When Evo magazine’s founder and Editorial Director Harry Metcalfe says a machine is “the most amazing vehicle you’ve ever seen,” you know you’re in for a treat. After all, Metcalfe has been at the head of the British magazine since its first issue in 1998 and has owned or driven nearly every vehicle you can imagine.
The amazing machine that’s netted such admiration from Metcalfe? The Scamander, a truly all-terrain vehicle designed and built by Peter Wheeler, the man who owned British boutique automaker for 23 years. With its 300-horsepower V6 engine, the Scamander is reportedly capable of hitting 60 miles per hour in about eight seconds and can hit a top speed of 120 mph.
On land, that is…
You see, there’s also a impeller out back, meaning this crazy floating contraption can also take to the water. Sadly, Wheeler died before seeing this project to completion, but his wife and a team of engineers made sure that the Scamander finally saw the light of day in fully finished form. to see Metcalfe take the Scamander over land and sea.
In pretty much any racing series you go to, the cars tend to progress in an evolutionary, not revolutionary fashion. This year’s crop of Formula One cars, for example, may have those ungainly stepped noses, but they otherwise look pretty much the same as last year’s cars, which looked mostly the same as the cars the year before and the year before that, and so on and so forth. The same could be generally said of Indy, Le Mans prototypes…even stock cars. The DeltaWing project, however, is another story altogether.
Designed and developed by an alliance of some of the biggest names in racing and recently backed by , the DeltaWing represents a comprehensive rethink of what form a race car can and should take. The idea was originally fielded as a proposal for the new IndyCar chassis, but that series’ organizers went once again for something much more conventional. So the brain trust behind the project adapted it for endurance racing and are taking it to Le Mans this year.
But surely they didn’t put all that work into it just to race it once – outside the classifications as a demonstration only – did they? Not if Don Panoz has anything to say about it. One of the partners in the DeltaWing project and the father of the racing car manufacturer that bears his name, Panoz hopes to find a way to race the DeltaWing in the American Le Mans Series which he essentially founded.
A way to equalize its performance with either the LMP1 or LMP2 classes would need to be found with the IMSA and the FIA, but considering how it was adapted from an IndyCar proposal to a Le Mans racer, the platform seems pretty flexible. But Panoz doesn’t want to race just one. Sure, a solitary entry in the full ALMS calendar would be a great start, but Panoz reportedly envisions assembling a quantity of DeltaWings at his factory in Georgia that has over the years built cars for Indy, Champ Cars, Superleague Formula and of course Le Mans and the American Le Mans Series.
Just how many remains to be seen, but with powerhouses like Panoz, Nissan, Highcroft, Chip Ganassi and Dan Gurney on board, we would be very surprised if the DeltaWing ran just the once.
It could be said that no auto show is as glamorous as the Concorso d’Eleganza Villa d’Este. Held on the picturesque shores of Lake Como in northern Italy, the annual concours is sponsored by . So it only stands to reason that the Bavarian automaker wouldn’t let the show come and go without making a splash on its own.
Previous years saw BMW roll into Cernobbio with such show-stopping concepts as the and the , but this year it’s not looking back on its history to draw its inspiration. Instead it’s teamed up with celebrated Italian coachbuilder Zagato to dream up the concept you see here.
A rare instance of Munich reaching beyond its own design department, the BMW Zagato Coupé is a one-off concept, but is far from a fragile show car. The shape is aerodynamically optimized and the car is fully road registered in Germany, and has already undergone high-speed testing at BMW’s own test facility. The Bavarian automaker remains tight-lipped on its underpinnings and running gear, but the obvious conclusion – whether ultimately correct or not – is that it’s based on the roadster.
Whatever lies beneath the hand-crafted aluminum shape, however, is of less consequence than its design. Reinvigorating a tradition of collaboration that goes back to the 1959 BMW 3200 Michelotti Vignale through to the Giugiaro-designed M1 of 1978, the Zagato Coupé concept aptly embodies design cues attributable to both BMW and Zagato – from the twin-kidney grille (whose mesh is made up of little Zs), over the double-bubble roof (a hallmark of Zagato styling originally intended to accommodate a racing helmet in early designs) to the Kamm tail that BMW and Zagato both claim as common heritage.
The greenhouse is set way back and the hood is longer than it took us to put together the immense gallery of high-resolution images BMW has released of the show-stopping concept, which you’ll want to check out in detail along with the full press release .
2,500 rpm in a family sedan generally isn’t a whole lot to get excited about. In fact, it’s traditionally closer to idle speed than anything offering the possibility of real entertainment. But each and every one of those 2,500 revolutions in this offers a frisson of excitement when whirling away in concert. Why? Because they add up to 100 mph. In a four cylinder.
Process that for a minute: 2,500 revs = 100 mph in a 2.5-liter normally aspirated four-door kinshlepper. This, friends, is impressive. We first verified the figure for ourselves during a prototype drive at Nissan’s Arizona proving grounds back in March. More real-world numbers include 2,000 rpm at 80 mph and just 1,450 rpm at 60 mph. Credit the Altima’s Continuously Variable Transmission, which has been extensively reworked for this new model. Seventy percent of the transmission’s parts are new, and internal friction has been reduced by up to 40 percent through a battery of small tricks including redesigned internals swimming in lower viscosity oil. The transmission has a super-wide 7.0 gear ratio spread and reprogrammed control logic to help the keep all four pots on boil as necessary.
Of course, it’s still a CVT, which is to driving enthusiasts what Mark Zuckerberg is to the Amish. But Nissan’s Xtronic unit at least makes a good go of it, thanks to a sport mode that introduces shift points to create a physical and auditory experience similar to that of a traditional torque converter automatic. To be fair, the revs don’t plunge quite as far as they would in a slushbox, but it keeps the engine in the meat of its powerband and still delivers a pretty convincing performance, even when subjected to aggressive throttle openings. Either way, those awkward “stretched rubberband” CVT moments are kept to the bare minimum, only rearing their head when the accelerator is buried in the carpet, and just for a moment. Under most circumstances, we imagine most Altima drivers probably won’t even notice they own a CVT.
Renault has officially released details on its Alpine A110-50 Concept. Designed to pay homage to the original Alpine A110, the machine wears a body crafted from carbon fiber and dipped in a shade of the same iconic Alpine Blue we all know and love. Up front, designers worked in a set of half-ring yellow LED lights reminiscent of the hood-mounted fog lights found on the original. That’s pretty much where the similarities end, however. Based loosely on the crushingly-sexy Renault Dezir Concept, the new machine boasts proud fender arches, a wild split-wing rear spoiler and scissor doors.
As we’d heard before, the A110-50 Concept rolls on the same chassis as the Megane Trophy, complete with adjustable Sachs dampers, 21-inch wheels and the notable absences of on-board nannies like ABS or traction control. Hefty 14-inch front brake discs are pressed by six-piston calipers, while the 13-inch discs out back make due with four-piston units.
Renault placed a 3.5-liter V6 mid-ship with a full 400 horsepower on hand. A roof mounted-intake funnels air from outside the engine bay into the machine’s carbon-fiber intake. Meanwhile, a dual-clutch six-speed gearbox allows the driver the choice of disengaging the transmission via a floor-mounted clutch pedal or shifting via steering-wheel mounted paddles.
the full press release as well as a couple videos.
The 2013 gets incremental improvements everywhere. Outside the changes are minimal: fewer vertical slats inside the kidney grille and a larger chrome surround, two horizontal chrome accents bars splitting the lower intake, restyled side mirrors with turn-signal indicators, and new shades of red on the taillights. Inside are resculpted front seats, more soundproofing, redesigned ambient lighting, an updated iDrive controller and “floating” screens for the Rear Seat Entertainment package, and an optional Bang & Olufsen sound system. Along with those changes, the look of the navigation system has been updated with new menu organization, displays, a “pie menu” and 3D elements. The Attention Assistant system provides gives BMW drivers their own coffee cup icon to remind you when it’s time to rest and hands-free trunk operation makes its first appearance in the range.
The eight-speed steptronic transmission, fitted to every model, allows the new 7 to make more of its engines. Under the hood, the inline six-cylinder in the 740i maintains the same power ratings, 315 horsepower and 330 lb-ft, but is mated to the new eight-speed Steptronic transmission and said to have “significantly improved” efficiency, with a 20 percent increase noted in the EU cycle. The 4.4-liter V8 in the 750i gets fitted with Valvetronic and gets bumps of 45 hp and 30 lb-ft, for 445 hp and 480 lb-ft total. The changes reduce its 0-60 time to 4.7 seconds, at the same time as fuel economy on the EU cycle climbs 25 percent with the new transmission.
The second-gen ActiveHybrid 7 drops down an engine size, swapping its previous V8 for the 3.0-liter six-cylinder from the 740. It’s yoked to a 55-hp synchronous motor. Rated at a combined 349 hp and 367 lb-ft, BMW says it is 14 percent more fuel efficient than the 740i.
Both the 740i and 750i will come with a new powertrain management system dubbed ECO PRO that joins the other Driving Dynamics Control settings and that includes a coasting mode operable between 30 and 100 mph. Other driving enhancements include Dynamic Damper Control, an electronically controlled damping system that works on each shock individually dependent on road conditions, self-leveling rear suspension now standard on all models, and xDrive available on the 740i.
Both the 740i and 750i will arrive in showrooms this summer, the ActiveHybrid 7 coming this fall. The high-res gallery above can show you what’s coming, scroll down to read all about it in the press release.
Say what you will about the whole retro design trend that gave us such vehicles as the , the , the Ford GT and the , but it has been (neo Thunderbird notwithstanding) a rather successful formula for several automakers, chief among them. The German automaker is now on its third generation of , and is preparing to launch the new convertible version at the in the fall (previewed by the E-Bugster concept pictured above). And when it does, it is slated to go even more retro.
That much, according to Car and Driver, will come in three special launch editions. Each one will be dedicated to a specific decade from the original Beetle’s long history – tipped to center around the 1950s, 60s and 70s. Special touches will be period-specific, including unique colors, seat upholstery and even white-wall tires. We’ll have to wait a few months to see how many of these particular details pan out, but recent history has been replete with launch editions from Volkswagen.
With putting its Chris Bangle days behind it, one name that has emerged as a dominant force in the design of German luxury sedans has been Karim Habib. The Canadian-Lebanese designer and engineer rose up through the ranks of the BMW Group design offices, styling among other vehicles, the current . A few years ago, Habib defected to arch-rival , but was lured back to Munich to head up the brand’s exterior design department.
Now BMW has promoted Habib to design director, putting him in charge of all aspects of vehicle design – both inside and out – for the BMW brand specifically (discounting and ). In his new capacity, Habib will report to Adrian van Hooydonk, who continues to oversee all design for the entire BMW Group as senior vice-president. Find the official announcement .
An unusual topiary sculpture took the top honors at this year’s Chelsea Flower Show in London. It took King & Co. a full seven years to grow these bushes into a replica of a Williams F1 car, including a full standing pit crew.
Owner Paul King said he wasn’t entirely sure the design would be embraced by the Chelsea judges because of its off-the-wall nature, but the show’s organizers took a shine to the creation, and even Sir Frank Williams, founder and team principal of the Williams F1 team, stopped by the show to take a look. The piece also featured a few components from an F1 car and Bruno Senna’s race helmet.
There’s no word if the Williams team will roll out of the paddock with a Miracle Grow livery next year.
Renault has confirmed the unveiling of an Alpine concept at this weekend’s Formula One Grand Prix de Monaco, but as we get closer there are new details alongisde new questions. Just yesterday came the called the A110-50C, heavily based on the , that could turn out to be the thing itself or pure Photoshop fancy. French press is reporting that that a 400-horsepower concept will appear that “could be homologated and on the road in the future,” and it will take a lap of the Monaco course.
Another story in the French press has a picture of a vintage Alpine 110 racer – the car that all this hubbub is about, an example of which is pictured above. It was taken in mid-April for German GQ magazine at the Barcelona F1 circuit. Vettel and Tavares will supposedly be presenting the concept, but that report indicates the car is called the ZAR and suspects the first letter is for “zero emissions,” the second for Alpine, the third perhaps for Renault. A also claims for the concept, allowing that the meaning of the acronym can only be supposition for now. True, the DeZir was an all-electric concept, so either the A110-50C/ZAR has 400 electric horsepower and there isn’t any mid-mounted 3.5-liter Nissan V6, or Renault has found a way to break every single law of internal combustion… or we just don’t know what’s really in there.
We’ll should know all come Friday .
* UPDATE: The leaked image (inset) is the real deal. Renault has released some and a video, and the reveal will happen on French Yahoo! Autos on Friday at 1:01 p.m. Monaco time. to watch the teaser vid.
According to , ingenuity can be defined as “skill or cleverness in devising or combining” or “cleverness or aptness of design or contrivance.” We’d say that’s an apt description of a Frenchman named Emile who reportedly found himself stranded in the deserts of Northwest Africa after breaking a frame rail and a suspension swingarm underneath his Citroën 2CV.
What to do? Why, disassemble the broken hulk and build yourself a motorcycle from its pile of parts, of course! As the story goes, Emile was able to use the inventive machine to escape the desert, though not before convincing the local authorities that he wasn’t an insurgent and paying a fine for importing a non-conforming vehicle…
Since Emile was the only soul in the area, nobody has been able to confirm the veracity of the events that led to the little French runabout’s conversion into a makeshift motorcycle. That said, judging by the images you can see (apparently from the March 2003 issue of 2CV Magazine), this Citroën-bred two-wheeler does indeed exist, and it was definitely fashioned from parts scavenged from an old 2CV.
Emile, wherever you are, we take our hats off to your real-life MacGuyver skills, sir.
The six basic building blocks of life are sulfur, phosphorus, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon and hydrogen. Arrange those in any number of ways and you can get either a single-celled paramecium or Angelina Jolie. The brand works much the same way. Take the same group of engines, interior bits and exterior design elements, combine them in various ways and you get everything from a three-door hatchback to a five-door crossover.
It all started with the three-door , but Mini kept reconfiguring its basic elements to create a full range of automobiles that now includes the Convertible, , , a , and this little guy: the , available for our test purposes with the aggressive John Cooper Works package. All members of the Mini clan, however, share the same DNA and do little to hide their lineage.
Truth be told, just the idea of the Mini Coupe has few fans around the Autoblog offices. What point is there to a Mini that’s smaller, heavier and more expensive than the standard hatchback? It seems to some that the Coupe exists just because it’s an easy and obvious way to configure those basic Mini building blocks. But just because one can build something doesn’t always mean one should. There’s got to be a reason.
Does the Mini Coupe have a reason for being? Or is its existence owed simply to the fact that it could be made, so it was?
If you thought it seemed a little odd that Poland – a country without much of a history of producing exportable cars – would suddenly come out with a high-performance supercar, well… we’re afraid you may be right. Because the latest reports out of the Eastern European country suggest that the Arrinera project is nothing more than a reclothed replicar.
Arrinera, as you may recall, is a project to build a supercar in Poland. Specifications recently hit the interwebs, indicating a $160,000 list price and a 6.2-liter V8 with 650 horsepower driving the rear wheels through a Graziano gearbox for a 3.2-second sprint to 62 and a 211 mph top end.
Now reports coming out of Poland – citing a certain Jacek Balkan who seems to be the Slavic version of Jeremy Clarkson – are calling the whole project into question. According to the word on the Warsaw boulevard, the people at Arrinera took a Lamborghini replica made by another Polish outfit called Bojar Tuning and gave it a new skin. Interior components were reportedly borrowed from the Opel Corsa and late-90s , all in an effort to raise funds on the stock market.
The question we’re left with is, if the project started as a replica but now has its own design and identity, should its humbler beginnings matter? If the specs are right and legendary chassis tuner Lee Noble is involved, the Arrinera could still emerge as a winner. Of course, we’d have to drive it in order to tell for sure, but we’ve got some openings in our calendar coming up…
Apparently the new spindle grille is here to stay. According to the Kaizen Factor blog, has filed numerous trademarkapplications in both the United States and Canada for various spindle grille designs.
The main differences in the designs are the inserts, either a zig-zag mesh like the current F Sport models of the , , , and , or a horizontal pattern like the non-F Sport models. But there’s also a new “vertical bar” design revealed by the filings, which the report speculates may be applied to the next-generation IS.
Toyota has also filed paperwork to trademark the basic spindle outline with no insert, according to the report. For what it’s worth, Lexus isn’t the only Japanese automaker that’s …
What’s a fresh face worth? A lot when you’re talking about NASCAR. Because the styling is about all that links a stock car to the production vehicle it’s made to mirror. And for , the latest is the new .
The Blue Oval automaker the race car “based” on the new Fusion back in January. But at the Roush Fenway Fan Day in Concord, North Carolina, this coming Thursday, fans will get their first chance to see the new stock car in full race livery.
The paint scheme in question bears the red and white colors of Motorcraft, Ford’s spare parts division, as it will be raced by the Wood Brothers team in this year’s Sprint Cup. But if you can’t wait that long and aren’t going to be near Concord this week, you can check out the full-size clay mock-up put together by the Ford Design Center in Dearborn in the pair of high-resolution images below.
may have once been a form of motorsport in which only domestic automakers competed. And that’s largely still the case, with one notable exception: . The Japanese automaker faced some difficulty breaking into the Good Ol’ Boys racing series, but though some purists may still malign it, Toyota is in NASCAR to stay. And this is its latest car.
“Based”, in design anyway, on the latest , the new stock car from Toyota Racing Development is set to compete in the Sprint Cup next season, alongside the new (among other competitors from and ). The result of “an aggressive redesign”, the new racer was developed with input from the company’s Calty Design studio to look more like the road-going Camry than ever before.
Yes, it does bear a resemblance to its road-going cousin, especially in the fascia. That said, it’s still a composite body over a tube frame powered by a V8 engine driving the rear wheels. In other words, this is a Camry in name only.
Of course it doesn’t hurt Toyota’s case that the Camry is built in America with more American components than most “domestic” vehicles, and now the stock car looks more stock, too. Keep reading for the full press release.
We’ve seen weirder camouflage. But despite the fact that this next-generation prototype looks like it drove through a garbage bag warehouse, we now have a very clear glimpse at some of the new car’s details – namely, the shapely new front fascia.
Merc’s new flagship takes many of its new design cues from the that debuted back in 2007, specifically the larger, more upright grille and the redesigned headlamps that now incorporate LED running lights (just like what we’ve seen on the new and models). The big sedan’s overall shape doesn’t change too much from the car that’s currently on sale, though things seem to be a little swoopier for this new generation.
Under the hood, we can expect Mercedes’ latest engines to be on tap, including the 4.6-liter twin-turbocharged V8 as well as some V6 options. Naturally, an AMG model will follow suit, likely using the new 5.5-liter twin-turbo V8 in the .
Look for the redesigned S-Class to officially bow later this year.
is in the process of , beginning with the that just went into production at the automaker’s Smyrna, Tennessee facility. Next up is the all-new , which made its debut in earlier this year, and now Kicking Tires reports that the smaller crossover will be the next vehicle to get a much-needed freshening.
Unlike the current model, the next-generation Rogue will be built in the United States, specifically in – you guessed it – Tennessee. That aside, we don’t know much else about the next Rogue, though Nissan’s from the (pictured) certainly gives us a good glimpse as to what’s possible, at least in terms of design.
The Hi-Cross, a seven-seat crossover, featured a new turbocharged four-cylinder engine coupled to a hybrid powertrain and a continuously variable transmission. It’s hard to say if this sort of powertrain will find its way into the new Rogue, though. Rumors had circulated for quite some time about the new Altima using a four-cylinder turbo setup, but the production car makes due with refreshed versions of the existing four- and six-cylinder engines.
There have been rumors of an Apple iCar for much longer than five years. But it was five years ago that there was enough heat under them for that Steve Jobs and CEO Martin Winterkorn had met to discuss the idea. A year later another German outlet printed a (pitured) alongside an iPhone, and a columnist in the New York Times kindly .
But did the iCar ever really exist as more than an idea? Mickey Drexler is the CEO of J. Crew and sits on the board of Apple Computer, and at a recent conference in New York he said that Steve Jobs’ “dream before he died was to design an iCar.” Drexler doesn’t say when Jobs had this dream, whether it was just before he died or so long ago that it could substantiate the ancient rumors. No matter, Drexler said “He never did design it.”
The edited video of Drexler’s comments is posted . And know that this doesn’t mean the rumors, nor the iCar itself, are dead.
You don’t hear too much about the Henrik Fisker-designed Artega GT, but its occasional appearances are always welcome. In this episode of Where’s Artega Now?, the folks at eGarage worked with Germany’s Christopher Kippenberger, who make a quadrocopter designed for capturing aerial footage.
A day was spent at Germany’s , essentially a German version’s of Spain’s . One slight difference: Blister Ber’s track isn’t finished, so the Artega was left to drift it out over the construction site threading around haulers and front-end loaders.
Kippenberger’s quadrocopter is of his company’s design, meant to bring both Unmanned Aerial Vehicles and helicopter shots into the range of the enthusiast video shooter. At $5,000, it’s not cheap, but that’s a steal compared to other UAVs – and just pennies compared to a helicopter – and each unit is built-to-order.
But enough reading. Have a look at what it and the Artega GT can do in the video .
![3a291 renalpzar Followup: Renault confirms 400 HP Alpine concept debuting on Friday *UPDATE [w/video]](http://theautoblog.ru/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/3a291_renalpzar.jpg "Followup: Renault confirms 400 HP Alpine concept debuting on Friday *UPDATE [w/video]")
