The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) is working to incorporate a headlight-rating segment into its analysis of cars’ safety performance, and it is working to do so soon. According to Automotive News, the research firm is looking to tie headlight performance to a car’s safety rating as soon as 2017. This means that, in order for a car to attain, say, the highest rating of Top Safety Pick +, its headlights must meet yet-to-be-determined criteria. Most likely, expensive technologies such as steerable headlight modules, LED bulbs, and more will be necessary items.
The implications of IIHS’s move are far-reaching—just look at the results of the recently introduced (by car-development standards) small-overlap crash test—and could force automakers to adopt fancier lighting tech sooner. Currently, an IIHS Top Safety Pick is earned by way of “good ratings in the moderate overlap front, side, roof strength and head restraint tests, as well as a good or acceptable rating in the small overlap front test,” according to IIHS. A Top Safety Pick +, on the other hand, must “earn an advanced or superior rating for front crash prevention.” Most recently, IIHS hung the requirement that cars have front-crash prevention technology (automatic braking and collision warning) around the neck of a Top Safety Pick + rating; as the firm notes, “Top Safety Pick + winners with optional front crash prevention qualify for the higher award only when equipped with the technology.” As a result, we’ve seen a flood of models add that feature.
It’s a fair assumption that similar bait will be set with headlight technology. Today, HID headlights are only just starting to become widespread in average-priced cars, while LED headlights and adaptive, steerable lights are still optional and largely the purview of luxury vehicles. We’re all for the democratization of better headlights—and safer vehicles—but it isn’t yet clear what the implications will be for vehicle cost. Nor is it clear whether the IIHS’s upcoming mandate might speed the availability of future lighting technology such as laser lights, matrix-LED lamps, and the like that currently are tied up in U.S. regulatory tape.
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As if Formula E didn’t already fail at creating so much as a ripple in the racing community, the all-electric racing series has announced its new opening act: Roborace. Think a bunch of near-silent electric race cars whizzing around a circuit is boring? Just wait until you soak in a Roborace event, which will also use electric cars—but eschew the drivers. That’s right, this is an all-electric, autonomous racing series.
It seems appropriate that Formula E and its partner, Kinetik, debuted Roborace on Cyber Monday, but we’d wager that online shopping is a more interesting endeavor. The plan so far is to have 10 teams running pairs of identical electric race cars through one-hour races ahead of every Formula E race on the 2016–2017 season calendar. According to Roborace, the cars will “compete using real-time computing algorithms and AI technologies.” Elaboration on this topic will come later, the series promises, yet it is clear that the series will be leveraged to advance self-driving cars’ skills. (A noble cause, given the potential benefit it holds for the honing of roadgoing autonomous tech.) Even so, let’s hope the racing is more interesting than watching a washing machine do its thing.
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A better, worldlier pony car enters our long-term corral.
2015 Car and Driver Editors’ Choice Awards
Our editors’ top choices for the best cars, pickup trucks, SUVs, and more for 2015.
Lightning Lap 2015: Z06, Huracán, Miata, and More!
We invade VIR with 2015's hottest performance machines.
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Being headquartered in Michigan, where winters are usually grey, very often snowy, and bitterly cold, we’re major proponents of winter tires. Indeed, if you’ve ever driven a car on winter tires and experience the kind of additional stopping power they provide when ice, snow, and slush cover the roadways, you no doubt feel the same way. Of course, driving or testing winter tires in appropriate conditions is difficult in all but the coldest portions of the year, which is why Hankook invited us to Ivalo, Finland, some 186 miles north of the Arctic Circle, where we sampled its winter tires at an indoor facility called Test World.
Test World sits just a short distance east of the 4000-person city of Ivalo in the Lapland region. Lapland is about the size of Indiana, with the total population of Worcester, Massachusetts, but the only thing Lapland and “Wooster” have in common is funky pronunciations to us Midwesterners. Given that there are few signs in English, you need GPS to navigate—without it, you’ll likely end up in Russia, Norway, or Sweden.
You might think that indoor winter testing is commonplace. Tire Rack does a lot of testing on ice rinks as well as outdoor venues, but Test World is different than most manmade winter facilities in that the staff stockpiles natural snow in early spring and fills its two buildings with about 60 cm (24 inches) of packed white stuff. It’s worth noting that you can’t just dump a ton of snow in at once. Five-millimeter (0.2-inch) layers are applied and then given time to settle to make the resulting packed testing surface as natural as possible. Carefully controlled humidity and temperature keep snow loss, or evaporation, to a minimum. The painstaking process ensures consistent testing conditions, which is critical to tire development.
Hankook showed us its worldwide catalog of winter offerings including a newly updated Winter i*cept Evo2, a performance winter tire available in the U.S. For those less familiar with winter tires, they can be grouped into roughly three categories. (There are more, but these three cover all the basics.) First are the studded winter tires that are fairly self-explanatory; metal studs inserted in the tread provide maximum grip on ice. Then there are studless snow-and-ice tires, which are our favorites because you get the most traction possible without noisy studs humming in your ear (not to mention studded tires are illegal in many places). Then, there are the aforementioned performance winter tires. These tires are generally rated for higher speeds—the Evo2, for example, is rated for 168 mph in some sizes—they come in lower-profile sizes, and they are usually constructed with an asymmetrical tread pattern. Performance winters give up traction on packed snow and ice in favor of improved performance in mixed conditions, or in the cold, wet, slushy mess that is common in metropolitan areas.
Our day of Hankook evaluation started with braking and accelerating on ice and on snow, getting a feel for what Test World does on a day-to-day basis. The interior thermometer reads about 12 degrees Fahrenheit, so it’s 20 degrees below freezing despite being nearly 60 degrees outside on the day of our visit.
Indoor acceleration and braking tests are methodical in the 525-by-52-foot Indoor 1 building. First, accelerate to 18 mph on the snow, then slam on the brakes. Data is collected with optical fifth wheels because the roof eliminates the possibility of using GPS data loggers. Testing on the single lane of ice requires surface preparation, which is just making multiple passes, carefully putting the tires on the same path each lap to even out the surface.
On snow, every run is done in fresh tracks. Once all the available space is used up, Test World resurfaces the snowpack with a Toyota truck that does a great impression of an MLB grounds crew dragging the dirt. Scraping the top layer of snow keeps the surface as natural as possible.
Next came the real fun in what Test World calls Indoor 2. This is an indoor handling circuit nearly 1200 feet long and 30 feet wide (not counting the snow drifts). From a bird’s-eye view, it looks like someone drew the outline of a giant Jelly Belly and built a squiggly barn over it.
Driving up to 40 mph indoors on packed snow with no runoff room feels like doing 150 mpg on an open racetrack. There is no room for error, and even worse, as laps accumulate, grip starts to drop in places where the packed snow has been tossed around by tire spin and ABS-assisted braking. Under normal circumstances, the Test World team resurfaces Indoor 2 after every test tire has done a full test loop, which is about eight laps.
As on Indoor 1, GPS isn’t an option for data collection. Indoor 2 is mostly a subjective evaluation where testers concentrate on tire feel more than objective results with a lap timer keeping tabs on consistency, which is more important than outright speed when testing tires. Indoor 2 is where you get a sense of how the tire feels while braking into and powering out of a corner.
Test World’s indoor facilities don’t replace its own hundreds of miles of outdoor track, but they do successfully supplement development and stretch the testing season from just a handful of months per year to year-round.
In the afternoon, we drove the Evo2 on dry roads to the Russian border and back. The terrain isn’t all that different from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and the border looked only slightly more guarded than the Mackinac Bridge toll booth. The Evo2’s asymmetric pattern kept tire noise to a minimum and it tracked quite well on the Finnish roads. Without having driven it on snow or ice, we can’t say for certain how it might stack up in a full winter-tire test like the one we just published (and which was conducted at Test World), but we’re going to attempt to fit a set to one of our long-term cars this winter and will report back.
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Name it Chiron, and they will come. Or name it whatever you’d like, and so long as it’s the descendant of the mighty Bugatti Veyron, the rich and powerful will toss money at you like so much confetti. We’re talking, of course, about the Veyron’s successor, which Bugatti has confirmed will be named “Chiron” and debut at the 2016 Geneva auto show this coming spring.
We had already assumed the new Bugatti would be named Chiron—for the legendary 1920s and 1930s racing driver, Louis Chiron, who won several Grands Prix for Bugatti—and a debut at the Geneva show seemed wholly appropriate. What we didn’t know is that, despite no one outside of Bugatti having driven the new Chiron, 100 orders for the car already have been placed. It isn’t presently clear whether those orders indicate an over-abundance of super-rich (remember, the Chiron should cost upwards of $2.5 million) or excitement over a super-sports car that’s expected to top 288 mph. Probably a little bit of both.
Also not lacking in Bugatti’s strata? Modesty. Besides an apparently secret push to attract the aforementioned 100 Chiron orders, the company’s President Wolfgang Dürheimer has declared that, “With the Chiron, [Bugatti] will make the best significantly better.” We suppose this means that Bugatti’s Volkswagen Group money isn’t on the chopping block in the wake of the TDI scandal, after all.
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A better, worldlier pony car enters our long-term corral.
2015 Car and Driver Editors’ Choice Awards
Our editors’ top choices for the best cars, pickup trucks, SUVs, and more for 2015.
Lightning Lap 2015: Z06, Huracán, Miata, and More!
We invade VIR with 2015's hottest performance machines.
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The curtain comes up early on Infiniti’s next coupe. We’re impressed.
Spied: 2017 Honda Ridgeline
Breaking out of its mold-breaking mold.
Bentley Bentayga Driven: First Time’s the Charm
Bentley’s first SUV skips the learning curve altogether.
2015 Car and Driver Editors’ Choice Awards
Our editors’ top choices for the best cars, pickup trucks, SUVs, and more for 2015.
Lightning Lap 2015: Z06, Huracán, Miata, and More!
We invade VIR with 2015's hottest performance machines.
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The curtain comes up early on Infiniti’s next coupe. We’re impressed.
Spied: 2017 Honda Ridgeline
Breaking out of its mold-breaking mold.
Bentley Bentayga Driven: First Time’s the Charm
Bentley’s first SUV skips the learning curve altogether.
2015 Car and Driver Editors’ Choice Awards
Our editors’ top choices for the best cars, pickup trucks, SUVs, and more for 2015.
Lightning Lap 2015: Z06, Huracán, Miata, and More!
We invade VIR with 2015's hottest performance machines.
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The curtain comes up early on Infiniti’s next coupe. We’re impressed.
Spied: 2017 Honda Ridgeline
Breaking out of its mold-breaking mold.
Bentley Bentayga Driven: First Time’s the Charm
Bentley’s first SUV skips the learning curve altogether.
2015 Car and Driver Editors’ Choice Awards
Our editors’ top choices for the best cars, pickup trucks, SUVs, and more for 2015.
Lightning Lap 2015: Z06, Huracán, Miata, and More!
We invade VIR with 2015's hottest performance machines.
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The North American debut of the 2017 Alfa Romeo Giulia Quadrifoglio sedan was a highlight of the 2015 L.A. auto show. To get a clearer picture of what’s next for the legendary brand, we sat down with Reid Bigland, head of the Alfa Romeo brand in North America.
Car and Driver: How long will it take for the Giulia to make the transition from the show floor to the sales floor?
Reid Bigland: Look for production of the Giulia to start in late first quarter [2016] for Europe and late second quarter for North America. Both the Giulia Quadrifoglio and base model Giulia should be in U.S. dealerships by summer of 2016.
C/D: Speaking of dealers . . .
RB: Right now [there are] about 140 dealers in the U.S., but it’s continuing to change on a monthly basis and will likely spike as we get close to the on-sale date next summer. Right now it’s a mix of about 120 Fiat/Alfa Romeo dealers and 15 Alfa Romeo/Maserati stores; as the brand matures over the next few years, we’ll have stand-alone Alfa Romeo stores.
C/D:So the dealer strategy sort of follows your previous statements about keeping the Alfa brand unique and not just a collection of select corporate parts?
RB: That’s sacrosanct. You’ve seen scores of examples of people trying to masquerade a premium brand that is a rebadge of something else. The Giulia and 4C use chassis that are completely unique. The Giulia is built on the entirely new Giorgio platform, and if there is a parts bin that we are looking towards, it’s the Ferrari parts bin.
What’s unique about Alfa is that we can keep it in the pure-premium segment, and not have to get down in the $30k range where a lot of the German competitors are right now due to the addiction to [sales] volume. We’ve got that covered with our mass-market brands. The easy thing for us would be to roll the Giulia into the Chrysler/Jeep/Dodge/Ram stores and get 2400 dealers overnight. But that isn’t going to work, as rebuilding Alfa is a long-term journey. The cars need to be right, the cars need to be pure, and we need to create a separate experience from that of our mass-market brands.
C/D: Is the 4C going to see any revision or additional derivatives in addition to the recently released Spider.
RB: The 4C really is what it is, a bargain supercar. The car has been in the market for about a year, and we always intended to have a lease program for the car, but it’s been so hot we’ve had absolutely zero incentives on the car so far. We will probably initiate a lease program in the future.
C/D:What are the sales numbers to date?
RB: We’ve sold about 560 4Cs total, and we’ve received about 600 cars. I think we sold 178,00 Chrysler Jeep, Dodge, and Ram vehicles, last month.
C/D:Is there a limited-slip differential in the cards for the 4C?
RB: In the Giulia, yes. But we are making no announcements regarding the 4C.
RB: That will be the next one up. Its size is just a little bit bigger than a BMW X3. Look for it to start appearing—realistically in early 2017, maybe earlier in Europe. It’s well underway; we’ve shown the car to our dealers, but it’s got to be right before we bring it to the market. Look for it to have peerless performance when it comes to zero-to-60 and Nürburgring times, the whole thing. It will have the performance, technology, and really gorgeous Italian design and style to set it apart.
C/D: Are you close to announcing the name of the Alfa SUV name?
RB: No word on the name yet.
C/D:What’s the single best thing about making the jump from Ram to Alfa?
RB: At every turn there is something exciting or interesting about the Alfa Romeo brand. I mean, the Honda Civic is a nice car; it’s going to sell well. But it just doesn’t get the juices flowing like the Quadrifoglio does.
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The North American debut of the 2017 Alfa Romeo Giulia Quadrifoglio sedan was a highlight of the 2015 L.A. auto show. To get a clearer picture of what’s next for the legendary brand, we sat down with Reid Biglund, Head of the Alfa Romeo brand in North America.
Car and Driver: How long will it take for the Giulia to make the transition from the show floor to the sales floor?
Reid Biglund: Look for production of the Giulia to start in late first quarter for Europe, and late second quarter for North America. Both the Giulia Quadrifoglio and base model Giulia should be in U.S. dealerships by summer of 2016.
C/D: Speaking of dealers…
RB: Right now [there are] about 140 dealers in the U.S., but it’s continuing to change on monthly basis, and will likely spike as we get close to the on-sale date next summer. Right now it’s a mix of about 120 Fiat/Alfa Romeo dealers and 15 Alfa Romeo/Maserati stores; as the brand matures over the next few years we’ll have standalone Alfa Romeo stores.
C/D: So the dealer strategy sort of follows your previous statements about keeping the Alfa brand unique and not just a collection of select corporate parts.
RB: That’s sacrosanct. You’ve seen scores of examples of people trying to masquerade a premium brand that is a rebadge of something else. The Giulia and 4C use chassis that are completely unique. The Giulia is built on the entirely new Giorgio platform, and if there is a parts bin that we are looking towards, it’s the Ferrari parts bin.
What’s unique about Alfa is that we can keep it in the pure-premium segment, and not have to get down in the $30k range where a lot of the German competitors are right now due to the addiction to [sales] volume. We’ve got that covered with our mass-market brands. The easy thing for us would be to roll the Guilia into the Chrysler/Jeep/Dodge/Ram stores and get 2400 dealers overnight. But that isn’t going to work, as rebuilding Alfa is a long-term journey. The cars need to be right, the cars need to be pure, and we need to create a separate experience from that of our mass-market brands.
C/D: Is the 4C going to see any revision or additional derivatives in addition to the recently released Spider.
RB: The 4C really is what it is, a bargain supercar. The car has been in the market for about a year, and we always intended to have a lease program for the car, but it’s been so hot we’ve had absolutely zero incentives on the car so far. We will probably initiate a lease program in the future.
C/D: What are the sales numbers to date?
RB: We’ve sold about 560 4Cs total, and we’ve received about 600 cars. I think we sold 178,00 Chrysler Jeep, Dodge, and Ram vehicles, last month.
C/D: Is there a limited-slip differential in the cards for the 4C?
RB: In the Giulia, yes. But we are making no announcements regarding the 4c.
RB: That will be the next one up. Its size is just a little bit bigger than a BMW X3. Look for it to start appearing—realistically in early 2017, maybe earlier in Europe. It’s well underway; we’ve shown the car to our dealers, but it’s got to be right before we bring it to the market. Look for it to have peerless performance when it comes to 0-to-60 and Nürburgring times, the whole thing. It will have the performance, technology, and really gorgeous Italian design and style to set it apart.
C/D: Are you close to announcing the name of the Alfa SUV name?
RB: No word on the name yet.
C/D: What’s the single best thing about making the jump from Ram to Alfa?
RB: At every turn there is something exciting or interesting about the Alfa Romeo brand. I mean, the Honda Civic is a nice car; it’s going to sell well. But it just doesn’t get the juices flowing like the Quadrifoglio does.
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