Autoblog

Click above for high-res gallery of the Hot Wheels Honda Racer

Last November at the 2007 SEMA Show in Las Vegas, Hot Wheels unveiled a troop of concepts to celebrate its 40th anniversary. These new Hot Wheels cars were not designed by everyone's favorite 1:64 scale model toy maker, but rather were all new designs penned by designers from Lotus, Chevy, Ford, Mitsubishi, Dodge and Honda. The Lotus Concept, Mitsubishi Double Shotz, Dodge XP-07, Gangster Grin from Ford, Chevroletor (GM), and Honda Racer, along with Hot Wheels' own HW-40, are going on tour around the United States in August, so keep an eye out.

The first of these concepts to actually become a toy will be the Honda Racer, the design of which is inspired by the 'H' in Honda's corporate logo. There's room for a driver and navigator in the side-by-side shape of the concept that features a paint scheme inspired by Honda's participation in F1 back in the day. A fictitious Honda V10 VTEC that displaces a theoretical 2.0L per cylinder (that's a 20-liter engine for those keeping score at home) powers the red-and-white racer. The Honda Racer's design, Guillermo Gonzalez, says rather than bean counters and engineers imposing restraints on his creativity, the only parameters when designing his Hot Wheels car were that it had to fit in the trademark orange track and be able to do a loop. With a 20L V10 and the assistance of good old gravity, we're sure a loop is well within its means. You'll be able to buy the Honda Racer next month when it begins arriving on store shelves in May. Until then, check out the high-res shots Honda released of the Honda Racer in our gallery below.


[Source: Honda]

Click image for hi-res gallery of the GTX1

Gennadi Dedign Group has announced that the end draws nigh for the company's limited-run Ford GT roadster conversion, the GTX1. Over two years of production, the plan was to make 600 total cars available. 100 would be SEMA Edition replicas of the Valencia Orange show car shown above and in the attached gallery. The other 500 would be regular customer cars. According to Gennadi, only 100 cars or so have been ordered and completed, and whatever the number stands at when orders are officially ended on August 31, 2008 will be the final production run. The SEMA editions, in addition to the roof conversion, also received a host of additional upgrades including racing seats, adjustable shocks, Wilwood brakes, a power boost to 700 horses, a hidden rear bumper, and other some interior tweaks, too. Incidentally, we recently saw one of the finished customer cars (it sported the Tungsten paint job) in Greenwich, CT not long ago. With the roof in place, it can easily be mistaken for a "garden variety" GT -- which we would have done if not for the GTX1 labeling aft of the front wheel. Little did we know that it was one of a much smaller group than Gennadi probably anticipated building. If you've got a Ford GT and a hankering for an arier experience, you've got until August to let Gennadi have its way with it.

[Source: Gennadi Design Group]

Vehicular lighting is a crapshoot. Some vehicles offer a great swath of even coverage from their headlamps, while others make you feel like you're squinting through welding goggles at night. I went through the trouble to retrofit one of my cars with Cibié lamps running overwattage H4 bulbs. That effort required a couple hundred dollars of parts, a good amount of labor to wire up relays and triggers, and not everyone is willing to expend such time and money, even if it means you won't overdrive your lights so easily. Sweden's Visualeyes has trotted out the Rayzer, an auxiliary lighting system that mounts from the inside and projects a beam through the windshield. We're taking the product's SEMA appearance as an indication of legality in the US. From the amount of end-user modifications we see on a daily basis, nobody's enforcing the rules on lights, anyway. The system has been patented and was developed by former race car driver Lars Svelander after a close call with a deer.

The line-of-sight position is purported to be more effective and has the benefit of leaving the outward appearance unmarred. We'd be worried about throwing light spill onto the hood, or too close to the front of the car, for that matter. Too much light in the wrong place is a detriment to night vision, but putting more lumens down the road could improve your chances of not overdoing it. The Rayzer uses a pair of HID bulbs and is wired into the car's lighting system to illuminate when the high beams are in use. There's also a fail-safe circuit that will shut the Rayzer off if oncoming vehicles are detected – a good thing when you're blasting light through your windshield. No price has been announced, but trading the hours of cutting, crimping, and snaking wires for the ease of a 15-minute installation by a non professional sounds good to us, especially if it works as well as the pictures make it appear.

Thanks for the tip, Andreas!

[Source: Visualeyes]

click above image for more pics of the Concept 'Cuda

It appears that whoever took the trouble to have Metalcrafters build the one-off Concept 'Cuda got tired of it pretty quickly. Just a month after the 'Cuda made its first appearance at the SEMA show, Barrett-Jackson has announced that the car will be offered to the highest bidder come January. The winner will essentially be getting a modified Dodge Charger chassis with custom 2-door carbon fiber bodywork covered in Lamborghini Pearl Orange paint, a functional shaker hood feeding air to a 6.1-liter Hemi V8 and 22-inch Zenetti wheels wrapped with Pirelli P Zero tires. Before potential buyers plunk down hundreds of thousands of dollars for the car, they might want to see if Metalcrafters would build a second, and if so, how much it would cost.

[Source: Barrett-Jackson via Motortrend]

Now here's something worth giving thanks over. The podcast makes its return in time for you to load it on your iPod for the drive over the river and through the woods. We've been away at shows, so of course we do some recapping of whatever highlights struck our fancy at Tokyo, SEMA, and LA. We start Autoblog Podcast episode #81 by discussing pickups, though. New spy shots of the 2009 F150 have surfaced and that pushes us into a wider ranging discussion about pickemups. From there, we try to send GM the message that messing with the nose of the Solstice is a bad idea, and the very last car they should be worrying about, anyway. No current Pontiac discussion would be complete without mention of the G8, so we make sure to pontificate about that for a while, too. John, Damon, and Alex take a little time out to gloat over discuss what's currently in the Autoblog Garage, touch on the fact that the Scirocco's not coming stateside, and partake in a scorching GM vs. Honda/Toyota green car debate. It's all over in 52 minutes, thanks for waiting so long, we'll do it again soon!

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click either image to enlarge

The SEMA Show in Las Vegas is huge, which is the only explanation we can muster for why we didn't see the Tractorri Lamborghini Mustang there ourselves. Built by John Haugh from Cleveland, OH (w00t!), the car you see is basically a 520-hp mid-engine, all-wheel-drive Lamborghini Gallardo wearing the heavily modified body panels of a Ford Mustang. Out back the rear taillamps of the Gallardo have been incorporated along with a gaping grate through which one can view the Lamborghini hardware. The interior is also mostly Lamborghini, though the door panels obviously come from the Ford.

We know, some of you are asking why anyone would embark on such a project, but why sweat the details when there's a freakin' mid-engine, all-wheel-drive Mustang staring back at you? Just count your lucky stars that there are people out there who will build something like a Mustang-bodied Lamborghini for the rest of us to enjoy. Oh, and we extend an open offer to buy Mr. Haugh a beer at The Winking Lizard in Lakewood so he can show us this insane coupe in person.

Click the Read link below to visit themustangnews.com where there are more pics of the Tractorri Lamborghini Mustang.

[Source: The Mustang News via Carscoop]

Uncle! UNCLE! Here's the scoop. Shelby's dusting off another name from the 1960s to affix to the flanks of yet another clapped out version of Ford's Mustang. Damn. Was it like this back in the day, too? Terlingua was a racing team in the 1960s that campaigned a GT350 with ferocious bunny livery. The new Terlingua models dropped at SEMA (which might as well stand for Simply Everything Mustang Always), and they're actually pretty intriguing. We'll forego the bestickered body baubelization, but in the engine room, they've gotten creative.

Rather than focus all the attention on the GT, the base V6 gets some lovin' from the Terlingua package. $7,995 buys you handling and braking upgrades as well as a supercharger that helps the V6 churn out 375 hp. That's one we'd love to sample. Armchair quarterbacking postulates that it might be a bit more nimble than a GT, with a slightly less massive mill and possibly superior weight distribution, but of course, we're just blowing sunshine without actually looking at hard numbers. Ain't speculation fun? Of course, the obligatory 20-inch rims probably do more to hinder performance, but they rev up the style, if that's your thing. Other Terlingua goodies are a continuation 1967 Mustang with more modern engineering, and a specially tweaked '65 427 Cobra.

[Source: Autoweek]

Last year at the 2006 SEMA Show in Las Vegas, we reported on a unique piece of hardware called the DashDAQ. It looks like a third-party sat nav, but it's actually an open source Linux-based computer that suction cups to your windshield. Commenters at the time went ga-ga over what could be done with the DashDAQ after plugging it into their OBD-II port. Unbeknownst to us, the company was listening and returned to SEMA in 2007 with the actual product that just went on sale a couple weeks ago.

Called the DashDAQ Series II, the $695 production model walked away from this year's SEMA Show with nine new product awards. The DashDAQ is still as open source as it was last year, but has grown up a bit and added more processing power and more inputs in the form of two serial connecters, two USB ports and an SD card slot. Any type of sensor can be plugged into the unit and its data displayed as long as you've got drivers for it. Out of the box, though, the DashDAQ can display a gauge cluster in a variety of skins, display and clear diagnostic codes, and show you data points from any of your car's sensors while simultaneously logging them for future analysis.

One of the big knocks against the DashDAQ last year was that despite looking for all the world like a navigation system, it didn't have the hardware or software to perform that function. Well, it still doesn't, but they have addressed the issue by making it simple to plug in a third-party GPS unit. A company named Elektrobit is currently developing sat nav software for the DashDAQ, but you can of course use other Linux-based GPS programs. Since it's open source, just imagine the possibilities. You could have your car's true speed or even lap times clocked accurately via GPS just like the pros, but for thousands less.

We're going to have one of our more computer literate bloggers take a DashDAQ Series II for a spin in the near future. In the meantime, the company, its engineers and software designers are listening, so tell them you think.

[Source: DashDAQ]

While cruising through the enormous American Racing display area at SEMA, we spotted a pretty cool Mustang that made us stop for a closer look. While the car itself will be detailed elsewhere, one of its trick features really stood out. There was a keyboard on the passenger seat. Thinking it might have to do with a programmable engine management system or something, we were told that it was actually controlling a fully functional Windows XP in-dash computer. The computer system is made by a company called Infill and this was its newest G4 offering. The system features a 40 GB hard drive, 1.5 Ghz Pentium 4 CPU, 512 MB RAM, 800 X 480 6.5" Sharp touch screen display, wireless internet, a 3-second boot up time, built-in GPS, 3 USB ports, rear-view camera display compatibility and a DVD-ROM (What, no Blu-Ray?).

It also features steering wheel controls to operate the integrated 5.1 channel A/V system. And if you want to control any of the computer's functions while under way, it also has text-to-speech capability and advanced KT-HUVOIS speech recognition. Not that we'd recommend using it while in motion, but this system can turn your vehicle into one heck of a mobile office or den. The entire thing is also entirely self-contained in the dash-mount unit -- no remote HD or peripherals – which is impressive. The company promises a 40-minute install in most applications at any decent install shop. We'll try to get you more details when they become available, but for now you can get more by clicking on the Read link below or the image above.

[Source: Infill]

click above image to watch video of the Hossfly V8 Barstool in action

When the SEMA Show is over and it's time for the exhibitors to clear out of the convention center, it makes for an interesting spectacle to watch. Vehicles forbidden to operate on the street can be seen ripping down Paradise Rd. without consequence. It just so happens that during this time we caught a glimpse of the previously posted Hossfly V8 Barstools in action. While walking away from the convention center, the crowd around us began to part like Moses and the Red Sea. We could hear a vehicle approaching that sounded like a pissed off Camaro with an open header exhaust. Turning around we discovered that the commotion was caused not by a crazy muscle car, but by two stools on wheels. We luckily whipped out the camera in time and caught a clip of the barstools in action. The video doesn't quite do justice to the amount of noise generated by these contraptions. We can also only assume that after a week of sitting idle at the show, they were on their way to the nearest bar counter for a couple of cold beers. Follow the jump to see the video.