First Drive Reviews

We drive the Lamborghini Aventador Roadster and come away sweaty, exhausted, and satisfied.

If you've been saving your pennies hoping the new seventh-generation Corvette would deliver the performance goods, get your hammer. It's time to break open the piggy bank. Why? Because the Z51 package makes it almost--almost--as good as a C6 Z06, but it's just $51,995 in base form. The last Z06...

Not so long ago, a five-speed automatic transmission was pretty advanced--but we're in a new age now. Six speeds is the norm now even in smaller cars--when they're not fitted with continuously variable transmissions (CVTs), anyhow--and even the eight-speed automatic pioneered by Lexus a decade ago...

The new 550-horsepower Jaguar XJR is indeed a stormer of a big sedan. We knew that much, even before heading out for our first drive in one this past week. But what we learned after a few hours behind the wheel is that this super-sedan (in size and performance) retains all of what comprises the...

Spend around a hundred grand on a performance sedan, and it had better put a smile on your face, right? After driving the 2014 Jaguar XFR-S up on Pacific Northwest mountain roads, as well as on the track, we can say that this very focused model—the fastest, most powerful Jaguar sedan...

Out on the Interstate, barely ten minutes into our first drive of the 2014 Infiniti Q50, my co-driver and I had already found something to marvel about in this sport sedan: We could carry on a quiet conversation. That might sound like a low bar—and there's much more truly marvelous...

One of the more confusing questions car reviewers get--other than, "why so much bacon?"--is innocent enough, on the surface. "What's the best car?" Hm. Can I get a metric? Some vague parameters or constraints? Are we talking about the most value you can extract from a $20,000 bill--or the most...

Military intelligence and jumbo shrimp are the classic oxymorons that keep garden-variety morons like me awake at night. Toss in a third mindbender--"sporty SUV"--and the WTF factor does a damn fine job of counteracting jet lag. We drove headlong into all three in the course of our first drive of...

There are few cars that are actually abhorrent to drive on track, though there are many ill-suited to the task after the first lap, or even less. It's almost always fun to drive a slow car fast, especially if it has some dire handling deficiency, to be overcome by technique and anticipation--as...

Time travel is, perhaps unexpectedly, enlightening. Reading of the conditions and actors of the past provides only a dusty image, rendered in grayscale; dunking oneself fully in the scene teaches lessons that cannot otherwise be learned. Thus I recount for you my recent sojourn to the early 21st...

It’s the fastest, most powerful GTD ever—capable of getting to 60 mph in less than seven seconds, and hitting a top speed of 143 mph, yet returning more than 40 mpg on the highway. What even is the GTD, you ask? We don’t expect many Americans—not even many driving-enthusiast...

Texas loves its mythology, but it's not always supported by cold facts. "Everything's bigger here" fits on a bumper sticker. Austin's a hub for Smart cars. DFW could fit snugly inside Beijing's Capital Airport with room to spare. Bubble burst. Texas does have one of the biggest new race tracks in...

Mainstream success gets a bad rap. Most of the time it's richly deserved, emphasis on the "rich." Bieber, Budweiser, Burger King--they're all huge, and hugely profitable. But even at their very best, they're baseline goods, zero hashmarks on the pop-culture barometer. When it's done correctly, with...

Thanks to the combined efforts of companies like Tesla Motors, Mercedes-Benz and others, the concept of an electric supercar no longer seems as unlikely as it once did. Audi has now joined that list too, with its striking R8 e-tron electric supercar. The German automaker invited us to the mighty...

Have we driven the Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG enough? You tell us. We've flogged it in its debut form as a gullwing, as a roadster, as the new SLS AMG GT, and as a GT Roadster in a weekend joy ride. We've even driven the Tomorrowland edition, also known as the SLS AMG Electric Drive. We've chunked the...

The Nissan Juke-R started as an off-book project that was, at first, not a favorite of the home office. Once they saw what it could do, however, they came around. Now there are four of them in existence--two for Nissan/NISMO and two delivered to private customers. The example we got to drive last...

We're hustling along in the all-new Mk7 Volkswagen GTI, on a tightly curved back road in mountainous Southern France. Just as traffic opens up and I can see a fair distance ahead, I raise our speed into the next bend. But it turns out to be a flat, decreasing-radius corner. I pull my line tighter...

What defines a sports car? Is it an arbitrary set of numbers--weight limits, 0-60 mph times, lateral g forces? Or is it something more emotional, something that can't easily be quantified? I tend to think it's the latter, and the 2014 Jaguar F-Type presents a convincing case in support of that...

The idea of packing a very powerful engine into a very small car—especially a car originally designed with frugality in mind—isn’t by any means a new formula. It’s been done over and over again, over decades, to spice up lineups and add bragging rights. And while some...

It's inevitable: With increasing pressure from fuel-efficiency and emission regulations globally, engines are going to get smaller. But BMW has simply taken its time-tested design principles and applied them to a new type of engine: its first-ever three-cylinder, which you can think of as half of...