Oscar Piastri is officially a McLaren F1 driver. After all the contract drama with Alpine heading into the summer break, a four-person Contract Recognition Board unanimously ruled in McLaren and Oscar Piastri's favor. Soon after, McLaren confirmed Piastri on a multi-year deal.
The Circuit of the Americas was the location to crown the Champion of the 2022 Spec MX-5 Challenge Series Presented by Toyo Tires – a race weekend which had no shortage of stories to showcase
Volkswagen unveiled its newest concept hybrid vehicle at the Detroit Auto Show this morning. Cleverly, it’s called the New Compact Coupe.
If you’re sitting behind the wheel of a base Camry sedan or Sequoia SUV, you may be hard pressed to believe that Toyota has a far-reaching vision for the future of transportation. It does. Really.
If there’s one car that really speaks to our enthusiast hearts at this year’s Detroit Auto Show, it’s the Buick Regal GS. And while General Motors is technically calling this a show car, we’re pretty much going to assume that it’ll be hitting dealerships within the next year.
The Hyundai Blue-Will, while only a concept, looks to rival the Toyota Prius and Chevrolet Volt when it hits the streets in production form. The details on this funky concept are pretty impressive — being able to net up to 55 miles per gallon in its combined EV and internal combustion forms.
This morning, GMC unveiled its new small car offering, the Granite concept. The little urban cruiser is about two feet shorter than the smallish Terrain, and is a whole new style of thinking for the GMC brand.
We just snapped these photos on the show floor of Cobo Arena of the 2012 Ford Focus. She’s a real looker, wouldn’t you say?
It’s no secret that the Ford Motor Company has been putting out some rather good products as of late, especially throughout 2009. All this hard work has paid off, too — the Ford Fusion Hybrid and Transit Connect have just been named North American Car and Truck Of The Year.
Based on the Chevrolet Orlando platform, the Granite features rear-hinged rear doors with no B-pillar, making it extremely easy to load people and things inside of the useful little vehicle. The overall interior design is very open and airy, but is still very functional. This meshes well with the angular, edgy exterior lines, finished off nicely with LED lighting and twenty-inch wheels.
Visually, the new Focus is a huge departure from the not-so-pretty coupe and sedan currently found on our roads. Ford’s kinetic design language is in full effect here, and we can easily spot some styling cues from the Iosis Max concept which debuted at the 2009 Geneva Motor Show last March. And rejoice, all—Ford will bring the five-door hatchback Focus to America, as well as a sedan. A wise choice, since many consumers were unhappy when Ford ditched the three- and five-door hatches in favor of a less useful, two-door coupe.
The Alpina package starts with a reworked version of the 750i’s well-liked 4.4-liter, twin-turbocharged V-8. Power has been increased to 500 horsepower and 516 pound-feet of torque (gains of 100 and 66, respectively), and runs to 60 miles per hour will happen in a mere 4.5 seconds. That’s fast, especially for a 7-Series.
We have a confession to make: In its current form, the Chevrolet Aveo has been the butt of many a joke within the automotive industry. It isn’t nearly as good as anything else in the class, and in a time when more focus is being put on B- and C-segment cars, General Motors really disappointed with its smallest offering. But a new version is on the horizon. And judging by the preliminary information about the Aveo RS show car (which will appear next week at the Detroit Auto Show), drastic changes are in the works.
The fact that General Motors is finally bringing over the new Opel Insignia (Buick Regal) to the States makes us very happy campers. And now, knowing that a Regal GS is in the works, our interest is more piqued than ever. But hold on just a minute — while the GS might look like an all-American version of the Insignia OPC, it’s been diffused just slightly for Yankee consumption.
India’s popular minicar, and the world’s least expensive car, the Tata Nano, will be heading to the U.S.in 2012, according to the company chief, Ratan Tata. The announcement came at the New Delhi Auto Expo, where Tata said the car is undergoing changes to meet U.S. guidelines for crash safety.
Ford’s SYNC system was a huge step forward for the automaker, showing that the Blue Oval folks are serious about making sure that the cars rolling off their assembly lines have the best, most up-to-date technology available. Now, Ford debuts the all-new MyFord Touch system (see also: MyMercury Touch, MyLincoln Touch), which will be implemented into 2011 model year vehicles like the next-generation Ford Focus and the refreshed Lincoln MKX (both of which will make appearances at the Detroit Auto Show).
We have just received the cover art for the upcoming PS3 title, Gran Turismo 5. We’re happy to see our favorite new gullwing, the Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG on the cover.
The Noble M12 is, in a word, superb, but we haven’t seen the last of Lee Noble’s supercar creations. These new teaser images are the first renderings of an all-new supercar, set to start development next month in South Africa.
The BMW 3-Series is one of the most well-known vehicles in the enthusiast market, and with each new generation, BMW knows that it has to be relatively subtle with the overall tweaks, keeping the whole goodness of the 3-Series in tact.
Honda has revealed a new small concept car, cleverly named the Honda New Small Concept, at the New Delhi Auto Expo. It is a compact, five-door commuter, which Honda intends to sell in India and Thailand beginning in 2011.
While the tagline of “The Caddy That Zigs” may not have worked too well for the all-but-forgotten Catera sedan from the late 1990s, we think it will be a very appropriate description for this hot little number. Cadillac just recently unveiled the new CTS Coupe bodystyle, and only one month after the two-door’s official debut, we now have a much-anticipated V-badged variant, set to go on sale in the summer of 2010.
Even though automakers like Toyota are looking to breathe some life into the minivan segment, there isn’t that strong of a business case for the once-loved people movers that stole Americans’ hearts over the past few decades. Because of this, Nissan will be stopping production on the much-overlooked Quest minivan.
The CLS Estate will take a lot of its design direction from the original Mercedes-Benz ConceptFASCINATION (shown above), and its underpinnings will be a heavily revised version of the E-Class platform. In speaking with Autocar, a source at Mercedes-Benz says that the CLS Estate has been in the works since around 2004, and that a concept version was originally supposed to be shown at the 2003 Frankfurt Motor Show.