Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Welcome to 60-0, our new end-of-day roundup post you can find every weekday at 5:00 PM. It'll lasso up all the fast-moving auto stories from around the Internets and drag 'em to a screeching halt right here in one easy-to-find post. Never mind those other car sites — we've got everything you need right here.

60 MPH: How well does a car company have to know its audience of marked men for it to start planning a bulletproof, high-security version while the model's still on the drawing board? Pretty damn well. Audi's new A8 L Security can fend off a grenade tossed under it by a passing rival henchman, keeping the syndicate boss safe while his Ronin get the sedan the hell out of danger post-haste.

50 MPH: No, it's not the Rangie — down-underspeak for Range Rover — it's the Range_e, a diesel, plug-in hybrid prototype the company's bringing to the Geneva motor show. The company's claiming 20 miles on electricity alone, making the Range_e a sort of bourgeois Chevy Volt, with more room for riding crops, horse magazines and stocky girls named Jillian.

40 MPH: First of all, what would an overly demonstrative supercar be without a grandiose name? Definitely not a Savage Rivale Roadyacht GTS. That's the Corvette-powered Dutch model that stormed the Top Marques Monaco show in 2009. Now the company's building a 700-hp GT version, for oil-moneyed, boy-king racers to storm around sand-strewn raceways in dry climes. What? Who else is could it be for?

30 MPH: And speaking of grandiose names, BMW's "Megacity" electric car could come with a feature to combat buyers' issues with range-anxiety. That is, a small ICE (internal combustion eggcrate) that'll charge the lithium-ion battery if a driver strays too far afield. If the rumor is true, it's a backtrack, albeit a practical one, from the pure-EV stance BMW had taken with the carbon-fiber-lightened minicar.

20 MPH: The impending megamillion-dollar stock float of the Williams F1 team won't sway Ferrari to do the same. Back in '10, talk of a Ferrari IPO was all the rage among the finance kids. Now, Ferrari CEO Luca Cordero di Montezemolo says big public-money raising is off the table. Ferrari, keeping all of its strings pulled tight? Can't be true.

10 MPH: Good news in planelopnik, with the USAF ready to take delivery of 20 new F-35s for operational training of the pilots who teach other pilots how to fly them. One major training issue is the joint strike fighters' helmet-mounted display, which gets particularly jittery in night-vision mode. Of course, that's nothing compared to the training needed for the F-35B, which has vertical-landing capability.

0 MPH: And lest we forget, F1 hot-shoe Robert Kubica is still laid up in the hospital, recovering from injuries he sustained in a violent rally crash in Italy earlier this month. Kubica just went through his third, eight-hour surgery to reconstruct his smashed-up elbow. Thankfully, doctors say the procedure was a success, though his return to racing is still a question mark. Get well, Kube.

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