#FirstDrives

Perhaps the 2025 Hyundai Ioniq 5 N we featured isn’t your speed. Too tall, too expensive, too electric. Give me an old-school small sports sedan, you say. Give me internal-combustion and real exhaust noise and a trunk – hatchbacks have too much utility for me!

I wouldn’t expect most crossover-ish hatchbacks to be solid track machines. Especially if they’re carrying the weight of an electric-vehicle battery.

So imagine my surprise at the relative capability of the 2025 Hyundai Ioniq 5 N as I hustled it around the famous Laguna Seca racetrack near Monterey, California.

Subaru has given its popular Crosstrek crossover its most significant update in quite some time. The little SUV has been changed front, back, and sideways. But the change that grabbed all the headlines involved the expansion of the Wilderness lineup, which now includes the Crosstrek.

As a lifelong motorcycle enthusiast, I cannot tell you the number of times I’ve wanted to sneak stories about two-wheeled transportation onto this website. So you can imagine my delight upon being informed that I had been tapped for a driving event that required a license featuring a cycle endorsement. Though I quickly learned that the vehicle I would be experiencing wasn’t quite what I had in mind.

Can-Am had invited me to test out the 2023 Spyder RT and Spyder F3. Despite having seen them around for years, they were models I had long assumed would be marginally better than the atrocious three-wheeled motorcycles offered by Harley-Davidson. This turned out to be a mistake on my part. Can-Am’s three-wheeled products turned out to be some of the best touring vehicles I’ve ever ridden sans air conditioning.

The 2024 Hyundai Kona is launching now – dealers should be receiving units as you read this – and Hyundai has some challenges to overcome as it gets the new Kona to market.

It was almost certainly a coincidence that the site Ford chose to launch the 2024 Ford Mustang GT was near a horse-racing track. The company likely chose the location due to its proximity to challenging mountain roads like the Angeles Crest Highway.

Still, I wouldn’t put it past them. After all, the seventh-generation Mustang is the company’s newest version of a muscle-car thoroughbred.

For most car enthusiasts, a Ford Mustang without a V8 under the hood is sacrilege. This despite the fact that V6 and four-cylinder Mustangs have long ago shed the pejorative label of “insurance beater.”

I was cruising along a Catskills two-lane in a 2024 Volkswagen Atlas at a leisurely yet quick pace when I caught a flash of brown and white out of the corner of my eye. Conversation with my drive partner ceased and I instinctively got deep into the brakes as Bambi decided that she needed to cross the road right that second, traffic be damned.

While Ford has been shipping all trims of its all-new 2023 Super Duty pickup line to customers since May, production issues have delayed things and you’ll be hard-pressed to find someone that’s actually driven one. Fortunately, the Blue Oval invited us to take a gander at the new trucks at the Ford Michigan Proving Grounds earlier this month.

As first impressions go, the Super Duty led off with a firm handshake and proved that it can be slotted into a myriad of roles. Ford offered up an impressive resume and a sound business plan and allowed us to beat on a few examples to prove its rigs were the correct vehicle for any job.

The Toyota Prius has pretty much always been focused solely on fuel economy. The design was driven by the desire to maximize MPGs. Driving dynamics took a back seat to fuel economy. If you bought a Prius (or leased one) you likely bought it for fuel economy – or maybe because it was affordable.

The redesigned 2023 Toyota Prius is supposed to change all that without sacrificing all that fuel-economy stuff.

Does it? Well, for the most part, yes. But is that good enough to lure in those who have long disdained the car as a wedge-shaped penalty box that existed only to lengthen the time between fill-ups?

The Toyota Crown may wear a well-known nameplate, but we haven’t seen it in the U.S. since the early 1970s. Now it’s back, replacing the venerable Avalon as the brand's full-size sedan.

And it’s … well, the 2023 Toyota Crown experience is just a bit different than what the Avalon offered.

As I crossed the Golden Gate Bridge for the third time, thanks to Google Maps failing at its one primary job (more on that later), I realized I’d be quite late for lunch. No matter, I thought, since I’d get more time with the 2024 Mazda CX-90.

You may have already seen the first ad for the 2023 Dodge Hornet – it’s a spoof of disaster-movie trailers and it includes a man standing in a city, arms wide open, shouting “let me feel your sting!”

I felt the Hornet’s sting during a day of driving through North Carolina. And I didn’t even need an EpiPen.

Standing in the lobby at Mitsubishi’s suburban Nashville headquarters last week, I looked out the window and saw Nissan’s own HQ just down the street. Even though Mitsubishi tells me that it’s just a coincidence that the two offices are that close to one another, the two companies are part of a larger alliance that also involves Renault. Even if it’s not intentional, one can feel the corporate synergy.

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.