2010 Subaru Legacy on 2040-cars

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2015 Subaru Outback

Realistically, many enthusiasts give horrible, horrible car buying advice. They will recommend something bizarre, inappropriately high performance, compromised or utterly impractical for a given consumer's needs, and they'll almost never recommend something that makes sense. And then they'll come up with 3.7 million reasons why the leading vehicle someone is thinking about is a bad choice.
Or maybe that's just what I do.
Regardless, if you poke, prod, bother or just get us drunk enough, eventually you'll begin getting honest feedback. And more than likely, we'll tell you, in hushed tones, about the many virtues of very, very boring cars. We'll talk about why the Toyota Camry is actually a pretty decent purchase or we'll explain how spacious and feature laden the Nissan Versa is.

A car writer's year in new vehicles [w/video]

Christmas is only a week away. The New Year is just around the corner. As 2014 draws to a close, I'm not the only one taking stock of the year that's we're almost shut of. Depending on who you are or what you do, the end of the year can bring to mind tax bills, school semesters or scheduling dental appointments. For me, for the last eight or nine years, at least a small part of this transitory time is occupied with recalling the cars I've driven over the preceding 12 months. Since I started writing about and reviewing cars in 2006, I've done an uneven job of tracking every vehicle I've been in, each year. Last year I made a resolution to be better about it, and the result is a spreadsheet with model names, dates, notes and some basic facts and figures. Armed with this basic data and a yen for year-end stories, I figured it would be interesting to parse the figures and quantify my year in cars in a way I'd never done before. The results are, well, they're a little bizarre, honestly. And I think they'll affect how I approach this gig in 2015. {C} My tally for the year is 68 cars, as of this writing. Before the calendar flips to 2015 it'll be as high as 73. Let me give you a tiny bit of background about how automotive journalists typically get cars to test. There are basically two pools of vehicles I drive on a regular basis: media fleet vehicles and those available on "first drive" programs. The latter group is pretty self-explanatory. Journalists are gathered in one location (sometimes local, sometimes far-flung) with a new model(s), there's usually a day of driving, then we report back to you with our impressions. Media fleet vehicles are different. These are distributed to publications and individual journalists far and wide, and the test period goes from a few days to a week or more. Whereas first drives almost always result in a piece of review content, fleet loans only sometimes do. Other times they serve to give context about brands, segments, technology and the like, to editors and writers. So, adding up the loans I've had out of the press fleet and things I've driven at events, my tally for the year is 68 cars, as of this writing. Before the calendar flips to 2015, it'll be as high as 73. At one of the buff books like Car and Driver or Motor Trend, reviewers might rotate through five cars a week, or more. I know that number sounds high, but as best I can tell, it's pretty average for the full-time professionals in this business.

This Subaru BRZ has a snowmobile engine and gets 104 mpg

A hybrid powertrain didn't win the Honda CR-Z numerous fans, but it might be the magic ingredient in making the Subaru BRZ more potent. This is the "Car of the Future" as envisioned by Mississippi State University's Center of Advanced Vehicular Systems – the result of a two-year project, which married a front-mounted 850 cc snowmobile engine with two electric motors powering the rear wheels. The battery pack accounts for 12.7 kWh, which enables the car to go 50 miles on just electric juice. The two-liter boxer engine is no more, but what the car loses in cubic inches it gains in MPG. According to MSU engineers, the re-engineered car gets 104 mpg equivalent, and it only weighs 2,904 lbs: about 60 lbs more than an unmodified Sportshift BRZ. It clocks a 0-60 mph run at around 5.7 seconds, too, which beats a stock automatic BRZ by a second. The electric brain of the car improves the range by calculating optimizing algorithms, based on earlier driving. The guys from MSU's Bagley College of Engineering call this Predictive Engine Control. The most likable thing about this project might be that it's still clothed in a sports car body. Future-proof car designs are often focused on mobility instead of the driver, and choosing a BRZ as the basis shows how there's still room for petrolheads in the future.