#CarReviews

Today's rewind is a bit different than the usual car review.

In the beginning, God created the dinosaurs. He saw that they would eventually decompose into petroleum, and said this is good. And God said let there be bitchin’ V8 engines.

And God said Oh Crap, I didn’t kill off enough dinosaurs to feed these hungry V8 engines. So on the seventh day, he left it to someone else to create EV charging stations way too far apart in sketchy parts of everything that he had made, and he rested.

We are well beyond the book of Genesis when it comes to electric vehicles - we no longer look to an EV as simply an efficient urban runabout not suited to the open road. Witness the big two-letter badge on the decklid of this 2021 Ford Mustang Mach-E GT - yes, there is a healthy dash of grand touring within Ford’s sporty EV. And, should you wish, a touch of sports car joy.

Today's TTAC rewind is a capsule review of the 2015 Subaru WRX.

For your perusal this fine fall evening, we present a first drive from the autumn of 2018.

Hello again! Today's TTAC Rewind takes us back only a few years.

We heard them before we saw them.

Our merry band of journalists and PR folks were walking to dinner in Bozeman, Montana on the second night of the 2023 Jeep Wagoneer/Grand Wagoneer L press launch when we crossed paths with a bunch of college-aged folks who were walking the opposite way shouting “hi-ho, hi-ho, fossil fuels have got to go!”

If only they could lay eyes on this particular Jeep, which caused one colleague to tweet out a reference to The Simpsons' Canyonero.

It’s hard to come up with a better hot hatch than the 2022 Volkswagen Golf R. Unfortunately, it’s also hard to build such a sublime vehicle and also make it a bargain.

If you’re on a budget, VW will happily sell you a GTI and you’ll get about 80 percent of the Golf R’s performance. On the other hand, if you have the scratch, the Golf R is worth it.

Hey, Editor Tim here -- we're trying something new. Keep an eye out each Sunday morning for a review from the past, chosen more or less arbitrarily, for you to peruse over your morning coffee.

The consensus, at least among us shrimp-sucking keyboard warriors who get paid to review cars, is that the Jeep Wagoneer is a bit of a flop, mostly due to an oddly-proportioned exterior design.

Sure, the overfed journo writes between bites of shellfish, the Wagoneer has a nice interior, an excellent stereo, and an unobjectionable, if unremarkable powertrain. But its looks frighten small dogs.

One could be forgiven for worrying that when Honda updated the Civic, it would muck things up. Make a good thing worse. Especially when it comes to the enthusiast-oriented Si trim.

The eleventh-generation car debuted last year as a 2022, and the Si version followed soon after. As most of you no doubt know, the Si is the hopped-up performance version of the Civic, though it’s not the highest-performance trim. That would be the Type R, which is currently on hiatus for the moment – the 2023 Honda Civic Type R will bow soon.

Nissan finally updated the Frontier mid-size pickup for 2022, thus finally bringing an aging truck current.

But staying up to date isn’t always enough. Did the Frontier suddenly become a much stronger competitor?

Extremes are easy to write about.

Just as sportswriters would prefer to cover either contending teams or basement dwellers instead of those that win about as much as they lose, most auto writers find it easier to describe sexy sports cars or to lampoon rolling failures.

This is why writers who are itching to show you how well they can use a thesaurus are almost as happy to see a Mitsubishi Mirage arrive at their home as they would be a Ferrari. Almost.

Those who’ve studied the build and price site for the Ford Bronco will note that the company labels the upper trim Badlands and Wildtrak versions as the ones you should select if you plan to go wheelin’ often. That’s before even thinking about adding the Sasquatch package.

The "Save the Manuals" crew will also note that the Badlands trim is the only way to get a loaded Bronco with a clutch pedal.

The idea of a plug-in hybrid Jeep Wrangler intrigues me. Wranglers that run exclusively on dead-dino juice have never been terribly fuel efficient. That’s true of recent efforts, too, despite overall improvements in automotive technology/design/engineering that have helped even the thirstiest of gas guzzlers become, well, less thirsty.

So it makes sense that a Wrangler that can run at least part of the time on electrons would pique my interest. Even if the alternative powertrain underhood changes little else about the Wrangler experience.