First Drive Reviews

When the new Ford F-150 was unveiled in 2015, it was the world's first aluminum pickup truck, an innovation that General Motors and Ram still haven't caught up with. Combined with a pair of twin-turbocharged V-6 engines, Ford's perennial best-seller pushed the art of the truck into an important new...

Term limits don't apply to the new car industry. If they did, the 2017 Nissan Frontier you see here wouldn't be a dead-ringer for the 2005 Nissan Frontier that hit dealer lots during George W. Bush's first term. A lot has changed since 2005. But not the Frontier. Sure, it's up for a redesign, but...

Life gets in the way, even when you're behind the wheel of a 2017 Porsche 911 Carrera 4 GTS. Instead of zipping around scenic Lake Tahoe or pushing things to the limit on a South African racetrack, as we've been fortunate to do before, I just spent a week behind the 911 GTS' wheel through rain and...

Audi Sport's slogan is "Born on the track. Built for the road." While most of us would love to test the limits of any Audi Sport model on a racetrack, we'd also be happy to merely have the opportunity to slide behind the wheel of any RS model for a week, especially if it's a $137,000 RS 7...

Neither jaw-droppingly gorgeous nor particularly utilitarian, the 2018 Porsche Panamera Sport Turismo is nonetheless highly endearing. It’s the latest in a line of cars from Porsche that seem to do little wrong either on paper or in reality. It's practically perfect, but not all that...

If you were going to design a sports car, you wouldn’t start with the layout of the Audi TT. You wouldn’t choose a front-wheel-drive architecture. You wouldn’t turn the engine sideways, and you damn sure wouldn’t locate it ahead of the front axle. Instead, you’d start...

Audi’s turbocharged 5-cylinder cars have a short but distinguished history. The Audi Quattro burst onto the scene in the early 1980s and won multiple driver's and manufacturer's titles in rally racing. In 1987, an Audi 5-cylinder was the first car to run up Pike’s Peak in less than 11...

The Toyota 4Runner refuses to evolve, and that’s why we love it. It has stayed true to its rugged roots for more than three decades, outliving long-forgotten 4x4s like the Mitsubishi Montero, Nissan Xterra, Chevrolet Blazer, and Isuzu Rodeo. Today’s 4Runner, the fifth generation of the...

A Dodge Durango might be one of the last vehicles you'd want to drive on an angry lap of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway's in-field road course. It's a 3-row crossover SUV, designed for school runs rather than running down the front straight. And yet, I'm doing just that, thundering (the wrong way)...

Americans love excess, noise, and bombast, and the 2018 Dodge Challenger SRT Demon is as excessive, noisy, and bombastic as a car can get. But the ultimate Challenger is also a stunning piece of engineering, capable of nearly effortless straight-line performance unlike any car to ever carry a...

R-E-L-A-X. Frankie said we should all do it. Aaron Rodgers famously said it when the Green Bay Packers started 1-2 in 2014 before coming within three minutes of a trip to the Super Bowl. And now, Mercedes-Benz, not content to build what it considers the best car in the world, wants S-Class...

With Lenin, Marx, and Engels literally looking down on us, my fiancée Mindy, a Hungarian taxi driver—whose name I never did catch—and I pushed a dung-brown 1982 Trabant with a dead battery down a hill. After a few feet, it sputtered to life, coughing out a constant stream of blue...

Automotive public relations is a funny profession. As a young writer, my editor told me ahead of my first media program to never say anything that could be construed as a request for something, even in passing, because PR people take it seriously. I apparently forgot that lesson, and ended up...

When you're slinking behind enemy lines, the last thing you want is to be detected. For the U.S. Army's Tank Automotive Research, Development and Engineering Center (TARDEC), the next step in military vehicle technology marks its location with only a hint of water dripping out of its tailpipe. The...

It's 9,000 feet from Denver to the summit of Mt. Evans, the highest point accessible by a paved road in North America. That's 9,000 vertical feet. It's a heck of a climb, especially considering it only takes about an hour and a half to do by car. We set off in a 2017 Alfa Romeo Giulia Quadrifoglio...

The Mercedes-Benz E-Class Cabriolet has a strange and winding 25-year history. It all started with W124-generation cars in the early 1990s, the first Mercedes models to bear the E-Class name. In the late 1990s, the E begat the CLK-Class Cabriolet for two generations, both of which were based on the...

Like all animals, humans are subject to various temptations. A salad is healthier than a burger and fries, but the whiff you get within a block of an old-fashioned burger joint is irresistible. Similarly, you shouldn’t buy another project car, but when will you find another like it?...

The 2018 Alfa Romeo Stelvio needed style, personality, and drivability to help the fledgling brand not only survive, but thrive. The only question we had: Could all those things be too much? Let's ignore that the Stelvio has the body of a crossover SUV—it's not one. It's the same skeleton as...

When you have an obscene amount of money, you should be driving a grand tourer. I recommend the Aston Martin DB11 or a Ferrari GTC4 Lusso. But what if you're not a sultan, an oligarch, or a tech innovator and still want what a GT can provide? You buy the 2018 Mercedes-Benz E400 Coupe. Priced from...

It’s a spectacular summer day in Montreal, and not just because it’s 80 degrees. It’s Formula One week, and the remote buzz is audible even downtown as F1 drivers crackle off practice laps at Circuit Gilles Villeneuve. They turn one of the most peaceful places in one of North...