The new Buick Regal is back, and the specs read like a laundry list of ways GM could build a car to make people look at Buick again. As the car is based heavily on the Opel Insignia, the Regal wears almost identical styling save the badge on the nose. While the looks do impress, it's what's under the skin that's really getting us interested. The base car gets the 2.4 liter four cylinder with 182 HP and a highway fuel economy of 30 MPG while the uplevel car will have the 2.0 liter direct injected turbocharged four banger which saw previous duty in the Cobalt SS, though tuned to a less hairy 220 HP and still delivering 29 MPG highway. Both mills have a six speed automatic transmission. The turbo model gets something we need to know more about called "Interactive Drive Control System" (IDCS) which allows four different driver-selectable suspension settings.


Inside the Regal borrows heavily from the LaCrosse's playbook, with sweeping lines, dramatic lighting, and rich textures. Seems to be finished with a bit more modern and clean flair then the LaCrosse's traditional luxury bent. We'll be seeing more of the car at the LA Auto Show but until then, check out the video, press release and slew of images.

[Source: GM]

[via Wired]

Grotere kaart weergeven

"These new plates, in the official colors of the State of New York, will help maintain highway safety, reduce the number of unregistered and uninsured vehicles on our roads, and generate $129 million in General Fund revenue over two years, which will help address the State's financial crisis," said State Commissioner of Motor Vehicles David J. Swarts yesterday. It's that $129 million that people are taking issue with.

Where most private owners will only be responsible for one or two cars' worth of $25 fees, small business owners fear the "plate tax" unfairly targets them. It's hard to understand the kerfuffle over a $25 fee, but multiply that by a fleet of, say, 300 vehicles and you begin to understand the objection. An anti-new NY plate site has already sprung up, NoNewPlates.com, where over 57,000 people have already signed a petition opposing the plate's implementation.

Rather than simply representing a permanent increase to registration fees, the new plates are controversial because they're being added as an additional one-off cost for all motorists. Albany is perceived to have manufactured the need for them, suddenly citing visibility concerns with the old plates seemingly out of the blue (and white).

The plates will begin rolling out in March next year, and will be mandatory with all new vehicle registrations and renewals. The state already raised general license and registration fees 25% in September.

The first glance is barely cursory. Engine blocks, after all, are fairly common elements of a certain school of interior design. This one is standing on its end behind a plate of glass on a residential street in downtown Budapest. It’s rather tall, so definitely not a Chevy small block, most likely some sort of straight six from a truck.

Except it’s not. So I double back. And realize a few things in rapid sequence:

1. The block is almost waist-high and I’m 6'2"
2. The block has eight cylinder bores in a W pattern
3. Make that sixteen: there’s another bank of cylinder bores at a 90° angle
4. Is that really a Bugatti logo stamped in the metal?

So I rock back and forth on the sidewalk, trying in vain to bridge the vast chasm between what I see and what I know. Empirically speaking, the object cannot be anything other than a Bugatti Veyron engine: no other car has ever been manufactured with a W16 and engine blocks generally don’t carry the stamped initials of Ettore Bugatti in their metal.

On the other hand, we’re talking about a ludicrously expensive car with perhaps 200 examples in existence. What are the chances of running into the dismembered engine of one in a shop window in Budapest?

I might as well enter the store to find out. The space behind the plate of glass is the headquarters of Geppetto, a Hungarian design studio founded by the Elek brothers in 1996. A man descends the well-designed staircase.

“Is that what I think it is?” I ask, cutting a glance at the engine block.
“It indeed is,” comes the answer.

Wordless shuffling commences. We then strike up a conversation. The guy turns out to be Peter Kucsera, one of the designers employed by Geppetto and creator of the Seeyou Project, a rather beautiful horizontal gravestone made of concrete.

But how does one end up with a Veyron engine?

“We were approached by Bugatti to make something out of their engines which didn’t pass QA,” Peter explains. “So they shipped us a W16 and we came up with some interior design ideas and sent them our proposals. The ball is in their court at the moment.”

We are standing in the middle of Geppetto’s generous studio space, flanking an inconspicuous metal crate which looks like a downsized shipping container. With a mischievous flick, Peter removes an Ikea carpet from the crate’s top. Under a glass cover, the crate is filled with the rest of the engine’s parts. Headers, camshafts, cylinder heads, a single piston, a lone turbo and the giant crankshaft which handles the 1001 HP the engine makes. The surreality of it all never quite fades away.

“The block would make a perfect family crypt for people who prefer cremation,” Peter says, revealing a continued fascination with unusual burial, “although with a big family, the 16 holes would fill up fast.”

I suggest using only one cylinder bore per generation, reserving it for the most deserving member of that generation, thereby stretching the block’s life into the centuries. The block could then remain put, its great heft planting it into the very earth, while the city surrounding it would evolve, the Geppetto office fading away to become a butcher shop, only for that to turn into yet another place of business.

It would certainly make for a killer time lapse video.

“We’ve yet to find the best use for it. For the moment, we’ve decided to install it in the shop window to serve as a conversation piece,” Peter says, adding that it does attract a strange assortment of passersby.

I wave goodbye and return to the November gloom. Should you visit Budapest these days, you’ll find the block at this address. It really is quite a sight.

The very Aristotle Onassis-esque interior was planned as the cherry atop the the $1.5 million Dartz Prombron Monaco Red Diamond Edition, which was ridiculous opulence personified. Amenities which weren't covered in whale penis leather included

• Ruby Red matte paint
• Gold-plated bulletproof windows
• 22" Kremlin Red Star bulletproof wheels
• Tungsten exhaust
• Tungsten and white gold gauges with diamonds and rubies
• White gold diamond and ruby encrusted badges - grill, side and dashboard
• Special edition Vertu mobile phone with "alert" button
• Additional outside kevlar coating
• Rogue Acoustic Audio System.

[Jameslist]

This comes to us from the hallowed halls of Teamspeed, where one of their forum members spotted this sucker at local South African dealer. Just like the headline suggests, the carbon fiber is coated in diamond impregnated resin to give it that ridiculously expensive, ultimate warlord status symbol finish. Imagine the repair bill when your little warlord-in-training crashes his tricycle into it and leaves a nice long scratch. [TeamSpeed]

Name: No, Speed Racer, No

Motto: "To Boldly Slow…Where No Man Has Wanted to Slow Before."

Club Principles: A support group for people with too many points on their license to continue speeding. You probably know the feeling, even if you haven't bumped up against your state's license-pulling limit: The first ticket is almost a non-event, more a speeding tax than a deterrent. By the second, you begin to analyze how, where, and why you haul ass. By the third, you're well and truly paranoid, eyeing overpasses and frantically glancing into the trees. ("The pigeons. They have radar guns." "Honey, they're just birds." "Are you kidding? That's what they want you to think.")

Have six months left before it's safe to flat-foot it? Your next five-over going to get you arrested? Everyone needs a hand to hold on to.

Name: The Zipcar Abstinence Group

Motto: "Keep it Zipped."

Club Principles: Exactly what it sounds like-a club dedicated to stopping people in big cities from using Zipcars for prostitution and random sexual acts. (This happens. Seriously.) Achin' for some on-the-go bacon? Dying for a good old-fashioned game of Hide the Shift Knob, only without the time-consuming cleanup? Sorry, pal—some of us actually use these things to get around in, and nothing ruins the morning traffic slog like the smell of someone else's man-butter. Do the rest of us a favor and stick to your own garage—or at least the nearest bus station.

Name: We Bad

Motto: "You suck. Admit it."

Club Principles: A club for bad drivers who want to improve their skills behind the wheel. Don't worry—this isn't you. It's never you. It's always the other guy, and if he weren't such an asshat, you wouldn't have driven your car over that cliff and into that orphanage and ruined little Timmy's Christmas and now you're in jail and wait until your lawyer sees what you did to that guy with the shiv you made out of that iPod, only seriously, it wasn't your fault…

Name: (No) Love and Theft

Motto: "Steal my car. Please."

Club Principles: A club for people who drive vehicles so desperately crappy that they would literally be better off walking. You may not have been here, but you probably know someone who has. This is for the folks who avoid driving like the plague, the people who hate their cars with a passion. Ford Topaz catch fire on a daily basis? Datsun Honey Bee once give you the Hanta virus? Welcome home. Leave your conscience at home, leave your keys on the table, and leave the building before your insurance company finds out.

Name: Art and Science, My Ass

Motto: "Get off my lawn!"

Club Principles: A club for people who think old-school, front-wheel-drive Cadillacs are just fine, thank you very much, and who don't like the division's current styling direction. There are several thousand of these people, and they all live within a hundred-mile radius of Boca Raton, Florida. Most of them drive a gold-plated DTS and believe the internet to be a compellingly old-fashioned mystery show featuring Angela Lansbury. Which is probably just as well.

At this point, it's not clear why or how this suicide occurred, though the mayor of the town where his business is located said he'd been told by Richard Burd himself that business was good and mentioned they were in the process of replenishing their sold-out stock. It's possible he was just one of the many Americans suffering from depression and the location of this suicide isn't significant. Until the police release a note or details it's all just speculation.

You can see Christine in one of their "Burd Is The Word" commercials below. (Hat tip to Carrew!) [IndyStar]

Photo Credit: MICHELLE PEMBERTON/Indianapolis Star

Like the AK-47 assault rifle and the RPG–7 bazooka, the Toyota pickup truck has become an icon of irregular armies worldwide. When mounted with an anti-aircraft cannon or a rocket laucher on its bed, it is called a technical and technicals have helped militas wage and win war against armies equipped with mechanized divisions. There was even a conflict in 1987 called the Toyota War, in which Chad’s Toyota-equipped troops defeated Muammar al-Gaddafi’s Libyan army.

The practice is not local to Africa. In Afghanistan, it was an influx of Toyota pickups from Pakistan’s ISI spy agency which transformed the Taliban from a Kandahar militia to a force which took over most of Afghanistan with remarkable speed, defeating established mujahideen commanders with decades of experience.

This has nothing to do with good guys, bad guys or tribal affiliations and all to do with the Toyota pickup’s extreme reliability on hostile terrain. You have no doubt seen the famous Top Gear episode where a Toyota Hilux is subjected to every manner of destructive testing short of a thermonuclear explosion yet it keeps on ticking—but you may not have seen this image from 2002, where US Special Forces soldiers ride in a quad cab Toyota identical to the ones used by their Taliban foes:

But all that may be about to change.

The only clue is a few pixels of an illustration which accompanies Seymour Hersh’s latest piece for The New Yorker, where he reports on the safety of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal—or its lack thereof. It was created by the acclaimed French illustrator Guy Billout and if you lean in close, the truck you see the Taliban soldiers riding in is rather striking:

It’s not a Toyota. It’s a quad cab Dodge—a Dakota to my untrained eye, but it could be a Ram as well. This might be an inconsequential detail if the magazine in question was not The New Yorker, famous for their fact checking team. And the truck is definitely not some sort of generic placeholder pickup: it has a Dodge grille.

Cooperation between American companies and the Taliban would not be without historical precedent. Back in 1995 before they conquered Kabul and became host to Al-Qaeda, Unocal executive Marty Miller was involved in negotiations with the Taliban leadership for a natural gas pipeline which was to run from Turkmenistan to Pakistan, straight through Taliban territory. While the deal eventually fell through, Miller visited Kandahar several times and at one point even had Taliban leaders flown to Houston for Christmas, of all holidays.

Perhaps Toyota, with its humbling losses and its exit from Formula One, has gone over the hill—while Chrysler has found itself a particularly lucrative market for trucks, where demand for new vehicles is guaranteed not by rebates but by American firepower. And nobody likes to stick with a loser. Least of all the Taliban.

Photo Credit: SAEED KHAN/AFP/Getty Images, TERENCE WHITE/AFP/Getty Images, Paula Bronstein/Getty Images, Guy Billout, EMMANUEL DUNAND/AFP/Getty Images, U.S. Air Force

The line between awesome and obnoxious is a fine one, but these ten vehicles (and a bonus!) end up on the wrong side of it. We'll just take a long-wheelbase Executive Town Car, thanks.

Started Life As: An Excalibur
Turned Into: A neo-classical car that's even worse to drive
Appropriate For: A wedding officiated by a Rodney Dangerfield impersonator.
Suggested By: Maymar

Started Life As: Hummer H2
Turned Into: A Yellow Tiger-Print Monstrosity
Appropriate For: A nightmare trip to the Zoo.
Suggested By: Jagvar

Started Life As: Lamborghini Countach (we think) or a Fiero!
Turned Into: None of the privacy of a limo or the handling of a Ferrari... complete with a built-in jacuzzi full of crabs!
Appropriate For: Taking your friends to a White Snake reunion tour.
Suggested By: AtlasFugged

Photo Credit: LosAngelesExoticLimos

Started Life As: Some sort of boring Ukranian car
Turned Into: The visual approximation of Viktor Yushchenko's face.
Appropriate For: Celebrating your victory over taste, Russian-backed political parties.
Suggested By: Buster Brew

Started Life As: Ferrari 360
Turned Into: A waste of one Ferrari and about $1,000 an hour
Appropriate For: Marrying someone who wears Ferrari team shirts but actually drives a Ford Escort.
Suggested By: Scandanavian Flick

Started Life As: Toyota Prius
Turned Into: A rolling monstrosity that takes up a lot of space on the road, uses more gas, and is a waste of six doors since we can't imagine six people getting into it.
Appropriate For: Taking an Angry Green Girl to the Teen Choice Awards.
Suggested By: Oddfish

Started Life As: Mini Cooper
Turned Into: A waste of over 1,000,000 swarvoski crystal
Appropriate For: Princess Regina of Kazakstan, who is driven around in it.
Suggested By: Sharkd

Started Life As: PT Cruiser
Turned Into: It's definitely pink
Appropriate For: A 15th birthday party in Hello Kitty hell
Suggested By: K5ING

Photo Credit: Limofan.net

Started Life As: A Pontiac Grand Prix
Turned Into: Something actually worse than a Pontiac Grand Prix
Appropriate For: A NASCAR-themed funeral
Suggested By: Firepwr

Started Life As: Cadillac EXT
Turned Into: A giant limo with a tiny bed
Appropriate For: Going to homecoming... with your cousin.

BONUS LIMO
Started Life As: A DeLorean DMC
Turned Into: A stretched DeLorean Limo, which is either obnoxious or awesome, we can't tell the difference right now.
Appropriate For: Marrying Elizabeth Shue
Suggested By: TheCharles411

FIRST IMAGES OF THE ALL-NEW VOLVO S60 – SCULPTED TO MOVE YOU

Here are the first official pictures of the all-new Volvo S60 – sportier and more dynamic than any previous Volvo car.
"The all-new Volvo S60 is sculpted to move you. It looks and drives like no other Volvo before and the car's technology will help you to be safer and more confident behind the wheel," says Stephen Odell, President and CEO at Volvo Cars.
The Volvo S60 can be equipped with Pedestrian Detection – a groundbreaking safety feature that can detect pedestrians in front of the car and brake automatically if the driver doesn't react in time.
The all-new Volvo S60 will be unveiled at the Geneva Motor Show in the beginning of March next year. Production of the sporty saloon will start early summer 2010 at Volvo Cars' plant in Gent, Belgium.
"The customers in this segment want emotional appeal, sporty design and dynamic driving properties. The S60 has it all. We are convinced that it will be one of the strongest contenders around," says Stephen Odell.

BMW plans to officially unveil the more 7 Series-like 2011 5 Series at 2 PM EST / 11 AM PST on November 23. For the moment, however, we're left with the plethora of spy photos and this much-less-revealing but very artistic side profile teaser of the new 5 Series. So how'd they BMW make it?

Easy. BMW designers made use of their kinetic sculpture exhibit located at the automaker's Museum in Munich. Take a look at the artsy-fartsy video below:

This information can be heavily qualified because this is only through the first three quarters of the year and comes after Toyota drastically cut back on production in the first half while Volkswagen took advantage of cash-for-clunkers schemes and other government support for its vehicles in markets like China.

But none of that changes the fact that Volkswagen has quickly passed Toyota and GM at the top of the heap. We'll see if it lasts all year and, hopefully, if it works out any better for them. [The Guardian]

Photo Credit: Matt Cardy/Getty Images

Before we go any further, let's make one thing clear: When I say "sideways," I mean sideways. What we have here is some unhinged, prescription-strength, industrial-grade madness. And the cars—bone-stock Evolution Xs—do it happily, and they ask (beg, plead, pray) for you to keep it up, and all four tires burn like the Cuyahoga while you dance the dance of a thousand rally stars. If you listen closely, you can hear Tommi Mäkinen laughing.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

For the most part, one-day driving schools are not the stuff of legend. You show up, you take a class, you play on a skid pad, and you go home. This is not what happens at the one-day Evolution Experience. Mitsubishi Motors and Russell are well aware of the Evo X's strengths, and as such, the Evo school's curriculum was designed to highlight the car's killer chassis and all-wheel-drive system. Over the course of eight hours, you become intimately familiar with both the laws of physics and the Evo's staggeringly talented rear differential. You also spend most of your time leading with your taillights.

If the whole process sounds boring, then you're either the type of person who gets carsick in the parking lot at church or you have no soul. The school's exercises are spread across two large skid pads and all of Infineon Raceway's 2.5-mile track; the program is aimed at drivers of modest skill, but the ass-out exposure to one of the best all-wheel-drive production cars on the planet should be enough to draw more experienced 'shoes. As with most Russell programs, the emphasis is on tailored instruction and at-your-own-pace improvement; the school's instructors are happy to vary their teaching style based on student skill and need. Counterintuitive lessons abound—the Evo's unique all-wheel-drive system and active rear diff ensure that a lot of old-school techniques don't apply, and you can find yourself at minimum yaw if you try and go with your instincts. (A tip: Countersteer less, throw the car around more. And don't be afraid to throw it hard.)

All told, the Russell program isn't so much driving school as treatise on the Evo's genius—by showing ordinary folk the ins and outs of sliding a rally rocket on dry pavement, it merely reinforces the Lancer's formidable legend. At $1000 tuition, is it a bit too expensive for what you get? Probably. Is the whole production simply an elaborate advertisement for the most capable Mitsubishi ever built? Of course. Does that make it any less worthwhile? Not in the slightest.

The details: Jim Russell Racing Driver's School. Infineon Raceway, Sonoma, California. One thousand ($1000) dollars tuition per driver. www.jimrussellusa.com.

My name is Sam Smith. How did I get here? Why is my brain so fried? What the hell was I doing with a garbage bag full of candy in my house yesterday, and how did I manage to go through all of it in one sitting? What does a titanic sugar crash feel like on no sleep whatsoever? More important, which YouTube videos did I watch, and were they any good?

Some answers:

1. Me: I'm a writer. Always have been, always will be, always wanted to be. By way of illustration, I have four memories of my life before the age of six. Two of them involve weird old British cars, one has me sticking a piece of chocolate-chip cookie up my nose in the back seat of a BMW 2002, and one centers around being told to "put that lousy book away and pay attention" during first-grade math. (Predictably, I cannot balance my checkbook but possess an extensive library of vintage car books.) Five years later, I discovered Peter Egan, Gay Talese, and Ayrton Senna, and my life changed forever.

2. Candy Overdose and Sleep Dep: It feels like the music of Warren Zevon, were the music of Warren Zevon wrapped around a gold brick, attached to the front of a speeding fire truck, and hosed down with the juice of a hundred lemons. Then the sugar wears off and you want to die. (The sensations are similar, but your teeth ache and the whole world smells like Lemon Pledge.) Oddly enough, a good long week of margaritas seems to accomplish the same thing.

3. The videos: Yes, the videos rocked. (Try searching for "Ari Vatanen Climb Dance," but don't do it if you've got someplace to be.)

My road here was a long and twisted one. I've done time as an Alfa Romeo mechanic, helped edit a major car magazine in southeast Michigan (Sam's talking about Automobile Magazine. — Ed.), and held an amateur racing license for most of the past decade. I live in San Francisco but grew up in the Midwest, which means that I miss driving in the snow and occasionally freak out when I can't find good barbecue. I have an unhealthy attachment to rally racing, weird old motorcycles, German film cameras, and the BMW E30 M3. I learned to drive in a car with a crash gearbox, and I love the smell of bourbon. I have a tendency to pay for things in nickels, but I hate change.

I'm happy to be here. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go take a nap.

Photo Credit: Andrew Yeadon/Automobile Magazine

While a production date has not been set, the Converj will join the Caddy lineup as its second hybrid following the Escalade, though it'll be considerably more serious about fuel mileage than that behemoth. With a 40-mile all-electric range just like the Volt, the Converj will be able to command a higher premium at the dealer, or at least not induce the sticker shock everyone has over the Volt. The entire Volt program now makes a lot more sense to us financially. [Detroit News]

I'm not a huge energy drink imbiber, so when the giant NOS box with a canister-like blue bottle and ugly t-shirt showed up I turned to the one place I was sure to find numerous caffeine addicts: a political field office. The job of a field organizer on a political campaign is to identify every potential voter within a given geography and then turn them out on election day.

It involves long days of knocking down doors/making calls and longer nights of entering the information into database. Therefore, it involves drinking a shit ton of caffeine at every turn. I selected Cameron as my victim tester because he exclaimed "Oh, I've never tried that one."

Because it wouldn't be a real review unless I actually tried it, I warmed up with my palette with an appropriate amuse bouche (a Shipley's Bulls Eye Do Nut, which is a yeast donut filled with creme, topped with chocolate, and then topped with whipped creme). Pouring the NOS into a white cup you get to see what you're drinking and it's pretty clear why they've done all they can to disguise it with an opaque bottle.

It looks like radioactive piss.

Fortunately, it tastes better than I can remember radioactive piss tasting (ahh... college). It's clearly citrus-based, sort of a Fresca meets Mountain Dew with an undeniable hint of Flintstone's chewable vitamin you get in any drink that's got a high Taurine content. Cameron rates it a 7/10 but I could really give a shit what he thinks about how it tastes. He's here for one reason: to see how long before he can enter data before the crash.

He downs the drink at around 8:00 pm and we're making bets on just how far he can make it while entering voter IDs into the voter database — a job about as interesting as watching flies fuck. My guess was the witch's brew of taurine, inositol, ginseng, B vitamins, and L-Carnitine (whatever that is) would keep him juiced for a couple of hours before the inevitable crash.

Having ingested only donuts but also involved in boring labor, I worked as the lame control group and decided to check in every 30 minutes. Through the first couple of hours there was no discernible crash and he continued on with an extra bit of zest. Unfortunately, having not ingested an energy drink I wasn't able to stay up long enough to track just how long Cameron went before passing out — but he claims 2 AM, which isn't bad.

Overall, it's not the worst tasting energy drink. it's certainly better than Monster but not quite as refreshing as Bawls. In terms of energy it does the trick, providing about four hours before a crash. The t-shirt I got with it wasn't great, but Cameron was happy to take it off my hands as a reward for his work. And the packaging works if you're mostly an idiot, and I'm guessing mostly-an-idiot is going to be the demo buying this.