EPA Filing Reveals Tesla Model 3 Long Range Horsepower http://ift.tt/2wCfhM1
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Monday, August 7, 2017
Rare Ferrari Sergio Hits Market with $5.1 Million Price Tag...
Rare Ferrari Sergio Hits Market with $5.1 Million Price Tag http://ift.tt/2ujcJ4F
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Genesis Virtual Guide Brings Augmented Reality to the Owner’s...
Genesis Virtual Guide Brings Augmented Reality to the Owner’s Manual http://ift.tt/2fnypds
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Sunday, August 6, 2017
Saturday, August 5, 2017
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A More Powerful Car is Not Always a Better One
My British wife enjoys living in America but she’s also properly cynical about many aspects of our over-the-top society. I’m regularly reminded by my lovely bride that more isn’t always better—many times it’s simply more. In the world of cars, the ever-increasing horsepower of each new version has no international boundaries. No matter what country an automobile originates from, the latest generation usually carries more power. I don’t believe that needs to be the case.
My dad’s old 1983 Volkswagen Rabbit GTI only had 90 hp. I had my first proper go in the wonderful hot hatch as a drivers permit-carrying 15-year old. The black two-door felt fast and was wicked fun. The old man smartly sold the VW before I obtained my driver’s license, as I likely would have killed myself if I had daily access. But by today’s standards, the small hatchback was terribly slow. I drove one recently—how did I ever think it was fast? A big part of that surprising sensation is surely because today’s average sedan and SUV—even pickup truck—carries Rabbit GTI-annihilating speed and power.
Contrast that with the Four Seasons 2017 BMW M2, which is currently in my possession. I’m consistently blown away by what an insanely fast car it is—and it’s the company’s entry level M car. The dual-clutch gearbox adds to this sensation, making the small German coupe faster than the manual version. But does the M2 actually need to be that fast? I’d argue that BMW would be better off concentrating on reducing weight and offering a more focused and pure driving experience.
Supercar manufacturers are in the same boat. A friend of mine owns an early McLaren MP4-12C. I’ve driven the car many times and had some further seat time recently. To be honest, nobody needs a car faster than an MP4-12C. Its 616-hp engine never, ever stops pulling and I saw maximum velocity numbers at Grattan Raceway that I’ve never seen in other cars. And that early modern McLaren is a dinosaur in the evolution of cars—it’s the same age as an iPhone 4S.
The 650S replaced the MP4-12C and now there’s the new 720S. You can’t tell me that the majority of owners come remotely close to exploiting the full potential of the their daily-driver SUV or sedan let alone their crazy-fast McLaren. But like sex, horsepower sells and it’s rather tricky to market a new automobile to the upper crust if the latest model carries less output.
One possible alternative that still feeds the marketing department animal is the lap time. What the stopwatch displays at the famed north loop of the Nurburgring—the Nordschleife—is a benchmark that car geeks like to follow and manufacturers love to brag about. The updated 2018 Porsche 911 GT3 only carries 25 more horsepower than the outgoing rear-engined two seater yet its ‘Ring time of 7:12.7 is a rather impressive 12.3 seconds shorter. Remember that the ‘Ring is a daunting 12.9-miles around. But does that actually translate into something for the end user—the buyer?
There is no doubt development at the undulating German circuit is helpful but I’m not so sure the ultimate lap time is that important now that most performance cars have gotten so insanely quick. Yes, maybe it makes sense for track-rat cars like the 911 GT3 RS due to their extremely focused nature and the particular type of buyer, but I’d argue that the typical buyer of the GT3 changed with the arrival of the speed-enhancing PDK dual-clutch gearbox in 2013. It widened the appeal of the 911 GT3 to other less-hardcore buyers even though it’s much quicker around a circuit than the old manual versions.
I actually love that Porsche is offering the choice of the PDK or a 6-speed manual on the updated 2018 911 GT3, not that it’s a sound financial decision to go the row-your-own route. The 500-hp, naturally aspirated GT3 comes standard with the more sophisticated PDK. If you want to sacrifice speed, efficiency, and lap times, you can tick the box on your order form for the manual gearbox but you save no money. That doesn’t bother me at all and I wouldn’t buy the car any other way—Porsche understands there’s a market for people who care more about fun and involvement than the outright lap times. There is clearly hope for this world.
The manual gearbox option is only a baby step. Let’s just hope Porsche keeps building the 911 GT3 without the need to bump the horsepower each time a new version arrives. They’ll likely have to turn to turbocharging if the power creep continues and anybody with a brain doesn’t want that to happen. There are few more visceral experiences than revving Porsche’s flat-six engine to 9000 rpm.
Certain ego-centric buyers will always carry the ‘bigger is better’ mindset. They can’t remotely wrap their head around the fact that the Corvette Grand Sport is a better car than a Corvette Z06 or that the Mustang Boss 302 was far more fun and better balanced than the Shelby GT500. I sincerely hope the next generation of car geeks understand what makes cars great and helps foster a strong market for pure, focused driving machines. Plus, it’s always nice to reinforce that my wife was right all along.
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Friday, August 4, 2017
Mazda Japan Launches Program That Makes NA Miatas New Again...
Mazda Japan Launches Program That Makes NA Miatas New Again http://ift.tt/2fga1dK
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Toyota and Mazda to Build Vehicles in New U.S. Assembly Plant...
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Dream Theater: Subaru’s Nurburgring Record
Last month, Subaru took its Prodrive-tuned rally/touring car monster, the WRX STI Type RA NBR Special, to the most notorious race track in the world, Germany’s Nurburgring Nordschleife. There, the 600 horsepower Subaru, in the hands of professional race car driver Richie Stanaway, lapped the Green Hell in just 6:57.5, a record beating countless supercars worth ten times the Subaru’s meager starting price. And now we have video of Stanaway’s insane lap.
While the video itself isn’t the in-car footage we’ve come to expect from these Nurburgring lap record videos, it does give us a glimpse of what the car was doing outside the cabin. There are moments when the car leaves the tarmac or only has two wheels touching the ground while the other two in the air, and a few shots of the DRS-like rear wing folding up or straightening out for either increased downforce or top speed.
One thing is clear throughout the entire video, however: Stanaway was absolutely pushing the WRX STI Type RA NBR Special to the ragged edge of adhesion.
As mentioned above, the car was built by Prodrive and setup the time-attack race car with a rally spec 2.0-liter Boxer engine that sends 600 horsepower to Subaru’s Symmetrical All-Wheel Drive system. Internals were fortified and the turbocharger now runs an insane 25 psi of boost and while the engine revs to 8,500 rpm. Prodrive also installed a full FIA roll cage, a World Rally Championship gearbox, 9-inch-wide Dunlop tires festooned on Speed Line wheels, and an aero package that creates nearly 650 pounds of extra downforce at top speed, which has been upped to 179 mph.
The 6:57.5 record beats cars well-above the Subaru’s weight class, beating cars like the Mercedes-AMG GT R, Dodge’s Viper ACR, the 911 GT3, and tied with Porsche’s million-dollar hybrid 918 Spyder hypercar. Check out the footage below.
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Our Four Seasons 2017 Jaguar F-Pace S Hits the Test Track...
Our Four Seasons 2017 Jaguar F-Pace S Hits the Test Track http://ift.tt/2ubD9JU
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A Primer on the 2017 Rolex Monterey Motorsports Reunion
There’s nothing sadder than seeing a vintage racecar, built to be seen and heard, collecting dust, wasting away in someone’s garage or in a museum. But far too often, these collectible automobiles are stowed away, pushed into a hermetically sealed garaged, and left to rot. Not so with the cars that race at the annual Rolex Monterey Motorsports Reunion at Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca.
The Reunion allows for almost every class of vintage racecar to come and race head-to-head on the historic pavement of Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca. And it seems that each year, entrants get better and better. 2017 is no different, with the list of entrants including a 1958 Lister Knobbly, Mazda 767b, 1973 Porsche 911 RSR, and a handful of pre-war cars including a Bugatti Type 51 and an Alfa Romeo 8C.
Taking place during the Monterey Car Week, which is headlined by the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance, the Motorsports Reunion is where you’ll actually be able to see these precious metallic machinations be driven in anger, likely for the first time in decades. The Reunion is also where you’ll be able to rub shoulders with celebrities like Jay Leno, Patrick Dempsey, and Keanu Reeves, as well as billionaires and a host of famous racing drivers such as Walter Rohl and Sir Stirling Moss.
The 2017 Rolex Monterey Motorsports Reunion kicks-off Wednesday August 16th with an orientation and group photo that will see every car on the field come together. Racing, however, begins on Thursday morning with first practice and qualifying. Scroll down for the weekend’s schedule, or click here for a more detailed version of the race schedule.
Thursday, August 17-Practice/Qualifying for All Classes
Friday, August 18- Practice/Qualifying for All Classes
Saturday, August 19- First Race Day
Pre-1940 Sports Racing and Touring Cars
1927-1951 Racing Cars
1955-1961 Sports Racing over 2,000cc
1973-1981 FIA, IMSA, GT, GTX, AAGT
1947-1955 Sports Racing and GT Cars
1970-1984 Sports Racing under 2,100cc
1963-1973 FIA Manufacturers Championship
1981-1991 IMSA GTP
Sunday, August 20-Second Race Day
1955-1962 GT Cars
1958-1960 Formula Junior-Front Engine & Drum Brakes
1961-1966 GT Cars under 2,500cc
1963-1966 GT Cars over 2,500cc
1961-1963 Formula Junior-disc brakes
1955-1961 Sports Racing under 2,000cc
1973-1991 IMSA GTU, GTO/Trans-Am
1955-1962 GT Cars
1958-1960 Formula Junior-Front Engine & Drum Brakes
1961-1966 GT Cars under 2,500cc
1963-1966 GT Cars over 2,500cc
1961-1963 Formula Junior-disc brakes
1955-1961 Sports Racing under 2,000cc
1973-1991 IMSA GTU, GTO/Trans-Am
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Thursday, August 3, 2017
Just Listed: Jamiroquai Front Man’s “Cosmic” Lamborghini Diablo...
Just Listed: Jamiroquai Front Man’s “Cosmic” Lamborghini Diablo SE30 http://ift.tt/2wc3NQ6
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First Ride With Cadillac’s Super Cruise
MILFORD, Michigan – Audi has a suite of self-driving features ready to go on its 2019 A8, although it remains unclear whether either North America or the European Union will allow it on the roads quite yet. Tesla’s Autopilot came quickly with a number of advancements a couple of years ago, though some features, including hands-free driving were removed by software update after some YouTube videos showed owners “driving” from the front passenger seat.
Because Tesla brought those features to market without the kind of belt-and-suspenders safety regimen that every mainstream, traditional automaker has been practicing for about half a century, Cadillac is ready to take the lead on self-driving car development. The General Motors luxury brand’s new Super Cruise is set to become the most advanced semi-autonomous technology on U.S. and Canadian roads if none of the above changes.
Super Cruise becomes standard on the 2018 Cadillac CT6 Platinum, and optional as part of a safety package that builds on such features as intelligent cruise control, on the CT6 Platinum Luxury, this fall. Cadillac says start-of-production of the ’18 CT6 is about one month away, so figure Tesla, Mercedes, Volvo et. al. (the ’19 Audi A8 can’t be a model year-’19 until January) have until the end of September before the first examples are on dealer showrooms.
Super Cruise will let Cadillac CT6 drivers pilot their new cars hands-off so long as conditions are right and the system can find the middle of the car’s lane, on about 160,000 miles of limited-access highway in the U.S. and Canada, mapped by GM and its high-definition mapping partner, Geo Digital. The system consists of front cameras, a map database in back, and a high-precision GPS developed with GM partner Trimble, which can pinpoint the car’s location to within two meters. Conventional GPSes are no more accurate than four meters, GM says.
“The driver is always in control,” chief engineer Barry Walkup says, which is unlike Volvo, whose Drive Me test program lets XC90 drivers read, eat breakfast or even nap. Volvo remains the only automaker to claim responsibility for any of its vehicles involved in an accident while operated by its autonomous systems, but the Drive Me test program is being conducted with 100 Volvo XC90s on just 50 kilometers (31 miles) of limited-access highway in Gothenburg, Sweden, which, I am told, doesn’t get much snow.
Super Cruise is easy to operate, if you’re familiar with ICC and lane-keep assist, or any of a number of variants of such technology from the past half-decade. Enter a freeway, center in your lane and wait for the Super Cruise steering wheel icon to appear on the dash. When the icon appears, press the system’s button on the steering wheel and the dash icon (which frankly, takes your eyes off the road to find it) goes green. You won’t miss the green LED along the top of the steering wheel rim, which also confirms Super Cruise mode. You may take your hands off the wheel for as long as the system is “green,” and at speeds up to 85 mph.
You can “drive” like this for miles, even, potentially across states for as long as there’s gas in the tank. But if you want to pass or change lanes for any reason, you must grab the steering wheel. If you touch the brakes, you’ll disengage the system, just like any standard cruise control, but if you give it more throttle to pass, just like any cruise control, Super Cruise will resume its original settings, once you’ve centered in the lane again. Super Cruise can slow the Cadillac down in tight freeway curves, such as those found in the American and Canadian Rockies.
The steering wheel LED goes from green to flashing-blue while you’re changing lanes or speeding up by overriding the ICC. Manual lane changing and speeding up back up Cadillac’s position that the human driver always is in control of the Cadillac.
“This is hands-free, but the driver is supervising the vehicle,” says Pam Fletcher, GM’s executive chief engineer for autonomous and electrified vehicles.
Red lights drive that point home. Super Cruise incorporates a GM-proprietary “driver attention system” that makes sure your eyes are on the road, even though your hands don’t need to be on the wheel. Take your eyes away for a long time, say to talk to the person in one of the passenger seats, or to jab at the touch-screen buttons on the CUE infotainment program and eventually the steering wheel LED and the dash display steering wheel icon go red.
How long does this take? Depends on the car’s speed, but if you don’t move your eyes back to the road, you get an audio warning and a haptic warning in the seat. Still not moved? The system eventually slows the car, then to a full stop in its lane, locking out Super Cruise for the key cycle. You must turn off the ignition and restart it to use Super Cruise again.
I tried to trigger the red light during my drive, by looking directly at Cadillac executive chief engineer Brandon Vivian, who was in the front-passenger seat. I could not get it to go red. I couldn’t take the idea of looking away from the road while traveling at 70 mph for that long, so I guess it works.
Will Super Cruise allow Cadillac owners to drive, or supervise, longer in a given day, I asked? Perhaps drivers will go for 10 hours instead of six, though I’m sure most CT6 owners won’t drive more than 200 miles before jumping on an airliner or private jet.
Super Cruise will allow its human drivers to arrive fresh for a business meeting or various arbitrage, Vivian told me. Well, he didn’t mention the arbitrage, but you get the idea.
We didn’t bring up the obvious: that Super Cruise also will make it safe for drivers to make calls and text on their smartphones, so long as their eyes are pointed toward the road. Cadillac would tell you to use the CT6’s Apple CarPlay or Android Auto instead, but the idea’s the same. Super Cruise will let you safely concentrate on that call to your broker while keeping you in the middle of the road without tapping the brakes every 500 feet.
Yes, you could have this level of hands-free control, more or less, in a Tesla Model S circa 2015, but as several of its less-intelligent owners proved with YouTube videos, Tesla’s system wasn’t well-tested. Super Cruise’s Driver Attention System makes it impossible, Cadillac says, to put your dog behind the wheel while you sit in the front passenger seat taking a selfie.
Cadillac first announced Super Cruise in 2012, and it was expected to launch in the ill-fated ELR extended-range electric. Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced Autopilot in 2014, added it in 2015, and has since retrenched a bit, though he plans to amp it back up with a cross-country autonomous drive by the end of this year. For now, you have to keep your hands lightly on the wheel for the Tesla system to work.
But by taking its time, and mapping out 160,000 miles of U.S. and Canadian highways, Cadillac seems to have a much more robust system, far less prone to driver errors or hooning than Tesla’s Autopilot. Thus, Cadillac stands as the leader of this technology, to-date.
Price hasn’t been announced, though Barry Walkup told me at the New York International Auto Show last Spring that it would be part of a $2,500 “safety” technology package. The 2017 Cadillac CT6 Platinum has a base list price of $84,790, and it remains to be seen whether the ’18 model’s price goes up to absorb the Super Cruise cost. The CT6 Premium Luxury starts at $54,890. I suspect that when pricing for the ’18 models come in, the option price on the Premium Luxury will be somewhat higher than the $2,500 mentioned earlier this year.
Cadillac plans to add Super Cruise to the Chinese-market option list some time in the future (mapping that country should take a bit longer than five years). If it proves successful in moving autonomous technology forward, Super Cruise will quickly trickle down into Buicks, GMCs and Chevrolets.
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Tesla Posts Record Loss in Q2 2017, but Still Beats Analyst...
Tesla Posts Record Loss in Q2 2017, but Still Beats Analyst Expectations http://ift.tt/2wpYz2l
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Wednesday, August 2, 2017
2018 Nissan Pathfinder’s Rear Door Alert Reminds You That You...
2018 Nissan Pathfinder’s Rear Door Alert Reminds You That You Used the Back Seat http://ift.tt/2ulwWGi
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2018 Nissan Pathfinder’s Rear Door Alert Reminds You That You Used the Back Seat
We’ve all heard enough horror stories of people leaving their kids or pets in the back seat of a hot car. To help prevent further tragedies, and lesser incidents like forgetting food or your gym bag, Nissan is adding a special alert feature to the 2018 Pathfinder.
Rear Door Alert keeps track of when the rear doors have been opened or closed prior to and after a trip. If it detects the rear doors were opened and closed before the trip but not re-opened after the trip, it displays a warning in the instrument panel. Later, the system uses a series of distinctive horn honks once the driver walks away from the vehicle.
The idea of reminding drivers to check the back seat isn’t new. On a host of GM models, a Rear Seat Reminder sounds a chime and displays a message in the instrument cluster to make sure drivers don’t leave something in the back of the car. But Nissan says the honking makes its feature unique from others.
“The Rear Door Alert uses a similar honking cue that has been proven successful with Nissan’s Easy Fill Tire Alert,” said Elsa Foley, one of the Nissan engineers behind the alert system. “By drawing your attention back to the vehicle, once you’ve walked away, you are more likely to recheck the back seat than with a visual alert alone.”
By scrolling through vehicle settings on the instrument panel, drivers can deactivate the horn portion of the alert or turn off the Rear Door Alert feature altogether if they choose.
Rear Door Alert will arrive as a standard feature on the 2018 Pathfinder when it goes on sale in September. Since the three-row SUV was significantly revised last year, only a few other changes are expected for 2018. Along with the new alert feature, the Pathfinder also receives standard automatic emergency braking, a new Midnight Edition appearance package, and two new exterior colors including Scarlet Ember and Midnight Pine. Intelligent Cruise Control and NissanConnectSM with Navigation and Services, previously only standard on the Platinum grade, are now standard on the lower SL grade.
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Aston Martin Poaches Maserati Powertrain Chief Joerg Ross...
Aston Martin Poaches Maserati Powertrain Chief Joerg Ross http://ift.tt/2u1t1iO
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