I should go on vacation more often. No, really. Last time I took some time off, I accidentally caught a parade of BMW prototypes descending the Sellajoch in Italy’s Dolomite Alps. Then, just weeks ago when I was in Los Angeles with Bertel, I was driving along towards Venice when I caught a glimpse of the tell-tale camouflage that makes every auto enthusiast’s heart skip a beat. And then I noticed that it had no tailpipe…

Of course, the vehicle I caught wasn’t anything earth-shattering, just a prototype of Toyota’s first-ever EV for the American market. And here in California, where electric RAV4s have been running around since 1997, this prototype didn’t exactly bring traffic to a halt. Still, it’s a reminder that even EV skeptics like Toyota are already dipping a toe in the battery-powered market… if only as a “compliance exercise.” Plus, it’s more evidence that my employers should give me more time to get away from the computer and drive around unfamiliar places. Obviously these prototypes want me to find them…

It’s easy to see the two Japanese luxury brands as Wahlberg brothers. Lexus is Marky Mark, the one which started off by flexing some low-priced knock-off S-Class clones and has gone on to make big bucks, receive critical acclaim. and fantasize in public about stopping 9/11 while respectful pop-culture writers whistle in awed approval. Infiniti is Donnie, who started out very stylishly but quickly became B-List despite popping out the occasional respected performance.

Part of the reason for that prestige gap between Lexus and Infiniti has to be what you see in this photo, which I snapped on the way back from lunch today. We have two vehicles here which are ostensibly from different brands and certainly don’t share any major dimensional commonalities or mechanical components, but I’ll be darned if they don’t look like the same car to most people.

The Sentra and G37 aren’t the only Infiniti/Nissan efforts which are totally different under the skin but very similar in the metal. Think first-gen Murano and FX, for example. Lexus does it the other way ’round, creating visually different vehicles from the Camry platform. Who’s right? It’s hard to say, but it’s easy to see that buyers prefer the approach where you put lipstick on a pig to the one where you dress a BMW like a Sentra.

“…as some men try to be proud of their defects, he extracted an ornament from an inconvenience, and vanity produced a grotto where necessity enforced a passage.”

So Johnson wrote of Pope. It’s always best to face the truth and do one’s best with it. Thus, in this TTAC-reader-contributed image, we have a FIAT Seicento — the absolute exemplar of “crappy Euro commuter” — and, rather than a Valkyrie or guy with a Fast and Furious sword on the side, we have the humble snail. Slow is good! Ask any hipster.

We all know Google’s evil hivemind constantly scans your GMail and targets advertisements to your recent mail threads. As a result, I’ve seen stuff from “Reliable Pregnancy Testing” to “Hundreds Of Collings Guitars In Stock” over the past few years, but what I saw this morning — “Check Out The Features Of The 2011 Lincoln Town Car” — intrigued me.

Why is Ford paying good money to direct people to the website pictured above?

While Chrysler falls flat on its face with inept social media and General Motors buys the bloggers’ bar every year at NAIAS in as heavy-handed a fashion as humanly possible, Ford’s gained a reputation for navigating the mostly navel-gazing and valueless world of “SM” a little more competently than the competition. They brought self-professed guru Scott Monty on board nice and early in the game and have reaped all sorts of rewards, up to and including giving a hundred Fiestas to a bunch of slackers for no particular reason.

Wait.

The point is, Ford usually dances where the others bumble. Why pay good money, then, to point people towards a dead-end website for a discontinued car that doesn’t even say something like, “Hey, check out the MKS!” My suspicion is that Ford, like many companies, has let their “spend” with Google spiral out of control. Ask any small businessman who uses AdWords how easy it is to blow through your prepaid budget. Google may be free for the little people, but that’s because they are in the business of selling little people to big fish.

Little mistakes like this add up. Too much wasted ad money, too many free Fiestas, too many 1000-hits-a-month bloggers on press trips, and pretty soon it’s time to cut costs elsewhere… like on the door panels of the MKT. You know what would have been a better idea than spending money advertising the 2011 Lincoln Town Car a year after its demise? Building a new, and better, Town Car. As it currently stands, the iconic Lincoln, just like that puppy your mom and dad sent to the farm when you were six, is gone, and it’s never coming back.

“Heritage” is a funny thing. Lamborghini wants to use it to sell you a shopping trolley. Chevrolet hopes you’ll see some of the spirit of the Sixties Impala in their current Azera-like.

What does Ford want?

This photo, sent to me by TTAC reader Pavel, captures a strange duality. In the foreground, you have the new face of the electric Fusion: smooth (except for that odd hood gap), futuristic, brandwashed into a faux-Aston. In the background, you have a Crown Victoria hard at work. Which car, I wonder, will still be on the road twenty years from now, or a quarter-million miles from now?

More pertinently, why is Ford so anxious in general that we, the buying public, forget the Panther? I suggested one reason a while ago, but surely there is something Ford can do with the heritage of reliability and durability they’ve built with the Panther.

Perhaps, in an era where “heritage” is plastered on garbage and used to sell Chinese-sewn clothing, the idea of having honestly built a million-plus durable vehicles simply doesn’t matter. Best to forget it and move on.

Now I understand that in the late 1940s or early 1950s, when the Murphy body was removed and replaced with an amalgam of Buick, Olds, Plymouth and Texas longhorn parts, a body designed in the early 1930s might look a bit old fashioned. To each their own and all. Car owners have every right to turn their ride into a testament to their own poor taste – it’s rather amazing what some people who claim to love Corvettes will do with fiberglass – but c’mon, do you really think that most people circa 1950 would look at the results and say, “yeah, I think that’s an improvement”? Still the rebody isn’t the worst thing about this car,  it’s the fact that underneath all that that pastiched together kitsch is a genuine Duesenberg, arguably the most esteemed prewar American car ever made. It gets better, or worse, the real Duesey wears engine number J-462, so it’s a Model J, the peak of Duesenberg’s perfection. Just to clarify, the headline uses some literary license, and this is not one of the supercharged SJ models.

Even without the fact that it’s a sow’s ear made out of a silk purse, there are so, so many things wrong with this car. To borrow a term from Sajeev Mehta, there’s enough venom in this thing to kill. That malignant growth on the back deck alone is enough to make you wonder just what kind of person would look at that and say, “Yeah, that looks goood, I like it!” and then get out their checkbook. There is not a single sense of line or proportion anywhere on the car and we haven’t even gotten to the air-cooled-Franklin-swallowing-a-bullet-nosed-Studebaker styled grille yet. What lines there are fight with each other shouting, “look at me, not him!”. Come to think of it, the Boss Hogg style bull horns are the least objectionable thing about this thing. It’s the hot mess of hot messes.

J-462 has also been passed around the Duesenberg collecting community a bit, finally ending up in the collection of deceased Texas tobacco and breast implant litigator, billionaire John O’Quinn. After all a Model J chassis and engine is still worth nicely into the six figures, nobody’s going to sell it for scrap metal. Still, it failed to meet reserve at a Bonham’s auction last year with a $400K-$600K pre-auction estimate and now the O’Quinn estate is offering it with no reserve at Worldwide Auctioneers‘ May 5, 2012 auction, where it has been given a $400K-$500K estimate.

Reportedly, the original Beverly Berline body still exists somewhere in Virginia. I suppose that a purist might buy the car, track down the original Murphy built body, and restore it to better than new condition. I can understand that, but the car’s already no longer original (though the auction catalog says that J-462 is one of the more original Model J engines), one might as well go the custom route, though hopefully a different path than taken by the original customizer.

Alan H. Leamy Jr. had a crippled leg, from polio, and he compensated with a fine sense of sartorial style. He was an avid outdoorsman and collected firearms.

Much as I understand the purist’s motivations, if I could afford it, I’d do something a bit different, after removing the existing body and loaning it to the Museum of Kitsch to preserve it as a cautionary lesson. One of the most talented and influential but least well known American automotive stylists was Alan H. Leamy Jr. He died at the age of 32 in 1935, which explains his obscurity, but Leamy was undoubtedly one of the greats, designing two of the greatest automobile designs ever, the L-29 Cord and the Auburn [boat tailed] Speedster and having a hand in a third masterpiece.

Alan Leamy at work in the Auburn design studio. Those studios have been preserved in the Auburn Cord Duesenberg Automobilie Museum.

Behind a clay model of Gordon Buehrig's Cord 810 is the same drafting table used by Alan Leamy and Buehrig. Note the same curtains on the windows.

As a designer, Leamy was completely self-taught, with a range of knowledge and skills that continued to amaze his associates. His resume includes being hired by both E.L. Cord and Harley Earl on the strength of his portfolio. He was held in the highest regard by other designers. When Gordon Buehrig was brought on to the Auburn team by Errett Cord, he declined to restyle Leamy’s design for the Model J’s signature grille and front end, saying that you don’t mess with perfection.

As Auburn faced increasing financial straits during the Great Depression and as Buehrig was given increasing responsibilities, Leamy got restless and started looking for another job. Enthused with the notion of front wheel drive from his work on the Cords, he showed Packard a proposal for a FWD Packard, but Alvan Macauley, who ran Packard, thought it was “too extreme”. When Leamy approached Harley Earl about a job at GM’s Art and Colour styling department, Earl hired him on the spot, and within months named him head of styling for the LaSalle brand. Tragically, Leamy, who survived polio as a child and never was in great health, died of a blood infection caused by a medical injection shortly thereafter. Leamy did, however, leave a legacy and not just his designs that made it to production. The Leamy archive at the Auburn Cord Duesenberg Automobile Museum includes scores of Leamy drawings, many of them of custom body proposals for Duesenbergs, Cords and Auburns that never got made.

Leamy's design patent for the Cord L-29. He took full advantage of the FWD Cord's low height.

Earlier this year a couple of interesting “classic” cars from the Milhous collection crossed the auction block. They were somewhat controversial because they were Cadillac V-16s that had never actually been built in the classic era. Master Packard restorer Fran Roxas found a couple of designs in Fleetwood’s catalog of custom bodies that he admired, but apparently those exact Cadillacs had never been ordered. So working with designers Strother MacMinn and Dave Holls, using original V-16 chassis, Roxas made one-of-none versions of the 5859 Custom Dual Cowl Phaeton, and the 5802 Custom Roadster. Each sold for right around a million dollars. Roxas is one of the world’s master automotive craftsman. His last project was the Packard Myth, his first custom car, which was a Great Eight finalist for the Ridler Award at the 2011 Detroit Autorama, the custom world’s most prestigious award. Making the Great Eight first time out of the box is a great accomplishment. If there’s one person to build a what-if prewar classic, it’s Roxas.

We don’t know who designed and fabricated the body currently on J-462. I think we can safely say that whoever did do it didn’t have the talent and taste of Alan Leamy and Fran Roxas. I don’t have a problem, really I don’t, with the then owner of this Model J doing what he wanted to do with his own property. It offends me aesthetically and think it was an indignity to the Duesenberg, but property rights are important. If J-462 was my property, though, I’d hire Mr. Roxas to rebody it with one of Alan Leamy’s as yet unbuilt designs.

You can see more of Alan Leamy’s designs, drawings and models, from the archives of the Auburn Cord Duesenberg Car Museum in Auburn, Indiana, here.

Ronnie Schreiber edits Cars In Depth, a realistic perspective on cars & car culture and the original 3D car site. If you found this post worthwhile, you can dig deeper at Cars In Depth. If the 3D thing freaks you out, don’t worry, all the photo and video players in use at the site have mono options. Thanks – RJS

Grizzled automotive veterans of the VRA (that’s Voluntary Restraint Agreement to you whipper-snappers) often wake in the night screaming about “ADP! ADP!” That’s “Additional Dealer Profit”, a little markup sticker found on everything from Accords to Z-Cars in the Reagan era. Honda dealers were perhaps the worst offenders, adding as much as three thousand dollars’ worth of pure markup to vehicles which often had MSRPs below ten grand.

There’s no “agreement” on the books that limits the number of Elantras that Hyundai can import from the far-off land of Alabama (or, in the case of this Touring model, Korea) but it looks like at least one dealer has decided to revive the glory days of automotive “stealerships”…

Yesterday, Jalopnik investigated College Park Hyundai, home of the $1,495 door guard. What did they find out? Not much, actually, other than the fact that door edge guards normally cost approximately eight bucks. The Jalops figured that the $1,495 door guards were a “bait and switch” to advertise a lower price in the newspapers and on the Internet. That’s at least partially true, but my experience in VRA-era dealership politics were that “options” like this were put on the sticker to offer an easy “win” for the customer.

Customer: I want this here Elantra, but I ain’t payin’ no thousand somethin’ dollars for no door guards.

Salesman: (Laughing) Of course not! Our owner makes us put that charge on there to (whispering) fool the suckers. (Back to hearty voice) But you’re no sucker! I can negotiate that off for you and we can put this Elantra on the road for the price of $21,680, just like it says on the regular sticker.

Customer: Awwwlright then! Let’s do it!

And there you have it. Unfortunately for the nice people at Hyundai, dealer-lobbyist-funded state law prevents them from doing too much about this kind of chicanery. The day may come where you purchase a car from a Web browser at a rock-bottom price and have it delivered via Amazon Fulfillment, but in the meantime, buying the Elantra of your dreams, just like meeting the girl of your dreams, will result in a sticky transaction or two in the flesh.

This has to be a Photoshop job, right? Some of the pixels don’t look quite right, and I’ve seen quite a few ‘shops in my time which look similar, but most of that could be explained away by the fact that the EXIF data indicates it was taken with an iPhone, and some iPhones take awfully grainy pictures.

Alternately, it really could just be another one of these well-meaning but statistically naive attempts to get people to stop looking at their phones while they drive. You know, so they can look up and see the bumpers of all the stopped traffic ahead. Or the billboards…

Maruti Suzuki’s big news at the Delhi Auto Show was the debut of its production compact MPV, the Ertiga. But it wasn’t all staid family-carriers at the Suzuki stand, as the Japanese-Indian automaker also debuted its XA Alpha concept, described in this dramatically-narrated (to put it mildly) video as “The Small God For The Big Future.” Remember the Suzuki Samurai (our global readers will certainly remember the Jimny)? It’s getting ready for its 21st Century makeover…

Suzuki says that the styling of this subcompact SUV, aimed at Ford’s new Ecosport and GM’s forthcoming Mokka, was inspired by traditional Indian wrestlers. Which may well be the case, but there’s no deny that there’s at least a little Range Rover Evoque in the look.

But what’s more enticing than the styling itself, is the question of whether or not a vehicle like this could bolster Suzuki’s muddled US product line. Suzuki has already established itself as the go-to option for low-cost AWD vehicles in the US with its SX4… but one can’t help wondering how many sales that model leaves on the table due to its small-hatchback design. With a more rugged, more-SUV-looking model on similar underpinnings, Suzuki might just be able to build a rugged-entry-AWD image in this market as Subaru moves inexorably upmarket towards an “Audi Junior” positioning.

In any case, the B-SUV market is starting to get some real attention globally, as the global giants update their aged entrants in the segment for ever-more-demanding developing markets. And as a fan of this genre, with its small, funky, affordable and surprisingly utilitarian mini-utes, I certainly hope someone decides to test the US waters with something like this.

Ever since the ill-fated Contour experiment, Ford has maintained a strict separation in its global midsized offerings: Fusion for the Americas and Mondeo for Europe (let’s ignore, for the moment, Australia’s Falcon as the doomed atavism it is). But under the global “One Ford” strategy, a fusion (ahem) of The Blue Oval’s midsized offerings was inevitable, and Ford has signaled for some time that the Fusion and Mondeo are on the verge of becoming one. And here, courtesy of the autoforum.cz, is the first leaked image of Ford’s unified, world-wide midsized contender: though the Fusion and Mondeo names will continue to be used in their respective markets, this car will carry both badges. But are we looking at a revolution in the oft-troubled “world car” game, or a repeat of the Contour’s compromises? Only time will tell…

Need an engineering project? Got 1,200 hours to kill with nothing to do? Take a tip from this heroically patient Spaniard, and hand-machine your own tiny (12 cc displacement) V12. This would be amazing feat of handwork even if it weren’t fully operational (using compressed air injection), but the fact that it works, runs and was made without a single CNC machine is nothing short of astounding.. If, as the book suggests, Shop Class is Soulcraft, this guy is like an engineering bodhisattva, inspiring us with his precision, patience and skill. In a world where not much is made by hand anymore, this achievement is worth taking a few minutes to marvel over… [Hat Tip: Dean Huston]

Editor’s Note: The image above is from Autobild (and is posted elsewhere in the German media), and is not labeled as a rendering, a spy shot or an official image. An anonymous tipster who has seen the upcoming Buick “Encore” (which GM has shown to select fans and journos under embargo for years now) says the vehicle shown here is “basically the same design” as the Encore. 

At first glance, it’s fairly obvious that there’s something not quite right with this picture. Better than most photoshops or renderings, but not quite convincing as a real picture, this car seems trapped in the Uncanny Valley, as if it were photographed undergoing winter testing on the set of the film The Polar Express. In any case, this little Corsa-based CUV (allegedly to be named “Mokka”) will debut at the Geneva Auto Show, and will take on such B-segment crossovers as the Nissan Juke, Suzuki SX4 and Ford’s forthcoming new Ecosport.

Meanwhile, GM’s American-market interpretation of a B-segment CUV is likely to be quite different from these little rough-and-ready softroaders [Ed: Or, not]. Buick is slow-strip-teasing its forthcoming Encore on Facebook, and it’s already looking like the Baby Enclave rumors were well-founded in terms of its exterior design. On the other hand, this isn’t a wildly detailed photo, so who knows? Either way, both the Mokka and the Encore are based on a jacked-up version of the Gamma II subcompact platform, and based on a video of what appears to be some relatively early chassis testing, the short-wheelbase and tall suspension took a little taming. Hit the jump to see for yourself…

This week I will publish two reviews of the automobiles I drove over the last two weeks, and though neither of these cars are available in the US, I believe they both hold fascinating lessons that are highly applicable and relevant to both the US market and the global auto business. But in the meantime I thought I’d share this picture, which would be near impossible to take in the US, and which speaks volumes about the evolution of small cars. Just blocks from Paris’s Place de la Concorde, in front of Chanel’s flagship Parisian boutique, I was able to capture a classic and modern Mini, with a Smart ForTwo sandwiched in between for scale.

I’ll leave commentary on this image to TTAC’s Best and Brightest, but I will say that the tableau stopped me in my tracks. Though I’ve always loved the classic Mini, and I have only the deepest admiration for those who keep these wonderful cars in daily use, this image confirms just how much our automotive expectations have changed. If you think a Smart makes undue compromises in the pursuit of its city-friendly size, imagine what an original Mini must be like in today’s traffic….

TTAC has long been bearish on the Scion brand, and in a lot of ways, Toyota’s global tri-branding strategy with its new “86″ sportscar (Toyota, Subaru and Scion versions are being sold) highlights how Toyota has lost its branding focus. On the other hand, the FR-S, Scion’s version of the 86, is by far the most compelling product that brand has offered… well, possibly ever (OK, since the Mk1 xB). If I were king of Toyota, I’d probably still kill off Scion and sell the 86 as a Celica in the US… after all, how much sense does it make to have two sporty coupes at Scion and none for the Toyota brand? But if Scion follows the FR-S up with a new truly compact pickup co-developed with Daihatsu, as has been rumored, I’d be willing to concede that Scion has a place in the market. After all, truly unique, funky vehicles justified Scion’s existence in the first place, before a watered-down second generation of products killed that positioning (and Scion’s sales). With the FR-S, Scion seems to be heading back towards focused and freaky niche confections… let’s hope it continues to return to those roots.

We won’t rule out the possibility of adding a sportier SUV to the Volkswagen lineup at some time. But the main message with the Cross Coupe is its styling, which stands for the future of SUV design at Volkswagen

You can see the evolution of VW’s new three-slat grille, further integrating the new cue into the headlights for a more cohesive fascia design. But does it work? We’ll let you be the judge of that…

Wintertime is coming, mama, the windows are filled with frost. So I went over to the nearby strip mall to get some thermal underwear. That doesn’t rhyme even half as well as Dylan’s most forced rhymes, but it’s really what happened. There’s a C.W. Price store in the mall. It used to be a location of the A.J. Wright chain that went under, and from the looks of things, all they needed to change were the signs. C.W. Price carries pretty much the same overstocked and distressed merchandise as A.J. Wright. Not quite as depressing as shopping at Big Lots but definitely not the Somerset Collection. While I was at the store of course I had to check out the cheap R/C cars that they had on sale for $6.99 and $7.99 with the other Christmas toys. At first glance they looked like Ferraris, Lamborghinis, Bugattis and Ford GTs. Actually, at second and third glance they still looked like those cars, scale models accurate down to the Veyron’s distinctive black hood, horseshoe Bugatti grille and exposed mid-mounted W16 engine.

Not-a-Bugatti

Nowhere, though, do the words “Ferrari”, “Lamborghini”, “Bugatti”, or “Ford” or those companies’ badging appear anywhere on the R/C cars or on the packaging. In some unintentional irony filtered through the joys of “Chinglish”, the Ford GT does have a decal at the top of the windshield that reads “FAMOUS CAR”.

Can I write anything funnier than reality?

Welcome to the wonderful of Chinese manufacturing where out the front door your vendor sells you your patented or licensed goods and out their back door they sell essentially the same products, only without branding, to dollar store distributors. It’s not a new story. Years ago Georgena Terry, founder of Terry Precision Bicycles for Women, found knock offs of her patented woman’s bike saddle on sale in the US that, based on the molding markings, had to have been made by her own supplier in China.

Legitimate Lamborghini? 

My guess is that something similar happened with these R/C cars. Xiangda Toys Factory, and Hunson Trading Co. are the brand names on the toys. What little that I could find out about the companies is that Xiangda makes R/C toys and the Hunson distributes R/C toys and other toys to dollar stores in North and South America. The Hunson labeled toys carry the XTR brand, which I’m guessing stands for Xiangda Toy Racing.

Here’s what I think is going on. If Xiangda or Hunson want to reply, we’ll give them an opportunity to do so. I think that Xiangda is the manufacturer and the Hunson is the distributor of all of these, regardless of how the specific toys are branded. On the multitudinous Chinese goods trading sites, you can find Hunson offering toys branded with names like Lamborghini so it’s possible that one or both of the companies has a legitimate license to make scale models. The toys could be complete knock offs, but they appeared, as I said, to be fairly accurate in terms of body shape, so they just as likely could have been molded with tooling made to produce licensed goods. I’m guessing that someone thought that they could make a few extra yuan by diverting some goods to market without the additional cost of paying a royalty fee.

There appears to be little risk. After all, this is being done in plain sight. Since they don’t sell the cars branded with the real car company names, as long as those brand names never appear on shipping manifests or customs documents nobody will ever be the wiser. Bugatti, Ferrari and Lamborghini’s licensing agents and lawyers don’t typically shop in stores like C.W. Price. Ford’s lawyers might have driven by the Price store on Telegraph in Redford, on their way to the Glass House in Dearborn, but again, they’re not likely shopping for their kids’ toys at dollar stores and deep discounters. Though it’s likely to be under the radar of white shoe law firms and their clients, dollar stores and deep discounters are still big business. There are over 20,000 stores operated by the three largest dollar store chains. Licensing deals typically pay 7-12% of wholesale prices as royalties. That means that for every one of these R/C cars that are distributed, somewhere between 25 and 50 cents doesn’t get paid to a car company that is rightfully theirs. That may not sound like much but when you consider that these toys are shipped over by the container load the IP infringement from quasi knock offs like these must represent significant sums of unpaid royalties.

Scale model radio control Fauxrrari

Of course, these days cars’ shapes are protected under intellectual property laws just as surely as Ferrari’s prancing horse and Lamborghini’s pawing bull are protected trademarks. My day gig is custom machine embroidery and I’ve gotten cease and desist letters from car companies unhappy about my embroidery designs that portray their cars. They were overreaching but it seems to me that while artists and photographers might have some leeway and fair use rights to create original art depicting a protected car design, there’s no doubt that if a car’s shape is copyrighted, making and selling scale models of that car would be infringing on the car company’s intellectual property, with or without a logo decal.

It happens with race cars too. When A.J. Wright was still in business, during the holiday season they’d sell R/C Formula One cars that looked just like the Ferrari and McLaren F1 cars, down to the coloring of the sponsors’ decals. Only if you looked closely the sponsors’ names were close but actually fictional, and nowhere did it say the team names or F1. It reminded me of a store that would advertise selling “names like Hitachi and Sansui” and when you get there they are selling knock off brands named Hatichi and Sunsai.

This isn’t going to stop. As long as there’s a market for quasi knockoffs and as long as the Chinese government and Chinese industries benefit from those knock offs they will continue to be made. If General Motors couldn’t get Chery to stop making the QQ, a copy of a real car, Ford isn’t going to get Xiangda to stop making scale model Famous Cars.

Everyone knows TTAC hearts data, so this little NPR/Edmunds collaboration, which maps hybrid and EV sales by locality, is right up our HOV lane.

With engine management technologies creating ever-more refined, well-behaved engines, the snap-crackle-pop overrun at the beginning of this video is an increasingly rare throwback to the time when men were men and engines could blow up at any second. Sure, such playfulness will probably be managed out of existence by the time the F30 M3 hits dealerships, but it seems like a good omen for the M3′s return to six-cylinder power. In fact, it might even be possible that the backfire heard here has something to do with the electric turbocharger that’s rumored to give the new M3 lag-free turbo performance… but then you’d probably be a better judge of that than I.

Last Monday, we regaled you out with stories of Toyota coming to grips with the “new peak oil,” and other topics related to the growing gap (or lack thereof?) between global production and consumption oil. This week I’m feeling a little less apocalyptic, and little bit more indulgent. And really, why not celebrate those precious hydrocarbons while they’re still cheap and plentiful? This Mercedes SLS AMG Black Series may burn ‘em by the bushel, but it sure sounds good doing it. And though cars like the forthcoming 650 HP Shelby Mustang GT500 prove that performance is still alive in the 21st Century, high-revving, large-displacement, naturally-aspirated V8s like the AMG Black’s are going to be facing special challenges under future emissions standards. Which makes its gargling, chortling music all the sweeter to my ears…

Lincoln’s updated look doesn’t seem to have won over too many of the skeptics, but before you make up your mind entirely, do check out these live shots from the LA Auto Show floor. Our man on the ground, Alex Dykes, notes

The interior refinements are welcome, especially as Cadillac has made some improvements to their interiors lately. Lincolns My Touch systems do seem considerably snappier than the previous versions, but we won’t be sure about the reliability until someone at TTAC has one for a week.

So you want to go green. The problem is a Prius isn’t green enough for you, what’s a green shopper to do? Go all in with all-electric. So far we have the Leaf and the newly announced Focus Electric both with ranges under 100 miles and charge times that can get a little long even at 240V (the Leaf takes 7 hours). In step the new breed of auto makers: Tesla, Fisker and Coda (just to name a few). Coda is a new all-electric car made in China (assembled in California). The first thing that strikes you about the Coda sedan is how plain the design is. The second thing is how the parts don’t come from any parts bin I’ve ever seen with all the window switches and knobs having a unique look. Good or bad? Depends on how reliable the parts are. Coda touts fast charging times with the 6.6KW charger (2x the speed of the Leaf) and a battery pack that’s another 33% larger than the Nissan as well. The shorter charging time and larger battery pack mean an advertised (but not verified) longer range and shorter charging time than the Leaf. The trade off? A cheaper interior. Pricing is expected to be slightly higher than the Leaf at just under $40,000 less the usual tax incentives. On our short spin in the Coda on the roads around the LA Auto Show, the prototype vehicle had too many rough edges that are due to be polished to posit a firm opinion of the car. Stay tuned for a review of the production model in 2012.

Based on a subcompact Polo-sized platform, VW’s eT Concept manages to offer nearly 144 cubic feet of storage. And because it’s aimed at the green-conscious postman of tomorrow (not to mention stop-start driving on fixed routes), it’s a purely electric concept with a 60-mile range and a 70 MPH top speed. Think of the performance as “optimized for the workplace psychology.” Speaking of which, one of the coolest features of the new concept is that it can actually be driven at speeds up to 6 km/h from the passenger seat, using something called the “drive stick.” The thing can even back itself up by remote control, using bumper-mounted sensors to avoid obstacles or stop itself. There’s no word on how soon this research vehicle will make its way into production, but because it was developed in partnership with the German Postal Service, some of its gizmology should filter into German postal vehicles. And with a very similar VW “Bulli” coming to market in 2015, not only could this actual vehicle be made, there may even be a civilian sliding-door version as well.

The Mastretta MXT is not very well-known outside of Top Gear buffs who recall Jeremy Clarkson giving the MXT an incredibly hard time for its Mexican heritage. Of course we all know Jeremy is a shock jock more than a motor head these days, so his opinion aside the MXT slots in right behind the Doking as one the more interesting cars on display in Los Angeles. The MXT is the first sports car designed and built-in Mexico, but rather than trying to dethrone Corvette or Mustang, Mastretta is going for the niche market of small, light kit cars. Yes, kit cars. At least north of the border…

You see, the company doesn’t have the funds to make the MXT pass all the safety standards in the USA and we don’t have the legal exemptions available on our side of the pond to allow them to sell low volume specialty cars like they do in Europe. So, if you want one, the fibreglass shell and extruded aluminum chassis will arrive fully assembled with two seats and a radio, all you have to do is un-crate the Ford-sourced engine and transmission, drop them in the rear and crank a few bolts. Of course, I’d take the extra step of removing the fibreglass body and driving down the highway Ariel Atom style, but that’s just me. Shoppers wanting this hot tamale don’t have long to wait with production supposedly underway with shipments starting in the first quarter 2012. Pricing? A moving target that started at $55,000 USD and now is in the $60,000-$65,000 ballpark. Not pocket change, but neither is that Lotus. (But at least the Lotus will at least arrive fully assembled.)