2020: The Year in Car and Driver Magazine Covers

The holy trinity of modern muscle cars—the Chevrolet Camaro ZL1 1LE, the Dodge Challenger SRT Hellcat Redeye, and the Ford Mustang Shelby GT500—fronted our March issue for a comparison test that involved exercising their combined 2207 horsepower at the test track, on a race track, in California canyons, and for this smokey cover shot.

The cover turned incandescent for our Tesla Model S versus Porsche Taycan Turbo S comparison test. We pitted the electric sports sedans against each other in head-to-head tests of performance, real-world highway range, and fast-charging speed, then honed our impressions in California's Angeles National Forest.

With the mid-engine Corvette finally on sale, what's the next big thing? A more powerful mid-engine Corvette, obviously. A speculative rendering of the Corvette Z06 carried the cover for our 25 Cars Worth Waiting For feature, which also included scoops on the Nissan 400Z, the GMC Hummer EV, and the rear-wheel-drive Mazda 6.

The Porsche 718 Cayman is one of the purest driving experiences you can buy today. And that was before Porsche's GT team got their hands on the current car. For our Porsche 718 Cayman GT4 road test, staff photographer Marc Urbano pointed his camera at the business end of the mid-engine sports car, where a soul-stirring, 8100-rpm flat-six resides.

You can imagine the amount of debate that went into compiling Car and Driver's Greatest of All Time list. Fortunately, it was much easier reaching a consensus on the cover for our G.O.A.T. issue. Inspired by the iconic Ferrari emblem, we commissioned our own symbol of greatness, a chrome-plated prancing goat.

The Volkswagen Golf GTI is a perennial enthusiast favorite. It's cheap, it's practical, and it's a hell of a lot of fun. In other words, it's idyllic, much like the German countryside where we shot the eighth-generation GTI. We didn't get to drive during this first close encounter with the new GTI, but we still came away plenty excited.

Porsche's iconic 911 has been drifting away from sports car purity and toward grand touring refinement for years. When Chevrolet rebooted the Corvette and moved the engine to the middle, it sealed our decision to pit America's sports car against Porsche's mid-engine hero. The new sports-car rivalry is Corvette versus Cayman.

Our annual New Cars, Trucks, and SUVs issue covers every vehicle on sale for the coming year—more than 300 models. One new arrival had clearly captured more of America's attention than all the others combined, though. We shot the Ford Bronco shining bright in Cyber Orange paint surrounded by a sea of vehicles living in its shadow.

The typical road test wasn't going to cut it for the new Land Rover Defender. To prove it was worthy of the storied nameplate, this luxe SUV needed a proper off-road test. So we took it to Drummond Island in Michigan's Upper Peninsula and drove farther and farther off-road until we were swimming.

Something possessed us during the creation of Volume 66, Issue Number 6. Maybe it was the wicked 591-hp Audi RS6 Avant. Maybe it was the Hellcat-powered Ram 1500 TRX that defeated a Ford F-150 Raptor in a comparison test. Or maybe it was the fact that our hometown of Ann Arbor, Michigan, had recently decriminalized psychedelics.