During the 2010 Los Angeles Auto Show keynote, Volvo CEO Stefan Jacoby discussed his plans to shift the Swedish automaker away from the rest of the premium segment. This doesn’t mean that the quality of materials or craftsmanship is going to suffer, but instead of creating products that are specifically... 

Nissan seems to be on a war path to fill every last ounce of white space in the automotive spectrum. The company has unleashed a barrage of vehicles that range from playful to downright confusing. At first blush, the 2011 Nissan Juke would seem to fit into the latter category. With styling that’s... 

Sometimes, luxury isn’t about having more – it’s about having less, albeit artfully architected. Just ask BMW, which lops off a heaping helping of headroom and cargo space to turn its well-conceived X5 into the costlier, less utile X6. Admittedly, the X6 isn’t particularly artful,... 

Do not press the start button. Take a deep breath. Savor the craftsmanship. Take it all in. Begin by examining the four brightly-polished organ-stop vent plungers. The stainless steel knobs situated high on the dashboard are easy to miss at a cursory glance. However, each is tasked with the important... 

Cadillac has never made anything like the CTS-V Coupe, a $63,000 monster that’s half hedonist and half hot-rod. Not only that, Cadillac’s never fought in this part of the market before. The brand had monster engines back in its early days, but they were always pulling monster barges that... 

While we shouldn’t be shocked by anything coming out of Madison Avenue, part of me is incensed to hear Honda using Judas Priest to advertise its new Odyssey. That’s right, the opening riff of the greatest album from the gods of heavy metal deployed, not in the service of Satan, but to sell... 

Try as it might, the BMW M3 Coupe can’t lose the Alpina B7. The two of us are an unlikely automotive pair, playing cat-and-mouse on one long road to nowhere deep in the reaches of an unincorporated area of the California coastal mountains. The air is cool and the canyons are mostly quiet. Only... 

After more than a decade of wild growth and nearly limitless prosperity, Toyota experienced an unthinkable 2010 – the bandwagon derailed in a very ugly, very public way. Embarrassing recalls played their role in the Japanese automaker’s uncharacteristic slide, but even though that public black... 

Can you have your cake and eat it too? Ford thinks so. The Dearborn darling is in the middle of unleashing a slew of turbocharged, direct-injection engines for its products in North America, and we recently had a chance to sample a few. We were most interested, however, in one particular vehicle: the... 

Sketched drawings of imaginary sports cars covered my notebook as an elementary school pupil. Assembled in the ether of a daydream, each penciled design came from an imagination unrestrained by reality, with nary a concession to things like outward visibility, bumper heights or ground clearance. Engines... 

Despite the company’s storied rally history, Volvo seems to have eschewed building its line of R-Design vehicles into street-legal racers in favor of simply creating design packages that give the company’s sedans, crossovers and hatches some much-needed attitude. In the case of the 2011... 

Bigger used to mean better, but in the modern era, that old chestnut no longer applies. Mobile phones aren’t the size of a brick, we can fit 2,000 songs in our pocket and this review was written on a computer that fits neatly on an airplane’s tray table. Sometimes smaller is better, and...