meCar.com.au

MATT CAMPBELL

A petrol-electric hybrid car has been voted the most popular in Drive’s People’s Choice award for Car of the Year.

In an indication of the increased focus on environmentally friendly motoring, the world’s best selling hybrid car has taken out the 2009 Drive Car of the Year People’s Choice award.

The Prius beat 45 Car of the Year finalists  including a twin-turbocharged supercar, highly sought after luxury cars and a V8-powered Holden ute – to take the crown of public favourite.

More than 18,000 people voted for the 2009 People’s Choice awards, which recorded some of the closest voting in the award’s history. All but seven of the 46 cars scored more than 100 votes.

The winning Toyota Prius, which is officially Australia’s greenest car  emitting less than 100 grams of carbon dioxide every kilometre – secured 1584 votes.

Again demonstrating the popularity of locally-made large cars, the Prius beat the second placed Ford Falcon (1187) and the pocket-rocket Volkswagen GTI (1034), and the Mazda 3 (823), consistently the best selling car among private car buyers.

The Toyota Prius unexpected victory is taken as a sign of the times for the automotive industry, which is rushing to market more environmentally friendly vehicles as buying tastes change in light of increasing environmental pressures and concerns about global warming.

The Toyota Prius is the world’s highest selling hybrid-electric car, with the Japanese manufacturer selling more than 1 million units since its introduction in 1997.

The third generation Prius has a more powerful 1.8-litre engine matched to an electric motor. Together they make 100kW of power, allowing the Prius to sprint from 0-100km/h in 10.4 seconds.

According to the Government supplied fuel figure it uses a claimed average 3.9 litres of fuel per 100km.
In light of tightening regulations on new vehicles, most car makers are now working on hybrid vehicles as a way to reduce fuel consumption by up to 50 per cent.
Even Porsche will next year begin selling a hybrid version of its Cayenne off-roader, while Ferrari is developing a hybrid supercar

It’s like Christmas for car collectors. Treasures in the Bonhams and Goodman motor vehicle auction include a car owned by Kerry Packer and two stunning re-creations of famous racing cars, writes Sarah McInerney.

It’s taken 4000 hours to get her prepared but Barrie Childs is finally ready to farewell his “Old Mother Gun”.

The Sydney car collector is hoping to sell two Bentleys at next week’s Bonhams and Goodman vehicle auction.

One is a replica of the “Old Mother Gun” racing car, a model made famous for two incidents at the Le Mans 24-hour race in Paris.

In 1927 it was involved in the famous White House crash, in which the three Bentleys that entered into the event collided. The following year it won the coveted event.

Childs believes his is one of only two replicas in the world. He was inspired to re-create it after finding a matching 1925 Bentley engine and chassis while on a trip in Britain to buy a Rolls-Royce Phantom II.

He enlisted the help of the Vintage Motor Garage for the restoration. Tackling the Phantom II will be his next project once the sale of his two Bentleys – the other is a 1934 sports saloon – clears out some space in the garage.

“It would be nice to keep all these items and keep them in your garage and go in and start them up, but we need to move those two on,” he said. “I’m already renting garages around the neighbourhood.”

Bonhams and Goodman holds its vehicle auction three times a year. Some of the heavy hitters in this upcoming sale include Childs’s “Old Mother Gun” and a 1955 Jaguar D-type re-creation. These are each expected to fetch more than $500,000.

James Nicolls is the head of collectors cars at the auction house. He described the Jaguar as “one of the jewels in the sale”.

“It is a real creation, it was built in the ’80s but it contains 25 per cent original parts so is worth its weight in gold,” Nicolls said.

Points of interest for collectors include originality – how much a vehicle has been changed, the less the better – condition and provenance.

One auction item with an interesting ownership history is a 1984 Audi Quattro UR, which once belonged to the late Kerry Packer. He was the first of its three owners and held on to it for 11 years. It is expected to sell for $25,000 to $35,000.

“It’s the UR model which stands for the original, and it is now quite a sought-after model,” Nicolls said.

One that might resonate with trans-Tasman focused collectors is a Maserati special created by New Zealand sports car designer Ferris de Joux, who died last year.

He was well known within the industry for his work on Buckler sports cars and the body he built for a Mini Cooper, the de Joux Mini GT.

The Maserati is expected to sell for $70,000 to $90,000.

“He has a marvellous reputation as an engineer and designer,” Nicolls said. “It is an interesting car. It is not shaped like anything else. It is shaped like a 1930s Maserati from the period but it isn’t a copy. He has based it on lots of Maserati original parts, namely an engine from 1958. It’s a Maserati special.”

Nicolls said the prestige car collecting industry had done “quite well” during the global financial downturn, with price records smashed in the US and Europe in the past 12 months.

The Bonhams and Goodman auction last November resulted in the highest ever price for a Lotus – $1.525 million, bought by an Australian.

He said the new auction didn’t have the largest number of cars up for sale but it did feature the biggest mix of vendors.

“It could be that people want to liquidate their asset and get access to the cash or they could just be ready to invest in something else,” he said.

“Other things are [restoration] projects that have come to fruition and the car is then ready to sell.”

The auction will be held on December 6. The vehicles can be viewed in Waterloo, Sydney, from 10am to 5pm from December 3-5 and on December 6 up until the time of the auction.

MATT CAMPBELL

This cool-looking customer is McLaren’s new P11, as spotted in these exclusive spy pictures during testing in Scandinavia.

These are some of the first images of the actual car, following a raft of clay-model photographs and digital renderings were released earlier this year.

The McLaren P11 is set to replace the Mercedes-Benz McLaren SLR, though Drive has learnt that the new P11 is going to be something very different.

The P11 looks set to fight it out with the likes of Ferrari and Lamborghini, and will likely utilise an AMG sourced 6.2-litre V8 engine, producing somewhere in the region of 410kW or 550 ponies.

Some sources have said that they’ve heard the McLaren mule take off from the line with lightning-quick shifts, and it is expected that the McLaren P11 will be fitted with a Formula One inspired sequential manual gearbox – with mandatory flappy paddles – to get all that power to the ground.

So will it be quick? With an expected 0-100km/h time of less than four seconds, and a top speed of over 320km/h, as well as optional go-even-faster bits likely to be borrowed from the McLaren Formula One team, the answer is yes, it will be quick.

Size-wise, the McLaren P11 will be relatively compact in the supercar ranks, and is expected to be sized somewhere between an Audi TT and an Audi R8, which should help to keep the car light.

McLaren are also said to be making extensive use of carbon-fibre in the construction of its new P11, and it is reported that the car will weigh in at less than 1150 kg.

That’s less than a Mazda MX-5.

As our snoop pictures show, the car looks set to have all the right curves for a mid-engined supercar. Though heavily camouflaged, some of the noticeable details include those bulging intakes and vents, and the P11 is expected to be fitted with a range of low-drag aerodynamic body-parts.

Unfortunately you’ll have to wait until sometime in 2010 for the McLaren P11 to be relieved of its camouflage and viewed by the public.

The McLaren P11 is set to go on sale in Europe by late 2010, and will likely cost upwards of $250,000.

REID SEXTON

Airbags and other improvements to car safety have saved at least 2700 lives and the Australian economy nearly $20 billion since the early 1990s.

In that time, 36,000 drivers and passengers also escaped serious injury thanks to safety advances.

In Victoria, 582 lives were saved over 15 years due to on-road technology that most drivers now take for granted, a study by the Monash University Accident Research Centre has found.

The impact of technology on road safety confirms what researchers have long suspected – improvements such as airbags and computer-assisted structural design have saved almost double the number of lives that were claimed on Australian roads last year.

Using the Victorian Auditor-General’s method for estimating the price of road trauma, which takes into account Federal Government statistics that calculate the community impact in lost productivity and associated costs, new technology has saved Australia’s economy a staggering $18.3 billion.

Author Stuart Newstead said the study highlighted how safety advances had led to national and Victorian road tolls decreasing in recent years despite population and road use soaring.

Using a formula that compares the safety performance of Australian vehicles in 1991 with the performance of cars over the following 15 years, the study tracked the number of deaths and injuries prevented during that period.

Dr Newstead said the research showed the overwhelming benefits of the safety innovations.

”There is an obvious economic saving through reducing the amount of hospital admissions and ongoing rehabilitations,” Dr Newstead said.

”But probably the most significant impact is in reducing the number of potentially grieving families.

”Given population growth, you would expect the road toll to be up, but it has gone down in the face of that and that’s quite an achievement.”

Victoria’s road toll was 337 in 2006 – 76 fewer than it would have been if not for safety developments, according to the study.

The research focused only on ‘’secondary safety improvements” such as airbags that minimise injury risk because, Dr Newstead said, the effectiveness of other technology such as electronic stability control is determined more by the driver.

RACV’s chief vehicle engineer Michael Case said the study drew on the research centre’s extensive database of vehicle safety performance, which he said is the largest and best in the world.

He said while secondary safety improvement technology was now included in most cars at the top end of the market, more lives would be saved when these secondary safety features became commonplace in all cars on the road.

”These numbers in this study are significant,” Mr Case said.

”What we’re seeing is the [safety] effect is still filtering down into cars on the road and we still have a long way to go before road users are driving cars with the most effective secondary safety equipment.”

Dr Newstead said that the improvement in road safety over the 15 years of the study was due to the fact that about 75 per cent of Australian cars were replaced with safer new ones in that time.

This, he said, reinforced that decisions motorists make when buying a car have long-term safety repercussions. ”The study shows that there are long and slow cumulative effects,” he said. ”So we have to do better each time we buy a vehicle. We have to live with that vehicle being in the fleet for 20 years.”

Victoria is on track to beat last year’s record low road toll, with 256 deaths this year, 17 fewer than this time last year.

Life savers
The innovations that have revolutionised road safety
1 Driver airbags.
2 Passenger airbags.
3 Seatbelt pre-tensioners that take slack out of belt in order to hold occupants tightly to the seat if there’s a crash.
4 Seatbelt load-limiters that allow the stitching to start giving way if the force on the occupants becomes more than the body can bear.
5 Crumple zones, which absorb the energy of a collision rather than transferring it to vehicle occupants.
6 Occupant cell that is much more rigid and immune from intrusion.
7 Crash resistant door pillars that defl ect the force of a side-impact collision away from the head area and toward the legs.
8 Stronger doors, internal padding and better seats also improve protection in side impact crashes.
9 Impact absorbing interior materials provide padding and cushioning on dashboards and armrests.
10 Many benefits flow from computer aided design, which allows for much more sophisticated modelling of what happens to a car in a crash.

Source: The Age

JAPAN’S Toyota Motor is planning to recall about four million vehicles in the United States to fix a potential problem affecting their accelerator pedals.

The recall was due to a risk that loose driver-side floor mats could slip forward and jam the pedals, Kyodo news agency said, quoting sources close to the matter.

Toyota, the world’s largest automaker, was expected to provide more details today, The Associated Press reported.

Popular vehicles such as the Toyota Camry, the top-selling passenger car in America, and the Toyota Prius, the best-selling petrol-electric hybrid, were part of the recall, AP said.

It included the 2007-10 model year Camry, 2005-10 Toyota Avalon, 2004-09 Prius, 2005-10 Toyota Tacoma, 2007-10 Toyota Tundra, 2007-10 Lexus ES350 and 2006-10 Lexus IS250/350.

The Japanese automaker announced the massive recall in late September and told owners to remove the driver’s side floor mats to prevent the accelerator pedal from potentially becoming jammed.

The recall was Toyota’s largest in the US. It was prompted by a high-speed crash in August involving a 2009 Lexus ES350 that killed a California Highway Patrol officer and three members of his family near San Diego.

The Lexus hit speeds exceeding 190 km/h, struck a sport utility vehicle, launched off an embankment, rolled several times and burst into flames.

A family member in the runaway Lexus made a frantic call to authorities moments before the crash, telling emergency responders that the accelerator was stuck and the driver couldn’t stop the car.

The call ended as someone was overheard urging others to hold on and pray, followed by a woman’s scream.

The US government has attributed at least five deaths and two injuries to floor mat-related unintended acceleration in the Toyota vehicles and has received reports of more than 100 incidents in which the accelerator may have become stuck.

The automaker and US Government regulators have been discussing a potential fix for several weeks.

In late September, Toyota announced the recall and told owners to remove driver’s side floor mats and not replace them until the company had determined a remedy for the problem.

AFP

James Phelps - From: The Daily Telegraph

THIS is the flyer that has infuriated the V8 world.

Jim Beam Racing and the Holden Racing Team fired off legal letters to the Minx gentleman’s club after learning their cars had been used to promote a high octane night of nudity.

“We aren’t very happy about it to say the least,” said Glenn Turnor, marketing manager for the Jim Beam Racing team.

“We don’t want to be associated with strippers. We have worked very hard for our image and we in no way gave this club permission to use our intellectual property.”

HRT demanded their car (albeit a very old one) be immediately removed from Minx’s promotional material.

For the record, $250 gets you sushi served on a naked girl at Minx on this so-called V8 night.

Bruce Newton, The Sydney Morning Herald

The range-topping Commodore should give Euro-rivals a fright.

 

2 Minute road test

Price and equipment

From $56,790 plus dealer and on-road costs

The SIDI (spark ignition direct injection) 3.6-litre Alloytec V6 engine and its new six-speed auto combine to cut the Calais V’s claimed fuel use by 11 per cent, down from 11.4 litres per 100 kilometres to 10.1L/100km. CO2 emissions drop from 270g/km to 241g/km.

Apart from the drivetrain, there are no equipment changes of note. The only way to pick the 2010 model is by its Ecoline and SIDI badges. Maybe that’s why pricing stays at $56,790.

Equipment runs to leather trim, six-CD audio, powered front seats, dual-zone climate control, an overhead DVD player for the rear seats and alloys.

Some equipment was culled in recent times. Audi-style flip-out front door bins are gone, the passenger seat is now four rather than eight-way power-adjusted and sealant and an air compressor replace the space-saver spare. A full-sized spare tyre is a no-cost option.

Competitors

Mitsubishi has unveiled a new hybrid off-road concept vehicle based on its i-MiEV electric car.

Mitsubishi will debut a new plug-in off-roader concept vehicle at the Tokyo Motor Show later this month.

The PX-MiEV – the PX stands for plug-in hybrid crossover – is based on the i MiEV electric car, which is set to be released in Australia next year.

The crossover is fitted with an 85kW, 1.6-litre engine that can both power the car and act as a generator for the drive battery. The electric motors generate an extra 60kW. There’s also the option of plugging the car in to recharge.

Mtisubishi says the car uses just two litres of fuel per 100km, roughly half that of the petrol-electric Toyota Prius.

The Concept PX-MiEV uses a new version of Mitsubishi’s Super All Wheel Control (S-AWC), which controls the drive from the electric motors to shift torque between the front and rear wheels as required.

The concept has a low-speed, EV-Mode, where the battery powers the front electric motor, which drives the front-wheels.

When the battery level drops, series hybrid mode kicks in: the petrol engine helps power the wheels. Depending on driving conditions, either front- or all-wheel-drive will be deployed.

The next driving mode is Parallel hybrid, where the car switches entirely to petrol power, because it’s more efficient than the battery-powered engines at higher revolutions. If increased acceleration is required, the battery-driven motors kick in to assist the 1.6-litre engine.

Like other hybrid cars on the market, the batteries also have the ability to recharge when coasting or slowing down.

When the car is plugged in to charge, it can be programmed to start charging through a Wireless Charging Program feature. It can even start the air conditioner at a preset time, even if the driver isn’t near the vehicle.

Some of the other technologies that are being showcased with Mitsubishi’s Concept PX-MiEV include a power-supply mode, with a power outlet allowing the use of the car’s electricity in the event of a natural disaster. Or perhaps it’s just so you’re able to plug in the toaster when you go camping.

On the safety front, the car is fitted with a camera mounted facing the driver that monitors their eye movements to determine attention levels. If the system detects a decrease in driver concentration it issues audible, visual and vibration warnings, as well as emitting a distinctive fragrance to alert the driver.

Mitsubishi will also unveil a commercial version of the iMiEV, which has the same front end with a cubic caboose tacked on the rear.

Mitsubishi claims the iMiEV will be able to travel 160km on a single charge, with a top speed of 130 km/h, and this is said to be unchanged for the iMiEV Cargo model, though fully loaded it would be expected that these figures may change.

The flat-floored cube-shaped cargo area allows for flexibility, with the iMiEV Cargo set to be marketed to environmentally-conscious self-employed operators and business owners.

The iMiEV Cargo, unlike the Concept PX-MiEV, will use a plug-in electric engine only, producing 47kW and 180Nm of torque.

The Tokyo Motor Show starts on October 24.

Renowned Hummer gets an eco makeover – and it’s all about biofuel.

With oil prices rising again, fuel economy is on everyone’s minds. Even the most iconic cars are not immune.

Hummer is the latest brand to start implementing fuel-saving technology and, like many of General Motors’ premium brands, it’s all about biofuel.

The company this week said next year’s Hummer H3 and H3T models would include an E85 5.3-litre V8 engine that runs on flex fuel. Unfortunately for Australia, while the H3 is the version sold here (pictured), ours comes with a five-cylinder engine, not the V8.

There is no indication yet as to whether a flex-fuel version of the five-cylinder engine will be made.