Tag Archives: Car and Driver

2013 SRT Viper First Drive – Car and Driver

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Somebody at Car and Driver has the hookup with the folks at Chrysler. They got their technical editor in to be the first civilian to drive the new SRT Viper. Jay Leno didn’t even get to drive it when the car was featured on his show. As you will see, the engineers were not very pumped about Car and Driver being at their test facility. In the end, it seems that the new Viper is a very strong evolution of the old car. Gone are the days of the one-dimensional supercar that could get by on only being fast with compromises everywhere else. Car and Driver seems to think that SRT has built a real world class supercar with the newest Viper.


Source: Car and Driver on YouTube

Nissan Juke-R vs. Porsche 911 GT2 RS – Car and Driver Abroad

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Nissan Europe teamed up with the RML Group last year to build a custom Juke-R. It was basically a Nissan Juke body put on top of a shortened GT-R chassis and drivetrain. It’s kind of funny because Nissan Japan only found out about the car after it had been built and were a bit unhappy about having somebody crossbreed their flagship car with an economy crossover. The Juke-R was a big enough success that several people, whom I assume are Abu-Dhabi oil barons, have asked to buy Juke-R’s. Nissan Europe has decided to do a limited run of them at $590,000 a piece. Now that the cars are being sold, that means they have to go through a legitimate review with the press. This is the first one that I’ve found outside some random hooning videos. Jethro Bovingdon of Car and Drive Abroad puts the Juke-R up against a pretty high performance benchmark with the Porsche 911 GT2 RS.


If you’ve got some time to kill, here’s some bonus videos that Nissan Europe released last year as the Juke-R was being built. There were 10 short videos that this YouTube user has thankfully condensed into two. Continue reading →

48 Hours with a Lamborghini Aventador – Car and Driver

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I am really enjoying the videos by Car and Driver’s European correspondent, Jethro Bovingdon. This time he takes the Lamborghini Aventador out for a spin. He addresses concerns that Lamborghini’s halo car has gotten soft under Audi’s influence and talks about what makes the car special. There’s a touch of oversteer action, but it’s not the main focus.


Source: Car and Driver on YouTube

Ariel Atom 300 – Car and Driver

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Between Top Gear, Chris Harris and this guy from Car and Driver, the British are cranking out some excellent car reviewers. It’s a good thing for Car and Driver, too. The rest of their videos on YouTube are pretty much garbage. Here they are testing the latest iteration of the Ariel Atom with the supercharged Honda Type-R engine. I really liked the shots from different points of the car where you can see the components working as it drives. It might just be me, but it looks like they’ve made the suspension setup a lot more progressive. He’s able to do a lot of gratuitous sliding where it used to be more of a grip-grip-snap car. Just more proof that a fast lap time doesn’t necessarily mean the car’s a lot of fun.


Source: Car and Driver on YouTube

RUF Yellowbird and CTR 3

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Car and Driver pay a visit to performance car builder RUF in Germany to tour their factory and to see what they’re up to. Apparently RUF will let people test drive the car that put them on the map: The CTR Yellowbird. The car in the video is the same one used by RUF for development and stars in a Nurburgring drift video. There’s no need to look up the drift video because they’ve included a few shots in case you haven’t seen it. The tour ends with taking a spin in RUF’a newest CTR 3 on the Autobahn. RUF is an interesting company in that they sort of piggyback engineering development with Porsche. They basically use the front half of Porsche’s cars for the crash test structures, suspension and interior and then develop their own back half of the chassis to put their tuned engines in. It’s actual a pretty clever business model for a small aftermarket tuning company.


Source: Car and Driver