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CORRECTION APPENDEDSANTA BARBARA, Calif. -- There are Mustangs stuck in my mind. There's the red '68 California Special coupe I saw parked at a neighbor's house every day as I [...]

Not long ago it was easy to keep track of the Mercedes-Benz cars on sale in the United States. The small ones began with C, the middle ones had an [...]

Mercedes-Benz has always had its particular mojo. Made up of precise engineering, often impressive quality, an epic racing history and a few Nazi parade cars, this mojo was scalable. Even [...]

The Toyota Corolla isn't much different from a Nissan Sentra that looks like a Volkswagen Jetta or a Chevy Cruze and might as well be a Hyundai Elantra. Compact car [...]

John and Horace Dodge got a jolt of free publicity in 1916. Two years after the brothers began producing their own vehicles, General John J. Pershing used a fleet of […]

SANTA BARBARA, CALIF. -- As cars age, the market usually ignores them. There's nothing new, nothing fresh, nothing exciting about a car that looks like one more goose in the [...]

Its wheelbase is 4.2 inches longer and it has two additional doors, but the Dodge Charger sedan is virtually a mechanical twin of the Challenger coupe. So it was straightforward [...]

Volkswagen has been languishing in the United States. While its Audi luxury division has done well, the VW brand itself has been losing sales traction. Despite loudly proclaimed high ambitions [...]

They line up a dozen deep behind the Capitol in Washington, mostly black General Motors S.U.V.s -- Chevrolet Tahoes and Suburbans or their GMC equivalents -- waiting to shuttle important [...]

Pull up to the 7-Eleven in this car and you feel like Leonard Bernstein arriving at Lincoln Center. Ride in the back and you're escorting Julie Andrews to the Oscars. [...]

TESTED 2014 Mitsubishi Mirage WHAT IS IT? A subcompact four-door hatchback. HOW MUCH? Base DE, $13,805; ES as tested, $16,890. WHAT'S UNDER THE HOOD? A full 3 cylinders of mumbling [...]

Reruns are comforting. Gilligan always screws up the rescue, Lucy gets smashed on Vitameatavegamin every single time, and no characters on ''Seinfeld'' remain masters of their domain. At some point [...]

TESTED 2014 Ram ProMaster WHAT IS IT? A big metal box on four wheels, built for commercial service. HOW MUCH? $29,625 base for the 118-inch wheelbase 1500 Low Roof model [...]

Byline: JOHN PEARLEY HUFFMAN BEVERLY HILLS, CALIF. -- Up a flight of stairs from the Porsche Design boutique on Rodeo Drive, in a room of modernist sofas and chairs, low [...]

BEVERLY HILLS, CALIF. -- Up a flight of stairs from the Porsche Design boutique on Rodeo Drive, in a room of modernist sofas and chairs, low white coffee tables and [...]

CORRECTION APPENDEDIf Leonardo Da Vinci had painted dogs playing poker on black velvet, would it necessarily be a masterpiece? It would be a genuine Da Vinci, but not every Da [...]

AMG, the in-house tuner shop for Mercedes-Benz, has consistently found ways to push the performance abilities of production vehicles without betraying their luxurious nature. The AMG machines can be ridiculously [...]

Kia's start in America was clandestine. It built the forgettable Festiva two-door hatchback for Ford, using plans cribbed from Mazda. With its front wheels powered by a 58-horsepower 4-cylinder engine, [...]

If the redesigned 2013 Sentra has hit its target, what was Nissan aiming at? The car does everything its competitors in the compact sedan class do, but it doesn't do [...]

The state of the internal-combustion art has never been more artful. Direct fuel injection, variable valve timing, computer-controlled ignition systems and a hundred other technologies have become tools for shaping [...]

SANTA BARBARA, CALIF. -- It's the screwiest name on any new car, a name that seems swiped from the mid-1970s heyday of the Ford Gran Torino Brougham, the Dodge Royal [...]

Big flagship luxury sedans are relics. Artifacts left over from a time when social standing was reflected in the length of a car's wheelbase and how upright its grille stood. [...]

On a scale that ranges from ''coolly rational'' on the left to ''totally berserk'' on the right, Aston Martin's newly updated Rapide S four-door sports car is way over to [...]

The 2012 Honda Civic was a goof: a dull all-new car that wasn't better, in any significant way, than the one it replaced. Goofs are fixable, however -- just ask [...]

IN a year full of comebacks (and a few setbacks), memorable anecdotes were plentiful. Here are some automotive highlights of 2012. AUTONOMY FOR CARS In September, California became the third [...]

IT'S a word that nowadays seems to appear only in reviews of Broadway shows followed by four to eight exclamation points. It's the sort of word that, if you hear [...]

FOR 40 years BMW's M division has been the substance behind the company's claim of having created the Ultimate Driving Machine. BMW's image was not always so well defined. The [...]

By JOHN PEARLEY HUFFMAN THE most interesting thing about the 2007 Acura RDX compact crossover was that, unlike most of its luxury competitors, it didn't have a 6-cylinder engine. Instead, [...]

SANTA BARBARA, Calif. SINCE 1976, the Honda Accord has been the car for people who don't want their car to say anything about them. It doesn't boast or gossip or [...]

IT will be the black car waiting to pick you up at the airport. It's the Cadillac upon which hearses and limousines will be based. When Hertz runs out of [...]

FULL-SIZE American sedans are an endangered species, and the front bench seat is fading away with them. The 2013 Cadillac XTS comes with only front bucket seats, unlike the DTS [...]

McFarland, Calif. FROM Santa Maria in Santa Barbara County to Carlsbad near San Diego, dragstrips once spread thick across Southern California. Lions in Wilmington, Orange County International in Irvine and [...]

SANTA MARIA, Calif. THE new Porsche 911 Carrera S is a smart car. It won't over-rev its engine, it shifts gears better than Dyno Don Nicholson, the steering could play [...]

OJAI, Calif. -- BUILDING great supercars is easy; it's getting the ordinary ones right that's tough. Cars that sell for less than $20,000 are built on robotized fast-moving assembly lines [...]

CORRECTION APPENDEDEl Paso, Tex. -- FORT BLISS may be the least British place on earth. It's a million acres of Texas and New Mexico desert where it always seems hot, [...]

THOUGH millions of Vegas, Pintos and Gremlins were made during their production runs of nearly a decade, most are gone now, long since sent to the shredder. That, however, doesn't [...]

CORRECTION APPENDED ADDRESSING a group of 450 civic leaders at the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan on Oct. 3, 1968, the chairman of General Motors, James M. Roche, did something almost [...]

TESTED 2011 Chrysler 200 Limited WHAT IS IT? The direct lineal descendant of the Chrysler LeBaron K-Car, the 200 sedan carries many of that old box's virtues with 21st-century refinement. [...]

CHEVROLET may be celebrating its centennial, but along with the century's highlights are missteps too glaring to be ignored. The 1917 Model D, for instance, was powered -- barely -- [...]

IN 1920, Gaston Chevrolet, driving a car he and his brothers Louis and Arthur built, won the Indianapolis 500. But he wasn't in a Chevrolet. Louis had co-founded the Chevrolet [...]

Its Impalas dropped us off at school. Its pickup trucks hauled our produce on the farm. Its Corvette sustained our sports car fantasies through the boredom of high school algebra [...]

TESTED 2012 Scion iQ WHAT IS IT? Smaller than a mere small car, the iQ is a ''premium micro-subcompact'' that almost seats four in near comfort. HOW MUCH? There's only [...]

CORRECTION APPENDED NOW is not the time for Honda to rest the updated 2012 Civic on its ancestors' laurels. The compact car market is stacked. Hyundai redesigned the Elantra for [...]

Gardena, Calif. PERHAPS it's best to think of Ford's latter-day Boss 302 as the flat-panel, 1080p, 240 Hz, color-balanced version of the Mustang GT coupe. It's brighter, more vibrant and [...]

Santa Barbara, Calif. IN a world of infinite resources, one without responsibilities or consequences, I would drive nothing but V-8 Ford Mustangs. Each morning I'd get out of bed, fire [...]

Consumers Union, the publisher of Consumer Reports, sends out a news release each month summarizing the automotive evaluations of the coming month's issue. Rarely does the release generate significant attention, [...]

Santa Ynez, Calif. LIKE the three-button ventless Kilgour suit worn by Cary Grant in ''North by Northwest'' -- called ''arguably the most legendary in the history of American cinema'' by [...]

WHETHER it's called a small minivan or a tall wagon or a people mover or a multipurpose vehicle, the basic idea behind the redesigned 2012 Mazda 5 is one that [...]

WHEN it comes to describing precisely what makes the 2011 Hyundai Sonata so undeniably excellent, the structural metaphor that applies best is, obviously, the crunchy taco. What makes a great [...]

TESTEDDodge Viper SRT-10 WHAT IS IT? Two-seat supercar. HOW MUCH? Base $92,705 including $1,700 gas-guzzler tax. (Dual graphite painted stripes are $3,425 more.) Neither traction nor stability controls are offered. [...]