'They Could literally Suck The Air Out Of You' - These Two V8 Engines Are Freaks Of Nature

From the March 1995 issue of Car and Driver. Let’s be honest here: the reason sport-utility vehicles are selling faster than earplugs at a Michael Bolton concert is not because global tem­peratures are down and average snowfall is up and Americans need four-wheel drive in order to reach the video store for those adult-education tapes hidden behind that veil of beads. It’s because, in contrast to other roomy conveyances like station wagons and minivans, every SUV projects an image. The Hummer wears a Gold’s Gym body. The Grand Cherokee is as outdoor­chic as an Orvis flyrod. And the Mitsubishi Montero SR, the object of this review, packs all the techno-wizardry of a Sharper Image catalog. Aaron Kiley|Car and DriverThose who enjoy Pentiums and DirecTV and EOS cameras will feel immediately at home in the SR. The instru­ment cluster is straight off the set of The Hunt for Red October, with gauges for everything from four-wheel-drive mode to oil pressure to volts to a useful new elec­tronic compass and exterior-temperature display that replaces the frivolous “lean­-angle” inclinometer. Why, the SR has more buttons than a Marine Corps parade.

If you’re a child of the 1990s, a V6 is probably part of the soundtrack to your youth, just like the Backstreet Boys. These engines were once the default choice when automakers needed a little extra power in sedans, SUVs, minivans—you name it. There have been many notable V6-powered performance cars as well, from the Buick GNX to the R35 Nissan GT-R. But V6s just don’t inspire the same passion as other engine formats. V6-powered cars have their fans, but the engine itself really doesn’t. The Drive explored why that is in a new YouTube video, and it starts with engineering compromises. Companies started experimenting with V6 engines before World War II, and Lancia brought the V6 to mass production in the Aurelia in 1950, but the story of the V6 as a truly mainstream engine begins in 1962 with General Motors. Looking to economize, the automaker’s Buick division lopped two cylinders off one of its smaller V8s to create the “Fireball” V6. It was all about saving engineering costs since, aside from the different number of cylinders, everything else was the same.

Higher octane ratings will cost you more but it could be worth the price Regular and premium gasoline may look and smell the same, but they differ in many key ways. In the U. S., most regular pump gas has an octane rating of 87, while premium gas generally ranges from 91 to 94 octane. The increased octane rating means premium gas is better for performance and is often recommended for use in supercharged, turbocharged, and high-compression engines. And in the Ford world, regular and premium gas can mean the difference between an engine that's constrained and one that produces maximum power.

The V8 cruiser in your rearview mirror is becoming quite a rare sight these days. Police departments across America have largely moved on from big, thirsty eight-cylinders, and the reasons come down to three things: the cars are gone, the fuel bills make little sense, and the smaller engines that replaced them are actually really good. Start with the cars. The Ford Crown Victoria Police Interceptor, the 4.6-liter V8 sedan that defined American policing for decades, went out of production after 2011. Production of its Taurus-based successor, the Police Interceptor Sedan, ended in 2019. Dodge's Charger Pursuit, the last big rear-drive V8 sedan in patrol work, went away along with the gas-powered Charger in 2023.

Obrist, the Austrian engineering firm famous for ripping battery cells out of a Tesla Model 3 and bolting a gas engine into the frunk, is bankrupt. Three companies in the Obrist Group are insolvent with combined debts of about €31.8 million, or roughly $37 million. The company spent over a decade pitching its “HyperHybrid” range extender as the smarter alternative to battery-electric cars. It never got a single production vehicle out of it.

‘The first time I had the tooth in my hand,” says Linda Cardellini, “I thought, ‘Oh my God, this is what I’m doing.’” The star of Freaks and Geeks, ER, Dead to Me, Mad Men and DTF St Louis (for which she recently won an Emmy) is talking about her pivot towards full-blown horror. In Crystal Lake, the prequel to the Friday the 13th movies, Cardellini plays Pamela Voorhees, the original slasher of the 1980 film. The tooth, by the way, is human and gets embedded in Pam’s knuckle – until she yanks it out with a gruesome, revolting slurping sound. Casual filmgoers may associate Friday the 13th with Jason, the hockey-mask-wearing serial killer. But aficionados will know that Pam, Jason’s mother, is the villain of the first movie. “He didn’t even have the mask until the third movie,” says Cardellini, who has clearly done her homework. “Pam is the original killer, in vengeance of his death.” (There is some massaging of previous storylines in Crystal Lake, such as moving Jason’s drowning from the 1950s to the early 70s, but since the franchise is flexible enough to have sent Jason into space at one point, a bit of timeline tweaking feels fair game.)‘I like to change it up’ … Linda Cardellini