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A plain four-door 1970 Plymouth Satellite with Chrysler’s 440 Super Commando big block hiding under an ordinary hood embarrassed a BMW driver who never saw it coming. Built on the same platform as the Road Runner and GTX but wearing none of their badges or bravado, this sedan is a textbook sleeper — read on for how a grocery-getter body ended up packing genuine street-fighting torque, and why cars like it are becoming harder to find and pricier to own.
Some of the most aerodynamically efficient cars ever built look nothing alike, from the bubble-shaped Volkswagen XL1 to the deceptively ordinary Mercedes-Benz EQS. This rundown breaks down what a drag coefficient actually measures and which production vehicles have posted the lowest numbers on record. The results reshuffle a lot of assumptions about which cars are actually cutting through the air the most efficiently.
A supercharged Camaro ZL1 — reportedly belonging to host Liel Levy’s father — takes on a modified BMW and a $200,000 Bentley in this street-racing matchup. The factory 650-horsepower LT4 V8 makes the outcome closer than the video’s title suggests, and the comments are still arguing about just how close it really was. Watch to see how the numbers play out on the street.
By 2014, the Dodge Charger SRT8 packed a 470-horsepower V8 and genuine track-ready braking into a car still priced around $30,000 — less than half what comparable European performance sedans cost at the time. Getting there took three model years of shared engineering with the Chrysler 300, a redesigned face, and an engine lineup that kept growing without ever changing the car’s basic bones. Read on to find out how this generation closed out with a genuine value argument, not just an attitude.
BMW’s 2015 i8 looks like a concept car that escaped into showrooms, gull-wing doors, a carbon-fiber passenger cell, and two completely separate power sources that never mechanically touch. A 1.5-liter turbo three-cylinder drives the rear wheels while an electric motor independently powers the front, delivering 420 lb-ft combined and a 0-60 time of 4 seconds flat, all in a car lighter than a contemporary Corvette. Read on to find out how BMW split propulsion in two, and why the approach still matters.
The BMW i8 paired a 1.5-liter three-cylinder engine with an electric motor, a carbon-fiber passenger cell, and swan doors, then asked $143,400 for the combination. It hit 60 mph in about 4.2 seconds and returned an EPA rating of 76 MPGe. Almost nothing else on the market in 2017 was attempting the same thing. Here is what BMW actually built, and what the i8 predicted about everything that followed.
BMW’s 8-Series Concept revived a nameplate that vanished from showrooms for nearly two decades after the original E31 coupe was discontinued in 1999. Debuted at the exclusive Concorso d’Eleganza Villa d’Este rather than a traditional auto show, the concept previewed a production coupe arriving in 2018 with a lineup topped by a twin-turbo V12. Its low hood, sweeping roofline, and 21-inch wheels signaled BMW’s intent to reclaim flagship coupe territory it had quietly ceded years earlier.
BMW’s New Six sedans built the template for every sporty, luxurious BMW that followed — and the pivotal version, the E3 Bavaria, only exists because one persistent American dealer refused to take no for an answer. Read on to find out how a scaled-back interior and a bigger engine created the car most historians credit with starting BMW’s entire American identity.