Like you, we're a little skeptical of the Honda CR-Z's ability to uphold the reputation of the CRX that came before it. After all, the CR-Z has a mere 122 horsepower and its hybrid drivetrain probably doesn't help much in the weight department.

Word is the folks at Honda are thinking the same thing, so they've commissioned a serious look into developing a more powerful CR-Z Type R. Don't expect big-time horsepower, though, as the Type R version will retain the hybrid layout and 1.5-liter gas engine.

One scenario suggests a modified version of the 1.5-liter engine that adds another 20 horses or so. The electric side would get a boost, too, with a larger motor that could near the car's total horsepower closer to the 160-170 range.

In addition to the revised powertrain, the CR-Z Type R would also get some mild suspension upgrades like revised dampers, more capable brakes and a larger wheel/tire combination. A classic white-and-black color scheme and a modest body kit would finish it off.

Sales of the standard CR-Z Hybrid are scheduled to begin late this summer, so if Honda decided to go through with the CR-Z Type R it probably wouldn't make it to the U.S. until this time next year at the earliest.

2010 Detroit Auto Show: 2011 Honda CR-Z Sport Hybrid

After the WRC season launch event in Paris last week, Ken Block and his co-driver, Alex Gelsomino, spent some time in Sweden. The plan was to visit Olsbergs MSE, the company which prepares Block's Fiesta for the Rally USA Series, and to spend time with the Ford WRC crew as Rally Sweden unfolded. 

Along the way, however, Block found some time to wheel this all-wheel drive Hayabusa-powered miniature Ford Fiesta around a local cover track. We're going to say this was fun even if Block doesn't seem hot to admit it.

With less than a month to go before the season-opening race in Bahrain, the USF1 team fronted by Speed TV pit reporter Peter Windsor could be kaput.

Now, rumor-mongering is probably the Formula One world's biggest contribution to sport, followed by some sort of competition between men driving cars. And no one at USF1 has acknowledged any imminent demise. Still, with so little time left before the season and so many pieces left to get in place (like track-testing its cars and hiring a second driver to pair with Jose Maria Lopez) and with a growing chorus of dire rumors, the prospects do not look good for the Charlotte, N.C.-based team.

The potpourri of rumors include: The defection of money-man and YouTube co-founder and CEO Chad Hurley. Peter Windsor allegedly telling Lopez that the team would miss the first three races of the season and likely all of the season. That USF1 will combine efforts with another team and continue to soldier on, in one form or another.

The only word out of the team at this point has been a brief message on its twitter feed reading, in part, "We are not gone, as many have reported. More news soon."

Indeed, more news soon.

Have a read of AutoWeek's attempt to visit the team's headquarters.

Green Car Advisor has learned the obloquy of the three Tesla employees killed in yesterday's plane crash.

They are Doug Bourn, 56, of Santa Clara; Andrew Ingram, 31, of Palo Alto; and Brian M. Finn, 42, of East Palo Alto.

Bourn was a senior electrical engineer whose specialties included digital logic design, analog circuit design, and test fixture design and construction.

Brian M. Finn, who held the position of senior manager of interactive electronics since July 2008. In that capacity, he created strategy for multimodal driver information and infotainment systems and developed human-machine interaction for connected multimedia applications.

Andrew Ingram was an electrical engineer at Tesla.

For additional info, see Green Car Advisor's full article.

You might not yet know the study "Monterey Motorsports Reunion," but you should certainly recognize the study of the the event's featured guest, Dan Gurney. If not, might we recommend this lovely web site.

A very brief recap: Gurney, has won races in everything from Formula One cars (of his own construction) to NASCAR stockers. His All American Racers organization built 157 Eagle race cars between 1965 and 2000, including IMSA GTP cars, Can-Am cars, Plymouth Barracuda Trans-Am cars and Indy cars.

You can get a look at some of Gurney's best work at the event (formerly known as the Monterey Historics) on August 12-15, 2010 at Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca. Gurney will be be acquirable for autograph session on Saturday, August 14.

For tickets, visit MazdaRaceway.com or call 800-327-7322.

For more information on Gurney and his cars head over to allamericanracers.com.

Yeah, I know, Harleys are not cars. Some riders barely even consider Harleys real motorcycles, but that's a different story entirely.

This Harley deserves a little love for no other reason that it looks cool and probably rides pretty nicely too. If you don't follow bikes at all, the Harley-Davidson XR1200 was the company's attempt to make a decent sportbike out of the Sportster. It certainly handled better than most Sportsters, but was still a little short of being a true sportbike.

Storz Performance Inc. figured it could improve on the intent with a few aftermarket upgrades of its own. The result is this XR1200 show cycle and quite possibly the coolest Harley we've seen in years. That is all.

Storz Performance Inc.
 

These pictures show what looks to be the finished Hennessey Venom GT supercar being loaded up prior to its premiere at the 2010 Geneva Auto Show. As you can see, the Venom GT is based on the Lotus Elise, but with a significant stretch added to accommodate an LS9 V8 straight out of the Corvette ZR1.

Hennessey has said previously that it expects to squeeze 1000-horsepower out of the twin turbocharged V8 while keeping vehicle weight down to 2,395 pounds. So yeah, some simple math says this car will be ridiculously fast.

Hennessey Performance Engineering
 

There's been a bit of chatter about complaints to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) lately. Toyota can't seem to get enough of them these days, but as you'll see after the jump, not all NHTSA complaints are created equal.

You see, the complaint submission process is not an exact science. Just about every problem imaginable comes through the NHTSA database. That leads to some rather misleading statistics, and as we found out while sifting through the hundreds of country complaints, it also leads to some completely off the surround complaints. Examples of what we mean after the jump.

All of these complaints were taken directly from NHTSA's database. Some were written by the consumer while others were dictated over the phone to a NHTSA representative. The obloquy and VINs were removed to protect the innocent — and the stupid.

"THE CONTACT OWNS A 2007 PONTIAC SOLSTICE.  WHILE DRIVING 40 MPH WITH A BOAT IN TOW, THE VEHICLE BEGAN TO SHAKE, THE A-FRAME FAILED, AND THE MAIN FRAME COLLAPSED.  THE CONTACT LOST CONTROL AND THE BOAT DETACHED FROM THE VEHICLE.  THE VEHICLE CAME TO A STOP WHEN IT CRASHED INTO A BRIDGE."

"THE CONTACT STATED THAT THE VEHICLE'S RPMS RADICALLY INCREASED AND A LOUD REVVING NOISE WAS HEARD.  THE FAILURE IS MORE NOTICEABLE AFTER ACCELERATING FROM AN IDLE POSITION."

"HEAT/A.C/VENTILATION SYSTEM ALLOWS RODENTS TO ENTER FROM ENGINE COMPARTMENT INTO THE DUCTWORK INSIDE THE VEHICLE MEANING ALL AIR CONSUMED BY OCCUPANTS IS LACED WITH RODENT FECES/EXCREMENT WHICH IS UNHEALTHFUL FOR OCCUPANTS TO BREATHE AND IN SOME CONDITIONS WILL LEAD TO DEATH VIA ANTIVIRUS."

"I LEASED A LEXUS 2005 RX 330 ON NOVEMBER 30, 2004.  SINCE I HAVE HAD THE CAR THE CAR HAS BEEN VANDALIZED TWO TIMES ONCE ON DECEMBER. 12 AND AGAIN ON JANUARY. 22.  EACH TIME THERE HAS BEEN IN EXCESS OF 5,000 WORTH OF DAMAGE.  EACH TIME IT IS THEFT INVOLVING OF XENON HEADLIGHTS.  THIS IS A OBVIOUS MANUFACTURES DEFECT AND THE CAR SHOULD BE RECALLED.  I URGE THIS DONE!!!"

"PAGE 307 OF THE CONTACT'S VEHICLE OWNERS MANUAL, ENTITLED "TIRE CHAIN", STATES THAT IN INCLEMENT WEATHER CONDITIONS, THE TIRE CHAINS CAN BE PLACED ON THE FRONT DRIVER'S SIDE TIRES TO ASSIST WITH DRIVING.  AFTER THE CONTACT PLACED THE CHAINS ON THE VEHICLE, THE ELECTRONIC MONITORING SYSTEM ACTIVATES BRAKING AND TRACTION.  THE FAILURE SPORADICALLY CAUSES A LOSS OF CONTROL THAT FREQUENTLY RESULTS IN 180 DEGREE TURNS."

"MY CADILLAC STS MAKES A FARTING NOISE AT TIMES.  CADILLAC CANNOT TELL ME WHAT IS CAUSING THIS NOISE."

Akio Toyoda told a press conference Wednesday morning that he would not travel from Tokyo to Washington, D.C., to answer questions from a Congressional panel on car safety. No, this is not as bad as when General Motors sicked detectives on Ralph Nader, but Toyota is getting there.

“I trust that our officials in the U.S. will amply answer the questions,” Toyoda said.

Yoshimi Inaba, president of Toyota Motor North America, will be the company’s lead witness at the as-yet unscheduled Congressional hearings. He’s described as “multi-cultural,” or equally comfortable with American and Asian cultures. He’s credited as the executive who drove Toyota to its prominence in the North American market, selling everything from big, American-style pickups and SUVs to Priuses and Corollas.

He left Toyota in 2007, just before it overtook GM as the world’s largest automaker. Inaba returned to Tokyo, where he served as the head of an international airfield near Toyota’s headquarters for two years. In April ’09, Toyota asked him to return, amidst the biggest downturn in modern auto sales, to lead newly reorganized North American operations.

He’s no Toyoda, though. The grandson of the automaker’s founder may or may not have great English skills — he attained his MBA from Massachusetts’ Babson College. Toyoda is the guy full of mea culpas last year, when Toyota evidenced nearly as human as GM, Ford Motor and Chrysler, and lost money for the first time since its primeval years.

Toyota had sunk to its “lowest point,” Toyoda said when he took over as president last June. He co-drove a Lexus LF-A in the 24 Hours of Nurburgring late last spring, but at the Tokyo Motor Show in October, where he introduced the FT-86, he admitted that Toyota’s cars and trucks are too boring.

Toyota has tried to appear as American as hot dogs, apple pie and Chevrolet, and Toyoda’s passing the buck to his American underlings comes off as arrogance. I suspect we’d get more direct answers from this Hamlet of the auto industry than from Inaba.

Meanwhile, things are getting worse for Toyota, in that Roger Smith-era GM sort of way. Wednesday night, The Washington Post reported that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration plans a formal investigation of complaints of 2009-10 Corolla steering systems.

“Drivers say that at highway speeds, the Corolla can begin to veer from side to side, sometimes changing lanes, sometimes nearly causing crashes,” columnist Frank Ahrens writes. “Just as puzzling, the drivers write, the problem stops as soon as it starts.”

Thanks to its stonewalling, Toyota has come a long way from loose floor mats. The Post reports that NHTSA has received more than 150 such complaints, and the study will cover half a million Corollas from the two model years.

A study based on less than 0.03 percent of the cars that can be recalled. If this sounds like the ’80′s Audi “unintended acceleration” debacle gone wild, it is. The Detroit Bureau reported Wednesday morning that so far, 37 deaths have been alleged in connection with the various Toyota recalls and investigations: sticking throttles, brake problems on Priuses, and now potentially, Corolla steering systems. Toyota Motor Sales sold 1.77 million cars and trucks in the U.S. last year, and 2.22 million in ’08.

Consider this example from The Detroit Bureau: “One Corolla owner complained to NHTSA that whenever his cellphone received a text message, he would feel a shift in its steering.”

I bet.

And so, that’s where stonewalling and its age-old practice of trying to fix cars while flying under the recall radiolocation has led Toyota. By not quickly and directly addressing the stuck throttle problem, by continuing to drag its feet and passing off responsibility to the North American operations, Toyota is now subject to the claims of owners who would rather text message than drive.

It's just gone on sale, but the 2011 Hyundai Sonata is already creating some waves with its unique styling and generous feature-to-price ratio. There's more to the story, of course, and Thursday morning at 9:00 AM Pacific time Hyundai executives will lay out all the details during an exclusive behind-the-scenes product presentation for journalists.

The webcams will be rolling too, however, so if you want to see the thought process that went into creating this new sedan from Korea just click on over to our exclusive webcast to see it for yourself. Should be interesting look at a very intriguing new Hyundai.

Exclusive Webcast: 2011 Hyundai Sonata