They Hyundai Genesis sedan stole the show last year taking home many automotive journal’s car of the year awards for its ability to blend attractive styling and high end luxury in a resonably priced package. With the scheduled arival of the Equus, Hyundai will now hava a slew of upsclae offerings for new car buyers. Despite the warm reception that the Genesis received last year, a new car only has the ability to make one first impression, so you can expect to see the classic curvilinear shape and signature waterfall grill going through a few restlings as the Genesis ages in order to keep the design fresh and at the forefront of consumer’s consiousness.
This next generation of Hyundai’s flagship sedan was spotted in the deserts of the mid west, most likely undergoing extensive cooling system analysis along with the new Equus. The Genesis is hiding both its nose and rear quarters draped with the traditional black automotive camoflage that makes most spy photographers either jump for joy at the sight of a new car or swear in frustration at not being able to capture what lies beneath. In this case it looks to be a pair of restyled fenders and maybe even a redesigned set of headlights judging by the careful placement of the disguise. However the most interesting feature of this clothed beauty is the black flap in the middle of the grill.
We don’t know about you, but we’re the type who can’t get enough of Ferrari’s new stallion, the 458 Italia. While the car is still a few weeks away from being officially unveiled, the spy shots, renderings, and even videos of the car we’ve seen have done little to satiate our appetite.
But until the Frankfurt Motor Show arrives, we’re just going to have to make do with what we have. That being said, we have another video of the 458! Yipee!
This time, the supercar was seen driving near the Ferrari headquarters when it was captured on video by one Marco Bronzetti. Judging from what our man saw, the 458 Italia – which, by the way, is still camouflaged from the front to the rear - looks primed and ready for its world debut at Frankfurt.
It may be by bits and pieces, but until Frankfurt arrives, we’ll make do with any sort of footage we can get of the 458 Italia.
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.
This Aston Martin Volare is the next evolution of English sports car craftsmanship because not only does it combine a sleek new shape with the Aston Martin’s modern design, but underneath there four electric motors that are being fed go juice by a high power fuel cell stack located between the front seats centrally locating the weight as close to the ground as possible for enhanced performance while outside it looks like someone pushed down on the base of the wind shied of a Vantage, sharpening up the profile before transplanting a set of bold wings from a One-77 onto this innovative Aston Martin design.
If it were chocolate it would be good enough to eat, and it possibly could be because this isn’t the latest concept from Gaydon this a scale model from future automotive design master James Trim, we are referring to the days ahead because Mr. Trim is only a 23 year old recent graduate of Coventry University in England with a degree in Automotive Design and a quick look at his portfolio will quickly tell you that this kid is going places.
It’s an interesting idea that James is showing, creating design concepts specifically tailored for certain manufacturers. As every ten year old boy who ever got bored with a pen in his hand will tell you that it is hard to come up with a good looking design that is truly unique, most often the more memorable cars are shaped out of packaging and aerodynamic necessity something that only develops as the parts come together. But James Trim has a good shot at replacing Chris Bangle with his BMW Z1 roadster design study or even at Audi with his cute little A0 super compact city car, the only thing he would have to do is learn to speak German.
It would appear that Mercedes Benz was trying to rain on Mazda’s parade when a group of slightly camouflaged pulled up in front of the same hotel that the Japanese automaker was keeping journalists on a recent press trip. In a bold act of guerilla marketing, the three AMG SLCs were led into town by a Mercedes Benz SL65 AMG and actually parked themselves in between the exit of the hotel and the busses that Mazda was herding their guests into. It is a surprise that they didn’t pop the hood and hand the keys over to the camera wielding photogs.
According to the German luxury car builder, “For the first time in the company’s history stretching back over 40 years, the Mercedes-Benz performance brand, AMG, is presenting a vehicle developed in-house… the super sports car serves up an exciting proposition with its unique technology package: aluminum space frame body with gull wing doors, AMG 6.3 Liter V8 front-mid engine developing a peak output of 563 HP and 479 lb-ft of torque and dry sump lubrication, seven-speed dual-clutch transmission in a transaxle configuration and sports suspension with aluminum double wishbones.
One of those camera wielding photojournalists who was at the event happened to be our good friend and fellow Southern Automotive Media Association member Mark Elias on the left of the shot, even he couldn’t resist taking a few snapshots of the 195 MPH super car that can do 0 to 60 MPH in about 3.7 seconds.
We travel down under for this latest set of spyshots about what looks to be a batch of freshly rolled out 2010 convertible Camaros.
The photos, which were photographed by a Camaro5 forum member, show a number of soft-top silver Camaros in all their undisguised glory at the GHM Holden’s e Fisherman’s Bend production facility in Melbourne, Australia.
GM has been on thrown on the hot seat by a lot of anxious customers regarding the scheduled release date of the convertible Camaros, a date General Motors has pushed back repeatedly over the past. The Camaro Convertible comes with either a V6 or V8 engine has been one of the most eagerly-anticipated cars in America, so you can imagine the general public’s growing aggravation over the continuous delays GM has been making on the release of these cars.
But we’re confident that whatever frustrations people may have over GM, the mere sight of these mouth-watering Camaros should all appease their anxieties - even for just a bit.
Is it us or is the McLaren P11 supercar making some sort of track-testing world tour?
Days after being spotted in Bahrain doing a few test laps, McLaren’s latest creation was again spotted doing another testing session, this time, at the Nurburgring Nordschleife circuit in Germany.
As was the case in Dubai, the P11 is still wrapped under some – and we’ll be honest – pretty hideous camouflage. Nevertheless, the car is expected to look nothing like the zebra-striped abomination we’ve been seeing for the past couple of months.
We can definitely say for sure that as soon as the covers are lifted; expect the P11 – or whatever its name is going to be – to be nothing short of spectacular.
The Italian automaker, Alfa Romeo is hard at work preparing a factory tuned GTA version for their hottest model at the moment, the carbon fiber constructed 8C. The new car is set to debut sometime next year and will take its inspiration from the classic 1965 Giulia Sprint GTA. The exterior of this particular Alfa Romeo 8C GTA rendering shows how the Italian automakers could go with a touring car style front bumper that incorporates very large air intakes with a very low and a wide front splitter made from what looks like carbon fiber, this setup allows the engine to breathe while keeping the front end planted at high speed. This automotive designer also incorporated a set of larger vents in the front fenders located directly behind the front wheels to continue the functional racing theme started with the nose. However we doubt that when it goes into production that Alfa would choose to slather their logo across the hood like that.
The car will tip the scales at 1,450 kg that is about 150 kg less than the standard 8C Competizione and make use of tuned variant of the high revving 4.7 Liter V8, with this much displacement, the output of the Italian engine will go up to around 500 HP. The additional grunt means that the 8C GTA will be able to make a 0 to 60 MPH sprint in less than 4 seconds, while the top speed will be raised to 200 MPH.
Alfa Romeo is planning to build only 100 units of this particular high performance model, each wearing a price tag of £200,000. That’s about $282,000 here in America, and it’s really not that much when you consider that you a buying a high performance variant of an already outstanding automobile.
Bugatti has long been associated with producing some of the most exclusive cars on the planet so when they release a special edition car, people would want to keep tabs on where it goes.
Recently, one of those ‘one-off vehicles’ Bugatti created – the Bleu Centenaire – was spotted running around the streets of Kensington and by all accounts, still looks as beautiful and as expensive since the first time we saw it at the Geneva Motor Show earlier this year.
While it’s not really a unique Bugatti super car – it’s “just” a special edition Veyron with a two-tone blue matte exterior – the Bleu Centenaire is still extremely unique considering it’s the only one of this kind in the entire world.
We figure that a car of this stature could only be found in the more affluent neighbourhoods in London so spotting it in Kensington – near a Harrod’s no less – doesn’t come as a surprise to us. Maybe the owner was shopping at the store widely considered the most expensive in the world. Well, if he can buy the Bleu Centenaire for $1.7 million, shopping at Harrod’s shouldn’t be a big deal.
The staff of summer inters at TopGear America pulled a fast one on us. Remember the very strange looking Porsche Caymanshooting 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.
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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 
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