![]() “This car is extreme, like a double Long Island iced tea,” said Josh Green. Jon Robinson called the car “the bad boy of the group, but so fun to drive,” and Mike Sisk observed that “you can’t help but smile behind the wheel.” For Ken Parr, it was “ridiculously fun, but juvenile-this is a bachelor party with a steering wheel.” Others found the Dodge too overpowering for their taste. Many judges admitted that the Dodge was their guilty pleasure out of our field. The bad boy of the group, but so fun to drive.-Jon Robinson After announcing plans to reimagine the Challenger and Charger models for the brand’s upcoming transition to electrified power, Dodge seems hellbent on making sure everyone within hearing distance of this car’s rip-snorting, supercharged Hemi V-8 with 807 hp will never forget what we gave up in the battery-power bargain. The full Challenger SRT name doesn’t exactly say it all, but it says a lot, showing just how hard Dodge is riding out the last glory days of gas-powered, retro-inspired American muscle. Unfortunately for the Tecnica, fate intervened, and through no fault of its own, the perennial contender-Lamborghini has claimed top honors four times in the past five years, three of them going to Huracán variants-suffered a debilitating incident early on that, like Neymar in the World Cup, ended its contest prematurely. This year still enjoyed a ferocious soundtrack from a slew of fire-breathing internal-combustion-powered models, including the naturally aspirated, V-10-engined Lamborghini Huracán Tecnica. This past fall, on the road in Napa Valley, Calif., and on the track in Boca Raton, Fla., four of our contenders were EVs, and we won’t be surprised if next year more than half the entrants are powered in part (or entirely) by spinning motors. More recently, we’ve watched the ebbs and flows of the industry’s EV sea change in real time, as electric technology ushers in a radical new generation of vehicles undreamt of around the turn of the millennium. We’ve experienced such game-changing approaches to the automobile as the Bugatti Veyron and the Porsche 918 Spyder, as well as cars that have become undisputed classics, including the Ferrari 575M Maranello and the Mercedes-SLS AMG Gullwing. Porsches, Bentleys and Audis Will Soon Feature Your Favorite Apps ![]() Rod Stewart’s 1989 Lamborghini Countach 25th Anniversary Edition Is Heading to Auction Looking back at the well-over 200 sports and luxury cars that have been part of our Car of the Year program shows us that we were fortunate enough, on more than a few occasions, to have driven history in the making.īoat of the Week: This Bonkers 288-Foot Superyacht Has a 3-Story Glass Elevator That Would Make Willy Wonka Jealous Plus, we soon learned that evaluating 10 or more very different vehicles in one fell swoop was a challenging task, as many drivers not only compared them to one another but also considered their own personal experience in superlative and collection-worthy models spanning eras. ![]() The pool of competitors expanded, our circle of judges widened, and car manufacturers took notice. Yet word got out, and just one year after the event’s inception, things got serious. Robb Report Car of the Year started 20 years ago with modest ambitions and nary a thought that it would develop into not just an eagerly anticipated date on our editorial calendar but also a storied tradition. Robb Report’s editors never could have imagined that what began as a casual gathering of a few pals and fun cars would grow into an internationally recognized automotive competition, held on two coasts and attended annually by hundreds of car enthusiasts over the course of several weeks-but here we are.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |