Yahoo Autos Explore the State That Made Our 2020 a Little Better
In 2008, Michigan launched a campaign to celebrate its many natural wonders (and promote tourism). The hook: Pure Michigan. "Two Peninsulas, One Pure Michigan." That kind of stuff. You can get T-shirts and masks. The branding was slapped on freeway signs and bottles of water and other products. Tim Allen narrated the ads.
The state cut funding to the program during the great budget fights of 2019, but natural wonders don't quickly fade away, even if money does. And so, when 2020 went south and we were forced to stay close to home, we put Michigan to work. Michigan didn't disappoint.
We photographed the Ford Bronco at an ORV park internet snoops believed was a testing facility in the Arizona desert. We tried to sink a Land Rover Defender in Lake Huron. We cruised sand dunes and shorelines. We filled a vending machine–not necessarily all that natural a wonder, but a good setting–with the 10Best cars and trucks of 2021. Here's how we illustrated a year of uncertainty, using every trick in the book.
Beaver Island sits 32 miles off the coast of Charlevoix, Michigan, and is only accessible via plane or two-hour ferry ride across Michigan's second-largest Great Lake, Lake Michigan. Perhaps the most curious part of the island's history is the story of a self-declared Mormon king in the mid-1800s. James Strang arrived in 1848, and he and his followers built roads and founded the town of Saint James. The good times didn't last, however, and he was assassinated in 1856.
Anyhow, we also landed on Beaver Island, though only for a weekend. We brought along Audi's A6 Allroad. Beaver Island has about 100 miles of road, with awesome coastal dirt paths that parallel the sunrise or sunset. It was a good place to test the car's Allroad driving mode, which raises the body more than an inch over its normal ride height. We made it back home without a scratch.
The first step to finding the best location is finding the best lunch spot. For the Polestar 2, we needed a place that could fill our bellies and batteries. Leaving our headquarters in Ann Arbor with 100 percent charge meant the Polestar potentially had 190 miles of range, but we needed a good portion of that to get to our destination first. After hustling the 408-hp Polestar 2 roughly 65 miles to East Lansing and Michigan State University, we were left with only 51 percent of battery. Our pace on the highway ate up more range than we expected. Lucky for us, there's a killer ramen place not far from a ChargePoint charging station on MSU's campus. Take-out only? No problem.
After lunch, we shot photos under one of MSU's solar array carports. They've covered five of their largest commuter lots with solar panels, and are designed to generate 15 million kilowatt-hours of electricity annually. Although the Polestar 2 doesn't wow with its range, it's still fun to drive and looks stylish. We found its Android Automotive operating system for the infotainment intuitive, and the rest of the interior to be gorgeous by design. Hey Google, where's a good place for second-lunch?
A voice from the car next to us asked, “So, how do yah like that Jeep truck, eh?” Spoken like a true Yooper, which the Upper Peninsula's residents are known as. We traveled 440 miles from our office to Marquette as the fall colors exploded in early October. We were in a rush to accumulate miles on our long-term vehicles. What better way to explore the historic mining town than with our new Jeep Gladiator Mojave arrival?
We stuffed the Gladiator's five-foot bed with camping gear and empty growlers to cash in on both the most beautiful part of Michigan and its wealth of local breweries. It doesn't take long to climb scenic overlooks like Sugarloaf Mountain and Mount Marquette to find spectacular views of Lake Superior. During our secluded camping adventure we used ORV trails to test the strength and feel of the Mojave's Fox internal-bypass dampers and secondary hydraulic front jounce dampers. The added 1.0 inch of suspension lift and special dampening meant even the wilder portions of the trail never concerned us, even after crawling over a fallen paper birch tree on trails near County Road 550.
When we needed that shimmer only a city could give us, we turned to the deepest concrete jungle relative to our office—the Motor City. Once home to a 2.5-mile Formula 1 street circuit, the streets of Detroit are just as bumpy and tumultuous as they've ever been. Today, IMSA and IndyCar race on Belle Isle between downtown and the U.S.-Canada border. The Woodward Dream Cruise lives on as a smoky parade of car enthusiasts young and old.
We brought our own street fight to Detroit during our Ford Mustang and Toyota Supra comparison test. A turbo four-cylinder showdown between two cars that represent an almost extinct segment in America: real-wheel-drive performance cars. In an old-school stoplight launch, the Supra beats the Mustang to a quarter-mile by five-tenths of a second despite having 75 less horsepower. Sometimes bigger isn't better.
We didn't mind spending a few hours driving to Muskegon along Lake Michigan to photograph Porsche's hottest Boxster. The wind on these beaches gets strong enough that people living along Beach Street shovel sand instead of cut grass. It's common to see yard signs that read "free sand" after big storms. In 2017, a weather station near the beach recorded 88-mph gusts before its gauge stopped working. It's no Long Beach, California, but it's a lot closer to the office and there are 100 percent fewer sharks.
When we tested the Porsche 718 Boxster GTS 4.0, everyone raved about how much fun it was to drive. It's no surprise a 394-hp flat-six that revs to 7800 rpm would generate such joy.
