Automotive

The Quail Lodge sale held during Pebble Beach Car Week in August each year, always attracts extraordinary automobiles, and this year, the most talked about lot at the auction is one of the most delightfully eccentric for many a year. It is a handmade 1925 Rolls-Royce New Phantom, commissioned by the Maharaja of Kotah to be specifically built for tiger hunting. The eight liter Roller has spotlights for night hunting, a mounted Howdah gun (double-barrel shotgun in pistol form), a rifle stand in the rear passenger compartment, a mountable Lantaka cannon, and a machine gun mounted on an attached, matching trailer. Just the thing for peak hour! Read More

This year's Ferrari World Design Contest award has gone to three students from Hongik University in Seoul, South Korea. Students from 50 universities worldwide put pencil to paper to compete for the award, with the Korean students being chosen over close contenders from IED of Turin, Italy and London's Royal College of Arts. Read More

Shelby Super Cars has finally pulled the wraps off the car it has had under development for several years which is aiming for 280 mph. The aluminum and carbon fiber SSC Tuatara was styled by talented American designer Jason Castriota, and will run a mid-rear mounted, seven-litre, twin-turbo, Quad camshaft V8 producing 1,350 bhp. Shelby previously held the title of the world's fastest production car with the 1183 bhp, twin-turbo V8 Ultimate Aero TT which ran 412.68 km/h (256.18 mph). It bested the previous fastest, the original 1001 bhp Bugatti Veyron's 408 km/h (254 mph) but lost the title back to the French marque last year when a 1200 bhp Bugatti Veyron Super Sport ran 431 km/h (268 mph). Great image gallery on this one. Read More

Nissan has announced it will expand the U.S. availability of its all-electric LEAF to the Southeastern U.S. and Illinois markets. The 2012 model year (MY12) LEAF will also see a number of features previously available as optional extras now become standard, including a DC fast charge port and cold weather features such as a battery warmer, heated steering wheel and front and rear heated seats. Read More

Range anxiety, the fear that such vehicles will leave the vehicle's occupants stranded well short of their destination, remains one of, if not the main barrier to the widespread adoption of EVs. A new material developed by Japanese company Sumitomo Electric could help allay such fears by potentially improving the capacity of lithium-ion batteries by 1.5 to three times, and therefore extending the range of EVs by by an extra 50 to 200 percent. That would give a Nissan LEAF a range of up to 109 to 219 miles (175 to 352 km) or a Tesla Roadster a range of up to 366 to 732 miles (589 to 1,178 km) - enough to assuage the range anxiety of the most fretful drivers. Read More

Last October, we told you about the full-scale working Batmobile replica built by movie prop-maker Bob Dullam. The version of the iconic superhero vehicle that Dullam chose to recreate was the rugged, Hummer-esque beauty from Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, known as the Tumbler. Well, that car now has some company on the road, in the form of a street-legal copy of the smoother, slinkier Batmobile that first appeared in 1989’s Batman. Built by Ohio auto restorer and designer Casey Putsch in just five months out of race car and military surplus parts, the vehicle is incredibly faithful to the original ... to the point that it’s powered by an actual jet engine. Read More

car2go, the car-sharing service that began in Ulm, Germany in 2008 before spreading to Austin, Texas, Hamburg, Germany and Vancouver, Canada, has now announced it will launch a service in San Diego that will be the first car-sharing program in North America with a 100 percent electric vehicle fleet. The San Diego car2go program is due to start operations before the end of 2011 with 300 smart fortwo electric drive vehicles. Read More

As project leaders for the public/private EV Project (which has also received a funding injection from the U.S. Department of Energy), it is the responsibility of clean electric transportation and storage technologies experts ECOtality to oversee the installation of thousands of commercial and residential electric vehicle charging stations in various locations throughout the U.S. EV owners visiting select IKEA stores in the Western United States will soon be able to top up while they shop, thanks to a partnership formed between the home furnishing retailer and ECOtality. Read More

While there have been huge strides made in battery technology in recent times, the limited range of electric vehicles remains one of the main barriers to their general adoption. While maybe not an ideal solution, Volvo is producing a few electric test vehicles with range extenders – combustion engines that increase the effective range of the electric vehicle by effectively turning it into a hybrid. The project, which is supported by he Swedish Energy Agency and the EU, will test three different electric motor/combustion engine combinations. Read More