The Touchskin interface has beeen on display since last October; now it’s at a stage where Magna is shopping it to automakers. Although Magna is the marquee name, the various components that comprise Touchskin are produced by nine companies: , , , , , , Votteler, Hennecke Polyurethane and .
It is exactly what it sounds like: instead of buttons and knobs populating the center tunnel space around the gearshift, there is a a perfectly smooth Clearmelt panel whose glossy surface heals itself of scratches and nicks. On either side of the shifter in the concept is the IDMP area, where your mobile phone rests. Without needing to be docked, the phone can connect with the car through Qi transmitters (common to phones as of this year) and be charged. The IDMP area and near-field Qi system is one of Magna’s contributions and the company says it can’t be hacked like Bluetooth or Internet protocols.
To the rear of the concept panel is the haptic interface, a protuberance that responds to numerous fingertip gestures to provide control of the car’s various systems. It is made possible by the Touchskin film, produced in reel-to-reel fashion at a rate of 80 meters per minute, that can be molded to any shape and is wedded to the Clearmelt with copper foil.
There’s a video just to take you through the production process and how Touchskin works. It’s unlikely the entire panel would make it into a new car, but we can certainly see it creeping, piece by glossy piece, into our Minority Report futures.
The extended-range plug-in vehicle will start production about a year after its previously estimated mid-2013 date, Inside EVs blog reports, citing leaked company documents that were dated “a few weeks ago.”
The Atlantic, formerly known as Project Nina, will compete pricewise against the and sedans, as well as the and , and and . That would put the model in the $50,000 to $60,000 range, according to the publication. The model, which will still be produced at Fisker’s Delaware plant, will have 300 horsepower, a 0-60 time of 6.5 seconds and emissions of 50 grams per kilometer of CO2, Inside EVs reports, citing the documents.
“As these documents are obviously leaked investor documents and highly confidential, I am not prepared to comment any further,” a Fisker representative tells Autoblog sister site, AutoblogGreen.
The status of the Atlantic has since plans for the former plant in Delaware were put on hold once the U.S. Department of Energy froze most of the $529 million in loans earmarked for the California-based company.
Fisker the Atlantic at the last month, saying that the car’s price tag would be “a much lower price point” than Fisker’s sedan.
Saint-Tropez is a charming town in southeastern France nestled along the Mediterranean Sea. Internationally recognized as a summer playground for the wealthy and famous, it is also famed for its “clothing optional” beaches where more than just noses and shoulders get burned in hot weather. While still a couple months shy of warm weather and the influx of tourists, chose to get an early start on the topless party by flying us to the Côte d’Azur for some seat time in its newest high-performance droptop, the 2013 .
Our first taste of the new SL-Class was behind the wheel of the standard less than two months ago. The two-seater impressed us with its stout chassis, strong engine and lavish appointments – but it failed to stir our emotions. The base SL long ago steered away from being a driver’s car, and its latest incarnation proved no different. It was, in effect, just a very capable and posh GT.
But the SL63 AMG, boasting upwards of 557 horsepower thanks to a burly twin-turbocharged V8, still seems promising. Its luxury appointments are nearly identical, yet it wears AMG attire and its entire powertrain has been upgraded to appease warm-blooded automotive enthusiasts. Do fresh duds and a new muscular system make a more compelling athlete? We roughed in the French Riviera to find out.
The door has not yet closed on . Hoping for yet another 11th hour stay of execution, the defunct carmaker’s chief union, IF Metall, has written directly to President Obama, asking him to intervene, according to Just-Auto. While on the surface, this may seem silly, it’s actually rather clever, even if it has little likelihood of working.
With the United States government , the Swedish union is hoping it can appeal to Obama to pressure General Motors into granting licenses to continue manufacturing Saab vehicles, according to the report. It’s this sticking point that has , as GM fears that were it to allow continued production of Saabs developed under GM’s ownership, it would open up the possibility of , particularly if a Chinese manufacturer that competes with GM’s own Chinese partner, SAIC, .
You have to admire , as they clearly have not given up hope. But in this case, they just don’t have any other options: Unemployment in the Saab hometown of Trollhättan has hit 40 percent, according to the report.
It seems that ever since humankind grew legs and climbed out of the ocean, we’ve been trying to figure out ways to avoid using said appendages. While many of these efforts have been wildly successful – think Roman chariots, Pony Express, and the Model T – the recent spate of personal mobility devices hasn’t quite taken off.
The poster child for this failure is, of course, the Segway. Though completely awesome, its greatest success has come in comedic appearances on television (Arrested Development) and in the movies (Paul Blart: Mall Cop). But manufacturers have forged ahead, undaunted in their desire to bring human-like mobility to humans. The latest: The Uni-Cub.
An evolution of Honda’s , the Uni-Cub marries a saddle and sturdy base with an omni-directional drive wheel. A rider controls the Uni-Cub by simply shifting their weight. Honda says it is “designed for harmony with people,” as the device positions the rider at relatively the same height as pedestrians, rather than towering over them like a Segway rider.
The Uni-Cub is designed for use indoors, and is powered by a lithium-ion battery and electric drive. It can reach a top speed of 3.7 miles per hour and has a range of 3.7 miles, meaning that any reasonably fit individual should be able to both outrun and outlast the Uni-Cub.
Honda will begin demonstration testing of the device in June.
to read the full press release and watch a video of the Uni-Cub in action, and be sure to check out all the images in our .
Michael Arbaugh, chief designer of interiors, describes center console space as “oceanfront property” – already fully populated, with more tenants trying to move in every year. Speaking to the Automotive Press Association in Detroit, Arbaugh said one tenant he’d like to evict is the CD player because it’s dead weight for audio Luddites.
Ok, so he didn’t say that exactly. But Arbaugh believes they’re out of fashion with people under 30, and that growing lack of interest means they occupy space that could be better employed. CD players also add weight that has to be countered somewhere else in the march to meet CAFE regulations, an endeavor with nearly aerospace tolerances anymore.
The CD-less car is just talk at the moment, but there’s no doubt it’s coming. More and more computers are being sold without optical drives, and as it goes in the tech world so it shall go in the car-tech world. If we could just get carmakers to properly integrate connections for other PMPs that can play lossless codecs and don’t mutilate the music, we wouldn’t mind at all.
The Detroit News reports lithium-ion battery manufacturer A123 Systems is set to post a net loss of $125 million on revenue of $10.9 million for the first quarter of 2012. Official results will be released later this week. The loss includes $51.6 million tied to replacing battery packs produced at the company’s Lavonia, Michigan facility. Some of those packs could have been manufactured with defective cells. The figure also includes $15.2 million to increase inventory reserves.
As you may recall, A123 Systems provides battery packs for companies like Fisker. The extended-range EV manufacturer recently with the supplier’s products, but A123 says it has determined the cause of the defective cells and is working to make sure the failures don’t reoccur.
The report also suggests A123 Systems will lower its revenue forecast for the year to $145 million to $175 million. The company originally projected it would generate between $230 million and $300 million.
The auto industry has long been a cyclical business, and though this last trough was a deep one, the coming boom has economists excited. According to Bloomberg, the auto industry’s comeback contributed fully half of the 2.2 percent national economic growth in the first quarter of this year. , the best pace in four years.
Production is up at all three domestic carmakers, which has a ripple effect throughout the economy. Bloomberg cites Chad Moutray, chief economist of the National Association of Manufacturers, who estimates that every dollar spent on a new vehicle leads to an addition $2.02 in economic activity. The industry’s share of gross domestic product for the quarter was 2.8 percent, which is nearly as high as it was in 2007, before the economic crisis that devastated the industry, according to the report.
Yet despite the rise in fortunes for carmakers, stock prices have yet to follow suit. A key automotive index is up just 1.5 percent so far this year, but is down 31 percent in the past 12 months, according to the report. The U.S. Treasury Department recently indicated that because of lagging stock prices, anytime soon.
Certain videos, when the protagonists speak a foreign language, don’t need subtitles: Mexican telenovelas, dolphins in love and auto racing are but three. Although the narration is in Spanish and there isn’t any racing in this video of former WRC Champion Carlos Sainz and current DTM driver Miguel Molina lapping the Autódromo Terramar, the action needs no translation.
Terramar, in Spain, is the second oldest racing track in Europe after England’s Brooklands, built in 1922 to host Grand Prix cars. Its owner’s vision stretched further this his financial backing, so the two-kilometer oval track with 60-degree bankings hosted only one sanctioned race in 1923. After that, it was used sporadically, holding its last event in 1950. It is now part of land used for a chicken farm.
That didn’t stop Sainz and Molina from seeing how fast they could lap the 80-year-old circuit in a Red Bull Racing Audi R8 LMS. The video is a bit long, but it’s well-shot and definitely worth watching for the high banking and bumpy airborn shots alone. Check out the action by to watch the video.
By all accounts, Marussia is just another exotic automaker hoping to sell a few supercars but just as likely to disappear into obscurity. Except that it hasn’t, and may not for some time.
Having potentially overextended itself by buying the majority of a Formula One racing team from Virgin, the Russian upstart needed its newest product – dubbed the B2 – to be the runaway success that the (relatively) less dramatically-styled B1 wasn’t. And so it appears it will be as reports indicate that Marussia has sold out its entire production run of 500 vehicles.
In order to keep up with demand, production is reportedly shifting from Marussia’s own facility in Moscow to Valmet in Finland, the same place where the is built now and the and were before it. Cosworth will then be shipping the 3.5-liter V6 that provides between 300 and 420 horsepower (depending on customer specification) to drive the 2,425-pound lightweight supercar to 60 in as little as 3.2 seconds.
Check out the pair in the fresh image gallery above for a closer look.
What you see here is an ambulance. It’s based on the Sharan, a van offers in certain overseas markets. We shall therefore call it the Sharanbulance.
The Sharanbulance was recently unveiled at the 2012 RETTmobil emergency vehicles show in Fulda, Germany, by , the company’s rescue vehicles division.
The latest vehicle in the company’s emergency lineup, the Sharanbulance (which VW incidentally refers to as the Sharan NEF) packs LED emergency lighting all around and loudspeaker/siren system that can still be operated once the vehicle’s been shut off. It’s held up by a heavy-duty suspension and motivated by a 2.0-liter TDI driving 170 horsepower to all four wheels through a six-speed DSG and 4Motion all-wheel-drive.
Head down to the Nürburgring for a lapping session without enough training and you just might get rescued from the tangled armco and medevac’d in a Sharanbulance, or in the , Touran or Variant emergency vehicles also offered by Volkswagen Rettungsfahrzeuge.
Clear your Monday nights. “World’s Wildest Police Videos” has officially returned to Spike TV. The show spent a brief spell on TruTV, but will now lay claim to a prime-time spot during Spike’s weekday lineup. The show airs footage from cruiser dash cams and the like to give the world a glimpse of what police face in cities across the country, from high-speed chases to armed bank robberies We wouldn’t exactly call “World’s Wildest Police Videos” intellectual entertainment by any stretch, but there’s something to be said for switching off your brainbox for 30 minutes.
“World’s Wildest Police Videos” comes from a long line of such noble shows. Paul Stojanovich Jr. helms the creation as executive producer. If that name looks familiar, it should. His father, Paul Stojanovich Sr. is the mind behind “COPS.”
Look for “World’s Wildest Police Videos” on Spike at 8:00 pm EST Mondays. In the meantime, click for a look at the show.
When it comes to supercars, the sky is the proverbial limit. You can literally spend millions. And with vehicles like the , and , you can spend hundreds of thousands on a top-of-the-line luxury sedan, too. But when it comes to SUVs, prices seldom if ever breach the $100K mark fetched by the likes of the and the .
There are a handful of automakers aiming to break that barrier though. Like the upcoming SUVs from and , the on-again, off-again Spyker D12, and this, the FX Sebastian Vettel Version.
Based on the , the Vettel edition has had the output from its 5.0-liter V8 upped to from 390 horsepower to 414 for a 5.6-second sprint to 60 and a 186 mph top speed. The suspension is said to have been set up by the reigning two-time world champion himself, with the carbon fiber aero kit developed by his Red Bull Racing team. The only change we’ve heard of from the concept car pictured above to the production version will be a more conventional pearl white paint job instead of the matte white of the show car.
Only 200 examples will be produced, with 50 earmarked for continental Europe, and most of the rest likely heading to the Middle East. The price for such a high-end performance crossover? 120,000 euros, or about $155,000 in American greenbacks (if it were actually offered here). Of course if that still seems too slow and too cheap, you could always order a custom Juke-R from Infiniti’s parent company and smoke some supercars in the process.
April showers may result in May’s flowers, but it didn’t result in great car sales numbers.
Overall, only climbed 2.3 percent compared to April 2011, leaving some carmakers and observers scratching their head. Of course, the raw numbers, as provided by AutoData Corp., also note that there were three fewer selling days due to that occasional month with five Sundays in it. Imagine the pain people paid on the 1st and 15th had to endure?
So the numbers may not be as bad as a first glance might suggest, and in my opinion, the slow pace of growth is better for automakers. Rather than big ups and downs that leave dealerships empty of popular vehicles and overstocked with others, a steady mild increase means it’s easier to match production to demand.
But there are plenty of outliers in the pages of spreadsheets when you look inside the numbers. So here are the 10 things I think I know about the auto industry based on April’s sales.
While the investigation of the that is not over, pundits have begun to weigh in. Automotive News has found a particularly credible one in Jon Bereisa, CEO of Auto Lectrification and the chief engineer of the General Motors EV1 and systems architect for the . And according to Bereisa, the poor packaging of the Karma’s internal combustion engine is what likely caused the fire.
“The engine is shoehorned into that bay, because they had to use a larger engine, because it was too heavy a car,” Bereisa told AN. “As a result, there’s no room for exhaust routing and heat shielding to route the heat away.”
The Karma uses a turbocharged, 2.0-liter four-cylinder engine sourced from GM. In the Karma, however, the Ecotec does not drive the wheels, but acts as a generator to supplement and recharge the batteries. The report says that a fluid leak, combined with tight engine compartment confines and the resultant high heat from the gasoline engine’s exhaust and the would have been enough to cause the fire.
Fisker is maintaining that it is not the car’s battery pack that is at fault, and has pointed to other potential sources of the blaze, according to the report, telling AN that, “There are myriad combustible materials that could be in the garage, in the wheel arch, or picked up on the roadside.”
Go back a decade or so – before Koenigsegg, SSC and the were on the scene – and the idea of a million-dollar, thousand-horsepowersupercar that could break the three-second barrier to sixty would seem out of this world. Posting those kinds of figures with an electric car? No way.
Way. That’s what the Rimac Concept_One is all about. It chews up and spits them back out into the Silicon Valley from whence they came. The electric motors mounted at each wheel give the electric supercar 1,088 horsepower of thrust and a 2.8-second sprint to 100 km/h (62 mph). Range comes in at a claimed 372-miles. All yours (if you’re one of the first 88 customers to call) for the low, low price of $980,000.
We could hardly believe it when we saw the show car in last year, and neither could the show-goers in Monte Carlo where it made its production debut. So to show the public that it was for real, Rimac put out this short video clip showing its Croatian creation laying down patches of its Giugiaro-designed Vredestein rubber on the tarmac. It’s brief, but it’s worth a watch. to check it out.
This week’s Superior Court verdict suggests there’s little to no recourse for consumers.
As Autoblog readers likely have already learned, a Superior Court judge in California has issued by a small claims court earlier this year awarding nearly $10,000 to owner . She had taken the Japanese maker to court claiming it used misleading advertising promising the sedan would get significantly better mileage than proved true in the real world.
In overruling the lower court, Superior Court Judge Dudley W. Gray II wrote that, “Federal regulations control the fuel economy ratings posted on vehicles and advertising claims related to those fuel economy ratings.”
Well, um, no. That was my understanding, too, until I had the chance to pursue the matter with the EPA a couple years back. In fact, I was told, the law simply sets an upper limit. If the tests determine a new model gets 50 mpg – as with Peters’ Civic Hybrid – that’s the most a maker can advertise or use on the Monroney window sticker. But should a manufacturer like realize through its own tests that the vehicle’s real-world mileage might be noticeably less they can mark it down to whatever they think is valid.
Of course, who would do that? With mileage now one of the top things on the consumer’s shopping list, who can blame a manufacturer for wanting to put the prettiest lipstick on a gas hog. And this week’s Superior Court verdict suggests there’s little to no recourse for consumers who only discover that fact after they’ve given it a big smooch.
Paul A. Eisenstein is Publisher of and a 30-year veteran of the automotive beat. His editorials bring his unique perspective and deep understanding of the auto world to Autoblog readers on a regular basis.
Ben Collins is staying busy. The former Stig has once again returned to stunt driving, this time for the upcoming James Bond film Skyfall. According to The Mirror, Collins has been spotted filming in Istanbul, where he took the wheel to ram a into an during a crash scene.
The stunt vehicle used a special cage on the roof, where the stunt driver can manipulate the SUV with the actors inside. Collins has a long history of working with the Bond franchise. The TV personality turned stuntman worked on both “Quantum of Solace” and “Casino Royale,” though he’s also worked on other films as well.
In Collins’ memoir, “,” the driver turned author describes how he juggled his time in the Army, on Top Gear, as a race driver and a stunt driver at the same time. As you may recall, the BBC attempted to from being published at all, but lost the lawsuit in which it alleged revealing the Stig’s identity would breach Collins’ contract.
has already sold over 84,000 minivans this year, but an unfortunate few were built with defective liftgate sensors. The 471 vehicles with the bad parts include both and models, all of them 2012s built in March, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration recall report.
The power liftgates are supposed to stop during automatic closing if they detect resistance, but NHTSA says the recalled vehicles could malfunction, and “may close on an appendage.” Owners should keep their arms and legs safely inside the vehicle and look for notification from Chrysler this month. Dealers will be fixing affected vehicles free of charge.
Last time we saw the non-AMG skin of the it was bathed in red paint and caked in Arctic snow and grime. Warmer times have brought new shots of a black car – which we’ll christen The Scarab – on standard wheels wearing nothing but a shine and a wisp of camo. Its shape has found a way to divide opinion, as the CLS-Class has always done, and we’ll admit that yes, perchance there’s something faintly Romulan about it, but we’re totally sold on the looks.
Right now, there’s nothing left to the imagination but the aft-most sliver of window – that final angle of chrome is an application. We expect all blanks to be filled in come the Paris Motor Show in September, which should see the reveal of the CLS550 and versions of the sleekest wagon this side of Rigel 5. The high-res gallery is above, and you should check it out.
Paul A. Eisenstein is Publisher of and a 30-year veteran of the automotive beat. His editorials bring his unique perspective and deep understanding of the auto world to Autoblog readers on a regular basis.
