Money Shift

28/09/2026

Subaru just revealed anniversary editions of the WRX and BRZ at Boxerfest, and the names are the best part of the whole thing.

The WRX is called the GD25. GD was the chassis code of the first US-market WRX that arrived in 2002, the one everyone calls the Bugeye. Twenty-five years of the WRX being sold here. The BRZ is the ZC15, after the ZC chassis of the first-generation car from 2012. Fifteen years.

The WRX gets World Rally Blue paint, gold 19-inch wheels, gold Brembo calipers, stiffer springs with revised damping, a strut tower brace, Recaro seats with Ultrasuede and red stitching, and an STI short shifter. The standout is the rear wing: dry carbon fiber, swan neck design, from Subaru Tecnica International, and it's the same component that runs on Travis Pastrana's ARA championship rally car. 350 units, arriving summer 2027.

The BRZ gets Ceramic White over matte bronze wheels, a callback to the 2020 BRZ tS, with red Brembo calipers, bronze side sill decals, black leather with Bordeaux red inserts, and a numbered ZC15 plaque by the shifter. 300 units, arriving early 2027. Both cars are manual only.

Here's my honest take though. Both make exactly the same power as the cars they're based on. 271 for the WRX, 228 for the BRZ.

Remember the S209? Widened bespoke bodywork, a bigger turbo, more power, 209 cars, built specifically for the US market. And yes, I know it sat on dealer lots and didn't sell well in period. But that's the kind of car a 25th anniversary of the WRX deserves. Something engineered for the occasion rather than wheels, paint and a wing on the car they already sell.

I'll still take it. I just wanted the other one.

No pricing announced yet.

What would you have done for the 25th?

28/09/2026

A car company just made a car $2,000 cheaper AND gave it 28 more horsepower. At the same time. Am I in the right timeline?

It's Subaru, and it's the 2027 Impreza.

It starts at $25,840 with destination, which Subaru says makes it the most affordable all-wheel-drive compact vehicle on sale in America. For context, the average new car right now is pushing $50,000. This is roughly half.

And they didn't do it by gutting the car. The old base model was a 2.0-liter making 152 horsepower. Now every Impreza gets the 2.5-liter making 180 horsepower and 178 lb-ft, with Symmetrical All-Wheel Drive standard.

Yes, it's a CVT. I know. I'd want a manual too, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. But look at what you actually get for 25 grand: all-wheel drive, 180 horsepower, and 56 cubic feet of cargo space with the seats folded.

You still get adaptive cruise control, the full EyeSight safety suite, and Apple CarPlay. You live with 17-inch wheels instead of 18s, which honestly means more sidewall and probably a better ride anyway, and dual 7-inch screens instead of the bigger one.

And this is the second time this year Subaru has done the right thing. The base WRX came back for the same reason.

Cheaper cars, and the fun ones getting more fun. Give them credit.

Would you take this over a Civic or a Corolla?

27/09/2026

Are you awake yet? Genesis is still cooking.

These are the X Gran Coupe and the X Gran Convertible, both derivatives of the G90, and Genesis has just had US design patents granted on both of them. The convertible came through on August 4th, the coupe on August 25th, both originally filed last July with Korean priority going back to March.

Now the honest caveat, because it matters. A design patent is not a production announcement. Automakers patent concept car designs all the time, and Genesis still describes both of these as concepts. So temper the excitement accordingly.

But look at them.

This is what the BMW 8 Series should have grown into. This is what the S-Class Coupe should have been the whole time. And both of those cars are dead now. Mercedes killed theirs. BMW wound theirs down.

So the big two-door grand touring segment is sitting basically empty, and the only company still poking at it is the one that's been around for ten years. Genesis has shown us coupes, convertibles and wagons we can't buy, and it keeps saying it wants to build them.

Carscoops saw the convertible in person and said photographs don't communicate its presence, and that parked next to a Continental GT or a Lexus LC it doesn't shrink at all. They also noted the example they saw had about every inch of orange upholstery available west of the Mississippi.

If you're still carrying Hyundai bias in 2026, I don't know what to tell you.

Would you buy one?

26/09/2026

I'm going to say something about the new Bentley Torcal that's going to upset people.

It looks Chinese. And I mean that as a genuine compliment.

Look at the face. Illuminated diamond grille, split headlights, razor thin daytime running lights, a hard square jaw. That's the design language coming out of China right now, and for about three years it's been the most interesting design language on earth. Bold, confident, unafraid of being noticed.

Meanwhile most western EVs look like a bar of soap with a light bar glued to the front.

Now the mechanical side, and the important part first: this is built on the Porsche Cayenne Electric. Same platform, same 119 inch wheelbase, same 800 volt architecture, same active suspension.

810 horsepower in the standard car, 876 in the S. 2.8 seconds to 60. Charging goes from 10 to 80 percent in about 16 minutes on a capable enough DC charger.

And here's the part I respect most. Bentley says they could have made it quicker and deliberately chose not to. Their engineers decided that past this point, the acceleration just becomes uncomfortable for most customers. For context, the Cayenne Turbo Electric on that same platform makes 1,139 horsepower and does 2.4 seconds. Bentley looked at its own platform mate and said no thanks.

There's also no passenger screen, because as Bentley put it, technology has to add value rather than dominate the experience. Good call.

US pricing lands under $230,000, arriving early next year.

Where do you land on the design?

25/09/2026

People got mad at Chevrolet for building the Silverado ZR2 instead of a Raptor fighter. After a week with it, I think that complaint is aimed at the wrong truck.

The pickup world has three lanes now. The Raptor, TRX and RHO are wide, fast desert trucks built to Baja the dunes. The Lobo and Rumble Bee are sport trucks built for pavement. And in between sits the class most people actually need, trucks meant to crawl over rough terrain, get to the campsite, and still have some fun on the road. That's the Ram Rebel, F-150 Tremor, Sierra AT4 and this ZR2.

Judge it there and the story flips completely. The ZR2 has the most extensive bodywork in the group and the biggest engine by almost half a liter.

Mine had the 6.2 V8, which is a $1,695 option over the standard Duramax diesel. 420 horsepower. Spend the extra $500 on the active exhaust too. You can't toggle it with a button like a Corvette, you have to put it in sport mode, but it remembers sport mode overnight, which makes for an absolutely ludicrous cold start the next morning.

I drove this weeks after the F-150 Tremor, so the comparison is fresh. Chevy wins on engine, steering feel, bodywork and dash layout. Ford wins on transmission tuning and it offers BlueCruise.

The interior is where GM quietly beats everybody. The screen is built into the dash instead of sitting on top of it, and there are real buttons and k***s for nearly everything, right down to head-up display brightness and position. No menu hunting.

The back seat is enormous, the Britax Poplar S fit without drama, and the rock sliders double as a step for loading a toddler in.

Two honest knocks. There's no Super Cruise at $71,800 while GM puts it in a $35,000 Bolt. And something about it felt faintly fragile in daily driving, like it might act up.

MoneyShift Rating: 8.0 / 10

My son named it "the biggggg red truck" and that has entered the household vocabulary permanently.

25/09/2026

My thoughts on the Silverado ZR2 are live!

The Chevrolet Silverado ZR2 is a 420 hp, 6.2-liter V8 off-road pickup riding on Multimatic DSSV dampers, front and rear locking differentials, and a $500 active exhaust that turns cold starts into events. Mine was red, it arrived weeks after the F-150 Tremor, and it walked into a controversy: people...

25/09/2026

38,000 pounds of gooseneck towing. 1,230 lb-ft of torque. Who is actually pulling this much?

GM just announced an all-new 8.3 liter Duramax turbodiesel V8 for the 2027 Silverado HD and Sierra HD. 555 horsepower, clean sheet design rather than a stretched version of anything, with a compacted graphite iron block, forged crank, forged rods and forged steel pistons. It replaces a 6.6 that made 470 hp and 975 lb-ft, so that's 85 more horsepower and 255 more torque.

They named it Mongoose, because Ford's diesel is called Scorpion and mongooses eat scorpions. That's the whole joke, and honestly I respect it.

And it is incredible engineering. I'm not pretending otherwise.

But run the thought experiment with me. Take a heavy duty truck from 2003. It towed plenty. People built houses with those trucks. Now imagine the last twenty years of engineering had gone into efficiency instead of chasing numbers. Same capability, less fuel, less size, less weight. Where would we be right now?

Or look the other direction entirely. A kei truck is about 11 feet long, makes 63 horsepower, and has a bed roughly the same length as the short bed on a crew cab half ton. Farmers in Japan do real work with those every single day. Obviously they can't tow a fifth wheel, and I'm not claiming they can. But it puts the question in focus.

Instead we got hoods you can't see over, trucks taking up a full lane and change, sitting in the left lane next to cars that genuinely cannot safely exist there.

The capability was already there. We just kept adding.

At what point does a pickup stop being a pickup and start being a semi?

25/09/2026

I've been rejecting the RAV4 for a long time. Not because I thought it was bad, but because I like driving things that aren't the norm, and the RAV4 is the norm. This was my first real week with one, and I was wrong.

The 2026 Woodland plug-in hybrid makes 324 horsepower and is rated at 49 miles of electric range. I routinely beat that. The only reason I used gas during my week was to deliberately push past the window and see how it behaved. It also DC fast charges, 10 to 80 percent in about 30 minutes, which almost no plug-in hybrid offers.

The Woodland kit is subtle in a good way. 18-inch wheels on all-terrains with a big sidewall, integrated Rigid Industries fog lights, black roof rails. And those tires pay off twice, because the ride is excellent.

But the real story is packaging. The new flat roofline gives you genuine headroom in back. The door opening is massive, which is the whole game when you're loading a toddler. At 6 feet tall I could sit in front of the installed car seat with room left over. And the trunk took a full-size UPPAbaby Cruz with space for shopping and a diaper bag on top of it.

Here's the part I'd actually tell a friend though. My tester was $46,895. The regular hybrid Woodland starts at $39,900 and returns 41 city and 35 highway. That's nearly $8,000 saved, and it takes a lot of gas to claw that back. If you work from home and keep cars a long time, the plug-in makes real sense. If you don't, take the hybrid.

Either way, the norm earned it. I finally get it.

Full review with the complete scorecard on moneyshiftcars.com, link in the comments.

Which one would you take?

22/09/2026

I've been avoiding REO on purpose.

When a startup announces a cheap truck and has nothing to show but a promise, giving it airtime mostly helps the hype machine. We've all watched "it's coming, trust me" play out before. So I waited until something real happened.

This week, something real happened. REO hired Frank Stephenson.

If the name doesn't ring a bell, his work will. He designed or led the design of the modern Mini, the first BMW X5, the Fiat 500, the Ferrari F430, the Maserati MC12 and the McLaren P1. Supercars, yes, but also small, affordable cars that sold in enormous numbers. That second part is the reason this hire matters.

Here's what REO says it's building. Three models under the Runabout name: two pickups and an SUV, all sharing one body-on-frame platform with four-wheel drive. Power comes from a simple gas four-cylinder, with no hybrid system and not even direct injection, and REO claims the powertrain is engineered for 500,000 miles.

The whole thing is designed around right to repair. Physical switches, analog gauges, and body panels REO says can be removed in under five minutes with common tools.

Pricing is expected to run $21,500 to $28,500, and the company says it already has over 32,000 paid reservations.

The catch: all we've actually seen is a teaser of four round taillights. A digital reveal is planned for later this year, with a physical truck in 2027.

I'm still skeptical. Just a little less than I was last week.

Would you put a deposit down?

22/09/2026

The 2027 Chevy Silverado can go over 900 miles on a single tank.

That's the 3.0 liter Duramax inline six, which is now the only diesel engine left in a half ton pickup. Same 305 horsepower and 495 lb-ft as before. What changed is the fuel tank, which grows to 34 gallons on the 2027 Silverado and GMC Sierra.

GM estimates a two-wheel-drive truck with the Duramax can hit 27 mpg on the highway, and owners regularly report around 30 in the real world. Run the math on 34 gallons and you're past 900 miles.

For comparison, a Silverado EV with the max-range battery is rated at up to 493 miles.

To be fair about it, the truck didn't get more efficient. It got a bigger tank. Full, that's roughly 241 pounds of diesel riding along with you. And the Ram EcoDiesel already did 1,000 miles on a 33 gallon tank, so this is a return more than a first.

I still love it. 900 miles is Boston to Charlotte without stopping for fuel. You'll need to stop. The truck won't.

GM also updated the pistons, turbo vanes and NOx sensor, along with revised DEF level indicators.

Would you take the diesel over the V8?