These Are the 10 Cars You Must Drive Before You Die

Arguments are frequent in our office, and sometimes they even have to do with cars. On topics such as comparison-test winners, 10Best, and the proper way to brew a pot of French roast, our wide range of opinions and preferences quickly outstrips our civility, and whittling down the list for this story came close to inciting a riot. In this year alone, there are more than 400 vehicles available in the U.S., so to sift all of global automotive history down to 10 great cars to drive before you die was a momentous task. No doubt some of your favorites didn’t make the list. We sympathize. Some staff members still aren’t speaking to one another. Ultimately, we settled on the cars below because they are the best representations of their respective eras in automotive development, the purest distillation of what we consider to be necessary automotive traits, and because these 10 would provide a person a broad and comprehensive overview of automotive history. Compared with many of the cars in this collection, the prospect of getting behind the wheel of a Model T Ford might seem a trifle tame, not to mention primitive. Just 20 hp, two forward speeds, three foot pedals (one for reverse), advance the spark, retard the spark, a top speed of about 40 mph—novel, but hardly a thrill ride. However, the unique part of this experience is cultural. Driving a Model T gives the operator a portal into the dawn of the automobile age, when cars made the transition from toys for the few to an everyday necessity for the many. It can be argued that more people learned to drive in a Model T than in any other car ever and that no motor vehicle has had a bigger influence on history. At one time, shortly after World War I, half the cars on the planet were Model T Fords, a fact that makes the prospect of actually driving one a bit more plausible than driving some of the other cars arrayed here. When Model T production ended in May 1927 after a 19-year run, the tally stood at just over 15 million. A good many of those cars have survived—experts estimate at least 25,000—in decent running condition. There might even be one in your neighborhood. It was big—finished cars commonly weighed over 2.5 tons. It was potent. It was brutish. It was just flat magnificent. The engineering was cutting edge for the day, and even in an age of grand classics, the Duesy’s 6.9-liter straight-eight made its contemporaries—Cadillac’s V-16, the Packard Twin Six, the Marmon V-16, the Lincoln V-12—look a little tepid. In basic J configuration, introduced in 1928, the DOHC 32-valve eight was rated for 265 hp, phenomenal at the time. Supercharging was added in 1932, creating the SJ and bumping output to 320 hp. Of the 500 or so Duesenbergs built between 1928 and 1937, only 36 were SJs, which makes driving opportunities pretty rare, even though most of them survive. If the prospect somehow presents itself, this car’s combination of power, speed, and opulence is as uniquely seductive today as it was some 80 years ago—the supercharger spooling up and down, the whine of straight-cut gears, double-clutching for downshifts, the rumble of the straight-eight, the heavy steering, the sense of enormous mass well managed. A contemporary writer characterized the SJ as “an elegant roughneck.” The accuracy of that description endures. Shortly after the Citroën DS’s launch in 1955, French philosopher Roland Barthes wrote that it had “obviously fallen from the sky.” Pronounced “déesse,” which means “goddess” in French, it looked like nothing else on earth. Streamlined to the max, Citroën’s proudest car boasted a hydropneumatic suspension, a fiberglass roof, and a one-spoke steering wheel—among many other technological highlights. In 1967, swiveling headlights were added—recently extolled as a great innovation by other carmakers. Driving the DS for the first time, you will look like an absolute fool. Back when it was launched, just like today, you basically needed to learn driving it from scratch. The brakes bite at the hint of a touch, the steering is strongly self-centering, and the optional semiautomatic transmission needs to be treated with the utmost care. In today’s environment, the DS would be utterly demolished by consumer advocates. But when you master the goddess, she reveals her beauty. The driving experience soothes and is superbly comfortable, and the DS—despite its four-cylinder-only engine portfolio—is a fast car, with late models topping 115 mph. For decades, the irreverent DS was a preferred mode of transportation by intellectuals and aesthetes, based on a quality seldom associated with luxury cars: intellectual superiority. There have been bad Ferraris through the years, but anything made in Maranello is still a special driving experience. And a Ferrari fitted with a V-12 engine is the most special of all: The first Ferrari had one, as did the firm’s dominant line of Le Mans winners in the 1950s and ’60s. The greatest of Ferrari’s V-12s is undoubtedly the Colombo-designed 3.0-liter engine that powered a string of coupes, convertibles, and sports-racing cars in the 1950s and early ’60s. And the best all-around car to use this engine is the beautiful Pininfarina-styled Gran Turismo berlinetta made between 1960 and 1962, otherwise known as the SWB (for “short wheelbase”). This engine sings and wails, its exhaust note accompanied by a tidal wave of induction roar and valvetrain noise. It goes as well as it sounds, with street versions making between 220 and 240 hp. The car is alive, from the engine to the steering to the shifter, with a seemingly telekinetic connection between a driver’s hands and feet and the mechanical components. The interface between the gas pedal and the three double-barrel Webers has a directness and precision that an electronic throttle can’t match. There’s simply no more soulful car on the planet. There had been front-wheel-drive cars before Sir Alec Issigonis designed the Mini. But none of those cars’ designers had seized on the packaging advantages of the transverse engine layout to the extent that Issigonis did. The Mini is a miracle of maximizing interior space in a minimal package. A tad more than 10 feet long, riding on 10-inch-diameter wheels and tires, a Mini seats four people in reasonable comfort. A base Mini was entertaining to drive, if slow. But when hopped up by John Cooper, boss of the racing-car company that won the 1959 and 1960 Formula 1 championships, the Mini became a riot on wheels. The ultimate development of this cooperation, the 1275-cc Mini Cooper S, made 76 hp and could just about reach 100 mph. By today’s standards, the performance is pedestrian. Yet the Mini Cooper is still one of the world’s most enjoyable drives, thanks to a combination of screaming engine, short-throw gearshift, chuckable handling that defined the term “lift-throttle oversteer,” and teensy size. A Mini Cooper is the smallest car you might ever pilot, dainty enough that it feels as if you were putting it on like a shirt. Getting so much from so little is both really appealing and a uniquely rewarding driving experience. Our list cried out for a muscle car, but which one? The LS6 Chevelle SS 454 was obvious but a little safe, too. We wanted something that more fully embodied the balls-out brashness of the first horsepower war. And so we present the 1970 Hemi ’Cuda, a steroidal demon sled born in the era of flower power but fueled by a million screw yous. The Barracuda started out as an option package for early-’60s Valiants but eventually evolved into a unique model. By the dawn of the ’70s, it had come into its own as a rorty “sports coupe” available in ridiculous colors such as Vitamin C (that’s orange), Lemon Twist (yellow), and Sassy Grass (green). The top engine available in the new-for-1970 ’Cuda was the Hemi, 426 cubic inches of fury and anger that existed solely to rain down great vengeance on air and gas in the interest of riotous self-gratification. Sitting inside a ’Cuda feels a bit like sitting in a washtub placed inside a storage container—the interior is tight, the beltline is high, and there’s a lot of sheetmetal around you. Twist the key, and the sound is glorious, sort of artillery-piece-meets-pissed-off-grizzly-bear, and the fuel and exhaust fumes are intoxicating enough to turn Al Gore into a believer. Then you stab the gas, the car rears up on its archaic suspension, and you’re the star of your very own Rat Fink poster—the chassis is that flexible, the power is that prodigious. A Hemi ’Cuda can’t corner well, and it sure as hell can’t stop, but, man, can it go, go, go. Today’s 911 is so easy to drive it’d almost be boring if it weren’t so ungodly quick—we timed a 2014 911 Turbo S at 2.6 seconds to 60 mph. That couldn’t be farther from the 911’s roots if the engine were in the nose. Thanks to the trailing-arm rear suspension, early 911s seemed to actively work to kill the driver. Anything less than perfectly steady throttle and steering inputs through a corner resulted in irreconcilable oversteer, and the faster you went, the harder the car tried to entomb you in wadded sheetmetal. The lightweight 1973 Carrera RS didn’t cure the 911’s problems, but it did make it so that the Porsche could kill you at even higher speeds. The first 911 with a “ducktail” rear spoiler also had an enlarged front unit that dramatically reduced the car’s uncertain straight-line stability at high speeds. Wider back tires tucked inside fattened fenders helped the rear to stay planted, although they didn’t so much cure the snap-oversteer problem as bump the threshold even farther beyond the point of no return. And it was faster—displacement swelled to 2.7 liters, and the power to 207 horses. It was the fastest and most visceral of the early 911s, and it still wanted very much for its driver to die (you might want this to be the last car you check off this list). We haven’t lost our minds. All BMW M3s have been impressive cars, as fast as you will ever need and practical, too. It’s just that the most engaging, most harmonious M3 remains the first one, built from 1986 to 1991 and sold in the U.S. from 1987 to 1990. The original M3 was actually designed for motorsports—5000 roadgoing examples had to be manufactured to qualify for Group A sedan racing—and heavily modified from the stock E30, to the extent that BMW’s wizards changed the suspension, brakes, transmission, and most of the body panels. Fitted variously with unique 2.3- and 2.5-liter four-bangers making 195 to 235 hp, the original E30 M3 offered solid performance, with a top speed of about 150 mph and 0-to-60-mph times in the high-six-second bracket. But it’s one of the great back-road cars, with a wonderfully neutral handling balance, a supple yet controlled ride, and steering seemingly hard-wired to your brain. An E30 M3 flows down the blacktop, involving its driver intimately in the process of covering ground as quickly as possible—more so than any M3 since. Lotus founder Colin Chapman always preached the automotive virtues of low weight and high agility, and the Elise is a perfect modern example of that simple formula. Making its debut at the 1995 Frankfurt auto show, it took roughly nine years for the then second-generation Elise to make it to our shores. But the ever-lasting impression it leaves was well worth the wait. Built on an ultra-rigid aluminum tub, the sub-2000-pound Elise promotes an intimacy between driver and machine that is duplicated by no other road car currently in production. Combining its light weight and mid-mounted 189-hp, Toyota-sourced 1.8-liter four-cylinder allows the Elise to blast to 60 mph in well under five seconds, but straight-line speed isn’t what makes the Elise so special. It’s the way every single bump, pavement texture, and pebble on the road is felt through the chassis and the miniature, unassisted steering wheel (and the human-accordion feats required to tuck into the claustrophobic cabin). It’s the smile on your face after you get out of one, seemingly plastered there for weeks. It’s fantastic. It’s the impossibility of the thing, the mystery of it. How can the most powerful production car in the world be so effortless to drive? How can the chaos of the Bugatti Veyron be reconciled with its calm? The Veyron was put here by VW chairman Ferdinand Piëch to do one thing: Allow anyone in the world, perhaps even those without prior driving experience, to go 253 mph. Whether or not this is admirable or lunacy is still open to debate. What is not is the speed—an almost immeasurable amount of it, rising and mounting with such swiftness that your eyes can barely adjust. In the Veyron, the scenery doesn’t blur, it bends. Passed cars don’t fade away in your rearview mirror, they cease to exist. Getting that kind of tidal force down to the pavement came at the expense of untold numbers of VW engineers’ careers, men who just couldn’t make the numbers work, who couldn’t produce Piëch’s promised 1001 hp. The tractive demands necessitated all-wheel drive, which necessitated stronger suspension pieces, which brought more weight—you see where this is all going. It became a Jacob’s ladder of crazy, packing some 400 pounds of fluids coursing through its 12 radiators and various tanks. It took a sort of magic to create. The result is a century of automotive learning condensed into a strange-looking, dumpling-shaped car that whirs and wheezes and clicks like a helicopter auguring in. And who wouldn’t want to experience that?



from Car and Driver Blog http://ift.tt/1BatHQm
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