There's a new minivan on the block. It's the 2021 Toyota Sienna, and the van is totally new from the ground up. Toyota hasn't given us a fresh new Sienna since the current-generation hit the roads for the 2011 model year, so this one is a long time coming. The big news here is the single hybrid powertrain choice Toyota is introducing to the new Sienna. There will be no gas-only option, and there will be no PHEV "Prime" option either.

We'll get into powertrain specifics in a second, but the Sienna's new design inside and out is another huge change. Toyota describes it as a minivan with SUV styling characteristics. One look at RAV4 sales is all you need to know why Toyota wanted to make the Sienna remind people of SUVs. Still, the traditional minivan shape is still very much intact with the short hood and long boxed-off body. The muscular flair and lines arcing down the side, though … that sculpting gives this minivan a much more crossover-like look and an air of aggression not seen in the minivan market today. As we bend around to the back, those taillights catch our eye immediately. The way the bottom black trim piece droops sharply downward, it reminds us of the Atlanta Falcons logo. That rear hatch is full of curves and things that pop out at you, too. The little tail that juts out above the "Sienna" logo even reminds us of the Supra's tail. Bravo, Toyota.

TOKYO — Subaru on Monday posted a 15.7% rise in annual operating profit in the fiscal year that ended in March as it recovered from a raft of product recalls last year, but warned that sales of its cars would take a hit from the coronavirus outbreak.

Profit rose to 210.3 billion yen ($1.96 billion) for the year just ended, from 181.7 billion yen a year earlier under international financial reporting standards. It exceeded a consensus estimate of 204.7 billion yen profit drawn from 17 analysts polled by Refinitiv.

Somewhere in Hiroshima, a parade of nearly finished Miatas glides along a track waiting to receive their beating hearts, the powertrains that'll let them ply their road-carving talents the world over. One – let's call him Fred – is eager to begin his new life as a 2020 Mazda MX-5 Miata, bringing joy to his future owner and just generally being awesome, even if the RF power targa-ish roof that's already been applied to him is a tad dweeby. Visions of hairpins and power slides and expertly executed heal-toe downshifts dance in his head … and then it happens. He is given the one thing every new Miata dreads: an automatic transmission. Poor guy.

This will not, entirely at least, be yet another diatribe in the ongoing Quixotic campaign to Save the Manuals(!). Automatic transmissions can be quite good and even beneficial in sports cars, especially on the track where removing the need to operate a clutch and expertly execute those heal-toe downshifts lets you better focus on the steering, what the chassis is doing and just going faster. That the computers can shift quicker than you can is another obvious advantage.

This is the Honda Civic Si Coupe, a sporty compact with a $25,200 MSRP in the United States, which is a more tamed variant of the full-blown Civic Type R hot hatch that starts at $36,995 and brings 306 HP to the party.

I've learned that finding discarded vehicles with astronomical figures showing on their odometers can be very difficult. Most manufacturers stuck with five-digit odometers well into the 1980s and even the 1990s, which rules out a majority of potential high-mile candidates right off the bat. With more recent vehicles, electronic digital odometers won't display unless you power up the main ECU— theoretically possible in a junkyard, but a real hassle. The most likely old cars to rack up interstellar mileage (Mercedes-Benz diesels) are also among the first to have their instrument clusters harvested by boneyard-prowling eBay sellers. Fortunately, Honda began installing six-digit odometers around 1981, and so today's Junkyard Gem (found last winter in a Denver car graveyard) can share its very impressive final odo reading with us.

Back in the early 1990s, American car shoppers could choose from an extravaganza of sporty-looking front-wheel-drive coupes. The Geo Storm GSi may have offered the most performance per dollar, but the early Mazda MX-3 made a lot of sense as a reasonably fun commuter car. The MX-3, based on the 323/Protegé chassis (and thus a close cousin to the Ford Escort of the same era) could be purchased in the United States for the 1992 through 1996 model years, and junkyard examples have become very hard to find. Here's a '92 in a Colorado Springs yard.

One rumor about the revised 2021 Nissan Pathfinder has cropped up nearly once a month since the beginning of the year. When we covered spy shots of a camouflaged Pathfinder prototype in January, commenter Bryson wrote, "A little birdie told me that the 2021 Pathfinder is ditching the CVT for a 9 speed automatic transmission." In March, a NicoClub forum thread cited a Reddit post for the same intel. In April, Carscoops acknowledged the whispers. Now AllCarNews joins the crowd claiming the disagreeable Jatco CVT is out, a new nine-speed auto is in.

If true, this wouldn't be the nine-speed gearbox going into the refreshed Frontier pickup; a transmission fit for the Frontier's longitudinal engine placement wouldn't agree with the front-wheel-drive Pathfinder's transverse engine placement. The ZF nine-speed that serves Honda and Jaguar Land Rover products among others is a shoo-in for the role if the rumors come true.

There are a few parallels to be drawn between the all-new Honda Jazz and the Honda-powered Red Bull or AlphaTauri F1 cars. For example, they all have four wheels, and do their best work on dry stretches of asphalt.

In this week's Autoblog Podcast, Editor-in-Chief Greg Migliore is joined by Consumer Editor Jeremy Korzweniewski and Senior Editor, Green, John Beltz Snyder. This week, they're driving a Jeep Gladiator Mojave, Acura MDX A-Spec, our long-term Subaru Forester and a Honda CR-V Hybrid. A little stir-crazy from quarantine, they also derail the conversation for a little bit to talk about beer before launching into this episode's "Spend My Money" segment.

Only Acura knows why its flagship RLX sedan is still on sale; every year that we had occasion to remember the RLX — which wasn't every year — seemed like a good year to let the car die peacefully. Automotive News reports the deed is finally done, or rather, will be at the end of 2020, when Acura discontinues the model that started with the RL in 1996. Honda told U.S. dealers yesterday that in other markets like Japan, the four-door will continue to sell as the Honda Legend. Honda's comment to AN included, "With SUVs leading the luxury market, the highly successful RDX and MDX now serve as volume leaders of the Acura brand," and, "We will further strengthen our sports sedans, consistent with the performance-focused direction we have been taking Acura over the past four years."

Speaking of the devil, the RL and RLX — and Acura as a brand — never got out from under the weight of the Legend sedan, that ancestor being the second of Acura's three albatrosses after the original NSX and the Integra. The RL never equaled the Legend's worst year of U.S. sales. The RLX, a combination of arousing performance under anodyne styling costing premium German money, might have performed the same feat viz the RL, but the RL sold less than 5,000 units here for the last five years of its life. The RLX has only exceeded 5,000 sales once, in 2013. Last year, 1,019 units found buyers. 

Not long after the Toyota Yaris Cross was unveiled, reports have surfaced that Lexus will launch a new entry-level crossover of its own using the same underpinnings.

When I got our long-term Subaru Forester back from the shop to fix a mysterious source of moisture, I also happened to have a Honda CR-V Hybrid taking up temporary residence in my driveway. After testing out my large son's car seat in each to these two right-sized vehicles, I moved on to the examine their capacity for the second-most-precious cargo they could carry: beverages. 

I counted eight cupholders in each of these cars, which amounts to two per outboard passenger. Two front cupholders on the center console, one in each front door, one in each rear door, and two in the center armrest that folds down in each rear row. That's not Subaru Ascent levels of beverage storage (19 cupholders!), but it should be plenty to keep a family hydrated on a short-to-medium drive. Though these two appear to be equal in quantity, let's take a closer look and see if they're equal in quality, too. I brought along a Klean Kanteen bottle that's about the same size as most other brand of metal water bottles folks carry around, a big Corkcicle 24-ounce insulated tumbler, a standard 12-ounce soda can, and a skinny, 7.5-ounce soda can that's the same width as a lot of canned energy drinks. As a bonus, I — the man known to Twitter as "that one dude with the Nalgene bottle" — brought my trusty 32-ounce Nalgene to see if it fits anywhere.

PARIS — Renault is preparing to substantially reduce its vehicle range, withdrawing well-known but ailing models like the Espace minivans, as part of looming cost cutting plans, four sources in the industry and close to the French carmaker said.

The company, shaken by the downfall of its once star CEO Carlos Ghosn and by setbacks in its main markets, is set to detail at the end of the month how it aims to cut costs by 2 billion euros ($2.16 billion) over the next three years.

Not even the coronavirus pandemic could stop Toyota from performing the media drive of the updated 2021 GR Supra with the first reviews of the German-bred Japanese sports car having just landed online and it seems as though those who  purchased last year's model may start regretting their decisions.