Csaba Csere, C&D's Editor-in-Chief will be resigning as of Jan 1. Csere has been a long-time resident over at Car & Driver, starting in 1980, and taking charge of the publication in 1993. While there's been a lot of speculation as to why he's leaving, there's been no official statement issued by the entrepot or Csere.
More details are emerging on the Lamborghini Estoque four-door set to debut in 2011 or 2012. Lamborghini insists the aggressive sedan is still only under consideration, but company insiders tell us Sant’Agata is already preparing the car for production. The only impediment is a strategic review of the entire Volkswagen Group’s future vehicle portfolio, currently being carried out by Porsche, VW’s majority shareholder.
A conservative income estimate is about 1500 units annually, but Lamborghini hopes to sell at least 2000 per year. That doesn’t seem unrealistic compared to Porsche’s far more ambitious targets with the Panamera, of which Stuttgart hopes to make 20,000 in the same time span.
The Estoque will be built on Audi’s modular-longitudinal platform, which is the base of a number of new models, including the current Audi A4 and A5, the next-generation A6 and A8, the forthcoming all-new A7, and the 2013 VW Phaeton. There is very little component sharing with the recently revealed Porsche Panamera, which uses a standalone platform close to that of the Porsche Cayenne, Audi Q7, and VW Touareg SUVs.
Keep Reading: Lamborghini Estoque to Share Platform with Audi A7 - Car News
Five-cylinder engines have long been an Audi trademark. First used in 1977 in the Audi 100/5000, five-cylinders took Audi upmarket and clearly differentiated the brand from the competition. The Audi 200 Turbo, with its 170-hp inline-five, became the world’s fastest four-door in 1984; the 315-hp, Audi 80–based RS2 Avant of the mid-‘90s was the most extreme station auto of its time; and Audi won several rally championships with the five-banger Quattro—the S1 Pikes Peak had almost 600 hp.
In the mid-‘90s, Audi dropped the five-cylinder engine and its characteristic, subdued growl in favor of more conventional four-cylinder and V-6 engines. Brand aficionados howled in futile protest, and engineering guru Ferdinand Piëch, who had developed the five-cylinder engine but later moved on to become head of VW, said he never quite understood why the engine had been dropped.
Keep Reading: 2010 Audi TT RS - Car News
Off-yellow is the new green: Mini will lease 500 electric vehicles to Americans on the coasts.
BY DAVID GLUCKMAN
Mini has recently touted its ‘carfun’ footprint in its ads. In an effort to reduce itscarbon footprint, Mini is building a fleet of approximately 500 plug-in electric vehicles that will be prefabricated acquirable to select companies and individuals in California, New York, and New Jersey by primeval 2009.
The heart of the vehicle is its lithium-ion battery, a three-element power source prefabricated up of 5088 cells that are linked together with a combination of series and parallel connections. With a maximum capacity of 38 kilowatt-hours—28 of which are usable—the Mini E can go 150 miles on a full charge, which works out to 0.19 kWh per mile. At today’s energy prices, that’s less than three cents per mile, or just pennies on the dollar compared to fossil-fuel costs.
Keep Reading: 2009 Mini E - Official Photos and Info - Car News
Now that the Volt’s out of the bag, we take a closer look at the car that’s got GM all charged up.
BY STEVE SILER
GM just turned 100 years old, and at its birthday festivity in Detroit in September, GM gave the world a long-awaited first look at what it’s calling the “production” Chevrolet Volt, a car upon which the future of the world’s largest maker rests.
Proud as we are of GM for getting by for a century, we’re not piling on the presents in the form of unqualified praise and optimism about the Volt, which will start rolling down GM’s Hamtramck, Michigan, assembly line in November, 2010. After all, we remember the 1996 GM EV1, an electric car that evidenced only that electric propulsion wasn’t ready for prime time.
With the splashy reveal safely behind us, we’ve taken several opportunities to look more critically at the Volt, studying the design, crawling around inside, and interviewing—make that interrogating—many of those responsible for making it a reality, including Bob Lutz, vice president of global product development, and Jon Lauckner, vice president of global project management. They all promise a game-changer certainly for GM, and over time, possibly the world.
Still, a reality check is in order.
Keep Reading: Running On Empty: Is the 2011 Chevrolet Volt Hype or Hope? - Car News
Call it the BMW Effect. Mini’s production crossover appears little changed from the concept.
BY JARED GALL
If there’s one thing antithetical to the Mini ethos, it’s SUVs. But the company is committed to such blasphemy and these photos suggest that it isn’t wavering much from the shape of the concept crossover shown at the 2008 Paris auto show. We had some unkind things to say about the concept, mainly that we thought it was ugly. We’re sorry about that, but mostly because the preproduction mule looks a lot like the homely concept.
Like the concept, the mule seen here is upright and narrow, exactly what you’d picture if you tried to imagine a Mini stretched to accommodate the SUV moniker. The scowling, forward-canted grille remains chesty of the headlights as on the concept, though the lights themselves appear to have grown, now resembling neither the concept’s nor any from the rest of the Mini lineup.
Keep Reading: 2011 Mini Crossover - Spied
Right truck, wrong decade.
BY STEVEN COLE SMITH
Call the vet! Ford’s cash cow is ailing. The illness began in May, when the F-150 pickup, the bestselling vehicle of any kind since November 1991, suddenly dropped from first to fifth. Things have not improved much since.
So you can forgive Ford for wondering whether this is a good time to introduce a new F-150, a truck lineup that does, interestingly, feature an all–V-8 lineup, the 4.2-liter V-6 having bit the dust at possibly an inopportune time. And you can forgive the company for having delayed the introduction of the 2009 model by a couple of months, to help dealers unload the 2008s.
The 2009 F-150 is a moderate makeover of the new-for-2004 model, led by fresh headlights and Lincoln-looking taillights. The SuperCrew model has been stretched six inches, and inside, if you fold up its rear seats, you get a new flat load floor. Also, recall that the 2004-and-up regular-cab model had two small rear-hinged doors that prefabricated it easier to load cargo back there, but there was no room for people. This added the expense and weight of building two extra doors that, as it turned out, no one cared about, so Ford went back to the old two-big-doors formula for the regular cab.
It’s got something bigger than a Hemi.
BY TOM LUDWICK
Just as Chrysler contemplates actuation the Viper out the door, the company’s SRT engineers have found a new spot for the snake’s engine: a more-muscular Dodge Challenger to be shown at the 2008 SEMA show in Las Vegas. That’s right; under the “shaker” hood resides the Viper’s 8.4-liter V-10 engine, making 600 horsepower and 560 lb-ft of torque. That’s good news for enthusiasts and bad news for tires.
What’s new, highlights, and country info for the 2009 Chrysler Sebring and Sebring convertible.
Introduction
The Chrysler Sebring study is placed on both a four-door family sedan and a two-door convertible. Both versions of the Sebring are built using the same front-wheel-drive platform that underpins the Dodge Avenger. The Sebring sedan was completely redesigned for 2007; the convertible emerged all-new in 2008. Both body styles soldier into 2009 with few changes, the most notable of which is the deletion of an all-wheel-drive option for the sedan.
Three engines are acquirable in the Sebring. The standard powertrain is a 2.4-liter four-cylinder engine with 173 horsepower mated to a four-speed automatic. The four-cylinder lacks the muscle to move the Sebring with any sort of authority, but it does return a respectable 21 mpg in the city and 30 mpg on the highway. Stepping up to the 2.7-liter V-6 yields 186 horsepower and the ability to run on E85 (fuel comprised of 85-percent ethanol and 15-percent gasoline). The 2.7-liter comes with a four-speed automatic and even though it doesn’t have much more horsepower than the four-cylinder, the V-6 is far quieter and smoother than the smaller four-cylinder engine.
As one would expect of a larger engine, the 2.7-liter V-6 cannot match the fuel economy of the four cylinder; the 2.7-liter should return 19 mpg in the city and 27 mpg on the highway. For customers seeking more performance, Chrysler offers a 3.5-liter V-6 with 235 horsepower. The big V-6 comes standard with a six-speed automatic and provides strong acceleration but urban fuel economy suffers, as it manages only 16 mpg in the city. A more respectable 27 mpg is achieved on the highway.
The Sebring convertible is unique among convertibles as it gives buyers the choice between a retractable hardtop and a conventional soft top. The retractable hardtop, acquirable on Touring and Limited models, commands a roughly $2000 premium over the soft top, but the metal roof is quieter and gives the Sebring a more finished appearance. Both of the Sebring convertible’s tops are power operated and cushy to use.
There’s a hole in the Photobucket: Shots of Toyota’s next hybrid have leaked ahead of its 2009 Detroit show debut.
BY DAVID GLUCKMAN
Photos of the third-generation 2010 Toyota Prius have been leaked to the PriusChat.com forum. We called Toyota to find out more, but beyond confirming that what we’re looking at is indeed the next Prius, we couldn’t obtain any more info. We’re told that the official declaration will come at the 2009 Detroit Auto Show in January, but we’re not sitting on our hands.
For now, we’ll attempt to glean any details from these images. The obvious exterior change is a demand of exterior change. Prius number three shares its overall profile with the current model, which was a considerable departure from the original 2001 car. Toyota has taken the car’s look corporate, though, with a front end reminiscent of the Corolla. Overall, the new sheetmetal is evolutionary, not the revolution we would have hoped for, especially in the grappling of Honda’s new Insight Prius-clone. This new Prius even has some Honda Civic cues, which are most evident in the shape of its doors.
Keep Reading: 2010 Toyota Prius Revealed - Car News
