Category: Concept Cars
What do you call a supercharged 5.4-liter plugged into a chassis behind the driver where the rear seats should be? I’d call that a hell of a good start.
Anyone with pockets as deep as the Grand Canyon can build a supercar, and the 2011 De Macross GT1 is no exception. With Korean business superpower, Jahong Hur, peeling the cabbage (money) behind the project, De Macross Motors Corp (DMMC) appears to have a good chance of building a serious competitor. At this point, they are comparing the price and performance of the new GT with the Pagani Zonda. So, their expectations are pretty high.
Jaguar is heading into its 75th anniversary with newfound vision, and we thank the automotive gods for the cat’s rebirth. Ten years ago, Jag was selling cars with old-man-styling and spotty reliability records. Today, it’s selling beautiful cars with crisp handling and abundant power…cars with soul.
The ultimate example of the is the top-of-the-line XJ, a car that puts other super-luxury cars to shame with its sharp road manners and heart-stopping style. And the ultimate XJ is this one, the XJ75 Platinum concept.
Built for the Pebble Beach Concours D’Elegance, the XJ75 carries the same mechanicals as the standard XJ, but it’s re-styled inside and out. It features a Pearlescent White paint job surrounding a blacked-out grille and huge, 22-inch black wheels. Inside, quilted black leather (with diamond-pattern suede inserts on the seats), a quilted leather headliner, and a hand-built chronograph from the Belmont watch company.
The same Bowers&Wilkins 20-speaker stereo found in the standard XJ is present, but we’ll call it out again because it might be the best stereo we’ve ever heard. Trust it, that thing is like the wrath of god.
The XJ75 is just a concept at this point, but it looks like a special edition in the making to us.
Last week we offered a sneak peak at the first images of the Morgan EvaGT before it was officially unveiled at the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance in Carmel, California.
The show is over and the real photos are finally in!
What do you think? Yay or nay…
(More photos at Autoblog)
We’ve got a ways to go until solar powered vehicles are a common sight. Not only are most of them rather dull, quirky, and slow (60 mph top speed), solar film technology is not quite as far along as some would have hoped it would be by 2010. Quite frankly, the most an automotive manufacture could expect to power a vehicle on a cloudy day with a small photo-voltaic sheet, is a cigarette lighter.
But technology continues to push forward, and Peter Wilkins, an automotive design student at Swansea Metropolitan University (UK), has built a model of a solar powered vehicle, which at the very least takes care of the typical humdrum look we’ve grown accustomed to. In theory, it should perform fairly decently too, considering it comes with a mid-mounted hydrogen fuel stack powering four independent electric motors. The fuel cell will get its juice from the sun, through an arsenal of photo-voltaic cells placed across the hood, rear vents, and trunk area.
The body has been streamlined with carbon fiber in the image of the Volkswagen Scirocco, minimizing wind resistance and increase cooling and down force. This solar powered Volkswagen would be considered somewhat of a luxury item, according to Wilkins, limited to only 200 units per year. The soonest we’d expect to see something like this on the streets would be somewhere between 2015 and 2020, so start saving now. This type of technology will not come cheap!
(Photos and Story via Top Speed)
It wasn’t all that long ago amphibious cars looked a little like this 1966 Amphicar (pictured below). Basically a motor boat with wheels. They really were neither too spectacular on the road, nor too maneuverable on the sea.
