS is an automatic-only hybrid and the manual makes its return here, it’s obvious: if you want a spicier analog 911, you get the Carrera S with MT Package.

This is undoubtedly great news. The world is getting steadily worse, but it’s just a bit brighter with another manual Porsche 911 in the mix. That said, salvation isn’t free. The manual package adds $8,550 to the Carrera S coupe’s starting price, bringing it to $167,100, while the manual cabriolet jumps nearly $11,000 to $181,000. It would cost you more than that to add all the new standard features a la carte, but it is also effectively an “I love driving” surcharge. Keep in mind the manual 911 GTS started at $150,900 in 2024 before it disappeared, and the manual was available as a no-cost option. Times have indeed changed.

But when you’re the only company on the planet making rear-engine sports cars with three pedals, you can price them however you want. And if a little more margin on 911s helps Porsche get back on track after a rough couple of years and keeps the model existing in its pure form for longer, are we really going to complain?

I mean, yes. It’s what we do. But we also applaud Porsche for a lovely bit of fan service here. And here’s a tip: the 388-hp manual Carrera T starts around $150,000, and because it inherited the bigger turbos from the old GTS, it’s not hard to get it up to S levels of power with a simple tune. See? You still got some options.

Got a tip? Send us a note: tips@thedrive.com

The post Score: The 2027 Porsche 911 Carrera S Brings Back the Manual Transmission appeared first on The Drive.

Earlier this year, The Drive launched a new collaboration with Blipshift—the premiere purveyor of sweet car-themed clothing and merch—to revive some of Blipshift’s best out-of-production designs from the last 14+ years. It was a hit, and after taking a few months off to retool, I’ve got great news: We’re so back. Our next drop is officially live for the next two weeks with five new picks and lots more on the way. Read on for all the details.

If you’re catching up, Blipshift has produced thousands of incredible designs for enthusiast apparel over the years, with a catch. Each one is only on sale for a short time. Once the window closes, it’s gone forever. But that’s where we come in.

As an official partner, we have the ability to pull any design from Blipshift’s archive and put it back into production for a limited time, so that’s what we’re doing. Running through the greatest hits. Each drop features a selection of bangers picked by The Drive crew, all available on T-shirts, hoodies, posters, kid shirts, and even baby onesies.

For this batch, you’ve only got two weeks to grab the four revival designs: Maths, Rumble Racer, Build-a-Brick, and Dial 996. Miatas, Corvettes, Volvos, Porsches, a little something for everyone. But the fifth is a treat. Starting today, we’re also slinging a throwback shirt featuring our OG logo from the YouTube channel back in 2012 (real ones remember), also available in all the varieties list above, that will be permanently on sale on our Blipshift store page.

See the goods below, and don’t miss the important notes after that.

The Drive Retro Logo

Maths

Rumble Racer

Build-a-Brick

Dial 996

Once this drop ends on Thursday 8/20, the next one will start two weeks after that, on Friday 9/4. That’s how it’ll work for the rest of the year: two weeks on, two weeks off, etc. You never know what’s going to make the cut, so eyes up. Here are the dates for the calendar inclined:

• 9/4-9/17
• 10/2-10/15
• 10/30-11/12
• 11/27-12/10

Last thing: these are all made on demand, so production doesn’t start until after each sale ends so Blipshift knows how many to make. That means it’ll likely be a few weeks from your order date for the package to land on your doorstep. But good things take time, y’know?

If you ruined your favorite shirt long ago and want to score a new one, send your requests for revivals to feedback@thedrive.com. It just might show up in the next drop. Or let us know if you’ve got any great ideas for entirely new designs. We’re taking requests.

The post Alert: Cool Shirts Are Back with The Drive’s New Blipshift Collection appeared first on The Drive.

The jury’s still out on whether Nissan CEO Ivan Espinosa was right when he told us that “Nissan is back” last year, but one thing is certain: the Xterra sure is. Tonight, alongside announcing a new strategic plan for Nissan and Infiniti, the Japanese automaker shared the first image of the next-generation Nissan Xterra as it commits to relaunching its once-popular off-road SUV in the next few years.

The teaser image shows the Xterra’s blocky front end above the bumper and below the windshield, revealing a segmented light bar across the nose with the daytime running lights as bookends, lower projector lamps with integrated turn signals, a three-section grille, and deep character lines running down the hood to set off the fenders. NISSAN is stamped across the nose in big letters. (Which, was anyone else hoping for a badge there?) It’s real yellow, as we reported it would be last year. As per usual with these releases, running the image through Photoshop reveals a clearer picture, but not much more information.

But! Here’s a tip. If you want a slightly better sense of how the Xterra might look, take a look at the new Nissan Frontier plug-in hybrid pikcup the automaker recently revealed for the Chinese market. That truck is based on a different platform made by Dongfeng so the details doesn’t line up 1:1 with the new Xterra, which will be built on the actual Nissan Frontier platform while also offering a regular hybrid option (confusing, I know), but you can see the lighting signature and overall motif are largely the same.

Honestly, it’s pretty good. I won’t lie, as a fan of vehicles with actual faces, I’d much prefer Nissan just slapped the current Frontier’s nose on the Xterra and called it a day, which is basically what it did with the original Xterra. But this one is undeniably sharper and does feel more suited to sharing a lot with the Nissan Z, for example. And unlike the Z’s beautiful design going unappreciated as prices rise and the sports coupe market keeps contracting, the Xterra just might deliver what Nissan needs most of all: sales.

We’ve been all over the Xterra’s relaunch since rumors first started spilling out, breaking the news that Nissan plans to start pricing below $40,000, use a V6 engine instead of a turbo-four, and use the Xterra as a base to build a new “family” of body-on-frame trucks that just might include a new Pathfinder. As mentioned above, today’s announcement also came with the expected confirmation that the Xterra will offer both hybrid and non-hybrid V6. If it’s wasn’t obvious before, it has the Toyota 4Runner squarely in its sights. This will be interesting.

Got a tip about the new Xterra? Send us a note: tips@thedrive.com

The post The Next-Gen Nissan Xterra Is Real, and Here’s Your First Look appeared first on The Drive.

Gas prices just hit an average of $4 a gallon in the US, and man, people are not happy. The longer the war with Iran drags on, the longer the vital Strait of Hormuz stays closed, and the longer that 20% of the global supply of oil is cut off from the world’s markets. But hey, the EPA has a plan to lower prices: stretch America’s fuel supply by diluting more of it with cheaper ethanol. What could go wrong?

Well, depending on how old or well-maintained your car is, and where you live, the answer is not nothing. That’s what we’re digging into on this week’s episode of The Drivecast.

This is a really contentious topic, so let’s lay out some facts. Outside of specialized blends, most gasoline in America is already diluted with 10% ethanol (an alcohol made from corn) as a baseline, called E10—so every gallon of gas you buy is actually 90% gas and 10% ethanol by liquid volume. We do this because ethanol is an oxygenator that helps gas burn cleaner and raises the octane rating. We used to use lead, but… that didn’t work out.

In some states, especially in the Midwest, you can buy what’s called E15 gas, which is 15% ethanol and 85% gasoline, labeled as 88 octane at the pump. It’s cheaper too, because you’re literally buying less gas and more corn juice per gallon, but air-quality rules restrict its sale in the summer because it creates more smog than E10.

And that’s what the EPA is focused on: waiving those rules to allow oil companies to keep making E15 gas longer into the spring and summer than they normally would ahead of the typical June cutoff. Theoretically, there will be more of this cheaper ethanol-rich blend available for longer. Thing is, though, E15/88 octane is only sold at a fraction of gas stations nationwide. Increasing the supply won’t really do anything to lower the price of regular 87, 89, 91, and 93 octane gas in the short term.

But even if you assume it will, because more people are choosing E15/88 so demand for the other grades goes down, that brings up the bigger problem. Ethanol is also a solvent that can eat away at delicate rubber seals and plastics in older engines, potentially causing major damage, which is one of the reasons why it’s usually capped at 10%. The EPA even says you shouldn’t use it in cars made before 2001, though that important note is missing from the agency’s triumphant press release on the matter. Even in newer cars, E15 will lower MPGs because it’s less energy-dense than gas.

So yeah. Don’t hold your breath for this to work.

New here? The Drivecast is The Drive‘s weekly podcast taking you behind-the-scenes with the biggest stories, controversies, and characters shaping the automotive industry and the way our roads look today. Powered by The Drive’s inside access, the show takes you through our original reporting, shares our exclusive insights, and expands on those stories in ways that aren’t possible with just one article.

You can listen to a new episode of The Drivecast every Wednesday on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts. Like what you hear? Hit us with a five-star review to help get The Drivecast in front of more people and keep the show going. Have a suggestion, request, or feedback? Drop us a line at feedback@thedrive.com. We read every email.

Full Transcript

Joel Feder: Man, have you seen those gas prices? And by man, I mean Kyle, who lives in LA where everything costs an arm, a leg, and half of your firstborn.

Kyle Cheromcha: Don’t remind me. I actually saw $8 a gallon on a gas sign the other day. It is hard to miss that. Makes you stop and stare in not a good way. Yeah, it’s really painful out here.

Joel: Andrew, what’s it cost out by you in your neck of the woods?

Andrew Collins: Yeah, in rural New York, we’re finally cresting the $5 barrier for 93 octane, which is rare for here. Usually hangs out in the $3 neighborhood at best, but it’s been a scary few weeks for sure.

Kyle: I have very little sympathy for that. None of this is satisfying. It all sucks, but there is something… heartwarming maybe about watching the rest of the country freak out about $5 a gallon gas while we’ve been paying well over that in California for years now. I feel like Bruce Willis in Die Hard, welcome to the party pal. That’s where I’m at right now.

Joel: Yeah, but you don’t understand. I live where we have snow and negative 40 with the wind chill. I’m not supposed to have to pay for that sunshine tax. I’m pretty sure you pay extra to live where you don’t have snow.

Kyle: There are benefits and a lot of reasons why everything’s expensive in California, but that’s not the point of today’s podcast. The point is to talk about ethanol. So Andrew, just give me a quick primer. What is ethanol?

Andrew: Yeah, ethanol is a kind of alcohol that’s made from corn. It is added to gasoline as an oxygenator. So it raises the octane rating. The number you see at the pump, regular, mid-grade, premium. It helps the fuel burn cleaner. And we used to use lead, which turned out to be toxic. And then we used something called MTBE, which polluted groundwater. Not so good. Ethanol is today’s diluter of choice because it’s abundantly available and it’s made of corn, which we grow a lot of here in America.

Kyle: Well, that sounds good to me. What’s the problem then?

Andrew: So downsides of ethanol, it’s less energy dense than gasoline. So the more ethanol you put into fuel, performance and efficiency goes down. And you can also damage cars with older engines and more primitive technology.

Joel: I will say, while there’s downsides, there are upsides. A lot of supercars and hypercars you see doing the tough speed runs like the SSC Tuatara and all that, they’re running on ethanol, basically E85. And that’s because while it is less energy dense, it has a higher octane rating, it has a superior cooling effect. It’s more oxygen rich in terms of its composition, which all of this enables a company like SSC to then tune the engine to be a more aggressive tune to put out more power.

And so the same engine that says—and I’m making these engine numbers up by the way—but let’s say it puts out 1,000 or 1,200 horsepower on 91 premium. You could put out, I don’t know, 1,700 or 1,800 horsepower on E85 just by recalibrating that tune. It’s all controlled by the ECU and the controls unit systems for the engine and it reads the octane rating and the fuel that’s in the system.

Andrew: And then of course you’ve got GM’s flex fuel engines, which similarly, they’re meant to run E85. And that was cooked up for efficiency, at least for cost efficiency. That was cooked up when gasoline was going to be really expensive. And so they figured out, why don’t we run more ethanol? So they’re tuned engines for that. And now in 2026, that idea is starting to look a lot better.

Kyle: That I think is the confusing part of this for a lot of people because you just said we have E85 fuel in this country. Well, in some states at least. You see that next to 87, 89, 91, 93 is the octane ratings for regular fuel up to premium. And so people are maybe used to seeing E85 on the pump and thinking, okay, well, there’s ethanol-based fuel. That’s not a big deal. But the octane rating of E85 fuel is actually more like 100 or 105. So all this is, it just speaks to the lack of knowledge that a lot of people have on gasoline. The consumer education is just not there.

Andrew: And for the common person, the ethanol content of fuel is almost never on anybody’s radar. I mean, except for E85, which is labeled, everything else is just kind of baked in and people never think about it. In the US, every octane gas is E10 at 10% ethanol. That’s the standard. That’s normal. From October to May, typically, oil companies are allowed to sell E15, 15% ethanol because it’s cheaper. Basically, they’re cutting gas with corn juice to save money. And that kind of brings us to this waiver we’re talking about where the EPA is extending that by a month pretty much to allow more of what is sometimes called winter gas creep into the summer a little bit.

Kyle: Yeah. I mean, 10 to 15% might not sound like much, but that’s 50% more ethanol going into your gallon of gas. And like you said, no one thinks about this stuff because this blend is done at the refineries and the fuel that reaches your gas pump is just the fuel that you can buy. No one thinks about this and the way they think about octane ratings, to the extent that people think about octane ratings at all. So what is really going on with this waiver? You mentioned that it’s usually summer versus winter gas. What’s the difference there? Why is ethanol not usually sold in the summer? And again, what is the EPA really trying to accomplish here?

Andrew: What the EPA is trying to accomplish is cheaper, regular gas pump prices at the pump, and which theoretically should be visible. E15 can be as much as like 25 cents a gallon cheaper than E10, which is not insignificant if you’re pumping fuel. And the reason you hear about summer and winter gas, ethanol evaporates more quickly in the heat, which leads to more smog. That’s why we don’t want it in this conditions typically. But some corn producing states have waivers to sell it year round and then some don’t sell it ever.

So because of the typical June cutoff, oil companies start winding down production of E15 in May. People think gas prices usually go up in the summer because demand is higher, but this is actually a factor too. Every gallon of gas actually has more gas in it. It’s less watered down basically. And with gas prices being so high and the global supply being hit by war, the EPA is announcing this waiver, basically allowing oil companies to make this E15 longer into May. And then there’s another critical point of this called eliminating boutique fuels, which we can talk about in a second too.

Kyle: So basically more ethanol equals cheaper gas. I think most people hear that and think, okay, great. Sounds good. So why is this a problem? Why is this something people need to know about?

Andrew: So more ethanol means cheaper gas, but it also comes at a cost, a few different costs really. So because it’s less energy dense, you need to move more volume of it through your vehicle to keep it running. And there are mixed results on what that number actually is. The EPA says you should expect about a 1.5% drop in fuel economy, switch from an E10 to an E15, but Cars.com and Car and Driver have tested this and they claim it’s more like 4 to 5%.

Joel: And there are variables in all this, by the way. So certain engines, turbocharged, supercharged versus naturally aspirated, and then your weather, right? So certain engines are just more efficient in sunny, warm California than cold Minnesota. And then there’s also the fact that you’re going to go more often because you are getting worse fuel economy and fill up. So yeah, you’re saving at the pump when you’re filling up, but you’re consuming more fuel. I don’t know where the real math lies, but it’s kind of like soup to nuts. Are you really saving money? Are you?

Kyle: I think people would probably hear, oh, 5% efficiency loss, single digit percentages, is that really going to add up? I mean, the answer is yes, especially over hundreds and hundreds of miles. If you’re driving a thousand miles and you have 5% less efficiency, that’s 50 miles that you’re losing out of that, right? So that’s not nothing.

Andrew: So the thing that really caught my eye about this, in addition to the range problem, there’s the wear problem. Because this fuel has more oxygen in it, it’s also kind of forcing your engine to run leaner, which you never want. Obviously lean is when there’s too much air and not enough fuel mixing in your engine. So if you have a high performance engine in your car, especially high compression, turbo, a lot of stuff that our readers might be using, they’re burning higher ethanol content, and that car’s ECU is going to detect more oxygen and then it’s going to think it has lean condition and then it’s going to spray in even more fuel to prevent knock and pinging.

On top of that is not every ECU is going to be perfectly right. The EPA says they did six million miles of testing. And based on that, they found that cars built after 2001 do not really have issues with E15. However, it’s a pretty vague result they got there. So even if a modern car can run it, you’re still asking a lot more of your car’s engine and your car’s brain when it’s burning a much leaner fuel mix.

Joel: Moreover, to the point, what’s a modern car? The average car on the road today is somewhere between 11 and 12 years old. I haven’t looked in a minute, but let’s call it 11 and a half years old. What is a modern car? If that’s the average and we’re on a bell curve, there’s a lot of cars on the road that are a lot older than 11 years.

Kyle: Millions, really. So what’s the issue with cars before 2001? They’re just dumber, therefore it causes more issues or what else is going on?

Andrew: They’re not only dumber, but it’s also materials. Not only is ethanol an alcohol, but it’s also a solvent. So it can eat seals. It can even damage types of aluminum, believe it or not. And this is especially a factor on very old vehicles and small engines. Anything with a carburetor, anything with old rubber, primitive rubber, ethanol can leave like a varnish behind and gum up carburetors very easily. It is not good for your old machines.

Joel: I would actually even argue to the point that it’s just not good period because it goes bad, right? It’s not shelf stable. So for a car you might not drive every day, you might not drive very often. Your power equipment for your home, like a two-stroke gas blower, a lawnmower, that kind of gasoline is not shelf stable as long as gasoline doesn’t have ethanol in it, which is known as non-oxy.

Andrew: I was going to say that’s definitely one of the biggest consumer takeaways from this, be triple careful when you’re picking fuel for your mowers and boats and go-karts, especially right about… March is usually when that stuff comes out and those engines will not run well with E15 or you really got to be careful.

Kyle: Right. I mean, we’re talking, if you’re filling up with one tank of extra ethanol gas and your car is not used to it, or even if you have one of these pre-2001 cars where it could cause a serious problem, one tank is probably not going to do it unless you have a seal that’s like on its last legs. But with a small two stroke engine in a lawnmower or a motorcycle or a boat, the damage can come a lot quicker because of the way those engines operate. And as Joel said, the shelf stability of this fuel is not as good. And so if you fill up your container at the beginning of the summer season to then just fill up your lawnmower every few weeks or so, by the time July rolls around, especially if you’re in a hot place, that fuel is not going to be good. It’s going to be degraded significantly and you could have some big problems. I mean, a lawnmower is not as big as a car, but you’ll still have some problems.

So when it comes to highway versus regular driving, is there anything extra to be concerned about there?

Andrew: I think highway driving is going to give you fewer problems in general, including in this issue, just because a vehicle running at a consistent, steady state, higher pace is happier in general in every sense of the word than one that’s constantly changing throttle position, constantly changing speed. So if you’re doing a lot of highway cruising, yeah, this is less of a concern. I’ll be honest about that.

Kyle: So let’s talk about where this is actually going to be sold, because not every state sells E15, but those that do, there’s a little extra trick at the gas pump that consumers need to be aware about. That is the fact that this E15 gas is going to be labeled with an 88 octane rating. And so you will see on the pump, 87, 88, 89, 91, 93, depending on which states, not every state has 93. Thank you, California.

But the 88 is better than 87 in terms of octane rating. So you might look at that and think like, “Oh, I’m going to give my car a little treat,” as a lot of people do by putting in a higher fuel grade that it doesn’t require. But from everything we’re saying here, going from 87 to 88 just for the heck of it and maybe it’s cheaper, that could be bad. That could end poorly for you.

Andrew: There is a fuel called unleaded 88, and that is commonly how you’ll see E15 advertised. You almost never see ethanol content as its own label on a fuel pump, but that is what that means when you see unleaded 88. And that is because, as Joel mentioned earlier, the ethanol content does boost the octane rating. And so octane rating’s a whole other conversation that’s about resisting knock and ping, but yes, that’s how you’re going to see it when it’s at the pump.

Kyle: Yeah. And Joel, before we started recording, you were sharing a pretty telling story about why you shouldn’t just go with the cheapest gas, which a lot of people know, but a lot of people don’t know. A lot of people just say, “Hey, gas is gas, right? My car still runs when I put in 87, even though it requires 93”. Whatever. What’s the risk here?

Joel: Gas is gas, but gas octane ratings, the number at the pump to what Andrew was saying, 87, 88, 89, 91, 93, and 101, that’s race gas, by the way. Octane ratings matter because it’s actually how your engine is tuned from the factory to run in terms of timing and compression. And if you run a lower octane rating than your car is requesting, not good. So let’s say you have a BMW or an Audi and it’s asking for 91 and you put in 87, regular gas, non-premium gas. What’s going to happen is your car is going to run and it will probably run fine, but there’s a real big emphasis here on probably.

First off, it’s not going to run a peak performance. What’s going to happen is there’s an electronic control unit, an ECU, and a bunch of sensors that are basically reading the fuel mix and saying, “Okay, engine, we don’t have peak performance. We don’t have the top shelf gas that we want. So we need to retard the timing. We need to slow the timing, change our compression, and we need to burn at a different rate.” It’s a different temperature, and it’s not going to burn as hot. And what’s going to happen is it’s going to theoretically modify everything around that. It will not perform the same way.

But it should still work, until it doesn’t, because you will not know if that sensor, your ECU, is not working correctly, if it’s not reading correctly. And should it not be reading correctly, and this is of course a catastrophic example, but something could happen. And why I know this is because back in let’s call it 2011, another outlet had a journalist that had a second generation Cadillac SRX. It had a 2.8 liter turbo V6 in it, actually a Saab motor from GM, and it wanted premium gas and the journalist did not put premium gas in it. And again, it should be fine.

Should be, probably, might be, until it wasn’t, because the ECU and the sensor failed and it did not change the compression and the timing and it blew a hole in the side of the engine. That is what we call catastrophic failure. So that lesson was very graphic and very much embedded itself in me. And so my wife’s 5.7 V8 Hemi in her Grand Cherokee takes 89, which is very specific by the way. It’s kind of like a blend of 87 and 91 and a lot of gas stations do not have 89. When we bought this car, I explained this whole thing to my wife and the possibility of the rare but catastrophic failure. And I’m like, “So if there’s a gas station that doesn’t happen to have 89, please let’s use 91 because an extra 30 cents per gallon or whatever is cheap insurance against the rare possibility of catastrophic engine failure.”

Kyle: That’s a preventative surcharge right there. And that story you just told, that was a new car.

Joel: It was a brand new car. It probably had 5,000 miles on it.

Kyle: And one that was within, obviously we’re talking about octane and not ethanol content, but one that is recent enough that if you’re just kind of glossing over these details, you might see the EPA’s announcement and think, “Well, my car’s from 2011, so no problem.” Any of this stuff can happen no matter how old or new your car is. The risk is much smaller with a new car, of course, but engines are very complex machines and there’s a lot of interdependent and interworking parts and systems that all need to be in close to perfect condition for the whole thing to work. And one small slip in one area can lead to compensation in another area, and then you introduce sub-octane gas that the engine’s not designed for and suddenly it all goes boom. That is a rare case, but it’s possible.

And that’s the point I think we’re trying to make here, that this one octane difference might not seem like a big deal, but that can be a big deal. And the bigger deal is that that one octane difference between 87 and 88 or 89 and 88 adds a lot more ethanol in the gas that can really, really have a detrimental effect on your engine.

Regardless, what alot of people care about is, will this actually work? Will this actually work to lower prices? Andrew, what do you think?

Andrew: I know. Short answer, yes, 88 octane is cheaper. That is a fact. It’s less-

Kyle: If you live somewhere where it’s available.

Andrew: Yes. Yeah, right. Exactly. That’s a very good point. Yeah, this isn’t going to make everybody’s prices go down. It will make regular gas cheaper for a select few people. Whether or not it will actually help consumers is very difficult to math out because as we said, it reduces your efficiency a little bit. I think probably the biggest benefactor of this is the oil companies that their refinement game just got a whole lot easier. Prior to this going out, these companies have to make different types of fuel for different regions. And now they’re talking about moving to a national gasoline pool. So everything would be the same. Removes a lot of the workflow from fuel refining. Now, will that turn into consumer savings or are they just going to pocket that? That remains to be seen.

Kyle: To that point, it was actually in October of last year that California finally legalized E15 gas to be sold year round. And it was done in response to higher gas prices, again, which we’ve been dealing with out here for many, many years. Hasn’t helped. Prices here are still the highest in the nation. It’s not available in most stations yet. We don’t have the refinery capacity for it. And that just speaks to this broader point that this could help if you live in a place where E15 gas is already available and it could increase the supply and be sold for longer. Great. But if you don’t, it’s not like this stuff’s going to magically appear at your local gas station.

And to the point of mileage, if you drive all around looking for E15 gas, 88 octane, you’re going to spend the same. The cost savings will be completely canceled out because your car is less efficient and you’re driving more to find it. And all this is just a swirl of math that really doesn’t change the big picture for drivers.

Joel: Look, the bottom line is, is that if we have more ethanol in our gasoline, you’re going to fill up more often. You maybe, maybe pay less of the pump, maybe, but you’re not going to be as efficient. You’re going to get less miles per gallon, be less fuel efficient, going to be at the pump more often. Whether you pay less at the pump or not, if you’re filling up more often, I’m not sure, depending on how much you’re losing in efficiency, I’m not sure you’re saving money.

And also, by the way, I’m not entirely sure that this is necessary. How much oil are we not getting in from the war? I mean, all of this is just… I think the basic summarization I would say is midterms are coming and people are getting scared and the headlines on the news are not so good. If you want to just summarize this, headlines bad, midterm’s coming, we have a problem.

Kyle: I mean, there’s what is it, I think it’s 20% of the world’s oil supply goes through the Strait of Hormuz and that’s not open, doesn’t seem like it’s going to be opening anytime soon, although we’re recording this on Monday. We’ll see what happens in the next two days by the time this is posted. But yeah, we are also one of the largest oil producing countries in the world. You would think that we would be able to manage our own supply in a time like this, or we have the strategic petroleum reserve and just unlock all those barrels, let it flow. There are lots of complex reasons and complex factors that go into gas price at the pump, and the greed of oil companies is just one of them. Supply is just one of them.

I just don’t see this making a big difference in the end. Like you said, this is going to make a good headline, “Oh, gas prices are suddenly 20% cheaper in certain places for certain kinds of gas”. But by and large, most people are not going to see any savings. And if you do fill it up, I would say keep an eye on your MPGs. Your car’s MPG calculator is not always accurate. The real way to do that is to measure how much fuel you put in at the pump and then measure exactly how many miles you drive until it reaches a certain point and just kind of math out literally how many miles you’re getting per gallons of gas in your tank. It’s going to go down. If you put in E15, if you put in 88, it’s going to go down. The question is just how much, and that depends on where you live, the climate, your driving style, your driving habits, the efficiency of the car to begin with. All this will depend, but really seriously, keep an eye out, look at it, and then email us and tell us what you’re seeing because we’re really curious too.

Joel: To that point, by the way, if you really do want to take the time to do this, and Andrew’s laughing because I’m not entirely sure anyone will, but to do that, you actually really need to actually use the same pump. I don’t mean the same gas station. I mean the same pump because different pumps and different gas stations actually have different calibrations to the handles of the actual gas filler and it actually calibrates with your car. It has to do with the back pressure when you’re filling your tank up. So if you want to do this and you go to two different gas stations, it actually might put a different amount of gas into the car depending on which gas station you go to. Now, I don’t mean a huge variable. We’re not talking about multiple gallons, but when you’re working with 6.2 gallons and 6.5 gallons or 7.1 gallons, and then you start mapping how far are you driving, it really messes with your calculations because we’re talking a difference between 21 miles per now and 22.2 miles per gallon. You’re going to look at that and be like, “Well, that’s a big difference”. Point is, it’s more complicated than you think.

Kyle: And you know what? If you are one of those people who likes to top off your tank and you think, “Oh, topping it off, that’ll get me that extra 5% back”. Don’t, just don’t do that. It doesn’t matter what kind of gas you’re putting in your car, don’t top off your tank. Let it click off automatically and drive away like an adult.

Joel: Well, actually, did you know that fuel expands with the vapors? And so if you like top of your tank and you go all the way up the fuel filler neck, and then you go put your car in your house, that gasoline, the vapors can expand, and then all of a sudden you lose gas because it expands. It kind of comes out over the fuel filler neck of there’s a little runoff and then it comes out and then trickles and then it vaporizes. You think you’re being smart, but I promise you, it clicks. We want to go one click, you want to go two clicks, live on the edge. It’s fine. Do a click or two, but just stop.

Kyle: There’s no outsmarting capitalism.

Joel: You’re going to spend the money, boys and girls. You’re going to spend the money, ethanol, gasoline. It doesn’t matter. You’re going to burn it.

Got a tip? Send us a note: tips@thedrive.com

The post The Feds Say Cutting Fuel With Ethanol Will Bring Down Gas Prices. We’re Not Buying It appeared first on The Drive.

It’s rare for yelling on the internet to do much of anything, but don’t tell that to the 2027 Chevrolet Bolt. General Motors’ 2023 announcement that it was killing its cheapest electric car was met with such outcry that the automaker quickly turned around and promised the Bolt would ride again… somehow, someday. And after a three-year forced sabbatical the Bolt is back on sale, cheap as ever, and a better car—electric or not—than ever.

Here’s the Chevy Bolt’s recipe for value: take a simple, compact EV platform and let it proof for 10 years. Mix in the latest in-house electric motor and a modern, durable lithium-iron-phosphate (LFP) battery. Test for doneness, range should read 262 miles. Top with a standard NACS charging port and a fresh interior, dust with hands-free Super Cruise (optional). Serve around $30,000. Astonishingly simple and effective. 

I don’t mean to make it sound like an easy thing to do, because the Bolt’s team will politely tell you that moving and calibrating the assembly line from Michigan to Kansas, engineering a new subframe for the battery and motor, stockpiling parts to hand-build prototypes, using virtual crash testing to speed development, and adding Tesla’s NACS charger was very much not.

At the same time, the resurrection of the Bolt is proof that in many ways it is this easy for a non-Chinese automaker to build a sensible EV and sell it to Americans for a sensible price. The market does not need more breathlessly-hyped 9,000-pound electric SUVs and pickups with 1,000 horsepower and sub 3-second 0-60 times. It needs affordable, proven, human-scale cars like the Bolt. You are starting to see this realization take hold at places like Ford, Nissan, and others. The new-old Bolt is coming at the right time. Pardon the completely inappropriate comparison, but in killing the Bolt and bringing it back, it’s like GM tried to shoot itself in the foot and struck oil.

Old Bolt/New Bolt

This is kind of a weird review because again, the 2027 Bolt is physically almost the same as the 2023 Bolt EUV. It occupies the same 169.9-inch by 69.7-in footprint, about a foot shorter in length than a Toyota Corolla. Its 96.6-cubic-foot cabin—a bit more than a Toyota Corolla Cross—still has a ton of space for junk even with the rear seats up, thanks to a deep hidey-hole under the cargo bay’s removable floor. There’s no frunk, but it doesn’t need one. The only physical difference from the outside is an updated front fascia with new headlights.

The EUV was the crossover-ified version of the original Bolt subcompact hatchback, which is unfortunately dead forever. But these are just labels. The 2027 Bolt rides and drives like a truly small car, greater headroom and higher h-point notwithstanding. The punchy X76 drive unit, developed for the larger Chevrolet Equinox EV, is paired with a 65 kWh LFP battery sending 210 hp and 169 lb-ft of torque to the front wheels. That’s actually a fair amount less torque than before, but it’s moderated by a higher final drive ratio.

Its strong acceleration even at highway speeds, planted feel, and surprising grip in fast turns are all better than before. Not mind-blowing, but come on! This is a $30,000 economy car. And it’s far more competent than it was, which itself was more competent than it needed to be. We are doing just fine here.

Its squint-and-it’s-a-hot-hatch dynamics are boosted by the short 105.3-inch wheelbase and a far superior set of Michelin 215/50R17 tires, which Bolt engineers point to as one of the biggest factors in the livelier handling. Tire tech has come a long way too, it seems. The old model was notorious for squealing at the slightest push, but an hour run through the Malibu canyons on my test drive was met with silence. The dampers were retuned and geometries adjusted to account for the 100 extra pounds the Bolt is carrying (3,776 pounds), but otherwise, the same independent MacPhearson front and torsion beam rear get the job done.

Safety-wise, the Bolt now has 20 standard features including adaptive cruise; automatic emergency braking for parking, normal driving, reverse, and crossing intersections; automatic high beams, and more. Of note in the optional kit is the HD Surround View camera system, which doubles as a built-in four-quadrant dash cam recording the front, rear, and side views of every drive. Then there’s Super Cruise, GM’s hands-free highway driving assistant that’s generally performed excellent in my testing across multiple models and really makes the Bolt compelling. Even though it’s only available as part of a $6,000 suite of options package, getting a Bolt with Super Cruise still rings up at $35,655 as the cheapest way to experience hands-free driving across America.

Much-Needed Improvements

So the Bolt is a better basic car, but it’s also a better EV, with the new electronic architecture, latest battery management and motor control software, vehicle-to-home power capability, 5x more processing power, and over-the-air update support. Memories of the disastrous battery fire issue and subsequent 2021 recall of every Bolt ever made are still fresh, and GM is going with a Chinese supplier instead of LG until its own Tennessee battery plant starts cranking them out by next year.

Speaking of, the battery can be topped up from 10 to 80 percent in 25 minutes with peak charging speeds of 150 kW on a Tesla Supercharger or CCS fast-charger. It’s only a 400-volt system, but that makes it cheaper, and it means it can still charge faster on a Supercharger than my 800-volt Hyundai Ioniq 5, which tops out at 126 kW. You can use Plug and Charge to make it all seamless, or pay through the Bolt’s 11-inch infotainment screen so you don’t need Tesla’s annoying app (another plus over my Hyundai).

That screen is part of an updated interior that looks a bit nicer and pretty similar overall, minus a few buttons (sigh) and Apple CarPlay/Android Auto support (bigger sigh), but plus a convenient wireless phone charger/junk tray underneath the dash. Of particular interest to weirdos like me is that GM finally removed the steering wheel mounted paddle to activate the regenerative brakes. I always liked it because it felt sort of like a handbrake on a motorcycle and added a weirdly fun dimension to the driving experience. When I asked the engineering team about it, they told me it only existed in the first place because they hadn’t perfected blending regen and friction brakes through the pedal, and they needed that paddle to get the car to its EPA-rated range. Market research showed most people only ever used it to cancel the cruise control, and they’ve optimized using the pedal to plow energy back into the battery, so they decided to pull it. Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened.

The Right Time, for a Limited Time

Starting under $29,000, the Bolt is a straight-up unbeatable value for as long as GM continues to make it, and right now, it’s only committing to 18 months of production. The same way the Bolt was originally booted from its Michigan factory to make room for the Chevy Silverado and GMC Sierra EV pickups, it’s slated to be kicked out of its new Kansas plant for the gas-powered Chevy Equinox and Buick Envision crossovers that have to be onshored from Mexico and China because of tariffs. 

That sub-$30K price is all the more precious now that the federal EV tax credit is kaput, and when I pressed GM on whether it would stay that cheap through the production run, a spokesperson replied “that’s the intention.” Well. You know what they say about the road to hell. I also asked if it was possible that Bolt production could be moved once more to another plant with spare capacity in 18 months, since they’ve apparently become pros at moving the assembly line. Through a tight smile, a spokesperson acknowledged that it’s physically possible to relocate it again and refused to comment further.

I don’t know about you, but I look at the 2027 Chevy Bolt, then I look at the 8,900-lb Chevy Silverado EV, the 9,100-lb Cadillac Escalade IQ, and the 9,400-lb GMC Hummer EV, and I think, how is this even the same company? Then again, it’s also the same company that built the GM EV1 30 freaking years ago with a calculator and paper clips. When GM is forced to think innovately, it can summon real, thoughtful, sometimes generational excellence.

I’m not saying the Bolt is revolutionary. It’s the opposite—it’s evolutionary. But in today’s market, that is precisely what gives it the potential to be excellent. Come on guys. More like this.

2027 Chevrolet Bolt Specs

Quick Take

The value to beat in the EV market right now. Your move, Ford.

The post 2027 Chevrolet Bolt Review: Back from the Dead and Better Than Ever appeared first on The Drive.

It’s been a minute since we had a fun supercar salvage auction to ogle, hasn’t it? And we’re back with a bang: there’s a 1-of-149 $2M McLaren Elva that’s seen better days for sale on Copart right now, with less than 24 hours left to snag it. Runs and drives, great color, no windshield as Bruce McLaren intended… I don’t know about you, but it’s almost too tempting to take out a second mortgage on my house.

Updated 2/25 @ 6:58 pm ET: According to a tipster, the Elva used to belong to former Luminar CEO Austin Russell, who was ousted from the lidar company he founded last May. It’s not known at this time whether Russell still owned the car at the time of the crash, or if he was behind the wheel, but the plot thickens. The original story continues below.

The damage doesn’t even seem that bad, with one hefty caveat. The Elva looks like it ran headlong into and submarined under something taller—hopefully not the back end of a truck, which would’ve been terrifying for the driver—as evidenced by the crunched front end and long scrapes running up along the front fenders. From the large gap between the front tires and the wheel well, it also appears the hydraulic front axle lift might be jammed up.

Your biggest problem will be that the McLaren’s Active Air Management System, which is supposed to funnel air up through the opening in the nose and arc it over the cockpit, negating the need for a windshield, is totally toast. But that’s what goggles are for, right? Go for a full restoration, or get the suspension sorted and enjoy the patina as is, or drop an LS in there and swap its V8 into whatever your heart desires.

When it launched in 2020, the Elva was the fifth installment in McLaren’s Ultimate Series line, following the F1, P1, Senna, and Speedtail. The F1 will forever be on a pedestal, and I’m personally a huge Speedtail fan, but you could argue the Elva was the most radical car McLaren built in modern times. Powered by a twin-turbo V8 sending 804 horsepower to the rear wheels, gifted with hydraulic steering and surprisingly plush active suspension, weighing just under 2,800 pounds, and rocketing from 0-60 mph in 2.8 seconds, it’s simultaneously an incredible piece of engineering and a total rejection of what modern supercars are supposed to be.

McLaren wasn’t alone in making a no-windshield supercar for rich guys to sometimes drive but mostly stick in their massive garages in recent years. The Elva was joined by the Ferrari Monza SP1 and SP2 and the Aston Martin V12 Speedster, and while any of them would do for our purposes, you can bet this’ll be the cheapest way to join that club. At least until the next incident, whenever that is.

I haven’t found any records or documentation of the crash that sent this Elva to a Copart yard. It’s got a Montana title, of course, but if you know more about how it ended up looking for a new entrepreneurial owner, get in touch: tips@thedrive.com

The post Lightly-Crashed $2M McLaren Elva Pops Up for Sale at Salvage Auction (UPDATE) appeared first on The Drive.

What you see here is the future of Ferrari, by way of two of the most influential designers of the 21st century. Today, the Italian automaker is revealing the interior of the all-electric Ferrari Luce, penned by Jony Ive—the former head of design at Apple responsible for the iMac, iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch—and his partner Marc Newson. And man, there’s a lot to unpack here.

It’s been 13 years since Ferrari split with Pininfarina and brought design in-house after six decades of relying on the influential Italian house to style almost every single one of its road cars. Overall reaction to the work of chief design officer Flavio Manzoni has been mixed since then, though it must be said that the company is still selling every single car it builds. But knowing that every little decision and detail in its first electric car will be scrutinized to no end, Ferrari called in the ringer of ringers and outsourced the interior to Ive and Newson’s firm LoveFrom.

This is what they returned: a retro-futuristic cockpit mixing classic influences from Ferrari’s past, loads of metal and glass (actually an unprecedented 40 individual glass parts, compared to 3-4 in a normal luxury car), an emphasis on tactile controls, and Ive’s trademark restraint and ingenuity. It’s an attempt to answer two big questions: can you design an electric car that feels like it has a soul? And can two industry outsiders who don’t know what they don’t know be the ones to do it?

Steering Wheel

Inspired by the classic three-spoke wooden Nardi wheel from the 1950s and 60s, the Luce’s tiller is made of anodised aluminum wrapped in leather, and it’s a reminder that automakers have fooled us all into thinking they can’t possibly fit an airbag into a center hub this small. The two horizontal spokes have aluminum turn signal buttons, with more buttons and rollers for volume, track skip, etc on the back.

Underneath those are two control pods flanking the hub with more physical buttons and toggles—the left houses the cruise control and powertrain settings, and the right one has the familiar Manettino drive mode dial, windshield wiper lever with a little glass magnifier showing the selected setting, and suspension mode button.

Two large column-mounted paddle shifters sit directly behind it, which will be used to change the Luce’s Torque Shift Engagement system. Ferrari really doesn’t want to call it fake shifts, instead focusing on how grabbing a paddle will change the car’s entire torque curve, but functionally, it’s going to be fake shifting. 

Gauge Cluster

Definitely the biggest innovation in the Luce’s interior, the gauge cluster, or binnacle as Ive kept calling it, is the best use I’ve seen yet of screens for critical driving information. Samsung OLED screens give it super-rich contrast and the flexibility for Ive and Newson to pull off the biggest party trick: punching three holes in the 12.86-inch top screen to show the individual dials underneath. They look like three separate small screens, but it’s really a second big 12.04-inch screen back there to reduce complexity. The aluminum speedometer needle is attached to a ring gear surrounding the central dial, lit up by 15 LEDs and a complex reflector prism system, and can spin 360 degrees as part of the “startup ceremony.” 

I’m a big fan of the yellow on the dials, the classic motif, and the new heritage-inspired font LoveFrom created that’s used both here and in the infotainment system. They’re enhanced with convex lenses that subtly warp the displays when viewed at an angle, delivering the all-important parallax effect that’s key to creating a sense of physical depth. Between that, the deep black enabled by the use of OLED tech, and the physical needle, the setup really does trick your brain into thinking they’re full analog dials.

But why is the whole thing shaped like a squircle, leaving all that empty space in the corners above the two side dials? The top left corner will show most of the warning lights, and the top left corner will relay turn-by-turn directions and other safety information. Also, the cluster is attached to the steering column and will move along with it when the angle is adjusted. 

Center Screen

Yes, the 10-inch OLED screen in the middle looks like a big Apple Watch. No, I don’t think that’s a problem in and of itself, especially because more physical controls run along the bottom: aluminum toggles and glass buttons for the HVAC system, and a glass volume knob. It’s a solid piece of kit, and the swivel function makes all the sense in the world once you grab that aluminum handle and move it for the first time.

I didn’t get to see the software in action, though its operation smooth and crisp in the demo video Ferrari played at the event. Instead, we heard a lot about the physical clock in the upper right corner. Apparently it was quite a challenge to create a zero-maintenance movement that could allow all three hands to move 360 degrees independently in less than one second, as required for the transition to its stopwatch or compass functions. That’s what the two buttons on the bezel are for. Notably, the clock’s gears are some of the only pieces of plastic in the entire cabin.

The clock is also indicative of LoveFrom’s fanatical attention to detail. The team’s use of half pixels to create those tiny hash marks around the edge is so convincing, I thought it was a printed border until one of the designers explained the illusion to me. 

Other Details

The center console is where I think the plot gets lost a bit. It’s very clean, and the use of glass for the surface, window switches, and shifter is a huge step up from piano black. The way Corning was able to create different texture on the polished shifter surround is impressive, and the microtexture on the rest of the console’s surface is designed to hide fingerprints; I can confirm it works as advertised. There’s also a nifty dock for the Luce’s fob, and when you place it there and press down to start the car, the color drains from the fob’s e-ink display and jumps over to the top of the glass shifter. You can also just press down on the dock and leave the fob in your pocket.

But as a package, it’s a little too simple. Because there’s no transmission tunnel, the console just kind of ends in front with a pair of cupholders under the center screen, leaving a flat floor between the two front footwells like in any EV, or less charitably, a truck. Corning’s reps didn’t have a lot of answers when I pressed them on how scratch resistant the glass will really be under daily use, other than that it’ll last longer than plastic, or if it’ll shatter if someone drops a Stanley mug on it. And the shifter action that LoveFrom spent eight months refining… it’s nice and clunky, but it’s also artificial. The console is also backstopped by another screen for the back seat passengers, and given the focus on tactility, I think it would’ve felt less like something to fill the space between the seats and more like an intentional part of the design if it tailed off into a more creative element.

Speaking of seats, not much was discussed other than how they look, classic and comfortable and tan. And one more comment on the air vents: I love that they’re not controlled through a screen. I don’t love the passing resemblance to overhead vents on an airplane, or the shared twist-to-open operation.

The Soul of a Ferrari?

I’ve never been to a briefing like the one Ferrari put on last week to show off the Luce’s interior. Exploded-view displays of the inner workings of every element emphasizing how little plastic is used. In-depth briefings on the ring gear for the analog speedometer needle, the screen resolution needed to make the face of the physical clock look printed, and the special glass Corning developed for the center console and shifter. Ive and Newson walking around explaining how something like this is only possible with the fresh eyes of two designers who’ve never worked on a production car before.

The preponderance of rounded rectangles and aluminum bezels does make it tempting to call it the Apple Ferrari, though since the Apple designs it calls to were all Ive’s anyway, it’d more accurate to call it the Ive Ferrari. I digress. The design work done inside an automaker is iterative and evolutionary by nature; even revolutionary new models are drawing from an established body of work in structured ways. Regardless of how you judge the result of two legendary tech designers taking their first crack at a car, I think you’ll agree that Ferrari (or any company) couldn’t have come up with something like this by itself.

Not that my opinion matters here but personally, I’m mixed to warm on it. The simple design feels like a friendly mask on an incredibly complex product, a contrast Ive, Apple, and the whole tech industry have excelled at striking. That tech-product-in-2026 vibe overrides the spartan, self-assured beauty of a real vintage Ferrari interior that LoveFrom sought to emulate.

At the same time, though—finally, finally, someone figured out how to do an interesting digital gauge cluster with real depth. I guess it makes sense it took the father of modern screens to solve that one. The swiveling center screen is clever as anything. The thin aluminum steering wheel with its sleek control pods has more class and negative space than anything we’ve seen from a car company in a long time. And true to Ive’s word, the near-total absence of plastic makes every component feel far more solid and weighty than the design can communicate through pictures. And critically, opting for glass or metal in all those places where plastic would normally be found only added about 22 pounds of weight to the car, so it’s still in keeping with the Luce name.

All in all, there are some genuinely fantastic ideas the rest of the auto industry would do well to adopt, mixed with some overconfidence on Ferrari’s part that getting the guy who designed the iPhone to create the Luce’s cabin will placate people who would otherwise dismiss a clean-sheet EV with no real connection to the mechanical heritage every Ferrari has carried up to this point. 

So will the Luce have a soul? Time will tell, and a brief interior preview sure won’t. But it’s clear Ferrari took a massive risk here, and that’s something worth applauding. We’ll see how it all comes together when the Luce is revealed in full in May.

Got a tip? Send us a note: tips@thedrive.com

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“I wish there was a way to know you’re in the good old days before you’ve actually left them.” – Andy Bernard

That quote from The Office series finale has lodged itself in pop culture as a perfect encapsulation of how hard it can be to appreciate the beautiful things in life right now until you’re far down the road. But apologies to Mr. Bernard: he’s wrong. There is a way to know, and it’s called driving the Cadillac CT5-V Blackwing, The Drive’s runaway winner for the 2026 Car of the Year.

By now, I don’t need to ramble on about how the auto industry is convulsing with massive and historic changes. You all live it every day. Electrification, software-defined vehicles, screens, crossovers, ugly designs, too-bright headlights, sky-high prices, death of the manual, monster-truck-sized pickups, et cetera. How could any reasonable person call this the good old days?

But that’s exactly my point. The good old days only become the good old days through the passage of time and the benefit of perspective, but the reasons you remember them that way are with us right now. So let me try to jump you 30 years into the future to the year 2056, when Chinese self-driving blobs have completely taken over American roads, 80 percent of the market is EVs or plug-in hybrids, stick shifts are actually dead, and car enthusiasts are seen more like, I don’t know, model train collectors. You pull out a dog-eared copy of Car & Driver from 2026 from a stack in your garage, gaze wistfully at a photo spread of the last rear-wheel-drive luxury sedan with a stick shift and a supercharged V8 ever made, and think Man. Those were the days.

They were, and boy, they are. Even with all the shit car people have to trudge through today, the Cadillac CT5-V Blackwing is one that makes the fight worth fighting. There is literally no other car like it left on the market: an absurdly engaging driving machine breathing a fiery 668 horsepower through eight cylinders of fury, controlled by a snickety-snick Tremec six-speed manual, all wrapped up in a classic luxury sedan form. 

It is an apogee, a capstone, a monumental achievement for enthusiasts. And it’s also an end, as GM recently announced it’s going out of production this year. Grimly ironic timing given Cadillac’s new foray into F1 racing, but I digress. Knowing it’s almost over, we simply couldn’t let it slip out of our lives without first handing it our highest honor.

Runner-Up: Rivian R1T Quad

Another kind of publication—a less considered one, I’ll say—might’ve given its COTY award to the Rivian R1T Quad, also an incredible achievement that Joel just won’t shut up about. This new-generation Quad might not look all that different, but under the metal, Rivian completely upgraded it with new oil-cooled motors that can actually stand up to off-road abuse, all-new electrical zonal architecture that allowed it to remove 1.6 miles of wiring and cut down the number of ECUs from 17 to seven, a NACS charging port, the RAD tuner for superfine powertrain adjustments, and the long-promised 360-degree Kick Turn function that can be used while in motion on tight trail turns.

Whew. That’s a lot. And so is the R1T Quad with over a thousand horsepower and over 370 miles of EPA-rated range. It’s almost too much, which is why it didn’t win The Drive Award for best EV or car of the year. But unlike every other vehicle on this list, it’ll only get better with time thanks to Rivian’s aggressive roadmap for over-the-air updates. Case in point: in December, Rivian announced the expansion of its Universal Hands-Free driving system from 150,000 miles of roads in America to 3.5 million for the Quad and other second-gen R1 trucks. (Free for now, but it’ll cost $49.99 a month or a one-time charge of $2500 starting in Q2. And a new AI-powered voice assistant that can control just about every major feature in the vehicle is slated to roll out sometime this spring. 

Runner-Up: Honda Civic Hybrid

The Civic Hybrid was our car of the year last year, and you’d be well within your rights to think it deserves back-to-back wins. In another world where the Blackwing wasn’t on its final lap, it might. A 51-mpg fuel sipper in a sweet little package with a torquey powertrain that packs more punch than the Civic Si, the Civic Hybrid is a worthy pick with a starting price around $30,000

We’ve spent many pixels lauding its smart two-motor hybrid system that seamlessly trades off between gas and electric power for maximum efficiency and linear acceleration. Especially when the standard Civic has a conventional CVT, if you can afford the $5K step-up to the hybrid, there’s no reason not to if you care even the slightest bit about driving dynamics. We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again—this should be the default answer when a normal person asks you which new car they should buy. 

Runner-Up: Land Rover Defender Octa

Credit where credit is due: despite Jaguar Land Rover being one of the more dysfunctional automakers right now, it summoned every bit of engineering excellence and decades of off-roading expertise it has and poured it all into the Land Rover Defender Octa and created one of the best SUVs not just of this decade, but arguably of this century.

You can spend a lot less and get something approximating its setup and performance as a super SUV in something like the Ford Bronco Raptor, sure. But this is one of those rare cases where an approximation just won’t do. The build is just that good. Land Rover took the 6D suspension system with hydraulically interlinked dampers from the Range Rover Sport SV, where it’s set up for track use, and re-engineered it to create an off-road god that can still take a high-speed corner. Throw in a twin-turbo V8 with 626 hp and 553 lb-ft of torque, over a foot of ground clearance, the ability to ford through 3.3 feet of water, and a luxury interior, and baby, you’ve got a stew goin’.

Runner-Up: Nissan Leaf

Even as automakers’ electric vehicle dreams have started to collide with the reality that people aren’t widgets and won’t be browbeat into making rational choices, every month brings more EVs with higher range, better practicality, more impressive technology, and faster charging times. But they’re all still focusing on the dwindling number of buyers in the $45,000-$80,000 range, leaving the low end of the market in the lurch.

Not so with Nissan. For a company that’s been short on cash, debating merging with rivals, and generally struggling to find its footing this decade, I’m not quite sure how it nailed the brief for a competitive $30,000 electric car with the next-gen Nissan Leaf. Especially after it squandered the early lead it had in launching the first leaf all the way back in 2010. Gone is the frumpy styling, the weak and cold-sensitive powertrain, and the embarrassingly low range, replaced by a sleek, boldly-styled crossover with NACS charging on the Tesla Supercharger network that’s genuinely fun to drive. It is exactly what the market needs right now.

Runner-Up: Hyundai Santa Fe Hybrid

Don’t look now, but just as the Hyundai Motor Group has become the first stop for EV-curious buyers with the Ioniq 5 crossover, Ioniq 6 sedan, and Ioniq 9 SUV (not to mention the Kia counterparts) offering excellent value and nigh-unbeatable pricing, it’s also been stealing away boatloads of hybrid buyers. And it’s starting to pull away with the Hyundai Santa Fe Hybrid

Starting at $38,000 and topping out just over $50,000, it undercuts every rival in the segment without asking for a single sacrifice on your part. Three rows of seating with optional second-row captain’s chairs, loads of storage, buttons, a delightful boxy design, and a combined 34 miles per gallon all add up to the best family-friendly hybrid you can buy right now. Its 231-horsepower, 271 lb-ft hybrid system with a 1.6-liter turbo four makes it a bit slower than, say, a Toyota Grand Highlander Hybrid, but are we really going to judge crossovers like these on 0-60 times? Like the Civic Hybrid, it’s all the car most people will ever need, and then some.

Winner: Cadillac CT5-V Blackwing

For the last two years, we’ve given the top prize to two excellent and economical hybrids for the overall value they presented in the market: the Honda Civic Hybrid and the Toyota Prius. Time to swerve, hard.

Empirically, the Cadillac CT5-V Blackwing isn’t the fastest thing on four wheels. It isn’t the fanciest, the best-handling, or the best-looking. But emotionally, and as a total package, I don’t know what else to say other than it is simply the best. It’s the only car I’ve driven in this job that I desperately wanted to buy, to have in my life day in and day out, to keep for the rest of my time on this planet. 

There are two ways you can look at the CT5-V Blackwing, and both amount to labeling it a true legend. One, it’s basically a Camaro ZL1 sedan—same Alpha platform, same 6.2-liter supercharged V8, same gearbox, same Magneride suspension—but with a luxurious cabin you can actually see out of, four doors, a useful trunk, and a backseat fit for people with legs. The Camaro died because it was kinda ugly and always played second fiddle to the Corvette, but by God, was it a handler. So take everything great about that car and fix the things that sucked, and you’re telling me this isn’t a winner? Come on.

Two, the CT5-V Blackwing is the BMW E39 M5 of our time. It shares the exact same traits and characteristics that made the E39 the ultimate driving machine, adds an addictive supercharger for good measure, and subtracts the bank loans you’ll need to maintain a daily-driven 26-year-old German car. It might not look quite as timeless on the outside, and the interior has some parts bin qualities, but when you’re the one driving, who cares? One glance at the current M5, now a complicated PHEV weighing nearly 1,500 pounds more than the Blackwing, and you’ll agree that Cadillac finally did what it’s been trying to do for the entire 21st century and beat the Germans fair and square. A knockout punch is still a knockout punch, even if the other guy basically gave it up.

One more point, as if I haven’t made it perfectly clear that I’m hopelessly in love with this thing. The Cadillac isn’t a car you buy because you want to impress other people. Aside from the quad pipes and V badge on the trunk, there’s little that separates it visually from the regular CT5. Most civilians won’t see how special it is. Kids won’t flock to you at a gas station. But when someone does recognize it, and excitedly runs up to you to ask how it is, or ask you to rev it, or even race you on the highway, you’ll instantly know you’ve found a friend. It’s the kind of car that brings us weirdos together, and isn’t that what this is all about?

The good old days, indeed. Cadillac, The Drive salutes you.

The post The Drive Awards: The 2026 Car of the Year is the Cadillac CT5-V Blackwing appeared first on The Drive.

“OK, we’re going to pick it up here,” the Italian-accented voice of one of Ferrari’s lead development drivers crackles over the radio, as cheerful and unbothered as if we were ordering another bottle of wine at dinner the night before. Except, we’re not—we’re easing through the final turn into the front straight of Circuito Monteblanco in Spain, in a rainstorm, in a pair of $600,000 2027 Ferrari 849 Testarossas. I grip the wheel harder and make a stupid face.

Pick it up he does. One second he’s there, a physical form in the vague shape of a car about a hundred feet in front of me. Next, he’s a distant set of taillights twinkling through the roaring wash. I put my foot to the floor, desperate to keep sight of the only thing tethering me to reality. The chassis shimmies for a instant, then surges forward assuredly, the 4.0-liter twin-turbo V8 howling past 8,000 rpm behind my head as the tri-motor hybrid system unleashes 1,036 horsepower in a place where common sense would tell you that’s a bad play. Out of the corner of my eye, I can see the traction control light flashing. But all I’m feeling is unrelenting power.

And then he’s gone. I’m a pilot flying VFR in zero visibility. I do what you’re not supposed to and glance down at the speedometer, not that it matters since all my reference points have vanished, and in that brief moment it leaps from 143 to 151 mph. Still no taillights. Uh-oh.

But—la salvezza! Four thin red lines suddenly pierce through the wall of water as he reaches the braking point, which is… somewhere out there. I try to time my footwork, quickly realize I’ve screwed up, and fully expect the worst as the lead car’s silhouette materializes in front of me and I slam on the left pedal. But the Ferrari’s upgraded ABS Evo system, feeding off a complex digital control system called FIVE to judge the perfect amount of slip in each wheel for maximum braking performance, won’t let that happen. Like I’m Senna in the wet, the car scrubs speed in an impossibly short distance. Next thing I know, I’m moving into the circuit’s first turn again at a placid 35 mph.

Catching my breath, I think back to what one of the car’s engineers said earlier in the day. The Ferrari 849 Testarossa is technologically complex, but it’s not complicated to drive. And how, my Italian friend. And how.

There are a few things worth saying up front. First, Ferrari as an automaker is no longer the purist brand whose cars prioritize raw, mechanical thrills over everything else, and whining about how the days of hot-and-bothered V12s and gated manuals are over is fruitless. Times have changed, Ferrari has changed. What hasn’t is the essence, even if the expression is completely different.

Second, as an all-wheel-drive, plug-in hybrid, twin-turbo V8 supercar sitting atop the company’s hierarchy of “range” cars—i.e. not super exclusive models—the 849 Testarossa shares almost nothing with its 1980s namesake except for the engine’s red valve covers. No side strakes, no pop-up headlights, no Don Johnson. Instead, it’s part of a new crop of hybridized mid-engine prize fighters with over 1,000 horsepower, replacing the Ferrari SF90 Stradale and going up against the Lamborghini Revuelto and soon the Aston Martin Valhalla. Heady stuff.

And third, as that engineer mentioned, the car is so complex that I could write 10 pages simply describing every little upgrade to hardware and software that Ferrari’s thrown into it before even getting to how it all adds up behind the wheel.

But I won’t, because you can read Ferrari’s extremely detailed press release to learn things like how it worked on the fluid dynamics of the turbocharger’s turbine vanes and borrowed a ceramic ball bearing from the F80 to minimize lag in the biggest unit it’s ever put in one of its “regular” cars. Or the exhaust manifold made from 100% inconel has a new flexible coupling also made from the same superalloy to account for thermal expansion. Or how a redesigned cylinder head with tumble-effect intake ports creates vortices in the combustion chambers that further improve efficiency. Or how all of that, plus more, allowed it to squeeze an astonishing 818 hp from the 4.0L V8 in the SF90 Stradale, and new gearbox control logic for the 8-speed dual-clutch transmission somehow creates sharper, barkier shifts and smoother power delivery.

You know what? This is kind of fun. The three-motor hybrid system—two radial flux motors on the front axle, an axial-flux pancake between the engine and transmission, and 7.45-kWh battery delivering 15 miles of electric-only range—is lighter and even more mind-melded with the V8’s power delivery. That makes the handoff between gas and electric power more seamless between low, mid, and high RPMs. The underfloor aero is completely redesigned with a trio of cascading vortex generators for a 20% boost in downforce and 10% decrease in drag compared to the SF90’s bottom. Ferrari somehow found a 15% increase in cooling demanded by the more powerful V8 through larger intakes, asymmetrical radiators, and side intercoolers also pilfered from the F80.

Finally, a redesigned suspension reduces body roll by 10% from the SF90, optimizing the tires’ contact patches and further increasing lateral grip. Semi-active Magneride dampers are standard. Bigger brakes—which are brake-by-wire, by the way—with better cooling and the SF90 XX Stradale’s ABS Evo system join the party. Even the regenerative braking system has been overhauled with “anti-jerk” characteristics in mind to make it feel natural. All that with an aluminum chassis for the same dry weight as the SF90: about 3,500 pounds.

Even if you’re jaded by the Ferrari of today, you have to appreciate the insane, obsessive level of engineering that went into the 849 Testarossa. When I drove the 812 Superfast a few years ago, I wrote that it was incredible to feel Ferrari working the tiny margins that remained to squeeze every drop of performance from a front-engine, rear-drive car. Even as we enter this new hybrid AWD era, the same is true of the mid-engine V8 setup. 

In both cases, doing so demands a huge dose of tech, and this is where I’m going to lose some of you. The 849 Testarossa’s nervous system is underpinned by the Ferrari Integrated Vehicle Estimator, a digital dynamic control system that takes in real time data like three-axis acceleration (longitudinal, lateral, and… up and down) and roll, pitch, and yaw. It essentially creates a virtual clone of the what the car is doing in a given moment, does the math to predict what’s about to happen, and tells systems like the traction control, AWD, and ABS Evo how to behave to maximize grip, acceleration, and braking. As a Ferrari spokesman put it to me, it’s basically the sensor of sensors in the car. Sounds like a gimmick, but I can assure you, it is not.

That is joined by more interconnected acronymic aids like Side Slip Control 9.0 (SSC) to dial in your optimum slip angle and Ferrari Driving Enhancer 2.0 (FDE) that complements the eDiff torque vectoring by selectively braking individual wheels in a high-speed corner. 

And the way it looks, well, there are few things people agree on less than the direction of Ferrari’s design language. Personally, I think it’s moving in a good direction, and this one in particular would’ve been received more positively if they didn’t call it a Testarossa and expect people not to draw comparisons to the 80s version. I like the retro black bar on the front end, the angled character line tracing from the front bumper all the way up to the twin-tail rear end, and the vertical bar behind the doors that pinches the body like a corset and outlines the side intakes. We should appreciate that the obsession with underbody aero has let Ferrari bring back smoother, softer panels up top. The only miss is the squinty taillights. Give me some circles any day.

Back to the track. As I mentioned, my day at Circuito Monteblanco was marked by off-and-on downpours, heavy fog, and temperatures in the mid-40s—hardly the ideal conditions for buckling up the four-point harness in an 849 Testarossa equipped with the track-oriented Assetto Fiorano package, which saves about 66 pounds with carbon fiber wheels and lightweight seats, and adds more underfloor aero tricks and twin spoilers out back for even more downforce.

The instructions from Ferrari’s team consisted of leaving the Manettino drive mode dial in Wet mode for the first few laps to get a feel for the car. Meanwhile, the hybrid system has four separate modes itself to manage how the electric power is delivered and recuperated—full electric, Hybrid, Performance, and Qualify—and Performance was best suited for the conditions. Otherwise, just try to keep up. 

Wet mode is aptly named: despite the rain and having a thousand horsepower at my command, the 849 simply refused to oversteer, even when I booted the throttle mid-corner just to see what would happen. What I quickly came to realize is that the suite of electronic aids and the hybrid system all act as what Motor Trend’s Angus MacKenzie and I later described as a stupidity sponge—soaking up and smoothing out even the dumbest of inputs.

Only once did an abrupt power cut feel like the traction control system was actively intervening. Otherwise, the 849 Testarossa’s brain makes the driving experience adaptable to conditions and driver skill in an astoundingly natural way. There’s that real-time magic. I’ve never experienced seeing a TC light flashing while burying the accelerator in the carpet in fifth gear and feeling nothing but unbroken acceleration well into triple-digit speeds. It is designed to make you believe like you are right on the edge of control, and it delivered the most visceral track experience I’ve ever had in this job.

There was certainly a lot of understeer, but mainly because there just wasn’t enough grip from the 265/35 R20 tires up front for the torque-vectoring electric motors to do their thing. Wet mode cannot defeat the laws of physics, and at some point you do have to back off. The steering itself was excellent—probably not enough feel for die-hards, but extremely direct and agile. The Assetto Fiorano package uses Multimatic shocks instead of Magneride, though Magneride remains an option, and it felt like the race-derived bit of kit it was, flat through corners and stable over curbs.

After facing my mortality in that first session, the development driver approached me to gently suggest that I was actually still braking too early, and I needed to trust the ABS Evo system more. Hit it late and hard and really lean into trail braking into a curve. That was a tricky ask, not because I didn’t trust it, but because the pedal was quite firm with a short stroke and it was difficult to modulate. The firmness is also adaptive, so it’s challenging to learn on the fly. I found myself wishing for more range to play with. When I did gather the courage to brake later than I thought possible, the 849 Testarossa came through and held the line, apart from more shimmying and shaking than a casual driver would appreciate.

On my last few laps, having learned the course, I switched the Manettino dial from Wet to Sport mode and was immediately greeted with a lot more oversteer, more aggressive intervention from the traction control, and a looser rear end under hard braking. A little more time and I could’ve adapted to it, but I had more business to attend to. The Ferrari team thoughtfully mapped out a two-hour drive through a totally empty, beautifully curvy road through the Spanish countryside to get a feel for the regular 849 Testarossa. Alas, it began to rain even harder, but it gave ample time to judge the car on its everyday usability. 

Slipping into the cabin of the street car felt like an immediate upgrade. The powered standard seat is a lot more comfortable, with adjustable bolsters and lumbar, not exactly soft but certainly easy to find a comfortable position. Forward visibility is excellent, with the front fender bulges making it easy to position the corners accurately. Even rear visibility is great because the V8 is mounted so low in the chassis.

Ferrari is quite proud of the fact that it added real buttons back to the wheel for navigating the single screen containing the gauge cluster and infotainment system, and you know, bonus points for that. The hybrid system selector is still the old touch capacitive nonsense along the bottom of the wheel, though, and only the current selected mode is backlit, so owners will have to get used to memorizing the order and spacing of each option. Otherwise, it frames the screen nicely, flanked by huge and satisfyingly clicky paddle shifters.

That said, I do have mixed feelings on the single-screen solution (not counting the standard passenger screen, which is useless to the driver). It certainly makes the interior feel more like a proper old-school cockpit, but navigating everything with steering wheel buttons is tricky and sometimes feels as dangerous as reaching over and being distracted by a central touchscreen. Especially when using Apple CarPlay, it just doesn’t feel intuitive. Certain apps “stack” their controls in different ways despite how it looks on the screen, so sometimes pressing the down button actually gets you to the thing you need to click, just below the menu option that’s currently highlighted, and sometimes pressing down actually sends you to the left. 

There’s one more thing that’s sure to polarize: there’s no gated manual shifter, but there is a gated manual shifter-looking thing that’s actually the selector for reverse, automatic mode, manual mode, and launch control. I can appreciate what they were going for, but having four options and two blanks on something that’s supposed to look like a six-speed shifter feels inelegant, and the short action on the little levers is weak. If you’re going to visually call back to something people sorely miss, at least try to recreate the experience more. 

The blinding rain and guardrail-less road meant any chance to press the 849 Testarossa on the street was out the window, but again, the car never skipped a beat or felt too powerful for how I was using it. It stormed through standing water and muddy wash-overs, never slipped on road markings. The rear was utterly stuck in. The only negative I have to report is that in Sport mode, the transmission is a little too slow to kick down. There’s plenty of torque to surge forward in 5th or 6th gear, but punching the throttle doesn’t bring the drama of a quick drop to 3rd or 2nd like you’d expect. 

The Magneride suspension was firm but yielding. Far from plush, but not punishing or over-aggressive, and it had enough ground clearance to never need the front-axle lift over Spain’s many speed bumps. And that brake-by-wire system with its adaptive pedal started to make more sense on the street, where there was less pressure to nail the right amount of force each time.

After a couple of hours of slow-speed fun, I got back on the highway for a half-hour blast back to base camp. The battery was full, having kept itself topped up in Hybrid mode, so I switched into eDrive to experience a silent Ferrari, minus a fair amount of road noise from the tires. The three motors by themselves put out 220 hp, and that certainly felt accurate given the decrease in passing power. Range is… not 15 miles when you’re doing 75 mph. I got about 8 miles before the battery ran out. But hey, it works.

Leave your preconceptions at the door, and the 2027 Ferrari 849 Testarossa is an astonishing machine. It is a genuine achievement in the way truly great cars are—surprising, delightful, enthralling, a bit scary, but most of all, fun as hell. If you worry that modern supercars are just way too intense to enjoy, find your way into one of these and see what a company like Ferrari has to say about that.

Because truly great cars are also a statement. In this case, technology can elevate a driving experience from a simulacrum of a more straightforward past into a future that’s truly connected to the things that made the past so special. Just like there’s no world in which screens will disappear from cars, no matter how many buttons we’re able to cajole automakers into bringing back, there’s no world in which modern supercars will ever be like the original Testarossa again. 

But we can and should appreciate what Ferrari has done here: using technology to make a 1,000-horsepower plug-in hybrid that engages those same primal pleasure centers in our brains. It scratches that same itch. It has the same magic. The expression is different. But the essence? It’s still there, still intact. Let Ferrari be Ferrari, and great things will happen.

Ferrari provided The Drive with travel, accommodations, and access to the vehicle for the purpose of writing this review.

The post 2027 Ferrari 849 Testarossa First Drive Review: Don’t Fear the Future appeared first on The Drive.

Few lineups have run the gamut of cars and trucks like Mercedes-Benz over the decades. That three-pointed star has graced everything from luxurious coupes to tiny compacts to buses, semis, and why not, the Unimog. Though the company’s corporate structure means that drivers in the U.S. can’t enjoy seeing the same badge on an S-Class and an 18-wheeler in traffic, there’s one obvious place where Mercedes’ passenger and commercial vehicle operations converge on American roads: the Sprinter van.

And this week, we’re getting a glimpse of its future. As Mercedes celebrates the 30th anniversary of the first Sprinter’s launch, it’s previewing the design of the upcoming fourth generation model with a sculpture named “The BOuLDER”—that’s the last time I type it like that—and sharing a few details on its next cargo van’s platform, functionality, and connectivity features. 

Even if you don’t run a delivery business, this is important. Mercedes-Benz is at a crossroads, squeezed by rising trade barriers and a hurried pivot away from an early all-in bet on electric vehicles. Revenue from its vans division had grown by 25 percent since 2019 before dropping in 2024, just after the boom years encouraged the company to plan an ambitious expansion with the new VLE/VLS class luxury vans. The Sprinter name and the image it carries as something that works as a red carpet shuttle and a utility truck is incredibly valuable, and financially, the automaker needs the next Sprinter to be a hit more than it needs to appease anyone by putting a V8 back in the C63 AMG.

The Boulder reveals the grille, a bit of the headlights, and chunks of a hi-roof Sprinter’s silhouette: the hood line, A-pillar, roof, and rear end. It looks like… a van, as it should. A closer look brings out some changes though, like a more rounded fascia, a flatter hood to create more of an angle at the A-pillar, and a slightly more slab-sided character overall.

Here I’m going to disclose that Mercedes actually gave me a secret preview of a styling prototype in Germany last week showing the full (but not fully finished) design, but I signed a heavy NDA, handed over my phone and recorder, and got wanded down by a stern German, so I can’t say anything about it. They asked for feedback, I gave it, and that’s that.

You might see this and think it pretty much looks the same. But it should! Commercial vans need to be two things – good at carrying stuff, and easy to repair and modify. Companies shouldn’t be getting wacky with that design brief. You don’t need the Rivian RSV’s massive U-shaped taillight and the corner-bashing issues it creates to signal that this is the future of vans, or even just an improvement over the one that came before it. All you need is something that does the job better.

Thing is, the Sprinter has lots of jobs. Here in America, we mainly see them as trade or delivery vans, camper conversions, and VIP shuttles. Globally, you can add flatbeds, box trucks, ambulances, fire trucks, food trucks, articulated semis, and more to the list. Mercedes has to account for all of those in how it’s setting up the next one. Importantly, the fourth-gen Sprinter will be available in a similar range of roof heights, wheelbases, and chassis configurations.

The next Sprinter will also come in both electric and gas versions, riding on the VAN.EA and VAN.CA platforms respectively, which are also shared with the new smaller and passenger-focused VLE/VLS-Class van Mercedes announced earlier this year. How may parts will be shared when the Sprinter needs to be built for durability? Mercedes won’t say yet, nor will it disclose anything about the ICE powertrains. The electric version will come first, and we expect 800-volt architecture to enable super fast charging.

Further, Mercedes will add its MB.OS connected operating system with a number of fleet management focused features, like custom app integration for route planning and realtime maintenance alerts. The van’s new computers will be deeply integrated in a “chip-to-cloud” setup to allow for remote control of everything from the HVAC system to charging settings.

Not every Sprinter buyer runs a fleet, and there will certainly be those who think those are needless complications in a work van, but we’ll hold judgment until those systems can be stress tested in the real world. Also, I have to stress how different this kind of preview feels from your average new model teaser. Mercedes isn’t promising a revolution. In fact, these are all advances already found on a lot of new cars today. Mercedes is just saying alright, time to put them in the van.

That’s actually been the Sprinter’s thing all along. Like the S-Class, it’s been the first to do a lot of things in its segment that have since become the norm for cargo vans, starting with standard four-wheel disc brakes when it first launched. Speaking of, Mercedes brought a yellow 1995 model out of its museum for a quick spin so I could see where things started. Honestly, apart from the diesel being glacially slow, it was remarkable how modern everything else felt from the driver’s seat—the seating position and ergonomics, the car-like touch points, the view over the hood. These changes were big leaps for commercial vans back then. Now, they’re just kind of how things are.

Thirty years later, it’s trying to do it again. The same, just better. We’ll see when the full reveal happens sometime next year.

Got a tip? Send us a note: tips@thedrive.com

The post The Next-Gen Sprinter Van Is Mercedes’ Most Important Launch in Years appeared first on The Drive.

Of all the things we do here at The Drive, there’s one kind of story that’s particularly polarizing: deals. Judging by our inbox, some of you love them, and some of you consider them war crimes. And I get it. Everyone on the internet is trying to sell you something, including your friendly neighborhood car news site. At the same time, part of being a car person is buying a lot of stuff, and who doesn’t like saving money on crap?

To level with you, we post deals because it’s part of how we make money and keep the lights on as a free website. If you click a link on a deal we feature and buy the thing, we get a few cents. I believe an outlet like us doing a good job with this can be a really useful thing for our audience. But I’ll be the first to admit we haven’t always met that standard.

So we’re resetting our whole approach. Today, I’m proud to introduce The Drive’s DealEngine, an AI-powered bot we built to trawl Amazon.com for killer deals on products for car people. Craftsman tools. Bilstein shocks. Dometic fridges. Meguiar’s soap. Mobil 1 oil. Random parts like wheel hub assemblies. Every day, basically every hour, it’ll post those deals to a new X/Twitter account before they expire. We’d be grateful if you gave it a follow.

Why X and Amazon? They’re the easiest places to automate and test tech like this, because ultimately that’s what we’re after. We want to make a tool that does its thing for you on any platform, for any retailer, and this is just the first step. We might as well get something for enthusiasts out of AI, right? And if you don’t care about deals? Skip it. You can opt out of this whole endeavor.

It’s clear that just plopping a deal on the homepage and expecting you to care isn’t the way forward. We’ll still do those occasionally, but you come here for the news, car reviews, and culture stories. This project will help us keep those going, and hopefully prove its worth to you. Let us know what you think: feedback@thedrive.com.

The post We Built an AI Bot To Find the Best Deals on Stuff for Car People. Meet DealEngine appeared first on The Drive.

Picture this: a German automaker known for small sports cars is up against the ropes, the ground shifting beneath its feet. It’s not looking good. But after a moment of peril, it saves itself the only way it can: by making an SUV.

Look, I’m going to spare you too much more of that. If you don’t already know, ask ChatGPT what happened when Porsche pulled itself out of the fire with the first Cayenne SUV back in 2002. We’ve got other things to talk about here. So just to get the obvious out of the way… yes, it is uncanny that 23 years later, Porsche’s once again hit a bit of a rough patch, and it’s leaning hard on what it hopes is a revolutionary SUV to carry it through. Just without a V8 this time.

Here it is: the Porsche Cayenne Electric. That sensible name belies the staggering amount the company has thrown at building an EV good enough to make you forget the gas one exists. To wit: Active Ride suspension that pushes and pulls to eliminate body roll. New in-house motors with internal liquid cooling between the rotors and stators, itself a feat of engineering. 400 kW fast charging for 10-80% in 16 minutes. 7,000-pound tow rating. 0-60 mph in under 3 seconds. Aero blades that pop out of the rear fenders on command. Genuine off-road abilities. And [redacted] in the interior, which, oops, I’m not supposed to talk about yet.

I flew to Spain at the end of June to drive a handful of Cayenne Electric prototypes, real development vehicles plucked out of the testing fleet, some with dust from heat testing in the Middle East still trapped behind their fake taillights. These are not finished products. But apart from the car, which I will tell you right now is excellent, what surprised me the most was how anxious the Porsche executives in attendance were to know what I thought about it. And more tellingly, what I thought American buyers might think about it. OK guys, here goes.

How Porsche Got Here

Porsche has good reason to be nervous, since it took over a decade for people to stop wailing about it making SUVs and admit that it’s probably not the end of the world for Porsche to be making arguably the best SUV in the world. The base Cayenne, the 516-hp Cayenne S E-Hybrid, the V8 Cayenne S (that one’s actually perfect) or GTS, the wild Turbo GT, every flavor of the third-generation car is spot on. Taste is subjective, but the focus and execution at Porsche on its most important model has been beyond reproach.

You can read it as bad luck that Porsche rolled the dice in committing to making the fourth-gen Cayenne fully electric four years ago, and just so happens to be launching it in a slowing EV market and a few pesky trade wars after the worst surge of global inflation this century. How could it know the adoption curve would flatten? I mean, it could’ve. But that’s not the point. The point is, people were so thoroughly freaked out that Porsche backtracked and said it would keep building the third-gen gas models into the 2030s, alongside the fourth-gen electric one.

This is all a bit inelegant, but what really concerns Porsche here is that its EV push is faltering and its two most important markets are increasingly skeptical about its electrics for very different reasons. In the U.S., political changes and our dumpy fast-charging infrastructure are turning away fickle luxury buyers. And in China, as the VP of the entire Cayenne Program, Michael Schatzle told me, they “think they’re building better electric vehicles” than any European company. Porsche is not used to asking people to trust it; now it has to, because its future depends on it. Even the doubts around the Taycan were gilded with the assumption that Porsche wouldn’t be launching its first electric car if it wasn’t pretty damn good, and it wasn’t replacing anything in the lineup anyway. The Cayenne Electric isn’t doing that either, yet. But it will.

New Motors, New Tricks, 1,000+ HP

So what do we have here, exactly? Coming in base, S, and Turbo trims, the Porsche Cayenne Electric sits on a reworked version of the PPE platform used by the Macan Electric with an 800-volt architecture, a 113-kWh battery, and a dual-motor powertrain mixing five different units all developed in-house. It’s those motors that create the power differences across trims; the battery is always the same.

I mentioned the internal liquid cooling before; among other advances, it means the motors can deliver maximum power 100% of the time. The battery now is the only reason that’s not possible, and why Porsche’s “push to pass” boost button exists. The company finally made its own motors because it couldn’t find a supplier that was up to the task, Schatzle told me. 

“The idea is always to build a car that is even better than the current one. So we put in everything we wanted, and then we said we want to make a car with extraordinary performance, and therefore we need a completely new battery and motor,” Schatzle said. “We think we have got it. I’m responsible for the ICE model and for the BEV, and I think the BEV is the better option.”

And I think Porsche should get bolder with branding and marketing its first in-house motors, which they’re clearly proud of but didn’t shout about during my visit. That’s a genuinely big deal. Admittedly, my experience with the Cayenne Electric was light on facts and figures, most of which they’re withholding for the full reveal this fall. And you can presume that I saw the interior since I drove the thing, but I signed my life away and can’t share anything about it other than it has panel heating, which is also quite neat.

Stuff we do know: Max power on the Turbo is over 1,000 hp, and it’ll sprint to 60 mph in under three seconds to a top speed of 155 mph. Even the base model will do it in “well under five seconds,” according to Cayenne Electric product line director Dirk Britzen. He asked me to guess the power in the base model I drove with him riding shotgun; I said 400-500 hp, and he shrugged and smiled. Take that how you will. Promised range is above 350 miles, and we’ll see about that. It’ll have NACS charging, but as of now, Tesla’s network can’t max out the car’s 400 kW charging capability. Vanishingly few chargers in America can, unfortunately. But Porsche is optimistic that people will latch onto that number as a real achievement.

“It’s not that easy to get the battery to do this. You need to cool it precisely and then heat it up, and it has to be able to give a lot of energy. It’s always stressful for the battery,” Britzen said. “But even when we do our test drives in Germany, we don’t need to charge with 400 kW to reach our target, but I do anyway. It’s just cool. When you are at the charger and you see the four as the first digit, you’re like okay, crazy. That’s wild.”

Yes, It Drives Like a Porsche

Optional rear-axle steering offers five degrees of angle, which is honestly just as important as the Active Ride suspension in bringing out the best of the chassis—responsive, composed, and impossibly light on its toes when they’re equipped. But rear-steer and Active Ride can be specced independently on the base, S, and Turbo models, creating a wide range of experiences. Turbo with rear steer and no Active Ride was my pick, flickable with a more visceral road feel. Later, climbing back into a base model with neither option ticked, I was shocked at how much more steering input I needed to make the same curves. 

The gap in performance and overall driving experiences between the base and the Turbo was about the same as you’d find in the gas Cayenne. The base is sharper than it has any right to be, though you can tell the chassis is capable of a lot more. Then you see what the advanced technology can add, and you realize the bouncier ride and more frantic steering without them could be tuned up. It’s far from a case where it feels like the company obviously developed the top trim first and worked backwards to figure out the model you can actually afford, though. I asked Sascha Niesen, the prototype fleet manager, about that scenario.

“Well, obviously, you start with those that can be released first. But depending on who you ask, the Chassis [team] will always start with top spec. Because that’s the one where they have the most things to do. If you don’t have an active ride, there’s nothing to do for you. If you don’t have rear axle steering, there you go. But you got to get all those systems up and running and working in harmony,” he said. “And with Body, it’s evenly distributed, they need to do both. The ones that are responsible for the high voltage architecture they will pick the top cars because the active ride is a voltage system. They need that one. But it’s basically, start with everything you want to release at the same time, so you don’t get any delays in there. And then the S will be released later. So that’s probably from a calibration standpoint less mature than the other ones.”

That would explain why the S model that I drove didn’t quite capture the goldilocks balance that letter represents on the gas Cayenne. Apart from stepping up in power, it didn’t feel all that different from the base. But again, base to Turbo? Massive jump. And that’s before you deploy the aero blades, which Porsche freely admits are more theatrical and only reduce the drag coefficient by 0.006, and give launch control a go. You know those viral videos where idiots in the passenger seat jump up as a car launches and let the g-force hold them suspended against the seat back? No? Well, sorry, that’s a thing. And the Cayenne Turbo Electric pulls so hard you could probably do that past 100 mph. Don’t, though.

Is that a V8?

Where all trims are equal is another possibly controversial point: the sound. The Porsche Electric Sound System, as it’s called, is the Cayenne Electric’s new “exhaust” note that can be added to any trim, and it sounds suspiciously like a V8—because it is. Porsche developed the sound by recording a Cayenne V8 running on a dyno, adding a touch of sci-fi,and modulating it to accommodate the electric motors’ wider rev range. We weren’t able to set up microphones on the cars to capture it well, but you can hear it a bit in the Richard Hammond video below:

This is going to irk any purists, like many things do. But I think it was a really smart move. The Hyundai Ioniq 5 N showed it’s possible for a fake exhaust note to add to the driving experience when it’s calibrated right, as it is here. You can clutch your pearls about it coming from a speaker, or you can lean back and appreciate that it sounds great, delivers the same addictive aural response when you bury the throttle, and adds real emotion to the car. And if it makes a difference, Schatzle said it was a “big discussion” within the company before they moved forward with it, with final approval coming from CEO Oliver Blume himself.

“It was my decision to do it. We started the development and then some of the board and top management, they got the information that we are working on something like that. Then I had to talk to them and say, give me three months to get it ready for the car,” Schatzle said. “You can drive the car and then you can make the decision for the recipe of the car. And then they drove the car and said Oh, that’s right, good idea. But before that, big discussion.”

“The test drivers say they’re using it because they are feeling what the car is doing. Because the people of our generation, we are used to the combustion engines and we hear what’s going on in the car,” he added. “When you’re pushing the pedal, you get more feedback with what’s going on in the car, so they’re using it.”

Niesen also told me Porsche is considering simulated gear shifts despite its earlier opposition, though no decision has been made yet. But there is a prototype built by PDK experts within the company that he drove recently, and in his words, “they know what they’re doing. I could not tell the difference.”

Cayenne Electric Still Shines Off-Road, Somehow

One final area where Porsche has pushed the Cayenne Electric farther than anyone would expect is off-road. The first-gen model was shockingly good in the dirt, with locking center and rear diffs and proper low range. This one is too, even though mechanical prowess has been replaced with software and Active Ride. 

Porsche put us on the trails of an off-road facility outside Barcelona where it’s tested every generation of Cayenne. The setting ranged from purpose-built obstacles to rocky climbs with blind crests, precarious drops, and tire-swallowing holes. You’re not going to see a lot of articulation in a heavy SUV with independent air suspension, sure. But in every other regard, the Cayenne Electric blew me away here.

The key is that the car’s off-road mode completely changes the throttle calibration, making it incredibly loose and languid. If you’re climbing a steep, loose slope and hit a tricky spot, you don’t have to back up and try again. Just keep the throttle pinned—I mean, actually pinned to the floor—move the wheel back and forth, and the traction control software will figure out where the grip is, find its footing, and send you onwards without suddenly launching forward. There’s no revving, no chaos; it’s methodical, bordering on meditative in its movement. The only times it struggled for more than a few seconds was with two wheels in the air, but it always got itself sorted.

It also managed to hold a 29-degree side angle, thanks in part to the weight of the battery. I wish I could’ve recorded the maximum downhill angle we pulled, but I was too busy working the brakes. That was the only meaningful place for improvement; it’s a heavy thing that requires deft footwork on the stop pedal going down a rocky chute, and even though off-road mode also changes the blend of the friction and regen systems, the pedal action felt weird and hard to smooth out. But otherwise, hats off.

How did we get this far without talking about how it looks? You have eyes, you don’t need me pontificating on a camo’d car where most of the details are obscured. It’s lower than the third-gen model, a bit more wagon-y in appearance, with a front design that’s definitely more Macan Electric than Taycan. The most useful thing I can say here is that the shape looked kind of squished and bland to me in pictures, but when I saw it in person, it really came together. The dimensions are human; it doesn’t feel excessive, nor does it feel like it’s hiding anything. To me, it’s a more mature expression of the Macan Electric’s design, as it should be. 

So, back to the question I kept being asked: What will Americans think of the Porsche Cayenne Electric? Setting aside that the eventual price is a wildcard given the tariff situation and disappearing federal tax credit, those who can afford it and for whom an EV makes sense will love it. I can even see Cayenne owners who are on the fence about going electric being convinced by its undeniable excellence.

It feels like a moment with echoes of the first-gen Cayenne, Porsche taking a risk and building a car that matches its ambitions. The Cayenne Electric can make the neighbors jealous, and that might be what it needs to take hold here. But if the price is wrong, or the gas Cayenne keeps feeling like a better deal, or the predictions about fast charging growth in America are as wrong as the EV sales projections, it could very well fall into the same chasm the whole market is struggling to avoid. 

A few hours with some unfinished cars isn’t enough to place that kind of bet. All I can say is: the Cayenne Electric is superb. And I hope that matters.

Got a tip? Email me: kyle@thedrive.com

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This photo isn’t real—but you wouldn’t know it by the way it swept across social media this month, with tens of thousands of people genuinely thinking they were looking at spy photos of two new Volvo cars and cheering the automaker’s return to boxy, retrofuture designs. Then, the counter-response: thousands more commenters declaring that it’s obviously an AI-generated image, and how could anyone be dumb enough to think otherwise? But the thing is, it’s actually neither of those. And the excitement and anger surrounding the conversation is an ominous sign of how AI can mess up even the smallest social interactions, like two car enthusiasts looking at a picture together.

The images are in fact renders created by digital artist Jordan Rubinstein-Towler, who published them on his Instagram page back on January 28. He’s been making sketches and 3D renders for years, mainly fan-service stuff like redoing the new Acura Integra to look more like the third-gen one. The two Volvos are just his latest project. He’s been having fun with the rollout, mocking them up in design sketches and camouflaged spy photo scenes in Instagram posts over the last six months.

How did they turn into a moment of mass misinformation? I’ll walk through it, but the big point is that relying on AI—to create or solve or filter the world around us—kills our already diminishing critical thinking skills. That’s not (just) my POV, it’s the conclusion of a recent study by Microsoft. (You know, the company investing $80 billion into AI this year.) As society struggles to adapt to these new technologies, problems will pop up in places we don’t expect. Like upsetting the delicate balance that previously made amateur 3D renders fun distractions for the car community, not the source of false rumors and deep frustration.

Over the last decade, more powerful graphics cards and the spread of open-source modeling software led to a real cottage industry for creators of fake car renders. Artists “fix” cars that had gotten bad redesigns (think the fight against BMW’s ever-expanding kidney grilles), make outlandish dream builds, or use actual spy photographs to mock up future models. Those with talent could earn a big following and decent cash.

Until recently, renders haven’t caused a lot of issues. When one broke containment and found a new audience who didn’t know what it was, confusion was snuffed out pretty quickly. At the same time, you could argue that Jordan, like many artists, at least sorta hoped people would think they were real photos, if only for the views. His original caption—”Volvo 240 sedan and kombi high performance prototypes spotted at the Nürburgring”—sure isn’t helping. It’s fine if you’re in on the running joke with his profile, but without that context, it adds to the new problem today.

Because now, the right render breaking containment is met by an audience (especially on Facebook) that’s being deluged with pure AI-generated content, struggling to separate it from reality, and relying on an algorithm that prioritizes it to determine what they see next. It’s a spark in a bone-dry forest.

That’s what happened here. Jordan’s renders were quickly screenshotted by someone—whether they believed the caption or not is irrelevant—and uploaded to Facebook without its crucial context. Users latched onto them, thinking they were real and spreading them across dozens of enthusiast groups. Others immediately jumped in to declare that they were generative AI nonsense, but those fact checks couldn’t catch up with the number of people falling for them every second and excitedly sharing them further. By the time the dust settled, after the images had already leapt to Reddit and other platforms, they were presented as real to millions of people. How many just moved on with their lives believing something fake?

Again, this is not a new dynamic. The speed is really what’s different now, for something as innocuous as a 3D model of a car. You could argue that incorrectly believing Volvos are going to look a certain way isn’t going to ruin anyone’s life and this is all ultimately harmless. But the response of people saying it’s AI and getting legitimately angry with those who couldn’t tell shows why it’s not. Before, when there was confusion over a render, the usual correction was to just point it out. “Uh, that’s a render guys.” It’s subtle, but when you say that, you’re acknowledging that this is something created by a person, who might not have meant to fool anyone, and it’s more on the viewer to keep that in mind. But when you say, THAT’S AI, ARE YOU KIDDING ME IDIOTS?, you’re saying that this is worthless content made just to trick people, and God help you if you fell for it.

I get why people thought it was AI, because most things that look like these two images are AI today: the too-precise shadows, weird depth of field effect, and incongruous body lines on the cars feel like tells. But that is the other side of the coin. Not only has AI content made it hard for less digitally savvy folks to tell what’s real, but it’s also set up those who are on guard with a new default assumption. If something isn’t real but looks like it’s trying to be, it’s AI. The idea of someone spending many hours building a 3D scene as a piece of art isn’t top of mind anymore. That person is erased from the conversation, as is the humanity of the person you’re judging for thinking it’s real. It’s no longer communication, it’s combat.

I’m not gonna get into what that means for society; this is a car blog. In our world though, I think in this one aspect, it means renders are going to cause more rough moments like this one, and the car community and industry are going to have to learn how to navigate them. And artists, whether they’re innocent bystanders or not, are going to see people writing off their work as AI in the aftermath, as people did on Jordan Rubinstein-Towler’s original post.

One last look at Jordan’s Instagram shows how things have shifted in just the last two years. In January 2023, he was in the middle of another rollout campaign for his retro redesign of the Acura Integra. That month, he posted a similar set of “spy shot” renders showing a partly-camo’d car in traffic with another factual-sounding caption. Over 13,000 likes, thousands of interactions, and almost as much algorithmic action as his ill-fated Volvo post last month. And not a single response from the time debating its origins. People knew it was a render, because what else would it be? Except last week, in the wake of all this, a curious user found their way to the two-year-old post. They weren’t sure if what they were seeing was real. They left a comment: “Is this AI?”

Got a tip? Send us a note: tips@thedrive.com

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