First Drives

At last, for the first time since the now-legendary EV1, General Motors has another all-electric car: the 2014 Chevrolet Spark EV. This past week we spent much of a day using it to get around urban environs in Portland, Oregon, and found it to be one of the best-driving battery electric cars yet...Read More»

Small cargo vans might not be the first vehicle you consider when shopping new, but chances are you've gone for a ride in one already--or will soon. The NV200 is new to the U.S. market, but it's been on sale in 40 other countries for some time. If you're a world traveler, you've seen it before. The...Read More»

The Nissan Versa sedan was new for 2012, but for all kinds of global-product reasons, the company carried over the previous-generation Versa Hatchback for a couple of years. At last, a new Versa hatchback is here, only its name has morphed into Versa Note. Will it eventually just become the Nissan...Read More»

As we've noted before, many automotive journalists seem to own Subarus as their personal cars. We recently spent three days with a new 2014 Subaru Forester XT--the more powerful turbocharged model--driving South Africa's Garden Route along the country's south coast, from Plettenburg Bay to Cape...Read More»

The 2013 Ford C-Max Energi is a plug-in hybrid. But if you keep your trip lengths relatively short, and get in the habit of plugging in at home and perhaps at work, it does a really good job pretending it's an all-electric car. Selecting the Energi's 'EV Now' mode, we managed to do a 20-mile...Read More»

It may not look any different on the outside, but the 2014 Chevrolet Cruze Diesel is a pioneering vehicle: It's the first passenger car with a diesel engine sold by General Motors for 28 years. Now reaching Chevy dealers in initial launch areas--those where the Volkswagen Jetta TDI diesel already...Read More»

Drift north out of the lights of Santa Barbara, and California gets dark quickly, as if it's trying to extinguish the whole idea of Lompoc. Somewhere in those 3G-free hinterlands, we're surrounded by scrubby wilderness, wrapped in the sound of crashing surf, drifting into a rugged sleep. Until we...Read More»

We suspect we're not the only ones who think that the very premise behind some high-performance luxury utility vehicles borders on perverse. Who are they kidding? Unless you're seeking revenge, you're not going to load your clients (or your mother-in-law) into the back seat and head out on a...Read More»

Everything's bigger in Texas, and Texans love their trucks. As we got our first drive time in the new 2014 Chevy Silverado this week, in Hill Country near San Antonio, we couldn't ignore how those two ideas continue to help put wind in the sails of the U.S. truck market. Going over well in the Lone...Read More»

How much of a luxury car's price is in the badge? It's a question we kept revisiting, repeatedly, during a couple of days with the all-new 2014 Kia Cadenza Because if you don't mind driving a car that tops $40k and has the Kia badge, the new Cadenza is a model that feels like a luxury car in almost...Read More»

After nearly 40 years of building sedans and grand tourers, Jaguar is finally back in the sports car business with the 2014 F-Type. So what's it like? That's exactly the question our sister site, Motor Authority, set out to answer last week in the hills surrounding Pamplona, Spain. Can the F-Type...Read More»

Can Mitsubishi still prove itself relevant in the U.S.? With the quirky Endeavor long gone, the flamboyant Eclipse coupes and convertibles now discontinued, the last Galant mid-size sedans carrying clearance stickers—and no replacement on the horizon for the Evolution sport sedan—you...Read More»

Ever since our first drive of the standard Hyundai Veloster, we'd been pining for the Veloster Turbo. In fact, after hatching plans to make the Veloster one of our inaugural long-term test cars (there are plenty of Six Month Road Test Veloster exploits to catch up on), we kept second-guessing...Read More»

The Honda Civic was extensively refreshed for 2012, yet amongst most of us who keep tabs on new cars and how they drive, it was met with a collective “meh.” There wasn't anything overtly wrong or half-baked with the new and seemingly stark and more conservative Civic; it just didn't...Read More»

Nearly a year ago, we took a first drive of the Mazda CX-5 and pronounced it the best-handling crossover yet. In the year since, with several new entries in the compact class, the CX-5's halo holds—even if you expand upward to luxury makes and outward to bigger, brute-force performance utes...Read More»

Among affordable, even frugal, mid-size sedans, the all-new 2014 Mazda 6 is about the closest we’ve ever come to love at first sight. We thought the new 2013 Ford Fusion, this model year’s The Car Connection Best Car To Buy, was hot; but the Mazda6 doesn’t have an even vaguely...Read More»

Last year, in several of BMW's mainstream models like the 3-Series and 5-Series, the German automaker did what might have a few years earlier been the unthinkable for the U.S. market: replaced its much-loved naturally aspirated in-line six with a turbocharged four-cylinder engine. Now for 2013 BMW...Read More»

If the somewhat larger Forester that emerged for 2009 was Subaru's first grab at a wider group of American family shoppers, the latest all-new 2014 Forester is an official coming-out to the mainstream—and at last, a direct rival again to the likes of the RAV4 and CR-V, as well as the Ford...Read More»