The overwhelmingly positive response of the ‘Jetsons-esque’ Vision EfficientDynamics may have given BMW the shot in the arm it has long waited for.
Due to the glorious feedback generated by the concept car, BMW is not tinkering with the idea of bringing back the M1 by 2012 where it would be based on the 2+2 coupe concept of the Vision EfficientDynamics.
The rumoured M1 will also come with the same hybrid powertrain that comes with the Vision EfficientDynamics concept, a sign that BMW may be more serious than anyone ever thought about the its efforts in becoming more eco-friendly.
In the event that it does use the hybrid powertrain, the M1 will be expected to carry a 1.5-liter three-cylinder engine that comes with an electric motor. The power output expected to come out of this set-up is expected to reach as much as 350 horsepower and 600 Nm of torque.
As far as aesthetics are concerned, we’re not expecting the M1 to look remotely close to that of the Vision EfficientDynamics concept, although we are anticipating that BMW will take a few styling cues from the concept and adapt it to the M1. After all, what’s the point of basing the car to the concept if it won’t have any resemblance to it?
In any event, if this supposed reincarnation of the M1 is all BMW says it would be, then we can expect it to generate the same type of reaction the Vision EfficientDynamics concept got in Frankfurt. And that’s going to be great news for the boys of BMW.
Photos courtesy of Fox Syndication
There is an ever popular trend amongst future automotive designers of developing ideas based along an established automaker’s lines. Take this Honda RA-X concept for example, although it looks like the sporty offspring of an Acura NSX and a Honda Fit it didn’t come from a Japanese design studio but instead from the mind of Spanish car designer Xuacu Pérez. If you follow the link below you will see Xuacu’s previous concept, the Lotus Excite a compact English sports car with a 21st century appeal.
The Honda RA-X looks like it is setting a speed record even when it is standing still. The forward leaning passenger compartment pushes the shape forward, while the wrap around windscreen and muscular kink in the C-Pillar make the RA-X look like a helmet poking out of a racecar cutting through the air, just like a GT-R. This could be a nod towards the Japanese sports car’s RA nameplate, the same two letters that were assigned to Honda’s Formula One cars in the 1960s. The F1 inspired name could also attest to the Spanish concept’s oversized wheels being pushed to the far corners of the body and quartet of trumpets that spit spent gasses out the back of the RA300 just like the horizontal exhaust pipes that poke out from the tail of the concept, just like the wingless wonder from 1967.
Being a road car the RA-X trades the open air experience of the vintage F1 car for a closed cockpit 21st century thrill. The body itself would act as a wing, producing enough down force with all its bold curves to reach over 250 MPH, following the same low drag design philosophy that made the NSX a serious super car competitor, the RA-X’s proposed 400 HP mid engine layout. However if Xuacu wants this futuristic Honda to come to fruition, we suggest figuring out a place to add some electric motors to the concept and win over a few more green fans.
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It hasn’t been a month yet since the Ferrari 458 Italia made its world debut at the Frankfurt Motor Show and now, there are talks that Ferrari is already hard-at-work in coming up with a Spider version for the Italia.
In an interview down with Quattrorute, an Italian car magazine, Ferrari top dog Luca di Montezemolo said that the 458 Spider is already in the works, although he also said that fans of Scuderia shouldn’t expect to see any vestiges of the soft-top 458 for at least a few more years.
Nevertheless, it’s always better to hear the news straight out of the mouth of the man who makes all the decisions in Ferrari so having Luca di Montezemolo say it should squash all those rumors about the 458 Italia Spider.
In the same interview, Montezomolo also announced that anybody who has made orders for the 458 Italia should expect their prized super car to show up on their driveways early next year.
Along with the rest of the automotive industry, the German luxury car builder BMW announced that they are planning to follow a recipe of downsizing and turbo charging their vehicle’s power plants in an attempt to meet the stringent Corporate Average Fuel Economy regulations that have been set forth by the U.S. Government stating that every automaker’s lineup must have an average fuel economy of 35 MPG by 2015. It was at last week’s Frankfurt Motor show that BMW North America CEO, Jim O’Donnell spoke with Automotive News about the automaker’s plans to sell four cylinder equipped vehicles in the U.S. by 2012.
The innovative German automaker sees the use of BMW’s next generation turbocharger technology along with smaller displacement engines as a way of generating output levels on par with today’s engines but with much greater fuel mileage and much less emissions. The CAFE regulations state that automakers must improve the fuel economy of their fleets by 5 percent every year leading up to the national standard of 35.5 MPG for the 2016 model year.
Across the pond, BMW already sells a European 3 Series with a four cylinder power plant under the hood, the automaker’s hope is that America will be just as accepting because they are planning on downsizing the drive trains of the next generation 3 Series as well as the X1 and X3 compact sports activity vehicles. O’Donnell sounds hopeful, saying “we see potentially a significant market that could get to 100,000 four cylinder engines” in the U.S. of course. If everything goes according to the automaker’s plans, then the Germans should be good by the year 2012, three years before the deadline set by Congress. Hopefully that will leave them some time to come up with a true 2002 tii successor.
BMW statement after the jump.
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The crew from Car and Driver spotted the real live BMW Vision EfficientDynamics concept car in front of the BMW Welt Delivery Center in Munich just outside the German based car company’s headquarters a short while ago. Up until now we have only been privy to teasers, renderings and factory stills; but this photo gives the vehicle the sense of being a real car, and that is because it is.
The BMW Vision EfficientDynamics is a 2+2-seater plug-in hybrid model powered by a 1.5 Liter three cylinder turbo diesel engine that produces 163 HP and 214 lb-ft of torque that is combined with two electric motors mated to a DTC gearbox to produce a very efficient sports car. All three power generators work together to deliver a maximum output of 356 HP and a peak 590 lb-ft of torque while fuel consumption is reduced to a very impressive 75.1 MPG. That much economical power allows the BMW Vision EfficientDynamics to sprint from 0 to 60 MPH in just 4.8 seconds and reach top speed of 155 MPH.
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.
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