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NBC News this morning confirmed to Deadline it has terminated Mark Halperin’s contract. News comes days after CNN first reported claims of five women, who spoke on condition of anonymity, that veteran journalist Halperin had sexually harassed them when he was working for ABC News. He had been suspended from NBC News since that late Wednesday report. Late Friday, Halperin issued an apology in which he acknowledged his “aggressive and crude” behavior towards women while at ABC. But, insisted Halperin, who joined MSNBC as senior political analyst in 2010 after working for Time and Bloomberg, he has had a “very different reputation than I had at ABC News because I conducted myself in a very different manner” – the result of “several years” of “weekly counseling sessions to work on understanding the personal issues and attitudes that caused me to behave in such an inappropriate manner.” MSNBC’s Morning Joe co-host Mika Brzezinski set the stage for the unraveling of Halperin’s empire Thursday morning when she addressed the absence of the show regular at the top of the broadcast: Now to a story that broke overnight involving someone you see around this table every day. CNN is reporting allegations regarding our friend Mark Halperin during his time at ABC News over a decade ago, unnamed sources detailing unwanted advances and inappropriate behavior. Halperin apologized for the pain his actions caused and said “I will take a step pack from my day-to-day work while I properly address the situation.” Since then: -Showtime, the network for which Halperin has co-hosted the buzzy political docu-drama series The Circus, announced it was “reevaluating” its relationship with him and the future of the program, then updated to say that if the show comes back, he won’t. -HBO dropped plans to develop a project based on Halperin and and John Heilemann’s 2016 election post-mortem, explaining, “HBO has no tolerance for sexual harassment within the company or its productions.” –Halperin’s publisher stuck a shiv in the book itself, saying “In light of the recent news regarding Mark Halperin, Penguin Press has decided to cancel plans to publish a book he was co-authoring on the 2016 election.” Penguin Press had, in March announced it would publish the book, on the heels of its success publishing their 2008 and 2012 campaign autopsies, “Game Change” and “Double Down.” -UltraViolet, the women’s advocacy group that targeted Fox News’ advertisers after the NYT report on the millions spent by Bill O’Reilly and his employer to settle women’s harassment claims, took a victory lap after similarly urging Penguin and HBO to walk away from Halperin. -CNN senior international correspondent Clarissa Ward tweeted that Halperin’s alleged behavior “was an open secret when I was at ABC for years – brave of these women to speak up.” Twenty four hours later, the number of women making claims having more than doubled, Brzezinki updated Morning Joe viewers, ominously, telling them, “Over the past 24 hours there have been more disturbing reports regarding Mark Halperin’s treatment of younger female workers. Behavior in these reports allegedly occurred one to two decades ago and now we’re looking at it.” Brzezinski said, “But we’re also witnessing a larger movement of women speaking up about sexual harassment, because the fear of being dismissed, or not believed, is melting away.” CNN’s initial report documented claims of five women. Halperin had responded in that CNN report with a statement, saying, “During this period, I did pursue relationships with women that I worked with, including some junior to me.” He continued, “I now understand from these accounts that my behavior was inappropriate and caused others pain. For that, I am deeply sorry and I apologize. Under the circumstances, I’m going to take a step back from my day-to-day work while I properly deal with this situation.” According to CNN, the harassment accusations from the anonymous women include propositioning employees for sex, kissing, and grabbing one’s breast without consent. Three women claimed that Halperin pressed his erection against their bodies. Halperin denied grabbing a woman’s breasts and pressing his genitals against these three women. Halperin may be best known for co-authoring the bestselling book Game Change that was later adapted by HBO, with Julianne Moore playing Sarah Palin. He previously worked as the political director at ABC News, and these days is a frequent panelists on Morning Joe as well as Showtime’s The Circus. The Halperin scandal capped an extraordinary week in which the number of women accusing screenwriter/director James Tobak of sexual harassment topped 300, while the number of women who have accused Harvey Weinstein of sexual harassment, abuse, and rape,topped 70, both United Talent Agency and WME announced they have dropped Bill O’Reilly in wake of a New York Times report he had personally settled a sex harassment allegation for $32 million, and the White House declared all of the women who accused President Trump of sexual harassment during the presidential campaign to be liars.

The Good The 2018 Mercedes-Benz E400 Coupe exhibits excellent driving feel, and includes very distinct drive modes from Eco to Sport Plus. Driver assist features can take over in stop-and-go traffic, and a new infotainment interface makes for a big improvement. The Bad A small thing, but it would be nice if the LCD instrument cluster automatically changed theme for different drive modes. The navigation system lacked points of interest that were easily found in a search of Google Maps, and the E400 Coupe's onboard internet would not connect. The Bottom Line The 2018 Mercedes-Benz E400 Coupe is a gorgeous car with exceptional driving characteristics, along with driver-assist technology that becomes near self-driving in stop-and-go traffic. Seating for four limits the overall practicality, but who wants to sit in the rear seat of a coupe? Cars have improved dramatically compared to 20 or 30 years ago, with better reliability, ride quality and safety, but they also tend to feel pretty similar from behind the wheel. Mercedes-Benz, however, manages to distinguish itself, even where other premium brands fail. The S-Class leads the luxury pack, and my recent week in the 2018 Mercedes-Benz E400 Coupe made me want more drive time. From my first moment in the driver seat, maneuvering the E400 Coupe out of our parking garage, the car's feel impressed me. The throttle was powerful and smooth, while suspension, body and steering all felt perfectly synchronized. Over many miles, as I got used to the incredible drive feel, the car continued to engage me with its many useful features. Caught in stop-and-go traffic, Mercedes-Benz's adaptive cruise control literally drove for me. The digital instrument panel let me explore different styles, and the new COMAND interface, Mercedes-Benz's infotainment system, proved much more intuitive than its past versions. And what's that pleasant aroma? A glance in the glovebox reveals the Air Balance cabin fragrance system, a vial of scented liquid that plugs into the climate control. This E-Class Coupe pampered me, while remaining an engaging driver. Mercedes-Benz offers the E-Class as a sedan, coupe, convertible and even a wagon. In sedan form, it seats five and, designated E300, comes with a turbocharged four-cylinder engine good for 241 horsepower. Figuring E-Class Coupe buyers might prefer a more sport-oriented car, Mercedes-Benz sells it as the E400 Coupe, equipped standard with a turbocharged three-liter V6 making 329 horsepower and 354 pound-feet of torque. New for the 2018 model year, the E400 Coupe also comes with a nine-speed automatic transmission, complete with paddle shifters. The version I drove came with Mercedes-Benz's 4Matic all-wheel-drive system, adding $2,400 to the price. With less of a practical focus than the sedan, the E400 Coupe's two fewer doors also mean a rear seat only made for two, as a center console negates a third occupant. Given the pillarless side window opening, I wouldn't regret the loss of passenger space. The E400 Coupe's fluid body lines give it an absolutely gorgeous look. I knew I was in for a technical treat when, digging into the car set-up menus on the center dashboard screen, I found three different styles for the LCD instrument cluster panel. Classic and Sport gave me traditional and realistic looking virtual gauges, while Progressive showed an integrated tachometer and speedometer along with a driving efficiency coach. My only complaint was that I couldn't program each style to come up when I engaged a particular drive mode. I've previously written many words criticizing Mercedes-Benz's COMAND system, the acronym standing for Cockpit Management and Data, which encompasses navigation, stereo and connected features. The E400 Coupe shows off a whole new -- and much improved -- interface for COMAND. Doing away with the former hodgepodge of drop-down menus and icons, the new system goes to an easier-to-understand icon format with sidebar menus, all showing on a wide, 12.3 inch LCD. It remains a non-touchscreen system, relying on a console-mounted dial and touchpad, both of which have some duplicative functions. The onboard navigation system looks good, with rich graphics on the maps showing terrain and rendered buildings. Destination entry uses a one-box interface where I could enter place names or street addresses, which is nice. However, when the system failed to find a regional park that came up on my Google Maps app, I turned to its online search function, and the car failed to establish a data connection. That may have been a service issue, but I would check that capability out at the dealership before making a purchase. Bypassing the onboard systems, the E400 Coupe supports both Android Auto and Apple CarPlay. I plugged in my iPhone and found the nontouch interface to work well, after I figured it out. My only complaint with Apple CarPlay integration is that, unless you set it to connect automatically, it takes a number of steps to switch between it and the onboard systems. The E400 Coupe supports the usual audio inputs, such as USB and Bluetooth, and I was very impressed with the Burmester stereo, with its 13 speakers and 590-watt amp. Surprisingly, I was listening to the base system in the car, as Mercedes-Benz offers an upgrade to what it calls the Burmester High-End 3D Surround system, with 23 speakers, for $5,400. As if the sounds and scents in the E400 Coupe weren't enough, the ride quality proved very comfortable in three of its four drive modes. Although particularly chunky pavement jarred the ride, most of the time it was smooth sailing. It felt just second to the bigger S-Class, which is the most comfortable car I've experienced in a long time. The easily modulated throttle let me take off leisurely or quickly, while the transmission shifted through its nine gears seamlessly, never intruding on my driving pleasure. In Eco and Comfort mode, the suspension felt nicely soft while never feeling loose, as with other adaptive suspension cars I've driven. The steering felt sure and natural. An idle-stop feature shut down the V6 when I stopped for traffic lights, helping to save fuel, and never delayed when I hit the gas. In fact, the limited vibration and noise made it difficult to tell when the engine was actually idling when I was stopped. Sport stiffened the ride quality and appreciably sharpened the throttle, but I didn't find it very impressive as I ran the E400 Coupe down a winding back road. It made for a comfortable sport ride, but I felt there should be more. Then I switched it to Sport Plus. The driving character changed drastically as the car willingly sacrificed my comfort for handling prowess. The ride quality became rough, but the E400 Coupe remained very flat in the turns, maximizing its grip on the road. The transmission made itself felt with abrupt downshifts, a distinct difference from how smoothly it works in other drive modes. In Sport Plus, the E400 Coupe became a hard sports car, and I embraced it by making the tires sing in the turns. Back to Comfort mode, the car's default, and Eco, where I spent the majority of my drive time, I averaged 23 mpg in a mix of city and freeway driving. That's a little better than its 22 mpg combined in EPA testing, where it also achieves 20 mpg city and 26 mpg highway. In general, low 20s may seem pretty poor fuel economy for a modern car, but 22 mpg average comes in on par with the BMW 640i xDrive and Lexus GS 350 all-wheel-drive sedan. Cruising down a country highway, I really came to appreciate Mercedes-Benz's adaptive cruise control technology, which has always been leading edge. Taking this feature closer to self-driving, I found the E400 Coupe automatically adjusting the speed I had set for lower speed limits. For example, cruising down a 55 mph highway, the car slowed down to 35 mph when passing through a town with those limits posted. That feature was very cool, with one caveat. Mercedes-Benz also gave the E400 Coupe the ability to read traffic signs, and it dutifully displayed the current speed limit in its head-up display. In the US, unfortunately, we aren't very good at posting and maintaining traffic signage, and I found plenty of road segments where the car thought the limit was 35 mph, but had actually gone back up to 55 mph. I was able to turn off the traffic sign recognition feature. Adaptive cruise really paid off in stop-and-go traffic, where the E400 Coupe kept a close following distance to the car ahead, so I didn't have to touch the pedals at all. Even better, at those painfully slow traffic speeds, the car's lane-keeping assist basically becomes self-steering, so I could even take my hands off the wheel. That feature was very cool, with one caveat. Mercedes-Benz also gave the E400 Coupe the ability to read traffic signs, and it dutifully displayed the current speed limit in its head-up display. In the US, unfortunately, we aren't very good at posting and maintaining traffic signage, and I found plenty of road segments where the car thought the limit was 35 mph, but had actually gone back up to 55 mph. I was able to turn off the traffic sign recognition feature. Adaptive cruise really paid off in stop-and-go traffic, where the E400 Coupe kept a close following distance to the car ahead, so I didn't have to touch the pedals at all. Even better, at those painfully slow traffic speeds, the car's lane-keeping assist basically becomes self-steering, so I could even take my hands off the wheel. I've largely been impressed by Mercedes-Benz's lineup, and the 2018 E400 Coupe is no exception. The cars show excellent driving dynamics, even in the sort of urban and suburban cruising that takes up most people's drive time. Mercedes-Benz is a true leader in driver assistance features, reflected in how comfortably the E400 Coupe handled stop-and-go traffic. And while the infotainment interface was a point of contention in the past, the update contained in the E400 Coupe is a welcome change. Add in the first-rate Burmester stereo system, and this car made driving more joy than task. The E400 Coupe also occupies interesting ground in the market, as it is the only true coupe in the luxury midsize market. BMW dropped its 6-series coupe, only offering the four-door Gran Coupe, and Audi's A7's four doors and hatchback also rule out coupe purity. Most luxury coupes come in smaller, from the BMW 4-series to the Lexus RC. While not as practical as the Mercedes-Benz E-Class sedan or wagon, the E400 Coupe is a very stylish, remarkable car. I would start with the rear-wheel-drive version, at $58,900, because I don't think all-wheel-drive would make as big a difference in slippery conditions as basic traction control. I would forgo the AMG package, which is mostly cosmetic, but add the $10,200 Premium 3 Package, which brings in a host of electronics, including adaptive cruise control, head-up display and the LCD instrument cluster. That package also adds heated and ventilated front seats, for $450, and automatic high-beams, for $250. And if I had an extra $950 in my pocket, I would throw in the massage seats, because those can be a real comfort on a long trip. That puts my total at $71,495, a big chunk of money but a thoroughly enjoyable car.

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Editor's note: This first appeared in The Hill. Okay, you are covering the White House. What do you do when a retired four-star general who is now White House Chief of Staff tells lies in an on-the-record briefing? You stick to the facts, and let readers and viewers realize the alarming dereliction of public trust from a high government official. Then comes a response from Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary. "If you want to go after General [John] Kelly that's up to you, but I think that if you want to get into a debate with a four-star Marine general, I think that's something highly inappropriate," Sanders said. Let’s review this effort to normalize lying by a White House official. In a democracy — government by the people and for the people — it is now “highly inappropriate” to tell the truth about a Chief of Staff who tells confirmed falsehoods? Trump’s appetite for shutting down the free press is a reminder of his open admiration for strong men dictators like Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Turkey’s Recep Erdogan and the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte. That appears to be President Trump’s opinion. He said in the Oval Office this month that it was “frankly disgusting” that the press is “able to write whatever they want to write.” Clearly the president has an authoritarian bent when it comes to journalism. His latest comments fit with past labeling of straight news reporters as “dishonest,” “scum” and the “enemy of the American people.” “I hate some of these people, I hate 'em,” Trump said about reporters at a Michigan rally late last year, a month after he won the presidency. “I would never kill them. I would never do that.” He then paused smiled and joked, “No, I wouldn't. I would never kill 'em.” But he did direct tirades at straight news reporters covering his campaign and have his supporters turn to curse and threaten them at rallies. And Trump did ask his Twitter followers: “With all of the Fake News coming out of NBC and the Networks, at what point is it appropriate to challenge their License? Bad for the country.” A corrupt President Nixon expressed similar thoughts about going after television stations owned by The Washington Post during the paper’s probe into the Watergate scandal. Trump’s appetite for shutting down the free press is a reminder of his open admiration for strong men dictators like Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Turkey’s Recep Erdogan and the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte. Those strongmen limit the freedom of the press and, in some cases, kill and jail journalists. Earlier this year, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., responded to Trump calling the press the “enemy” of the American people by saying that is “how dictators get started.” Trump, like those dictators, wants to control what the public knows. His goal is to shape reality in order to manufacture public approval of his leadership — which is at an all-time low for a president during his first year. And as brazen as that strategy is in a country with constitutional protections for freedom of the press, the bigger shock is that it is having some success. This is especially true among Republicans. A Vanity Fair/60 Minutes poll from April found 36 percent of Republicans say they believe freedom of the press “does more harm than good.” Recently, the president called attention to a Politico/Morning Consult poll that found 46 percent of Americans believe the media “fabricates stories” to damage him and his administration. In the same poll, 37 percent said the media does not fabricate and 17 percent said they didn’t know. Trump’s desire to make the American news media into his version of Pravda — the Russian government’s propaganda sheet — is being criticized even by some on the right. “This isn’t a game. It isn’t just Trump being Trump. It is a new front in his endless attack on a central pillar of our liberties — a free press,” GOP strategist Rick Wilson, a longtime critic of the president, wrote recently in the Daily Beast. Bernie Goldberg, a Fox News commentator, wrote this rebuke on his website: “As with so many things, this president is just plain wrong. Journalists have biases; they make mistakes; sometimes they’re sloppy; and worst of all, sometimes they have a political agenda. But fabricating stories that they know are not true, inventing fake news sources: that is so rare as to be virtually nonexistent.” Bret Baier, the Fox News anchor and my colleague, said last week that Trump’s criticism of the press is now “way over the top.” Another colleague, Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace, said in a separate interview he dislikes media personalities who join Trump in “bashing the media, because oftentimes what they are bashing is stuff that we on the news side are doing.” As a journalist, I have been critical of President Trump. That has led to Twitter taunting against me by Trump. And then there are the countless racist and hateful comments posted to my social media pages by self-described Trump supporters. When National Public Radio (NPR) fired me in 2010 for speaking my mind about fear of Muslim terrorism, principled conservatives — even those who disliked me — rose to my defense and called NPR out for their censorship and thug tactics to stifle free speech. When the Obama administration’s press shop waged a campaign to delegitimize Fox News by excluding it from a White House pool interview in 2009, journalists — even those who didn’t like Fox — stood up and said that was wrong. If people were outraged by what NPR did to me and what the Obama White House did to Fox, then their principles must dictate that they are similarly outraged by Trump’s treatment of the press. Recall what President Jefferson wrote in his famous letter to Edward Carrington: “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” How far we’ve come from Jefferson’s wisdom to Trump’s ugly, ignorant threats.

CARS.COM — For 2017, Cars.com has revamped its longstanding American-Made Index for the first time. Over the AMI's 11-year history, the number of models meeting our original criteria has fallen due to the globalization of automobile manufacturing — from more than 60 vehicles in the AMI's inaugural year to eight last year. By the original requirements, only three 2017 models would have qualified this year. Related: 2017 American-Made Index: The People Behind the Jeep Plant With that, witness the new AMI: an analysis of cars assembled in the U.S. with high domestic-parts content, predominant U.S. sourcing for engines and transmissions, and high U.S. manufacturing jobs supported per vehicle. This year, the index de-emphasizes overall sales — a factor that reflects the economic impact of a given model line — to focus on the domestic impact of a single buyer purchasing one model versus another. Cars.com analyzed light-duty passenger vehicles built in the U.S. (more than 120 in total) to arrive at the top 10. Methodology The 2017 American-Made Index ranks cars based on five factors: assembly location, domestic-parts content, U.S. factory employment adjusted by sales to reflect how many employees each sale supports, engine origin and transmission origin. (Additionally, curb weight is used in the event of a tie, favoring the heavier vehicle.) The changes in methodology mean current results can't be compared to those of past indexes. Domestic-parts content comes from the American Automobile Labeling Act, which requires automakers to report overall parts content on the window stickers of every new light-duty car and truck sold in the country. The AALA lumps the U.S. and Canada into the same "domestic" pool — a critical obstacle to reporting only U.S. content — but is the most specific domestic-content rating system. To further pinpoint U.S. parts origins and not Canadian ones, the AMI now factors the countries of origin for engines and transmissions, which automakers are also required to report. These are two of the most expensive and labor-intensive components in any vehicle. The final piece is labor. Except for engines and transmissions, the AALA excludes costs associated with final assembly, distribution and non-parts costs. To account for some of those costs, AMI now factors each automaker's direct U.S. factory employment relative to its sales footprint. As in previous years, a few disqualifications remain. Discontinued cars, or cars in their final model year before discontinuation, are ineligible. So are any models produced exclusively for export. Rather than a hard cutoff at 75 percent domestic-parts content, as the AMI did in past years, the index now disqualifies cars below the top 40 percent of all domestic-parts content ratings among U.S.-built models. To maintain a consumer focus, the index disqualifies cars that shoppers are unlikely to find — anything that sold fewer than 2,500 units in the first quarter of 2017 or models sold only to fleets. Note, as well, that heavy-duty vehicles (anything with a gross vehicle weight rating of more than 8,500 pounds) are ineligible for the AALA and thus not considered in the AMI. Why It Changed In redesigning the index, we sought to bolster the factors that address what makes each car American. There is still no easy way to determine that. Many factors exist, and no single one offers a comprehensive answer. But the revamped AMI scores five key components into its index ranking. It's more comprehensive than ever. In a politically charged era of build-American sentiment, a sizable portion of shoppers still care where their car comes from. Cars.com surveyed 1,023 respondents in June 2017 to find about 25 percent would only consider an American manufacturer. That's nearly double the percentage that answered the same way in 2016. The largest block of this year's respondents (again, about 25 percent) thought that between 31 percent and 40 percent of cars sold in the U.S. are "American made." That's accurate if it's strictly automakers fully headquartered in the U.S. — namely Ford, GM and Tesla, whose combined sales through May account for about a third of all U.S. auto sales, per Automotive News. But if you're looking at all cars built here regardless of automaker headquarters, it's about 60 percent. That's according to a Cars.com analysis in January, which found that around 3 in 5 U.S. light-duty vehicle sales in 2016 were from cars assembled in America. As the AMI continues to demonstrate, the badge on the hood doesn't always tell the whole story. The cars on this year's list hail from automakers headquartered in Europe and Asia as well as North America. Indeed, cars built and bought in the U.S. hail from automakers headquartered the world over, with nameplates as diverse as a Toyota Corolla sedan and Mercedes-Benz GLE-Class SUV. The Jobs Factor When it comes to the total impact of a global auto industry on U.S. jobs, direct employment at automakers' plants is just one piece of the pie. That piece amounted to 322,000 Americans directly employed by automakers, according to the Michigan-based Center for Automotive Research. That's from a 2015 study by CAR that analyzed the industry's total impact on the U.S. economy. Another 521,000 Americans worked at automotive suppliers. And new-car dealers employed another 710,000 Americans. Put another way: For a given 20 people employed by the U.S. auto industry, about four work directly at automakers. About seven work at suppliers, but the biggest chunk — roughly nine — work at new-car dealerships. If that's the pie, a gravy train follows it. Myriad additional jobs exist — from used-car dealers and independent repair shops to finance and insurance companies. Scale it all out and CAR estimated in 2015 that the U.S. auto industry directly contributed to the creation of another 5.7 million private-sector jobs. That's 7.25 million private-sector jobs attributable to the auto industry, CAR found, with some $500 billion in annual compensation — nearly $70,000 apiece. In sum, CAR noted the auto industry supported some 3.8 percent of all private-sector jobs and has historically accounted for 3 percent to 3.5 percent of U.S. GDP. Which Cars Are Built in the U.S.? What if you just want to buy a car that's built in the U.S. regardless of any other AMI factors? We have you covered. Tap the link below to see a full list of 2017 models currently assembled in the U.S. Cars.com American-Made Index: Which 2017 Models Are Built in America?

White House scandals have a way of turning nobodies into unfortunate somebodies. So it was 45 years ago in October with Donald Segretti, whom The Washington Post exposed as a major cog in a White House dirty tricks program to destroy Maine Senator Ed Muskie, the leading Democratic candidate for president. Segretti’s reported role added startling new context to what became known as the Watergate scandal. It showed that the June 1972 break-in of the Democratic National Committee was part of a much larger campaign of surveillance and sabotage against targets on President Richard Nixon’s “enemies list”—from reporters to liberal think tanks to dissident government officials like Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers. Now comes George Papadopoulos, another nobody whose name could soon be memorialized on a Trivial Pursuit card for political scandals. The 30-year-old was yet another enabler in the Kremlin’s multipronged campaign to destroy Hillary Clinton, according to the grand jury indictment unsealed by special counsel Robert Mueller on October 30. Donald Trump once called Papadopoulos, his former foreign policy adviser, “an excellent guy,” but now dismisses him as “a low-level volunteer” and a “liar.” Not so much, judging by his guilty plea. With that, Papadopoulos became just the latest name to surface in the widening list of Trump associates under scrutiny by the special counsel—including former campaign chair Paul Manafort and his business associate Rick Gates; Trump’s erstwhile national security adviser Michael Flynn; and oil consultant and Trump foreign policy adviser Carter Page (who met with Russians close to President Vladimir Putin, according to the controversial dossier compiled by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele). Page has denied any collusion with Kremlin figures and said he has nothing to fear from Mueller’s probe. Manafort and Gates pleaded not guilty after they were arrested on money-laundering and other charges a few hours before the Papadopoulos indictment and plea deal were unsealed. Keep up with this story and more by subscribing now Former FBI Director Robert Mueller (front), the special counsel probing Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election, leaves the Capitol building after meeting with the Senate Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill. Robert Mueller meets with Senate Judiciary Committee, Washington DC, USA - 21 Jun 2017 Xinhua/REX/Shutterstock "The big one is the Papadopoulos thing,” former CIA and National Security Agency Director Michael Hayden told me hours after the Manafort-Gates arraignments, following a Washington, D.C., panel he led on “Truth Tellers in the Bunker,” a reference to both the media and intelligence agencies that have reported on Russian interference in the 2016 election. For Hayden, the Papadopoulos indictment underscored yet again how eager Team Trump was to collude with the Kremlin when its emissaries came bearing gifts of Clinton “dirt.” Over the past year, Trump and his associates had repeatedly dismissed such interactions and their failures to report them as mere oversights. Before Papadopoulos, the most damning case had been a meeting between Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, Manafort and a Kremlin-connected lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya. The meeting occurred after an intermediary promised Trump Jr. documents that “would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia.” (“If it’s what you say,” Trump Jr. replied, “I love it.”) At first, Trump Jr. denied a report of the meeting. Later, he insisted that “no details or supporting information was provided or even offered.” Likewise, top Trump campaign aide and current U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions told Congress under oath in June that he had “no knowledge” of any conversations by anyone connected to Team Trump about "any type of [Russian] interference with any campaign." Later, The Washington Post reported that Sessions had failed to disclose two contacts with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the presidential race. Four days after the Papadopoulos plea deal surfaced, NBC reported that Sessions and Trump had both heard out a proposal from their young foreign policy adviser in March 2016 to use his “Russian contacts” to try to set up a meeting between the candidate and Putin. Sessions “rejected” the idea, NBC said. “Trump didn’t say yes and he didn’t say no,” CNN reported, citing “a person in the room” during the meeting. Asked about that as he prepared to leave for his Asia swing on November 3, Trump told reporters he “didn’t remember much” about the meeting, which he called “unimportant.” Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) is sworn in before the Senate Judiciary Committee during his confirmation hearing to be the U.S. attorney general January 10, 2017 in Washington, DC. Sessions was one of the first members of Congress to endorse and support President-elect Donald Trump, who nominated him for Attorney General. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Mueller may yet get a chance to refresh the president’s memory. He has Papadopoulos’s sworn statements that a Trump campaign official encouraged him to pursue Russian “dirt.” That person was unnamed in the Papadopoulos indictment but soon outed by The Washington Post as Sam Clovis, a former conservative talk radio host and co-chair of the 2016 Trump campaign. A self-proclaimed former “Russia expert while serving in the United States military in the Pentagon,” Clovis withdrew his name from consideration for a top Agriculture Department post after his conversations with Papadopoulos were revealed. Instead of recognizing the Russian offers as a classic enemy intelligence ploy—and calling the FBI—Trump’s minions welcomed alleged Kremlin agents into their inner circle. “How stupid can you be?” Hayden said of the campaign’s actions. George Papadopoulos and Dr. Michael Katehakis- Distinguished Professor and Department Chair, Management Science & Information Systems at Rutgers University, on Sunday, November 6, 2016 at a pre-election meeting at the Stathakion Center in Astoria, NY. Εθνικός Κήρυξ/The National Herald/Kosta Bej Getting access to Team Trump was a big score for Putin, an ex-KGB officer, says former CIA officer Jason Matthews, who served in Moscow and did battle with its secret agents for decades. “Just like the meeting with Donald Trump Jr. and the female Russian lawyer, the goal of these encounters was simply contact,” he explains in an email. “Of course, there was an element of baiting”—the Russians offered “thousands” of Clinton emails to Papadopoulos—“but Kremlin expectations for such meetings were modest. They just wanted to assess young, inexperienced green sticks like the Trump boys, Jared Kushner and Papadopoulos. The name of the game is assessment and looking for an opening.” Matthews, now a spy novelist, says the Russians didn’t expect to damage Clinton enough to tilt the election to Trump. “They simply wanted to put a turd in the punch bowl” by getting private audiences with associates of the New York real estate mogul. All the better for the Russians that their discreet meetings with Trump’s people, who failed to report them on their security-clearance forms, were leaked to the press. Emails showing the supposedly neutral Democratic National Committee favoring Clinton over Senator Bernie Sanders, stolen by Russian hackers and published by WikiLeaks, sowed further disenchantment with American politics. Reports of Kremlin agents messing with voters’ heads via Facebook in Michigan, Wisconsin and elsewhere added yet another layer of distrust in the system. And now comes evidence that the Kremlin’s mani[CENSORED]tion of Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms was far faster than previously known. Carter Page, former foreign policy adviser for the Trump campaign, speaks to the media after testifying before the House Intelligence Committee on November 2, 2017 in Washington, DC. The committee is conducting an investigation into Russia's tampering in the 2016 election. Mark Wilson/Getty “It’s the greatest covert influence program in history,” Hayden said. “If their goal was to make our society more dysfunctional, to exploit the dysfunction in American society, they succeeded.” If their goal was “to foster the notion that there are fundamentally no differences between their system and our system, they succeeded.” But Putin’s influence campaign backfired in other ways, Hayden told me. “If their plan was to get someone into office who would warm relations between us and Moscow, that was a disaster.” The scandal not only handcuffed Trump from acting on his oft-stated desire to have closer relations with Moscow, but also prompted Congress to pass more sanctions against Russia and some of its leading officials and businessmen. Seen from that angle, Putin’s triumph looks self-defeating, says Nina Khrushcheva, a professor of international relations at the New School in New York City and the great-granddaughter of former Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. “I am not sure he is a big winner, actually—maybe in a small, tactical way,” she says. “It was a dream of all Soviets before him—to embarrass and undermine the U.S., so he proved his point.” To Putin and his circle, “Russia's relationship with the West is a zero-sum game,” the Russian-born journalist Leonid Bershidsky observed earlier this year. If America is succeeding, then Russia must be losing. Thus, Putin has tried to stoke political disarray in the United States with a variety of ploys, ranging from compromising Trump’s aides with Kremlin meetings to flooding Facebook and Twitter with fake news fanning racial divisions. In this photo provided by the German Government Press Office (BPA) Donald Trump, President of the USA (left), meets Vladimir Putin, President of Russia (right), at the opening of the G20 summit on July 7, 2017 in Hamburg, Germany. The G20 group of nations are meeting July 7-8 and major topics will include climate change and migration Steffen Kugler /BPA/Getty But he may come to regret it, Khrushcheva argues. “He needs U.S. power. He needs cooperation in so many areas across the globe,” she says. “[Putin] can't possibly think that taking down the U.S. fully is good for him or the world.” ” That’s why Papadopoulos, a 2009 college graduate who listed his participation with the Model U.N. as foreign policy experience on his résumé, may pose a threat to both Russia and Trump. His cooperation with the feds—perhaps for several months—gave Mueller a pipeline into much of what Trump and his advisers were saying and doing about the Russians in private. A hint of those conversations has already emerged, in the form of an email Papadopoulos sent to his Kremlin-linked contact in July, which Bloomberg News discovered in an FBI affidavit supporting the charges against the young man. Papadopoulos wrote that a meeting between “my national chairman and maybe one other foreign policy adviser” with the Russians “has been approved by our side.” Manafort was not named in the email, but he was Trump’s national campaign chairman at the time. The candidate’s top foreign policy advisers then were Sessions and Flynn, the former Defense Intelligence Agency chief who had developed ties with Moscow’s ambassador to the U.S. and its state-backed Russia Today TV channel. Richard Gates arrives at the Prettyman Federal Court Building for a hearing November 2, 2017 in Washington, DC. Gates and former business partner and former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort both pleaded not guilty Monday to a 12-charge indictment that included money laundering and conspiracy. Chip Somodevilla/Getty It’s unclear if Papadopoulos’s account in that email was correct, but his cooperation with the feds appears to incinerate over a year’s worth of assertions by the president that he had “nothing to do with the Russians.” “Indeed, when the history books are written on the Trump-Russia investigation, it’s quite likely that the plea deal between special counsel Robert Mueller and...George Papadopoulos may be seen as the crucial moment,” Boston Globe columnist Michael Cohen wrote. “This is the first piece of [official] evidence that there was an ongoing effort within the Trump campaign to collude with the Russian government.” That Trump’s associates were so careless in meeting with agents of a hostile power astonishes Hayden, who called it national security “malpractice.” Papadopoulos’s engagement with Kremlin emissaries was, “at best, reckless,” says a former CIA Russia analyst, who asked for anonymity in exchange for discussing such a sensitive issue. The young, inexperienced player “didn't realize how potentially dangerous this situation was, both in a counterintelligence sense and in the sense of political optics back in the United States,” says the analyst, a longtime student of the espionage wars between Moscow and Washington. Papadopoulos at first lied to FBI agents about his Russia contacts—another amateur move, which resulted in his indictment. But now that he’s talking, he likely won’t do much time. In that, he’s very much like Segretti, the Nixon trickster who ended up serving four months of a six-month sentence after he pleaded guilty to three charges of distributing illegal campaign literature. In the mid-1990s, Segretti, a lawyer, ran for a judgeship in Orange County, California, where his Watergate notoriety trailed him. “The reaction to his candidacy was so negative that he decided to drop out,” the Los Angeles Times reported. The only thing people “wanted to talk about,” Segretti told the paper, “was Nixon and Watergate.” So it will likely go for George Papadopoulos. Only three weeks ago, the young man was looking for “a prominent publisher” on his LinkedIn page. As it turned out, however, he’d already told his story to the feds. One possible title? “Dupe.”

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Name of the oponent: @Renix & @Buzz- Theme of work: Type of work (signature, banner, avatar, Userbar, logo, Large Piece): Avatar Size:150*250 *Text:Battle Watermark:csblackdevil or CSBD somethink like this Stop votes ( min. 4 - max. 8 ):8 Working time: 24 hrs

Waymo's first product will be a driverless taxi service in the Phoenix area. Driverless cars are here. Waymo, the Alphabet self-driving car company, now has cars driving on public roads in the Phoenix metropolitan area with no one in the driver's seat. Waymo CEO John Krafcik plans to announce the news today in a speech at the Web Summit in Lisbon, Portugal. For the last year, Waymo has offered free taxi rides to ordinary people who live near the Phoenix suburb of Chandler. Until recently, the company's modified Chrysler Pacifica minivans had a Waymo employee in the driver's seat ready to take control if the car malfunctioned. Waymo is now confident enough in its technology to dispense with a safety driver. The company has released a video showing Waymo cars driving around the Phoenix area with no one in the driver's seat: At first, most of Waymo's driverless cars will have an employee in the back observing the vehicle's behavior. If something goes really wrong, they'll be able to push the "pull over" button to stop the car. In the coming months, participants in Waymo's early rider program will start getting the option to ride in fully driverless vehicles. Some time after that, Waymo will launch a commercial driverless taxi service that's open to members of the general public in the Phoenix metropolitan area and beyond. Waymo’s first product will be a taxi service Industry watchers have long assumed that a Phoenix taxi service would be Waymo's first product. But as recently as last week, Waymo was still playing coy about the question, suggesting that it might get into the trucking business instead. Now, Waymo is officially announcing that its first commercial product will be a driverless taxi service. There's a dichotomy in the industry when it comes to autonomous cars. On the one hand, you have companies like Tesla and Volvo that want to sell you a car that drives you around. Others, including Waymo, want to operate fleets of robotaxis themselves. Some car companies—including GM, BMW, and Volkswagen are pursuing both strategies simultaneously. Companies selling cars to customers envision a future where today's driver-assistance systems—like lane-keeping and adaptive cruise control—gradually evolve into more sophisticated self-driving software, with human drivers intervening less and less frequently over time. Google initially considered this same gradualist approach, which could have led to licensing partially self-driving technology to automakers. But early tests convinced the company that it was a bad idea. Google employees who got to test early prototypes started trusting the technology way too quickly. Google captured videos of test drivers looking at their smartphones, putting on makeup, and even napping in the driver's seat while cars zoomed down the freeway. So Google changed its strategy. The company decided that instead of selling cars, it would build a taxi service built around cars designed from the ground up for driverless operation. Customers would never be required—or even allowed—to take the wheel. This strategy allows Google—now Waymo—to pursue a different kind of gradualism. In the old model, cars could go anywhere, but at first the software would only drive some of the time. In the new model, the software drives all the time, but at first the cars can only go certain places. Specifically, Waymo's fully driverless cars will initially only navigate in a small portion of the Phoenix metropolitan area around the southeastern suburb of Chandler. Within this zone, the cars are able to go anywhere a conventional taxi can go. But the cars will refuse any trip that would take them outside of this carefully chosen area. To aid with navigation, Waymo has built high-resolution three-dimensional maps of its service area. Self-driving software in each car can compare the objects identified by sensors to objects on the map, allowing it to quickly distinguish stationary objects like trees and buildings from mobile objects like cars and pedestrians. As Waymo expands its map and acquires more vehicles, it will also expand its service area. Before too long, Waymo expects to offer service across the entire Phoenix metropolitan area. Eventually, Waymo will extend service to other metropolitan areas using the same incremental approach. Why Waymo is launching first in Phoenix A big advantage of starting in Phoenix is the region's excellent weather. It's warm and sunny there almost every day. Tricky situations like rain, snow, and ice are rare—though Waymo says its cars are able to drive safely in light rain. Waymo recently expanded its testing into Detroit to prepare for an eventual expansion of the service into colder parts of the United States. In addition to nice weather, the Phoenix area has wide, well-maintained streets and less traffic congestion than most major cities. "I'm not going to say Phoenix drivers are the best drivers, but the Phoenix metro area is an easy place to drive," Phoenix resident Eric de Gaston told Ars last month. Perhaps the most important factor is the regulatory climate. Arizona's leaders have bent over backward to attract Waymo and other self-driving car makers to the Phoenix area. Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey signed a two-page executive order in 2015 designed to encourage self-driving car testing in the state. Besides that, Arizona doesn't have any special legislation or regulations related to self-driving cars. Last month, I asked Ryan Harding, a spokesman for the Arizona Department of Transportation, if there were any legal barriers to launching a fully driverless self-driving taxi service in the state. "I'm not aware of any current law that would prohibit" fully driverless taxis on public streets, Harding said. "We don't have a problem with that." In the last year, Waymo's minivans have become a common sight in the Phoenix suburb of Chandler. "I live in Chandler. You see Waymo units all over the damn place," a Redditor wrote last month. "When it first started, a lot of people I think were kind of afraid," said Scott Suaso, who lives near Chandler and sees Waymo cars on a daily basis. "That was a year ago. These days, no one really seems to care. Everybody has become so used to seeing them." Ars got a preview of Waymo’s fully driverless cars last week Last week we were invited to visit Waymo's secretive test facility in the California desert to see Waymo's fully driverless cars in action. In a conventional car, the main user interface is the steering wheel, pedals, and other controls on the dashboard. But no one will be allowed in the driver's seat in Waymo's cars. So the company has had to think about building a user interface for a car where everyone is a passenger. Customers hail cars with an Uber-style app, so the car itself barely needs a user interface at all. There's a pair of video screens mounted on the backs of the front seats, and a row of four buttons on the ceiling above the middle row of seats. The main function of the video screens is to increase passengers' confidence in the safety of the self-driving software. The screens show a stylized map of the area immediately around the car, with outlines of pedestrians, other cars, bicycles, and so forth marked. Passengers will be able to compare what they see on the screen to what they see out the window and confirm that the car really does understand the road situation. The leftmost button initiates a call to Waymo's customer service center. The second button locks and unlocks the doors. The third button causes the car to pull over—though Waymo says the car won't stop in an unsafe place, like in the middle of an intersection. The rightmost button tells the car to start the ride.

Hello Ga[M]eR to the nickname changed it and than go Click ->Save for to join our comunity G L i hoppe this will help you

Trump speaks with Vladimir Putin The United States Congress has approved a bill placing new sanctions on Russia, Iran and North Korea. The measure passed both houses of Congress this week. The vote in the House was 419-3, while the Senate approved it 98-2. If President Donald Trump signs the bill, it becomes law. If he vetoes it, Congress is likely to override the veto to allow it to become law. White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci left open the possibility that Trump could reject the new sanctions. He told CNN on Thursday the president might decide to veto, then try to “negotiate an even tougher deal against the Russians.” In this file photo, White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci speaks to members of the media in the Brady Press Briefing room of the White House in Washington, July 21, 2017. Top lawmakers from both parties criticized a possible presidential veto. “I think that would be a very bad mistake,” Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn, a Texas Republican, told VOA. “What would be better is if they [White House officials] worked with us on the legislation.” Democratic Senator Ben Cardin of Maryland said the bill gives Trump a better negotiating position with Russian President Vladimir Putin. “If he vetoes it, it means he doesn’t want a stronger hand in dealing with Mr. Putin,” Cardin said. The bill places economic restrictions on many Russian industries. Russia’s economy has already felt the effects from 2014 sanctions placed in response to Moscow’s annexation of Crimea from Ukraine. The new sanctions are meant to punish Russia for that action. They are also a response to U.S. intelligence findings that Russia took steps to interfere in the U.S. presidential election. President Putin has repeatedly denied his government had any involvement in trying to influence the American election. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un supervised a ballistic rocket launching drill of Hwasong artillery units of the Strategic Force of the KPA on the spot in this undated photo released by North Korea's Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) in Pyongyang March 7, 2017. KCNA/via REUTERS In addition to Russia, the bill places sanctions on North Korea for its continued nuclear program. The measure bars North Korean ships from operating in American waters or docking at U.S. ports. The ban extends to ships from nations not following United Nations resolutions against North Korea. The bill bans goods produced by North Korea’s forced labor from entering the U.S. Also, the legislation punishes people involved in Iran's ballistic missile program and anyone doing business with them. It also places restrictions on Iran's Revolutionary Guards. Russia was quick to criticize passage of the bill and answered with its own diplomatic measures. The Russian foreign ministry said the sanctions were evidence of “extreme aggression of the U.S. in international affairs.” Russian officials called in outgoing U.S. ambassador John Tefft in Moscow to inform him of its own countermeasures. In this file photo, a Russian policeman stands in front of an entrance to the U.S. Embassy in downtown Moscow, Russia, on May 14, 2013. Russia ordered the U.S. to cut hundreds of diplomatic positions in the country to match the number of Russian diplomatic workers in the United States. In addition, Russia said it would block entry to two diplomatic properties in Moscow. The European Union expressed its concerns, saying the new sanctions could harm Europe’s energy industry. Several nations – including Germany and France – said the sanctions might harm businesses that carry Russian natural gas through pipelines. Senior Republicans said they had responded by making changes to the bill to deal with some of the European concerns.

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Despite what you may have heard, the November 4, 2017 protests actually aren’t being run by Antifa and they aren’t trying to start a civil war. A deeper look into the November 4 plans reveal a group that wants prolonged protests but doesn’t want violence. The protests are being run by Refuse Fascism, a group that has specifically said they want the protests to be reminiscent of the Women’s March in January, not violence-filled. You can read more about exactly what the protests entail and what they are planning in Heavy’s story here. News about the protests began when a protest on September 26 in California blocked Highway 101. The protestors were carrying signs warning about November 4.Their demands are for President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence to be removed from office. The organizers hope the protest will grow from thousands to ultimately include millions of people. They only organize nonviolent protests and are calling for these to be nonviolent also. Below is a list of every location where a protest is planned to take place on November 4. These are listed in alphabetical order by city, provided by Refuse Fascism.

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It’s best to remember that you are only passing through, that you are a guest here: a 10-car conga line of lollipop-colored, wings-and-spoilers, hiss-crackle-and-pop dream machines, showing up unannounced at the gas stations and convenience stores of deeply rural Kentucky and Tennessee. You come to expect the instant appearance of smartphones in careworn cases, snapping for social media, even when upload speeds can seem slower than the sun’s unhurried march across the summer sky. These are places where a late-model pickup truck might be a statement of success, and you’re driving a six-figure supercar. There will be questions. So you happily answer them. You put the Little Leaguers behind the wheel of the Lambo and the McLaren and the Alfa one at a time. You listen to stories about Terminator Cobras. You engage in nostalgic tales of Hemi Darts and dimly remembered drag races flagged from the town square in the moonlight of a distant past. Most of all, you stay polite and friendly. You’re a guest here. Just passing through. How could it be otherwise, in states where the very roads and buildings feel itinerant, where the natural rise and fall of the land remains almost entirely unconquered by the developer’s bulldozer or the engineer’s dynamite? Five minutes after you leave that gas station, you’re swallowed into deep forests, blind corners, roller-coaster descents terminating in wicked, decreasing-radius bends. They say that New York reaches 200 feet into the bedrock of Manhattan, but in Kentucky and Tennessee, the veneer of civilization is no deeper than the lightly laid asphalt connecting hill to holler and back again. Road & Track staffers come here year after year, from as far as London and Seattle, in order to forget. Forget the glitzy new-car introductions and the deep pile of the showroom carpet, forget the hype and the profit and loss. Here we read the Braille intent of nature through fingertips on the wheel. Here is where excellence shines and unpleasant artifice is exposed to ridicule, first gentle then earnest in long discussions over park benches and local barbecue tables. Our mission is simple: choose the car that impresses, surprises, excites, delights. Then come back from the hills and tell the story. And that’s what you will find in the pages to follow: From 10 cars, we chose first four, then one, and that one is our Performance Car of the Year for 2018. Come along and be our guest. THE CONTENDERS Welcome to the fifth year of PCOTY. As in the past, competitors must be new or significantly revised for 2017, and they must be series-production cars that push the limits of performance and pleasure on both road and track. That means no crossovers and no track-only specials. In all cases, we request the purest possible expression of enthusiasm in any given platform, which is why we have the Civic Type R instead of the outstanding Civic Si. It’s also why the Camaro on hand wears dive planes to complete its two high-performance badges—ZL1 and 1LE. Although we invite every car that fits our criteria, some manufacturers are unable to meet our scheduling requirements, while others dislike the prospect of exposing their products to our unsupervised and unblinking evaluation. This year, we had 10 contenders answer the bell. The field was incredibly diverse, so we decided to start by giving each car a chance to compete directly with its closest neighbors, both in terms of intent and execution. Therefore, the contenders were divided into four brackets. The Lamborghini Huracán Performante, fortified with additional power from its naturally (and defiantly) aspirated V-10 to complement what is arguably the most innovative active-aero package in production-car history, faces off against the captivating and enigmatic new McLaren 720S for our Supercars crown. In the Grand Tourers category, Bentley’s W-12 Continental Supersports will play the bespoke beast to the Lexus LC 500’s cyberpunk aristocrat. Porsche already won PCOTY with the 991-generation GT3 in 2015, but the cognoscenti-pleasing new option of a six-speed manual transmission makes it a natural fit for Track Stars competition, where it will reprise its Ring rivalry with the brutish Mercedes-AMG GT R and Chevrolet’s Amtrak-like ZL1 1LE. But first up, we have the Wild Cards: The Type R will play the plucky underdog in a cage match with Audi’s wicked-quick TT RS and Alfa Romeo’s unashamedly operatic Giulia Quadrifoglio. After two days on the road and two days at NCM Motorsports Park, our jury of editors selected a winner for each category. A second round of voting chose the Performance Car of the Year from that final four. It’s not about raw lap times, and it’s not about racking up the high score on some kind of stat-sheet version of Space Invaders. The purpose of PCOTY is to find the car that advances the state of the performance art and sets a new standard for its peers. It could be a warp-speed two-ton hammer or a carbon-celled scalpel—but in the end, there can be only one. THE WILD CARDS Alfa Romeo Giulia Quadrifoglio | Audi TT RS | Honda Civic Type R This is an odd group. A Japanese hatchback. A German coupe. An Italian sport sedan. The only common thread is the rarity of the badging, how special each car seems. Honda’s giant red R was last sold in America 16 years ago, on the hyperfocused Acura Integra Type R. This country hasn’t had a new Alfa Romeo sport sedan since the 1990s, much less one with the legendary Quadrifoglio clover. Audi’s RS logo has a long and storied history, and most of that lineage never legally crossed the Atlantic. It used to be that, while the rest of the world got Rs and RSs and four-door Alfas, we just got lust across oceans. Now we have a twin-turbocharged, rear-drive, 505-hp Alfa sedan with an exhaust that knocks birds out of trees. A 306-hp turbo Civic with obscenely large seat bolsters and a mammoth wing. And a five-cylinder Audi that spits out 400 hp and traction whenever you need it. The Audi looks deeply German, reserved and serious, probably because it is. And the Alfa . . . well, it looks like an Alfa. Drive it through a city, and pedestrians literally fall off sidewalks angling for a look. (To the man who tripped into a rural-Tennessee crosswalk while gawping at the Giulia, as I made a left turn: I’m sorry I laughed. It was only because I once stumbled the same way, almost a year ago in Europe, the first time I saw the car.) Somewhere near the Cumberland River, off a road that winds and churns, I fell into a groove with the Audi. Even next to the Civic, it feels a little ordinary—like other TT variants, the RS uses VW’s MQB platform, which also underpins the Volkswagen Atlas and seventh-generation Golf. But the car cracks through switchbacks and whoops without so much as a flinch. The steering is crystal clear and quick enough that you don’t so much guide the car down the road as nudge it through landscape. The suspension offers what feels like yards of travel and remarkable wheel control—more compliance than anything here, save the McLaren—and the twin-clutch gearbox is absurdly quick, one of the best in the world. Mile after mile, the Audi produces little fatigue or work for the driver, just relentless pace. In this company, however, that’s not enough. The TT was the first of this trio to be knocked out, and no one was surprised. Partly because, while the RS is sports-car expensive, it still feels like the world’s best VW Golf. “It’s a smart choice,” editor-in-chief Kim Wolfkill said, “but not especially stirring.” Website director Travis Okulski agreed: “Love the sound from the five-cylinder, but something is missing.” On the track, the 3270-pound TT works well—the car is remarkably quick, with strong brakes and a willingness to swing the back axle in a corner. But you never stop thinking about the raw vibe of old Audis. How those cars oozed aggression, not cold competence. Contributing editor Chris Chilton summed it up. “For me, the best TTs are the cheapest: less grip, less weight, more fun. This is Porsche money, and at that price, it’s out of its depth.” If the RS keeps you at arm’s length, the Alfa grabs you in a bear hug. The cannon-fire exhaust, the styling—it’s as enchanting as the Audi is dry and distant. Surprisingly, though, as we got deep into the backwoods of Tennessee, the Giulia’s fan club shrank. The test started with everyone in love. As the miles racked up, those feelings turned to weary resignation. “No sedan tents your trousers like this,” Chilton noted, “but I was disappointed. The steering is too quick, too light, and has no feel—a nasty combo.” He’s right; the Giulia’s ferocious steering rack and hypersensitive throttle sponge up your attention. Even a sneeze can throw the car off-course or unsettle it in a corner. The Quadrifoglio has so much tire and torque, with excellent damping, and it works so well when you’re cracking the whip, you want to love it. But then you let your guard down for half a second and things get sloppy. You can get unintentionally sideways or make a massive lane departure on a switchback, because you had a hand slip on the wheel. Or you induce a head-jerking stop from the touchy brake-by-wire pedal, because you decided to adjust the radio at the wrong moment. I admire Alfa for cooking up its own dynamic flavor,” deputy editor David Zenlea said. “We didn’t need another BMW imitator.” But toward the end of the first road-test day, even he wasn’t jumping at the keys. Over hundreds of miles of back roads, the Giulia wears on you. The trade-off, admittedly, is an intoxicating track experience: Greasy slides are forever a toe flex away, and the Alfa rewards like few others. When you nail a corner or a drift, the car seems to loosen up and grow more charming, as if to pat you on the back. For better or worse, the sum experience recalls modern Ferraris. Fitting, given that the car’s development was led by an ex-Ferrari engineer. But also frustrating: That man’s previous project, the 458 Speciale, was an amazing car for the first 30 minutes and exhausting for every mile after—just like the Quadrifoglio. Shouldn’t a sport sedan work with you over distance? That leaves the Civic. A machine many of us did not truly understand, or even like that much, at first. The bodywork seems not so much styled as vomited into place. That 7000-rpm turbo four is neither a joyous revver nor particularly charming in normal driving. “It’s more of a buzz than sonorous,” senior editor Matthew de Paula said, “and I miss that high-rpm VTEC fury.” Deputy online editor Bob Sorokanich stepped out of the Civic after a short back-road blast for photography reminiscing about the Hondas of his youth. “It didn’t have that same talkative front end and razor-sharp throttle.” It’d be a lie to say that no one missed the old company vibe, the spirit of the Integra and the S2000. But good Lord, does the Type R hustle. And above all, it shares one thing with the cars of the old-school Big H: Calm and comfortable when you’re cruising, a firecracker when you lean into it. The taillights wag on trailed brake, and the Civic will launch over track curbs or road chuckholes with your foot to the floor, the helical limited-slip clawing away, the car not even remotely slowing down. Topping it all off, no Civic ever had a brake pedal this communicative or effective—the enormous Brembo calipers behind the front wheels virtually evaporate speed. Alone in this group, the Honda begs you to get angry. But it’s also a fully finished piece, capable and resolved at once. “Magic,” Wolfkill said, “and the handling is standout.” Okulski was shocked: “No torque steer. How?” You forgive the styling, that obnoxious wing, the gaudy interior. The Honda wants to be hammered on for days, and unlike with the Alfa or the Audi, you’re thrilled to comply. —Sam Smith GRAND TOURERS Bentley Continental Supersports | Lexus LC 500 These were the hardest cars to suss out at PCOTY. It’s easy to distill what we want from a McLaren (maniacal performance) or even a Civic Type R (maniacal performance, on a budget). But ask a bunch of car-magazine editors what makes the perfect performance grand tourer, and you’ll get a dozen conflicting answers. Congress has an easier time reaching consensus. It didn’t help that our contenders are as far apart as the Sierra Club and the Koch brothers. The Bentley: more than two and a half tons of opulence yanked along by 700 indefatigable horses. The result: otherworldly thrust. Slap the trucklike shifter into Sport and the W-12’s distant thrum moves one room closer as the mansion catapults, flattening your facial features. The big Brit outsprints nearly every other PCOTY competitor, from anywhere on its clock-dial tach. Snap your right foot back and the titanium exhaust pops and rattles extravagantly on deceleration, to help millionaires reminisce about badly tuned carburetors. The experience is old-world, in part because this is actually an old car. The new Supersports spec adds 118 horses and brake-based torque vectoring, but the Continental hasn’t received a significant update since 2011, and the platform traces back to the original Volkswagen Phaeton. The interior reaches back in time, too. The infotainment system is tragically outdated; tech options you get in a Chevy are absent in this $327,985 beast. That said, most of the Bentley’s cabin is timeless. Buttery leather and sumptuous Alcantara line most touchable surfaces. Real metal—polished or knurled, cool to the touch—adorns every dial and knob, with Bentley’s delightfully dainty organ-stop vent controls sprouting from the checkered carbon-fiber trim. Our example’s black, white, and red interior had all the subtlety of a soccer-team uniform—“to the manner born, but it was a bad manner,” contributor Jack Baruth quipped. But sinking into the top-stitched driver’s seat and summoning the volcanic W-12, your concern for others’ opinions vanishes. Conspicuously wealthy appointments, private-jet pace, a hushed but not silent engine always murmuring a tantalizing tale of torque. This is the Bentley approach to performance taken to extreme. Breezing down the highway, it’s a convincing approach. But on switchback country roads or the sinewy NCM circuit, the Bentley’s stately poise unravels. Effortless, unflappable ease boils over into a yard-long brake pedal, mushy steering, and speedboat body control. “Pure, unadulterated, unrelenting acceleration,” Wolfkill said of the Bentley, “in a car that isn’t quite sure what to do once you’ve achieved terminal velocity.” Chilton was more blunt. “On the road at quickish pace, it’s kind of enjoyable,” he admitted. “But I hated it on track. Might as well have been driving an Escalade.” Others found charm in the Bentley’s disdain for the eleventh tenth. “You feel important in the Continental,” Okulski said. Editors consistently felt something else in the Lexus: stunned. “Surprisingly light on its feet,” Wolfkill said of the Lexus. “It changes direction quickly and predictably—not what I was expecting.” Then there’s the noise. On our first morning of track testing, multiple editors scrambled to the pit wall to see which exotic was shouting Mustang rock ’n roll at the Kentucky sky. Imagine their befuddlement as they traced it back to the LC 500’s (decoy) chrome tailpipes. Physics explains a lot of the LC’s athleticism. The Lexus is nearly as long as the Continental but lighter by almost half a ton. Yet the differences between the two cars are even greater than the scales—or, for that matter, the $206,030 spread in base prices—indicate. In its default Normal mode, the LC 500 continues the tradition of unobtrusive, easy driving that has long been a Lexus hallmark. But dial up Sport S+ on the drive-mode knob (one of two sticking out of the gauge binnacle like Frankenstein’s neck bolts) and this quiet cruiser jolts to life. The cushy suspension firms up; the steering, always sharp and direct, quickens noticeably. The 10-speed transmission whip-cracks itself through a fistful of downshifts, keeping the naturally aspirated 5.0-liter V-8 within eyeshot of its 7300-rpm redline at all times. Some wondered if this frenetic alter ego fit the grand-touring vibe. “Do you want to have to rev a GT car to death to get that whoosh of forward momentum?” asked Okulski. Others argued a performance grand tourer should be able to find another metaphorical gear. “It’s about looking pretty, feeling comfortable—and being able to kick ass when occasion calls for it,” Zenlea said. Where the Bentley’s interior evokes old-English charm, the LC 500’s presents a stylish, daring vision of the near future. Someone likened the dashboard to midcentury-modern stereo equipment, a low, wide, horizontal motif flanked by dramatic sweeping curves. The infotainment system, meanwhile, looks newer than the Bentley’s but is somehow even more frustrating. Editors called the LC 500’s infuriating touchpad interface “janky,” “dreaded,” “a nightmare,” and “impossible to use.” Over two days of lapping at NCM, the GPS insisted we veer off track and cut a path to the nearest highway. Nobody could figure out how to deactivate it, so we drowned it out with V-8 music. Voting hour was contentious. Traditionalists raised their hands in favor of the Bentley’s stodgy charm. “It does everything in the proper Bentley way—big, luxurious cruising,” Baruth argued. “They finally made it feel British, special.” Yet the majority—just barely, with design director Matt Tierney pulled in as a tiebreaker—thought the Lexus offered the R&T definition of a GT: a stylish cruiser that can still clip an apex and be steered with the throttle. Consensus may be elusive, but through the messy democracy of PCOTY, the Lexus is the winning candidate.—Bob Sorokanich TRACK STARS Chevrolet Camaro ZL1 1LE | Mercedes-AMG GT R | Porsche 911 GT3 The first line in the 911 GT3’s Driver Logbook sums up the childlike excitement this group of cars engendered. “The engine at 9K! The engine at 9K! The engine at 9K!” Sports cars honed for track driving are like divers’ watches: They look pretty, cost plenty, and are massively overengineered for the use they’re going to get. Driving them on the street is mostly about the great feeling of having all that potential right at hand, being the big dog in any pack. Despite their stiff legs, serious-looking aero mods, and “is it street legal?” rubber, you could use any of these cars as a daily driver—with a few caveats. They’re carpeted, soundproofed, and air-conditioned. “Get in, and if you’ve driven any other Benz, you know how to operate the AMG GT R’s various controls,” Wolfkill said of the big, green monster. “The switchgear is familiar, the environment strangely comforting.” Even the Racing yellow 911, in spite of carbon-fiber bucket seats that defied adjustment, was a darling to drive through backwater towns, thanks in part to its panoramic views and perfectly weighted clutch pedal. The Camaro was no less accommodating. “I only ever drove it on dry, mostly smooth pavement, but this thing felt more sure-footed and comfortable than any track-day special has a right to,” Sorokanich said. These cars were practical in unforeseen ways, as well. Those massive rear wings that create such stability at speed made a sturdy map table when planning our next leg outside Bubba’s BBQ and Grill, in Grimsley, Tennessee. Point is, they might look like race cars—and in some cases they’re even faster than the race cars on which they’re loosely based—but they don’t demand special skills to be driven briskly. Still, there are compromises. Starting with ride quality on anything other than billet-smooth asphalt. The fat 305-section front boots that come with the ZL1’s 1LE package are so easily distracted that holding the steering wheel can feel like walking a pair of police sniffer dogs through a network of crack dens. At least the 1LE’s ride is a huge improvement over the last-generation Z/28’s. Meanwhile, the wide AMG GT R is twitchy, too, with its stiff damping and fast steering rack. To get the best out of it, you must constantly monitor your inputs. That’s also the mind-set you need when approaching the Porsche, with its screaming flat-six that proves both a blessing and a curse. When can you realistically rev it to redline on the street, when 9000 rpm in second gear is good for 83 mph? At least this GT3 is easier to tool around in than its predecessor, as the engine has been stroked, from 3.8 to 4.0 liters. There’s more torque down low, so you don’t have to rev to redline for scorching acceleration. The Porsche nevertheless feels slower than the Camaro and GT R, both of which pair honking V-8s with forced induction. Driving the GT3 on the street is ultimately about the melodrama: a high-rpm shriek that could shame an F1 car, and throttle response so sharp, it could snap you in two. “It just hits that car-enthusiast sweet spot,” de Paula noted. Of course, track cars are ultimately about the track. Back-of-an-SCCA-license-form calculations and familiarity with the 911 suggested the Porsche, the lightest car of the three, might keep the more powerful GT R honest at the NCM circuit, where the steering wheel is almost never straight. Wrong. The AMG was outrageously rapid, more than four seconds faster than the GT3. The GT R reminded us of the Viper ACR we had here two years ago in its rock-solid stability through NCM’s fast Turn 5, its outright grip on a sticky set of tires, and its composure under braking. At least those are the subjective impressions of where the AMG saved time. When we started dissecting the VBOX data, it turns out that the Mercedes was indeed faster in those spots—but also everywhere else. The GT R hit the highest speeds on the straights, braked later, and carried more speed through the turns. Getting out of those turns was made easy, thanks to that yellow, knurled traction-control dial on the console. With the nine-position knob set dead-center, one can stand on the GT R’s right pedal as soon as the corner opens up. For those chasing that last hundredth of a second—and there were a few at PCOTY—the GT R is the perfect tool. And that’s exactly what it feels like: a tool—a ruthless, brutally efficient device for systematically tearing apart lap times. But fastest doesn’t always equate to most fun. The slower 911’s signature handling, the way it demands you keep that light front end happy before turning your attention to the rear, offers more of a challenge. As does its manual transmission. The three-pedal setup is back by po[CENSORED]r demand after a four-year sabbatical. But over four days of testing, there were as many voices admitting they’d rather have a PDK as there were rhapsodizing about the interactive delights of the stick’s sublime action. “Shifting the manual gearbox interrupts the glorious revving for just a touch too long,” Wolfkill said. Editor-at-large Sam Smith, who’s driven both manual and PDK variants, pointed out another difference beyond the tactility of the manual shifter: packaging limitations mean stick-shift GT3s can’t be fitted with the PDK’s torque-vectoring differential. “Without that diff, you have to work harder to turn the car,” Smith said. “It feels more like a classic 911.” That kind of dynamic might be great for true 911 buffs, but it also might be one reason why, of this trio, the Camaro spent the least amount of time idling on pit lane. Everyone queued up to drive it, hammering the Brembo brakes that make light of the 3842-pound heavyweight, leaning on those colossal tires and throwing gears at the 650-hp V-8 via a shifter that’s lighter and slicker than expected, given what it’s bolted to. “You could remove every other gear in this car’s transmission and just drive everywhere in third, with no appreciable impact on fun,” Sorokanich said. The ZL1 just sucked it up, lap after lap, like the Labrador that keeps chasing a stick for as long as you’re willing to throw it. It’s one of those great cars that demand little from a driver but reward anyway. Those with less experience on the NCM track never felt intimidated, and those with bulging notebooks testifying to seat time in similar cars felt like they were really getting under its skin. And, of course, it is fast. The Camaro clocked a lap time of 1:32.15, beating the 911 by 24 hundredths. And did we mention the price? We try not to in this competition. But when a machine costs half as much as a 911 GT3 and is faster around a racetrack, while plastering a grin across the face of everyone who drives it, the fact that said car is such a bargain makes it even more noteworthy. All in, the GT R’s impressive lap time showcases what an incredible job AMG has done turning the so-so GT into a proper driver’s car, and the 911 is as nuanced as it ever was. But the egalitarian ZL1 1LE won us over. Underdog, you say? Überdog, is more like.—Chris Chilton SUPERCARS Lamborghini Huracán Performante | McLaren 720S Two supercars, each alike in dignity—except that is far from the case. Not quite chalk and cheese, what we have here is swagger and sleek. First, the Huracán, running foot to the floor through fourth gear in Strada (street) mode, surprising the wildlife on the far side of the tarmac, appearing from nowhere with shark-shaped, nose-down, wings-and-spoilers greenburst. Only when it’s almost gone do you hear the 8500-rpm roar blasting from heat-blued pipes in the Kamm-cut, Reventón-style tail section. All green up front, all black in back, with aero add-ons ahead, around, and behind, crafted from this improbable-looking, milky-textured carbon composite that also pervades the interior. There are moments when you catch the car in repose, perhaps trailing it on the freeway during the transit sections that connect our back-road runs, and from the rear three-quarter angle, it fairly screams: “Jalpa!” Something about the combination of the big, blind sail panels and set-in doors. It’s the junior Lamborghini, and you can trace its heritage back 40 years. But don’t be fooled. The rest of the car is Essence of Diablo, refined and concentrated and bottled neatly in the unashamed retro wedge shape and the naked aggression of the Performante upgrades. The competition has all eaten of the forced-induction apple, but Lamborghini remains serenely in paradise with its 5.2-liter naturally aspirated V-10, now pushing 630 hp through an all-wheel-drive system that makes less use of the front axle than the rear. The power is omnipresent, undeniable, seamless. Flick the column-mounted paddles down once or twice and objects in the trapezoidal flat windshield are suddenly closer than they appeared. “Feels like sitting inside Bertone’s doorstop,” said road test editor Kyle Kinard, and he’s right. No matter where we went, the Performante was the unchallenged star of the show. The McLaren 720S might have those fabulous dihedral doors, but to the man on the street who doesn't know what it is, the car still has that faint fiberglass whiff of kit car to it, as if there just might be an old Volks-wagen Beetle lurking under there somewhere. By contrast, the Huracán has unchallenged provenance, an aristocracy of sorts where the family portraits aren’t oil paintings in the main hall, but rather glossy posters on the wall of every teenaged boy’s room since 1979. It traces its lineage directly back to the Miura and requires no explanation whatsoever. Okulski was moved to superlatives. “The first ‘complete’ car Lamborghini has ever built. There isn’t a glaring flaw, it’s just brilliant and special through and through. The best Huracán—and best Lamborghini—ever.” That word, “complete,” came up again and again in the discussions that peppered our driver changes. You can let it idle for half an hour in a parking lot on a 95-degree day and it won’t complain. The Huracán’s Gallardo predecessor claimed to be an “everyday supercar,” but some of us felt that Lamborghini went light on the “supercar” part in order to make the “everyday” side work. No such compromise here. Up gnarled hillside roads, the Performante could reel in the others at will. It might not have the most power in our group, but it delivers immediately, sans turbo lag or a time-consuming shift. You sit right up front, just three feet from the wheels that steer, and it sometimes feels like you can see around the turn. Without peer in the realm of conventional supercars, the Performante should be a lock for the win here. There’s just one problem: The McLaren 720S is utterly unconventional. You can feel it the moment you settle into the embrace of the close-coupled seats, which sit 15 inches inboard of the door skins and leave just enough room for the Lord between them. The Huracán might as well be an F-150 by comparison; it comes from the old school, where Countach owners expected to be separated from their passenger by a foot’s worth of lightly wrinkled leather paneling. The 720S has controls scattered hither and yon, tucked into such furrows and recesses as McLaren could carve out of the cockpit. There’s a bit of style that was lacking in the previous-generation 650S, yet the cabin’s main attraction is its minimalism, which makes it seem roomier and ultimately more comfortable. “I especially appreciate the amount of light it lets in,” said Wolfkill. “So different from the typically cramped and dark supercar cabin.” This is a machine with performance to raise the dead. It takes a bit of poking and prodding to activate the secondary settings for engine response, active aero, and suspension control, but no matter which way you shuffle that deck, you will be humbled by the power on hand. The McLaren leaps to 150 mph from a crawl. In lower gears, you might not be able to click the wheel-mounted paddle on the right quickly enough to keep up with the manic 4.0-liter V-8 as it turbo-whistles across the tach. On the boil, nothing short of a Kawasaki ZX-10RR has a prayer of keeping up with the McLaren. Maybe the hybrid hypercars, if their batteries were full. And when the first curve comes, you dial in the perfect amount of steering as if you’ve studied the car your whole life, and that’s when nothing can touch it. A 710-hp, rear-drive supercar could be forgiven for being difficult. This one isn't. The 720S will educate you, teach you what it needs with subtle touches of feedback in the steering and brake pedal. The car feels so natural, just like an old Formula Ford that happens to have acquired a commercial jetliner engine. “It’s an obviously digital thing, but it feels analog. And it succeeds masterfully. This is the future of sports cars and supercars,” Okulski noted. If the Lamborghini is pure theater, the McLaren is pure purpose. The 650S and sublime 675LT were a little light on rear visibility, so now the 720S has see-through rear roof pillars. The headlights are strong enough to expunge the mystery from a triple-digit nighttime blast. Finally, there’s the ride, which is a magic carpet courtesy of the second-generation hydraulic suspension. The Lamborghini can rattle your teeth on rough pavement; the 720S won’t even spill your soda. Sorokanich spoke for the group when he called the McLaren “the friendliest, least intimidating supercar I’ve ever experienced.” This pussycat is more than what’s new in supercars; it is also what’s best, what’s fastest, what’s most capable. As such, the 720S was the easy winner of our vote, with only your humble author and a few other Countach-poster holdouts in sullen dissent. Wolfkill doubled down: “If the Huracán represents the ultimate evolution of the old-school supercar, then the McLaren is the embodiment of the new-school approach.”—Jack Baruth THE FINALISTS And then there were four—the Chevrolet Camaro ZL1 1LE, Honda Civic Type R, Lexus LC 500, and McLaren 720S. You’d be hard-pressed to choose a broader-spectrum anti-biotic for creeping automotive disinterest, yet at the core, each of these cars expresses a similarly uncompromising approach to performance-focused engineering. They’re loaded with things that you only notice after long examination: the heavy-duty steering knuckles on the Civic, the combination knob/switch used by the Lexus to adjust the shocks and relax the stability control, the knee bolstering on the Camaro’s center console, the way the TFT dashboard on the McLaren Fosbury-flops out of the way for unimpeded vision on a racetrack. You can have opinions about the Civic’s aero package or the McLaren’s socketed headlamps, but you can’t say that our final four don’t bring their A game in nearly every aspect that matters to a driver. In years past, the PCOTY voting process has taken as long as four hours, often laced with impassioned speeches, tense disagreements, and uncomfortable bouts of soul-searching. Not this time. A single round of discussion and voting took a fraction of that. Our eight editors each assigned a ranking to the finalists. The rankings were added and averaged to provide the final results. Only two cars received first-place votes, and the mathematical distance between each place turned out to be unequivocal. In fourth position we have the Lexus LC 500. “Never felt wallowy, oversized, or heavy, either on street or track,” noted Sorokanich. This unabashedly design-centric exercise in prestige-coupe production should have been out of its league among the hard-edged, apex-focused competition. The fact that it held its own on track and in fast driving, bellowing a Talladega battle cry through its ornamental exhaust and cranking into every corner with a Supra’s worth of tail-out attitude was more than enough to earn our admiration. Yet this is a platform that fairly cries out for the full F-for-Fuji treatment. If the powers that be at Lexus think the brand can stretch to accommodate a fiercer and faster variant of the LC, we’d be delighted to give it another shot at the title. The third spot goes to the Civic Type R. Let’s get the low points out of the way in a hurry: The engine rarely feels fast and never comes across as particularly furious, the steering can seem inert, and the visual package is, shall we say, controversial. Chilton was properly cutting: “Even if it was quicker than the AMG, I couldn’t forgive those fake bumper grilles.” None of those problems will stop the Type R from sporting additional-dealer-markup stickers for some time to come, however, because this is a Honda truly worthy of the coveted red badge. In a market segment where some competitors are gelded by crossover-grade all-wheel drive and a ’77 Cutlass Supreme’s worth of curb weight, the Civic shines despite, and by virtue of, its fealty to the original hot-hatch template. “It possesses the unique ability to be driven like a front-wheel-drive car when it’s convenient—back it into turns under trail braking to get it rotated—without suffering from typical front-drive hang-ups under acceleration,” said Wolfkill. And the almost cosplay-like dedication to Nineties Ginza chic, while not everyone’s taste, will create a lot of fanatics and inspire plenty of tattoos. Most important, it’s a reminder that Honda still cares about its enthusiast owners. Two editors cast first-place votes for the Camaro ZL1 1LE, and no wonder. The big-box Chevrolet seems to vibrate from the tires up with a sort of manic pixie dream pony-car joyfulness. “Still big and heavy, but that makes it all the more impressive,” Okulski said. “The only limiting factor on track time is the amount of fuel in the tank—it could run for days straight.” If the C7 Corvette Z06 is a very good car, and the previous-generation Camaro Z/28 was a flat-out great car, then this combination is somehow even better than the sum of its impressive parts. Capable of running with $200,000 supercars, yet easily serviceable at your local GM dealer, the ZL1 1LE is a stunning statement of intent and an example of what America’s biggest car company can do when it lets engineers turn their dreams into reality. God bless it for existing. 2018 Performance Car of The Year: McLaren 720S Those of us who have been fortunate enough to drive McLaren’s exemplary 650S and utterly indomitable 675LT approached the McLaren 720S with no small amount of trepidation. There didn’t seem to be anything that needed fixing in the previous generation of the Super Series cars, particularly with regard to the longtail variant. In one respect, we were right to be worried. The 720S makes no pretensions to the rough-hewn rattle-and-clank Le Mans–series histrionics of the 675LT, and it can’t quite match that car’s concert-master touch on a road course. Not to worry. There is surely an uninsulated track-oriented variant on the way. In the meantime, the new McLaren effortlessly earns the PCOTY laurels by performing the near-impossible: It rides better than the Bentley, outhandles the aero-intensive Huracán, and leaves the snorting Camaro dead to rights in a drag race, all while making its driver feel like the most special person in the world. You could own this car for a lifetime and never grow tired of the pur sang manner in which it conquers everything from a 200-mph blitz to the commuting crawl. No street car in history has offered a better driving position, a more immediate command of the road, or a better integration of usability and capability. And, not for nothing, it’s improved in every possible respect from the 650S, which was already one of the world’s most competent supercars. In this fearsomely strong field of 10 brilliant automobiles, only this one truly advances the state of the art. The fact that it does so in the exospheric environment of the super-cum-hypercar only serves to underline the degree of difficulty involved. Inhumanly sleek, monstrously quick, reassuringly approachable, the McLaren 720S is our 2018 Performance Car of the Year.