Dom Testa

The first Lexus ES burst onto the market 30 years ago, a smaller luxury sedan that was originally built on the platform of a Toyota Camry. In fact, Lexus created the ES only because dealers didn’t want to be limited to just one model (at that time the LS). So they put together what some […]

The venerable Honda Civic will be celebrating its 50th birthday in just a couple of years. It burst upon the world as a two-door subcompact car, and over the years has gradually grown in size. It walks the tightrope now between compact and mid-size (with the couple in the former category). Through its evolution, however, […]

For a small SUV that’s only been around for two years, the Kona sure has piled up the awards and the love. That includes the North American Utility Vehicle of the Year, an award bestowed by automotive journalists. And this is for a vehicle that can be yours for well under $30k. For years I’ve […]

In the late 1950s, Fiat introduced a car known as the Cinquecento, which is only one of the coolest car names ever. Eventually the Cinquecento came to be known as the 500 — which is nowhere near as cool. By the mid-70s the car was discontinued, and that could’ve been the end of it. But […]

About ten years ago the folks at Range Rover decided to tweak one of their concept cars and see if it could work as a smaller SUV in the luxury segment. It launched in 2011 and, for the most part, has sold pretty well for its parent company, Tata. The idea is that you’d get […]

First things first. Other than being absolutely dazzled by the low, sleek, but fierce exterior of theM850i, something crazy happened the moment I slipped behind the wheel. I was mesmerized, for the first time in my 20-plus years of reviewing cars, by a gear shifter. Yes, the shifter. In this case, I immediately said to […]

I need to understand this weird disconnect between minivan reputations and how we actually feel when we drive them. Something doesn’t line up. If that confuses you, it probably means you haven’t driven one. So, as Inigo Montoya said in The Princess Bride, lemme sum up. For years minivans have been the vehicles we love […]

Whether we want to admit it or not, we are triggered by names. If they have any perceived negatives, we often find sneaky aways around using them. That means coming up with catchy names that camouflage the original word. Here’s what I’m getting at: Audi must’ve realized that Americans have a bit of a negative […]

Relationship experts like to say it’s all about compromise — while other, more snarky folks point out that compromise simply means both sides are unhappy. So I feel for the design crew at BMW when they sat down to pencil the rough plans for the second generation of the X4. The original models debuted in […]

Try as I might, I couldn’t stop my brain from defaulting to one particular thought during the week I drove this SUV: It’s a luxury vehicle built to perform near the top of the class in off-road conditions, to the point that it even has a device that measures the depth of the water you’re […]