First Drive Reviews

“Digital detox.” That’s what Bentley design director Stefan Sielaff promises in the 2020 Continental GT Convertible, and the opportunity sounds appealing. We are so inescapably immersed in the digital, the synthetic, and the artificial that a retreat to reality and authenticity...

Arizona Motorsports Park sits beside Luke Air Force Base outside Phoenix, so visiting drivers are treated to a non-stop free display of air power courtesy of F-16s and F-35s. The base is home to the F-35 demonstration team, whose preparations for the 2019 air show season provided overhead...

Twenty minutes from my front door is nowhere. And that’s somewhere I want to be. That’s true for many of us who live in Denver. It’s probably true for the 30 people who will move to Denver today, the 30 people who will move here tomorrow, and the next day, too. The greatest lie...

The sun bathes Lulea, Sweden with light for less than eight hours during the middle of the winter. It rises over the Gulf of Bothnia and its small, frigid islands and sets behind the charming and colorful town scattered with red, yellow and white buildings. As pretty as this small city near the...

Italian cars are known for four things: beauty, speed, noise, and a special feel. Fail on any of these and the car feels authentic like ravioli from a can. Maserati’s Levante is the Italian automaker’s first crossover SUV. It’s beautiful, but base models weren’t fast...

The 2019 Mercedes-Benz G-Wagen doesn’t look much different than the boxy SUVs from each of the 40 years preceding it. Typically, if a vehicle is indistinguishable from its predecessors, that’s a bad thing. The Mercedes-Benz G-Class is anything but typical. I went to San Diego...

Lights flicker underneath champagne-dry powder that dusts the old marquee at the Egyptian Theatre in Park City, Utah. The Egyptian’s been here since the 1920s. Back then, Park City was a glorified, dusty camp attached to a silver lode; a long ride but a world apart from Salt Lake City, which...

Valencia, Spain may hug the Mediterranean coast, but this morning it’s a chillier than normal 45 degrees and the massive tires on the 2020 Porsche 911 have gone stiff in the crisp air. That’s no good when the next thing they’ll do is scrabble for grip during track laps that could...

It looked like heresy when Porsche released its first SUV in 2002, but it turned out to be a brilliant move. The Cayenne quickly took the mantle as the brand’s best-seller, and it became an adage that the Cayenne enabled Porsche to keep building sports cars. The move also turned out to be...

It’s not a hypercar, supercar, or even a sports car, and yet it’s one of the most hyped vehicles of the last decade. The Tesla Model 3 needs no introduction. The linchpin in Tesla’s Master Plan, the Model 3 is supposed to be an affordable, high-volume electric car. It’s not...

The bar for mid-size pickup truck excellence is not high. It takes only a few minutes behind the wheel of the 2019 Ford Ranger to realize that, for the way most drivers use their trucks, it’s the best choice. Its 2.3-liter turbo-4 spools up its 270 horsepower and 310 pound-feet of torque with...

The BMW 3-Series has made bank for decades off its undeniable clout. With its mastery of nimble steering feel and brilliant balanced handling, it’s oozed something from its pores that seeps into brains of enthusiasts like sugar, or mercury. When we talk about “sport sedans”...

The corners are blind. An oncoming car, bus, or bicyclist could await on the other side. Please don’t be a bus. The lane is narrow. The SUV I’m in takes up almost all of it. There is barely any shoulder, and sometimes a guardrail sits right on the lane line and threatens to add an...

When the last mid-size sedan buyer exits the showroom in favor of a crossover SUV, Volkswagen will be there to turn out the lights. That’s the overriding thought about the 2020 VW Passat I drove in lightly camouflaged guise at the automaker’s proving grounds south of Phoenix. The...

The Audi e-tron SUV that goes on sale next spring in the U.S. isn’t just Audi’s first fully electric vehicle. It’s the luxury brand’s way of showing how an increasingly inevitable part of the future can fit right in and be a part of four-ring identity. In our first drive...

On Isla Sorna, the fictional island setting for the “The Lost World: Jurassic Park,” dinosaurs vaulted millions of years into the future and chewed up camouflaged Mercedes-Benz M-Class SUVs. The 2020 Mercedes-Benz GLE I find myself hustling through empty ranch roads outside of San...

The handheld radio crackled and a Ford Performance Driving School instructor’s voice came over the speaker: “Our target speed will be 50 mph as the front wheels hit the jump.” I’ve driven on racetracks, off road, and have played in the mud, but I’ve never launched a...

The Range Rover has set a high bar for luxury SUVs. It was one of the first of its kind and few can compete with its ability to go anywhere, any time, in any weather in a leather-lined interior. Introduced for the 2013 model year, the current Range Rover has aged with grace, but it is aging as new...

My 2019 Porsche Panamera GTS test car came with ceramic brakes, rear-wheel steering, and a frighteningly thick booklet explaining the driving laws—significantly, the penalties for breaking them—in Bahrain. The words “jail term” appeared often enough to dissuade me from...

In Hales Corners, Wisconsin, last Saturday night a 14-year-old boy named Sam reached over and pushed down on his mom’s knee to get the family’s Chrysler Town & Country moving. Her foot went to the floor, the Chrysler Pentastar V-6 perked up, and the van accelerated at a modest clip...