Last week we brought you the innovative forward thinking design of the young English automotive design student James Trim with his hydrogen fuel cell powered Aston Martin inspired creation. This week we bring you an even further look into the future with these latest renderings of what the students at the Istituto Europeo Di Design in Turin, Italy feel the hand built super car builder’s will be producing in the year 2025.
The Italian pupils were restricted to coming up with designs whose technologies will be feasible within the next 5 years. Whereas James came up with a three dimensional scale model, these are still renderings on paper. However that doesn’t mean that these are any less significant than the Volare, the finalists in the Italian automotive concept competition include quite a few traditional four wheeled designs, while there was one particularly interesting three wheeled machine.
However our favorite photo is the British Racing Green coupe sticking its oversized Bangle butt in our faces wearing a set of enormous flat five spoke rims that live up to the sporty design, performance and elegance enstilled in an Aston Martin super car. We can definitely see this futuristic innovative design being the equivalent of today’s Aston Martin’s One-77 in the year 2025.
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The next generation BMW 1 Series was recently spotted out and about on the Autobahn somewhere between Salzburg and Munich wearing the digital camera tricking camouflage that keeps unwanted onlookers from examining every detail of the new design. The car is known as the F20 prototype and is rumored to feature some of the more revolutionary design elements and the latest technologies that the German automaker is offering in their luxury vehicles today.
From what we have gathered, the next generation 1 Series will be powered by a range of three and four cylinder turbocharged engines as well as a 300 HP inline six cylinder engine for the top of the line model. In naturally aspirated form the 1.3 Liter engine makes 136 HP and 177 HP with the help of a turbo. The 120i should get a 2.0 Liter turbocharged four banger making 218 HP, while the 135i will continue to use the 3.0 Liter twin turbocharged straight six. You can expect to see a few alternatively fueled diesel and hybrid variants in the future, most likely in the form of the three cylinder hybrid found in the BMW Vision EfficientDynamics Concept. There is even talk about a 135i SuperSport, this factory tuned 1 Series would fill in for an M variant and could make use of lightweight materials like a carbon fiber in the roof or even the hood. Along with the upgrade in power, the SuperSport will also get a high performance suspension and stranger brakes to give the car the feel of an M car without the emblem.
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The English automaker Mini had announced that in addition to the Mini Roadster, the new Mini Coupe Concept that is scheduled to go into production by 2011 will also be making it auto show debut at the Frankfurt International Motor Show next month. However there aren’t the only two new cars that will be built atop the compact platform, because Mini’s parent company BMW is currently talking o the Japanese manufacturer Toyota about a future collaboration to produce more compact and fuel efficient vehicles, and it turns out that the new Mini platform is the perfect fit.
While it appears that Toyota’s design team will have access to the new platform, the German automaker BMW will also be able to use the new iQ platform for the return of the Isetta mini-car and it is also a possible candidate for the new Z2 Roadster as well as the future BMW 1-Series.
According to BMW’s newest design director, Adrian Von Hooydonk: "The Coupe and Roadster models could conceivably stand on their own within BMW Group, but there is certainly a chance for BMW to share in it."
Either way, it the automakers can combine the build quality of a BMW with the reliability of a Toyota, it won’t matter what platform it is based on because both teams have a knack for what they do, and when they work together the sky is the limit.
Our chat with Subaru left us sensing that the Japanese automaker is moving their lineup in a much more luxurious direction than it has in current years, now there is nothing wrong with this approach to selling cars, in fact it is a pretty smart one, but what about the boy racer in all of us that lusted after owning the same blue and gold car that Colin McRae raced to multi WRC championships. One of our concerns with the automotive arm of Fuji Heavy Industries withdrawing from the World Rally Championship is that their cars could lose that competitive performance edge, but the entry level Impreza has been replaced by the more spacious Legacy as Subaru’s GT300 competitor in the Super GT championship and a much more mundane version is currently being campaigned in the Koni Challenge Series here in the U.S. which makes sense because even the old WRC car was a Legacy. So with all this attention being paid to the larger vehicles in their lineup what is going to happen to the STi?
When I told the Subaru representative that my favorite of all time is the mighty 22B STi, he knew exactly what myself, and most WRX enthusiasts, were looking for in the next version of the best bargain sports car on the market. The 22B was built back in 1998 to celebrate the automaker’s 40th anniversary and by that point, multiple World Rally Championships. This special edition Impreza started out as a lightweight WRX RA coupe shell and then had a set of much wider rear arches to match the boxed front fenders that housed special gold BBS wheels, which widened the Subaru’s track and made it look just as bad as the WRC car.
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Earlier on this year Top Speed reported that the sporty Toyota MR-2 would be coming back in the form of a Prius Coupe in order to compete with the upcoming Honda CR-Z hybrid. However, despite our hopes and dreams of a new MR-2, the Japanese automotive journal Best Car have revealed some new news that gives us hope, but not too much. According to the Japanese magazine, the two door Prius is going to be designed by an Italian coachbuilder, names like Pininfarina and Guigario are being thrown around but no one has confirmed anything as of yet.
What we do know is that the coupe version of Toyota’s most profitable hybrid model will be approximately 4 inches shorter than the standard version and is expected to be very similar to the current Prius. We did know that a possible MR-2 would be powered by the same Hybrid Synergy Drive 1.8L 2ZR-FXE engine as the current Toyota Prius and should be tuned for a little more power as well as a sportier ride, but now we are not sure what to expect. Either way don’t expect anything before 2010, but at least we know that it will look good.
Speaking of anniversaries, Land Rover is set to celebrate its 40th birthday next year and in line with the occasion, the company is planning on unveiling its new flagship luxury SUV, the Range Rover LRX.
The tentative date set for the SUV’s official release is June 17 - the day Land Rover turns 40 – with plans for the car’s production to begin on June 17.
While the car’s concept has already been revealed, it seems that rumors abound that the production car will retain very little from what we saw with the aforementioned concept vehicle, although the notable exception would be the optional hybrid drivetrain that both the conception (has) and what the production version will eventually have.
It’s never an easy task for a company that has lost so much money as Land Rover has on a luxury SUV, especially given its market, which has dried up faster than a desert lake on a hot Sunday afternoon.
Nevertheless, Land Rover is hedging their bets on their flagship luxury SUV – a car that has been a perennial hot seller for the company.
Now we’re not exactly sure how elaborate Land Rover’s 40th anniversary celebration is going to be, but judging from the way a lot of manufacturers celebrated their milestone years in 2009, we’re going to expect nothing less than spectacular from Land Rover.
Judging from this announcement, we dare say that they’re off to a good start.
The staff of summer inters at TopGear America pulled a fast one on us. Remember the very strange looking Porsche Cayman shooting brake test car that was shot with a camera phone in some Italian back street? Well it was actually shot in an alley in Brooklyn, the car was a computer generated image that was created with Maya 3D drawing software, stitched together with Photoshop and then edited on Final Cut Pro to look like video from a mobile phone. They even went as far as to include a little hint that apparently no one caught on to, a Stig helmet tucked back behind the rear window.
There were three main masterminds behind the scheme. First was former TopGear.com America editor, Jared Holstein along with the renderings of Matt DuVall, a digital arts student at Savannah College of Art and Design and left to manipulate the media was Jon Masters, a master’s student in media studies at the New School in New York City. Holstein guided DuVall through some very meticulous details, like official Porsche development wheels, a front bumper that mimics the Porsche mule car as well as the same license plate number that the German automaker uses.
Once the digitally enhanced video was produced, Holstein planted it on the TopGear.com America web site while summer intern, Jon Masters, began to post links in various Porsche enthusiast sites as well as the major Automotive online media. Masters then went so far as to create a fake screen shot from Forza 3 and then linked that to other videogame websites, “It was originally posted on a Czech Forza fan site — in Czech to add a layer of deception and plausibility,” Mr. Holstein said. The group claim to have been testing the abilities of digital media as a way to introduce new designs and get a public reaction to a new figure that would traditionally take an automaker a lot of time, money and research to figure out. We’re still saying that they were trying to pull a fast one on us.
We still haven’t recovered from oogling over the photos of Tesla’s new Roadster Sport when the electric car makers decided to satiate our appetites even more by releasing all-new photos of its other ‘new’ car – the Tesla Model S.
Normally, we’d have to pause and catch our breaths after seeing such stunning photos like those of the Roadster Sport but in this case, it’s like getting desert one after another. And knowing us, we’ll never turn our backs on mouth-watering treats.
So here are the new photos of the Model S, which is being tested by no other than Franz Von Holzhausen, the man who designed this car in the first place.
Unfortunately for a lot us, this is the closest we’ll come to seeing a Model S out on the road until 2011, the date where the car is set to roll out of the lots. In the meantime, the two-year wait should be excruciatingly long, especially after seeing these photos that only makes us a little bit more eager to see the car out on the road.
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The all new 2012 SLS AMG Convertible was recently spotted in what appeared to be another round of testing under the scorching hot Arizona sun. From the images we can see that unfortunately without a fixed roof the MB engineers were unable to find a suitable mounting point for the hard top’s gull wing doors so SLS convertible owners will have to get in and out of their super cars just like most drivers. Despite losing its top, AMG shouldn’t downgrade the output of the SLS convertible’s hand built V8 engine, and make 563 HP from the 6.2 Liter motor just like the SLS AMG super car and that is a good thing, because adding in all those moving hydraulic and mechanical parts, not to mention the rag top itself, will add a considerable amount of weight to the SLS over the standard version. So hopefully the SLS convertible will be able to complete the 0 to 60 MPH sprint in about 4 seconds and reach a very super car like top speed of 200 MPH.
The only thing that we haven’t heard about the SLS Convertible is the extent to which the chassis’ structural rigidity will be compromised by going topless, however we are pretty sure that the automotive engineers at AMG have already thought of that one. When the SLS finally goes on sale it should be wearing a price tag of around $200,000 and it is almost certain that the convertible version will bring a premium over that. However the last question we would like to ask is, how come someone is always seen pushing the SLS in these spy photos?
Despite their current economic problems, General Motors has no plans to cancel America’s favorite sports car and will continue development on the seventh generation Chevrolet Corvette. The C7 will go into production in April of 2012 and then go on sale in the 2013 model year. We must remind you that previous reports have said that the seventh generation of the sports car was put on hold until 2014. Thankfully that is no longer the case.
Overall, the C7 Corvette will be smaller than the current version in hopes of reducing the vehicle’s weight in order to create a more efficient, better performing sports car. The materials will also be upgraded for more advances composites, think carbon fiber instead of fiber glass as well as a few high tech metals like magnesium and aluminum. It is possible that with the conservative minded market, the C7 will also be powered by a smaller engine, possibly with a turbocharger.
However the big question remains. Will the C7 be inspired by the Corvette Stingray concept that we saw in the Transformers 2 movie this past summer?
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