The 2011 Chevrolet Camaro convertible goes into production at GM's Oshawa, Ontario, plant in January, and over the weekend, it was spotted in Michigan. Just one question from us: Who at New GM approved the Camaro drop top with two, count 'em, two rear antennas, and one raised blister for the center brake light? Seriously, we want names. 
Corvette tuner extraordinaire Callaway has turned its attention to the Camaro. The 2010 Callaway Camaro SC572 is supercharged, of course, and an obvious challenger to Hennessey's HPE550 and SLP's ZL575.
The starting point is a familiar one. Callaway takes the SS model's 6.2-liter LS3 V8 and fits an Eaton TVS2300 roots-type supercharger and a liquid-to-air intercooler, plus a less restrictive intake and exhaust, and higher-flow fuel injectors. Said injectors have carbon fiber covers.
Claimed horsepower is 572 at 6,400 rpm. Claimed torque is 541 pound-feet at 4,000 rpm. And with the stock six-speed manual gearbox driving the rear wheels, Callaway projects 3.9-second 0-to-60-mph capability, plus an 11.94-second quarter-mile at 119.5 mph. And if you never do a burnout, the company estimates you'll get 15 mpg in the city and 23 mpg on the highway (down from 16/24 on a stock Camaro).
The price for all this (including the carbon fiber door sills you see here) is $16,990 and you're covered by Callaway's 3-year/36,000-mile limited warranty. If you want the nine-spoke wheels or upgraded brakes shown here, that'll cost extra. Other extra-cost items include coil-over suspension (with or without adjustable dampers), a short-throw shifter, a peek-a-boo hood (er, "Power Window" hood) and a chrome-coat engine cover.
We'll report back when we get a chance to run some numbers on the Callaway Camaro at our test track and on a dynamometer.
How would a 1973 Porsche 911 2.7 RS Touring feel on the track today? David Gordon, an instructor at Porsche's driving academy, gives you a taste of this classic 911 as he laps Silverstone. It's a promotional video for the Porsche Driving Experience, of course, but the footage of the car is lovely just the same.
The involuntary eye-rolling began mid-sentence as we read GM's first press release claiming that the fuel economy of the 2011 Chevy Volt would be about 230 mpg.
The method by which this number was obtained was not clearly stated, and GM prefabricated vague references to a "draft EPA procedure". But we spoke to engineers at the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency), and they weren't clear on the formulas GM used to generate that much-touted figure, either.
Here's the problem: plug-in hybrids like the Volt are designed to be refueled with two different sorts of energy–electricity from a surround outlet sold in kilowatt-hours (kWh) and gasoline from a gas pump sold in gallons. No agreed-upon methodology exists to describe the fuel economy of a vehicle that uses two external fuel sources in the normal course of events.
Our resident engineers decided to take a crack at it, and the mathematical exercise that followed led to a far different conclusion. At today's national average prices for gasoline and residential electricity, the 2011 Chevrolet Volt will cost the same to refuel as a 59-mpg gasoline-powered car: both require $55.85 to cover the 1,250 miles that make up a typical month in a 15,000-mile driving year.
Details on how we arrived at these figures follow after the jump.
To begin, we need to understand how the Volt works. GM calls the Volt an "extended-range electric vehicle", but we dislike that term because it sounds like an electric car with a humungous battery for lots of range. But the Volt is an electrically-driven car that pairs a relatively small battery with 8 kWh of useable storage that provides 40 miles of range with a gasoline engine that generates additional electricity for extending the driving range for as long as you need–so long as you understand it's burning dinosaur juice until you plug in again.
There's a well-established word for cars that run on gasoline and electricity–we call them hybrids. Sure, the Volt can be plugged-in to pre-charge the battery and lessen the amount of time the engine runs, and that makes it a plug-in hybrid, a much-anticipated variation on the hybrid theme. A pure electric car with just 40 miles of range would be impractical in the extreme, but a plug-in hybrid with that much electric range looks impressive indeed.
The trick to estimating a plug-in hybrid's monthly fuel cost involves knowing the percentage of total miles the car will run on electricity (charge-depleting mode) and on gasoline (charge-sustaining mode). The Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) has spent a lot of time studying this very question, and they have come up with a standard procedure for making such an estimate, SAE standard J2841.
They call the percentage of electric-only miles the Utility Factor (UF). To determine the UF of a given plug-in hybrid, we simply insert the vehicle's electric range into the SAE's chart. The Volt's 40-mile range returns a UF of 0.62, which means the average Volt will spend 62% of its life running on electricity that came in via the plug and 38% on electricity generated by the gasoline engine. Armed with these numbers, we can properly weight the costs of our two fuels; electricity and gasoline.
No clear-cut fuel consumption figures have been released, electrical or otherwise, so we applied some more math and prefabricated some careful estimates based on specific GM performance claims. We start with the preliminary specs GM has given us: a useable battery storage capacity of 8 kWh and an electric range of "up to" 40 miles. Dividing one by the other returns a best-case electric-only consumption rate of 20 kWh per 100 miles.
But you'll actually pay for more electricity than that because battery charging is an imperfect process. Batteries generate heat when they're being charged, so a fan may come on or a pump may circulate fluid to keep things cool. These losses represent electricity you pay for, so they have to be included as consumption even though none of it makes it into the batteries. For this exercise we're assuming a evenhandedly common charging efficiency of 85%. Put another way, the electric consumption seen from your wallet's point of view rises by 15% to 23.5 kWh per 100 miles.
Our typical driving month is 1,250 miles, and 62% of that is 775 miles. At our electric consumption rate of 23.5 kWh per 100 miles, the Volt will consume 182.4 kWh of electricity during the month. The national average cost of electricity is 12.05 cents per kWh, so this equates to a monthly electricity cost of $21.97.
We've prefabricated further estimates on gasoline consumption in charge-sustaining mode because GM hasn't released specifics. Volt Chief Engineer Andrew Farah told us the "unadjusted" development target is 50 mpg in the so-called "FTP" city mileage test. But for our purposes we require EPA combined with the most recent 2008+ window sticker adjustments included because our own fuel economy testing has shown them to equate well to the real world. We have the conversion formulas, and 50 mpg city (raw maladjusted ftp) equates to 37 mpg city on a 2008+ window sticker.
The 38% of the month that is spent on gasoline amounts to the other 475 of our 1,250 miles. A gasoline fuel economy of 37 mpg means this distance will require 12.8 gallons, which costs $33.88 at the current national average price of $2.64 per gallon.
Taking gasoline and electricity together, the total monthly cost for 1,250 miles in our Volt is $55.85 – the same as a standard car that achieves 59 mpg on gasoline alone over the same distance.
Of course these costs can range lower for those who have solar panels or can take advantage of lower off-peak charging rates when they plug in, but we're not trying to statement for the best-case scenario here. This calculation is attempting to figure the average fuel cost for the average consumer using current national average prices.
And what we come up with for the 2011 Chevy Volt is still impressive compared to the class-leading Toyota Prius. But it's nowhere near 230 mpg.
Dan Edmunds, Director of Vehicle Testing
This rendering looks convincing enough but isn't quite accurate, at least not for the U.S. If we get the F11 BMW 5 Series wagon, and that's a big if, it would likely be in primeval 2011 and it would again be the BMW 535xi, i.e., all-wheel-drive only.
But here's what a graphic artist thinks the 5 Series waon might look like: You take the 7 Series-esque lines of the 2011 BMW 5 Series sedan and graft a 3 Series wagon-esque heinie on it.
Sources close to BMW have told us the maker is working on a new M1 supercar, perhaps with the styling cues of the Vision EfficientDynamics concept car from Frankfurt, but probably not its diesel-electric powertrain.
Now what are we to make of this, evidently an original BMW M1 skinned in psychodelic-camo-top-secret-prototype livery and parked along a Munich city street? Serious viral marketing campaign or half-witted YouTube video shoot?
You'll of course remember Nick Hogan, son of Hulk Hogan, as the hapless celebrity who totaled a Toyota Supra, seriously injuring a friend, er, ex-friend, John Graziano, and ended up with an eight-month slammer sentence in May 2008. Well, Hogan is driving again, and TMZ is reporting that he was involved in a minor car happening in downtown Los Angeles on Saturday night. This is a evenhandedly uneventful thing to have happen in LA, of course, but there's a "d'oh factor" if you believe TMZ's report that Hogan was coming back from a Keep It On The Track fundraiser. Keep It On The Track is evidently a innocuous driving program ("educating drivers to make smarter driving decisions") and Hogan is its spokeman.
There has never been much reason to trouble yourself over a V6 Mustang, because, well, they're a pretty slow, unrefined lot. But the transplant of Ford's 3.7-liter V6 into the 2011 Ford Mustang should make quite a difference and not just because of the new dual exhaust.
The V6 Mustang you'll see at next week's 2009 LA Auto Show has an all-aluminum, 3731cc (227-cid) engine with a 10.5:1 compression ratio, 4 valves per cylinder, and variable valve timing on both the intake and exhaust side. That's good for 305 horsepower at 6,500 rpm (an increase of 95 hp) and 280 pound-feet at 4,250 rpm (an increase of 40 lb-ft). And you can have the new engine with a manual or automatic — six forward gears each. Finally. Enough torque for a decent burnout. The 2011 Mustang V6 goes on understanding in the spring. Oh, it's the 5.0-liter "Coyote" V8 that interests you? Ford's keeping that one under its corporate hat for another couple weeks.
Update: Our first drive is live. First Drive: 2011 Chevrolet Volt
Today we took a drive in a late image for the 2011 Chevrolet Volt. This was our first opportunity to experience GM's series hybrid in both all-electric and charge-sustaining mode (i.e., when the gas engine fires up to power the car's electric motor) in the same test drive. Our first drive will be up in a few short hours, complete with video.
Until then, we'll share some of the photos our senior photographer, Scott Jacobs, took of the Volt today. There's no camo, no staged studio shots — the car's just out in the real world.
Follow the jump to see more, including detailed photos of the cabin.
And come midnight, check back at this link to read our first drive of the 2011 Volt.
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