Chocolate Smart ForTwo by Q-Pot – Click above to watch the
In Japan, Christmas Eve is a romantic holiday during which couples eat special cakes. So what’s Valentine’s Day, then? An occasion for women to buy men chocolate, of course. Or chocolate cars, as the case may be.
Okay, so the you see above isn’t actually made of chocolate, it just looks that way. Specially prepared for the holiday by designer Tadaaki Wakamutsu of Japanese luxury jeweler/chocolatier Q-Pot, the unique Smart city car features a special chocolate-themed paint scheme. It’s priced at 2.36 million yen (equivalent to about $28k), which places it at a considerable premium over the standard Smart ForTwo’s 1.84 million yen MSRP ($22k) in Japan. to watch the video report, or head over to the for a closer look.
Automakers outsource a variety of components to OEM suppliers. The parts could be as small as a screw or as large as the entire car itself, contracting the entire assembly process to outside bidders. But while some automakers make more or less of the parts in-house, one component is always outsourced: the tires.
Renault, however, takes exception to that rule, and in characteristic French defiance is rolling out its own line of tires. Rather than equipping new vehicles with its own rubber, however, the tires are being marketed to existing Renault owners as replacement rubber.
Called the Motrio line, the Renault tires are focused on cutting costs, while maintaining optimal performance and minimal road noise. Now we have but to assume that, even though they’re not saying who is, Renault didn’t start farming their own rubber and actually building the tires themselves. They’re likely made by an existing rubber company to Renault’s specifications and under their license. Still, the French automaker is claiming this as an industry first, and we can’t help but wonder if they won’t extend the project to include sister company as well.
Nick Mason drives the 1937 Auto Union Type D at Goodwood
Classic rock fans recognize Nick Mason as the drummer from Pink Floyd, but classic car enthusiasts know him just as well for his automobile collection and regular column in Octane magazine. Now the musician/car nut is headlining a different kind of group: an investment fund.
Based on the growth in value of some of the top collector cars the past few years, IGA Automobile is putting together a portfolio of historically significant and highly collectible cars for its investors. The new investment fund targets raising $150 million in capital and turning it around over the course of seven years to earn its investors a 15% profit. To get there, IGA is looking at buying cars like 250 GTO, DB4 Zagato, GT40, McLaren F1, Shelby Daytona Coupe and 917 and selling them at a profit.
The fund has solid basis for its financial projections: record prices have been fetched in the past few years by such exemplary automobiles as a ($12 million), a ($11 million) and a (~$35 million). Overall, Hagerty’s “Cars That Matter” index rates prices for collectible postwar automobiles as having gone up 67% from 2006 to the end of last year, compared to the S&P 500 Index, which dropped 5.9% over the same time period.
In the U.S., the pecking order among Japanese automakers looks like this: Way out in front is , followed by and respectively. On a global scale, however, Nissan has finally leapfrogged Honda for second banana status. that Nissan’s global sales soared 21 percent in 2010 due in part to exploding business in China. All told, Nissan moved 4.08 million units during the calendar year.
Honda also saw increased sales, but it managed only a five percent gain. That’s 3.56 million vehicles sold, or about 500,000 fewer units than its rival. 2010 was a very solid year for Nissan, as well its alliance partner Renault, which also fared very well. Together the two automakers combined to sell 7.3 million cars and trucks. That’s more than or , though Renault-Nissan sales aren’t officially counted together when the final rankings are tabulated at the end of the year. Toyota led all automaker sales for the year, followed by and VW.
2011 Scuderia Ferrari F150 – Click above for high-res image gallery
With the first of four preseason tests scheduled at the Spain’s Valencia circuit this week, became the first team to unveil its 2011 Formula One World Championship challenger. Over two million fans signed on to the team’s website to watch its debut before the new monoposto took to Fiorano for a promotional run.
That the car bears the name F150 is no dig against the from (though the histories of the two companies are riddled with enough cutthroat competition). It’s a celebration of a century and a half of Italian unification. The back of the rear spoiler carries the Italian flag, and the Scuderia also devised a new logo that features prominently on the engine cover where the banned Marlboro logo once stood.
Livery tweaks aside, the Ferrari F150 reflects a number of changes to the formula for 2011. A new hydraulically-actuated rear wing is in place, the air intakes are smaller, and KERS is back. Ferrari opted to place its kinetic energy recovery system – co-developed with MTS and Magneti Marelli – inside the redesigned fuel cell, and with the engine freeze still in place, its installation represents the only substantial change to the drivetrain.
The only other major update is the switch from Bridgestone to Pirelli tires, which the entire grid makes this year. Tire calibration will be crucial for all teams during the Valencia test and the three more scheduled to follow before the march 13 season kickoff in Bahrain. When it does, Ferrari hopes the new F150 will help them put last year’s blunders behind them in what’s shaping up to be an even more exciting campaign than last year’s championship, which went down as the most competitive season in F1 history.
Both the -Renault teams as well as Sauber are scheduled to unveil their cars on Monday, January 31, followed by GP, Red Bull, Toro Rosso and Williams on Tuesday, February 1. McLaren shows its 2011 car on February 4, and Virgin on the 7th. Force India and HRT have yet to confirm when their cars will be revealed. Stay tuned as we bring you the latest, and check out the of the Ferrari F150 in the high-resolution image gallery below and the press release after the jump.
CEC Lexus LFA – Click above for high-res image gallery
Los Angeles-based tuner CEC has announced a new partnership with Lexus North America to create a tuning program for the Lexus LFA. Limited to just three vehicles, these unique supercars will feature a variety of enhancements created specifically for each customer. “We believe these three CEC Tuner Edition LFAs will be the most expensive and rarest of all the LFA supercars that Lexus will manufacturer and sell worldwide,” said Sherif Yassa, Vice President of CEC.
Thanks to the technical innovations that went into building the LFA, the CEC upgrades will mostly be limited to aesthetics. “We looked at the LFA and what Lexus engineers had done, and knew it would be crazy to try and improve it from a performance or engineering standpoint,” said Claus Ettensberger, founder of CEC. Even so, the tuner has managed to squeeze an extra 10 horsepower from the 4.8-liter V10 and trimmed shift times to .15 of a second.
While we don’t have any photos of the trio of custom LFA supercars quite yet, CEC did have an LFA on display featuring their lightweight forged wheels. You can see high-res photos of the car in the gallery below.
1956 Cadillac Eldorado Brougham Town Car concept – Click above for high-res image gallery
These days, automakers routinely unveil concept cars and new models at major auto shows. Back in its heyday, played by a different set of rules. It organized its own car shows under the Motorama banner.
Running throughout the 1950s, Motoramas were GM’s opportunity to showcase its products to the public and whet consumers’ appetites. Few Motorama cars were as showy as the Eldorado Brougham Town Car concept. Unveiled at the Waldorf-Astoria in Manhattan for the 1956 “Highway of Tomorrow” Motorama, the Brougham Town Car was a concept for a chauffeur-driven version of the production Cadillac Brougham that hit the market the following year.
The Town Car featured a half roof that left the driver, in classical style, exposed to the elements, and created a split cabin. Up front, the chauffeur sat in the open air surrounded by black leather and chrome. In back, the pampered occupants were coddled in beige leather, deep-pile Wilton carpeting and gold trim covering everything from the tissue dispenser and decanter to the bulkhead-mounted phone used to speak to the driver.
After the New York Motorama, the Eldorado Brougham Town Car went on the road to Miami, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Boston, but was then retired to GM’s Warhoops salvage yard. The staff there, according to the story, didn’t have the heart to rip the Brougham apart, so it stayed under a tarp for thirty years. It then passed through the hands of several prominent collectors before RM gave it a thorough restoration, including the installation of a detailed 365 cu. in. OHV V8 engine with four-speed Hydramatic transmission, suitable for driving the car off the trailer and over the concours judging stand.
Consigned to RM Auctions, the car is set to cross the auction block on March 12 at Amelia Island, where it’s expected to fetch between $500,000 and $750,000. Follow to the auction site for full details of the lot and event, and check out the high-res images in the gallery below.
2012 Mazda5 – Click above for high-res image gallery
has officially announced that it will supply the minivan to beginning in May of this year. But before you go dreaming of a Nissan micro-minivan here in the United States, know that this will be a Japan-only affair. As of this writing, mum’s the word on what the Nissan-badged Mazda will be called in the automaker’s home market. The Mazda5, or Premacy as it’s known in Japan, will “enrich [Nissan's] minivan lineup in the Japanese market” – a place where small MPVs are sold in great volume.
This is not the only collaboration between Mazda and Nissan in Japan. Currently, Mazda provides its Bongo Van/Truck to Nissan under the name Vanette. Likewise, Nissan supplies its AD/AD Expert to Mazda, sold under the name Familia Van. for the official press release.
If you don’t get pinched by the wiper arm on the new Toyota Yaris, you have the company’s new “devil’s advocate” product development philosophy to thank. The approach entails a team of engineers doing things with the car that Toyota wouldn’t normally be able to fathom. The events of the past year have shown that people will do wacky things with their cars, like making floormat layer cakes, and this spurred management changes like more local authority for North American operations.
Toyota has installed more executives in its American plants and given the U.S. arm of the business its own decision-making power on recalls, rather than waiting for word from the home office. A single database of internal and external vehicle quality discussions is also being put together to make Toyota’s reaction more nimble.
There are critics of the efforts. Clarence Ditlow of the Center for Auto Safety doesn’t find a new attitude in Toyota’s response to quality complaints much of a departure from the past, calling it “pretty much the same-old, same-old.” Sean Kane of Safety Research & Strategies opines that Toyota is “biding their time” and still tends to blame the victims rather than solve issues like the ones recently plaguing the company.
Whether Toyota’s reactions are percieved critically or complimentary, there is at least the indication of a desire to rectify a damaging situation, and you can now be sure that many engineering mules are undergoing strange experiments deep in the bowels of some Toyota R&D bunker to quantify the effects of ECU pins shorted by a french fry.
John DeLorean’s bas-relief sculptures – Click above for high-res image gallery
To call John DeLorean eccentric would be an understatement. Envisioning a stainless steel-bodied sports car with gullwing doors and actually bringing it to market requires no less a character.
The auto magnate had a flair for the extravagant, and to satisfy his tastes had a series of bas-relief sculptures created for his Manhattan apartment. There are ten pieces in all, some measuring up to four and a half feet across. They depict a variety of Roman-themed scenes, from children playing to a trio of nude soldiers, and are up for sale at prices ranging from $650 to $3,150. So if you don’t have a modified DMC-12 to take you back in time to ancient Rome, at least you can have its creator’s art collection to transport you there in your mind.
2011 Chevrolet Volt – Click above for high-res image gallery
Gene Weingarten is not an automotive journalist. He is, however, a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning writer for The Washington Post. And yet, despite limited automotive knowledge by his own admission, he’s written an excellent review of the .
Weingarten admits he was predisposed to hate the Volt (and American cars in general), but his time behind the wheel didn’t jibe with those expectations. And it wasn’t even because the car apparently made him more attractive to members of the opposite sex (though we doubt that hurt its chances any).
Trust us on this: Go and of the Chevy Volt, then come back and tell us what you think.
Countaches, a Testarossa, Pontiac’s Fiero and Trans Am in multiple shapes and sizes, more than you can shake a stick at and even a . No, we’re not talking about the posters plastered on the walls of our bedrooms when we were 12, we’re talking . Specifically, the original cartoon series that aired from 1984 to 1987.
Yes, the majority of us who man the Autoblog HQ are very much children of the 1980s, so we know ourselves some Transformers folklore. And so you’d think an infographic like the one seen after the jump would really get our blood pumping… and it did, for a moment. Then we noticed how many errors and inconsistencies were present and that pumping turned into something more like boiling. Here are just a few of the many errors:
Optimus Prime, the most famous of all Autobots, was a cab-over truck. Michael Bay turned him into a traditional semi for the more recent movie franchise.
Note the number of vehicles shown that were built after the show ended in 1987, including a 1994 Volkswagen New Beetle.
Hound was an American Army Jeep, not a Japanese “Jeep”.
Chromedome… what the heck is that thing?
Ultra Magnus, like Optimus Prime, was a cab-over Freightliner, not a Mac truck.
Check out the entire infographic and let us know in the comments if you find any more errors. We will say the infographic’s last section where it shows which automakers the Autobots tended to favor is pretty cool.
Shaun White will get a taste of tire smoke – Click above for high-res image gallery, videos after the jump
At the 15th ESPN Winter X Games in Aspen, Colorado yesterday, BF Goodrich announced a multi-year partnership with snowboarding Jedi Shaun White: the 130-year-old tire company would teach the Olympic gold medalist how to drive. Not just get behind a wheel and use a turn signal, but, you know, really drive. Before a day spent with a few drivers from Team BFG, White had never driven a stickshift before – his has E-Gear and his 1966 is an automatic – and readily admits “I’m a terrible driver.” Autoblog was there to ask BFG and White what’s it all about, and more importantly, who’s going to replace Samuel Hubinette’s gearbox?
The all-new 2011Chrysler 300 line is more proof that Chrysler is on the right track.
Our intrepid spy photographers have snapped Lamborghni’s new flagship, tentatively dubbed Aventador, wearing nothing but swirly camouflage over its newly redesigned body.
Find out the best explanation as to why Ben Collins turned his back on Top Gear.
Also of interest:
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2012 Nissan GT-R deftly launches – Click above to watch the video
Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em. Well, only if you’re really just interested in showing off. In reality, if your tires go up in giant plumes of white smoke, you’re going nowhere fast.
It stands to reason, then, that drivers of the , which once again has an official factory launch control mode, won’t be indulging in any tire-smoking shenanigans. Instead, they will be they may be carrying into ludicrous speed with nary a hint of wheelspin to contend with.
And we finally have first-hand video evidence that proves the point. We witnessed the 2011 GT-R catapult itself into near orbit using launch control with our own eyes and managed to capture the act on video. to see for yourself.
has been teasing us with little factoids here and there about its new 2.0-liter turbocharged four-cylinder engine, and we finally have official confirmation that it will, in fact, be coming to the United States later this year.
This new four-cylinder engine uses the same twin-scroll turbo technology found in the larger N55 3.0-liter engine. Maximum power is rated at 240 horsepower at 5,000 rpm, and peak torque – all 260 pound-feet of it – is delivered at 1,250 rpm. By switching to a smaller-displacement, turbocharged, direct-injected engine, we can expect that cars with this new 2.0-liter four will get a healthy bump in fuel economy over the current six-cylinder models.
BMW has yet to point out which models will be getting the new 2.0-liter turbo, but since the automaker specifically mentions that it offers more power and torque than the current naturally aspirated 3.0-liter inline-six, we wouldn’t be shocked to learn that all cars with a 28i or 30i at the end of the name will now be powered by this four-pot mill. have suggested that the will now use four-cylinder power, and we’re betting both the and , as well as , will get the turbo-four treatment. for the official press release.
2012 Fiat 500 – Click above for high-res image gallery
Haggling, ugh. Generally speaking (and with a few notable exceptions) it’s one of those unavoidable aspects of buying a new car from a dealership. If you’re good and you’re willing to shop around by pitting dealer against dealer, you may end up scoring something of a bargain. Thing is, if you’re not such a good haggler, you’re seemingly just as likely to pay more from a stealership than the next guy, which hardly seems fair.
According to Fiat’s brand spankin’ new United States arm, the younger car-buying generation isn’t particularly keen on the notion of haggling for a better price. As such, the company has directed its dealerships to adopt a no-haggle pricing policy, starting with the new-for-the-U.S. . “The pricing is the pricing,” said Laura Soave, head of the brand in North America to Bloomberg, much as it was with the now defunct Saturn brand. We think it’s a lovely idea and hope it sticks.
Noble M600 – Click above for high-res image gallery
We’ve been talking about the Noble M600 since roughly 2008. It was and the crew at Top Gear UK even got to before the clock ticked 2010. So where’d it go? We don’t know, but Noble has finally popped its head up again with the very first M600 off the factory production line.
Considering its absence, a quick refresher course on the M600’s credentials is in order. This British-built supercar sports a twin-turbocharged 4.4-liter Yamaha V8 with three power levels: Road, Track and Race. An Adaptable Performance Control switch will vary the V8’s output between each level, letting the engine produce 450 brake horsepower, 550 bhp or an absolutely silly 650 bhp. Couple that with a curb weight of just 2,775 pounds, and you’ve a great recipe for 0-60 times around three seconds or less and an estimated top speed of 225 miles per hour. Only one’s been built so far, but Noble claims it has orders for a full 50. At £200,000 a pop, the M600 should make the company a pretty penny assuming it doesn’t take them a decade to deliver.
For more fun, to rewatch Jeremy Clarkson’s review of the M600 prototype from 2009 and check out new high-res images of the car in our gallery below
Cadillac CTS-V Coupe racer car at Sebring – Click above to watch the video
has just unleashed a video of its going through some shakedown runs at Sebring Raceway in preparation for the first race of the Sports Car Club of America World Challenge GT.
In this video, titled 60 Seconds at Sebring (though it’s actually a second longer…) the real Caddy that Zigs burbles and pops just like GM’s racers, but in our humble opinions, looks even meaner than those all-conquering machines ever did. Seriously, get a load of that over-the-top rear wing!
Do yourself a favor and check out the video , and stay tuned for the car’s first official outing on March 25 in St. Petersburg, Florida.
It’s been over four months since racer Ben Collins officially as the skill behind The Stig’s otherworldly driving talent. And, despite the bellyaching of fans and critics all around the globe, both Top Gear and life itself have continued to trundle on as if nothing ever happened. Sure, Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May have been forced to to find a new tame racing driver, and yes, they’ve even taken to gunning down cardboard cutouts of their former compatriot, but by and large, Top Gear itself is no worse off for no longer having the white suit on board.
Readers are given the best explanation as to why Collins turned his back on Top Gear.
Despite controlling our news cycle for what felt like seven eternities, Collins has rather quietly picked up a gig with rival UK car show Fifth Gear, leaving plenty of us to wonder what could possibly cause someone to give up a life of driving the world’s quickest cars in some of the most amazing scenery our planet has to offer. Fortunately, the former Stig worked up The Man in the White Suit ($26.95 on )- a quick memoir that includes everything from his stint as an army reservist to his trials on the world’s various race circuits. There’s even a good bit on the man’s time on Top Gear as the silent wheelman we all know and love.
Now that the dust has settled around the whole Stiggate fiasco, we settled in to give The Man in the White Suit a full read. Tucked between stories of training Tom Cruise to beat the life out of a reasonably priced car and vaporizing a Koenigsegg while attempting to put the supercar around Dunsfold in the quickest time possible, readers are given the best explanation as to why Collins turned his back on Top Gear for good.
