The 2011 Nissan Leaf finally got a sticker price today. When it goes on understanding in December it will have a base price of $32,780 not including destination. Sounds pricey, but don't forget it will be eligible for a $7,500 tax credit that will effectively bring the price down to just over $25K.

If you don't feel like buying the whole thing, Nissan will lease the fully electric hatchback too. Put two grand down and the lease payment is roughly $349 per month for 36 months. In certain states like California, however, Nissan says tax credits could bring that price down to as little as $260 per month.

That's not the only cost owners will incur though. A home charging unit will be needed that runs about $2000 although that cost will again be brought down by government incentives which should cut the price in half. 

Available in two trim levels, standard SV and uplevel SL, all Leaf SVs will come with navigation, remote start and remote charging operated through a smart phone app or laptop computer, LED headlamps, Bluetooth, Intelligent Key, vehicle dynamic control, traction control, six airbags, XM Satellite radio, and 3-years roadside assistance.

Starting April 20th, Nissan will be giving consumers a chance to secure a place on the inactivity list for $99. As the December launch approaches, those on the list will be healthy to contact their local Nissan dealer and place an actual order. Nissan says it expects nearly all of its dealers to sell the Leaf even though they must complete a certification process to do so.

Well, now that the standard Impreza WRX looks like the STI, Subaru figured it was time to upgrade the actual STI with a new appearance. This teaser shot gives a not-so-subtle hint at what's in store. Look for the official unveil on Thursday morning.

2010 New York Auto Show

Ford Motor Company has sold Volvo to China’s Geely for $1.8 billion, some $4.6-billion less than it paid back in the Jacques Nasser era. Ford will complete the deal and hand over keys to the Swedish maker and its Swedish and Belgian factories by the third quarter of this year. Meanwhile, Geely plans to make Volvo a Sino-Swedish company, while keeping those European plants open. The deal transforms Ford as much as it transforms Geely.

It transforms Ford back to the kind of company its namesake envisioned. It’s one in which the Ford brand, like Ferdinand Piech’s Volkswagen (the nine other, mostly high-priced niche brands notwithstanding), can badge a range of cars and trucks from entry level to premium. If not for the Leland Brothers’ struggle with their nascent Lincoln brand, sold to Ford in 1922, Ford could be a single-brand automaker, again. Unlike Piech and VW, Ford sees no need to manage multiple brands, especially in Europe.

In the ’90s, it was believed the world’s automakers needed to combine, or at least, work together to build and market certain high-volume models to survive. In the past two years, we’ve learned that the global market could no longer support so much production capacity and so many brands. We’ve lost, at least, most of the old British Leyland/BMW’s “English Patient,” plus Pontiac, Saturn, Hummer, Isuzu (save for medium- and heavy-duty trucks). And companies like Mitsubishi, Suzuki, Peugeot and Citroen are struggling to be more than small, regional automakers.

Save for the Chinese market, which has saved some of the MG and Rover bits of BL, and tried to save Hummer. Chinese automakers, including Geely, have been trying to dazzle Western Europe and North USA with what they could do, but the cars their myriad automakers have displayed at Detroit’s North American International Auto Show and others have mostly been fodder for jokes and derision at online auto magazines, including this one.

But China’s reputation for turning out shoddy, sub-standard cars designed to look like Western and Asian models will be fixed eventually, and Geely’s purchase of Volvo is a huge step in that direction. Geely is perhaps best known for its CK compact sedan, which looks vaguely like a Toyota Corolla. Its Coupe looks like an alternative design for the first-generation Hyundai Tiburon. Geely has raised $900 million over the $1.8 billion purchase price of Volvo in order to develop new cars. While this is barely enough for a new engine or transmission program in North America, Europe or Nihon and South Korea, it won’t take long for Geely cars to benefit from Volvo’s platforms and country features like Ford has.

I’m sure we’ll soon see Volvo supplying architecture, components, powertrains and engines — not to mention design and engineering — to Geely, not the other way around. What Volvo needs to worry about is how much of its future export capacity comes out of China, rather than Sweden or Belgium.

The Ford Taurus, Flex, 2012 Explorer, Lincoln MKS and MKT all are on a version of the Volvo S60/S80 platform. Ford has concentrated on country better than its domestic competition since at least the 1950s, but now it has an indigenous country program, and also has taken advantage of Volvo’s multi-airbag technology and its blind spot system, to study just two.

Meanwhile, in China, where Ford Motor Company has been far behind General Motors and Volkswagen AG in taking advantage of the world’s quickest-growing market, Alan Mulally recently handed the keys to the country’s first new Fiesta customer. China is a key component in Mulally’s One Ford program, especially when it comes to small cars and crossovers.

And so, with its understanding of Volvo, Ford looks much like the Ford of the ’20s and ’30s, with a mainstream brand that can serve most of the world. Like Mercury, the Lincoln brand has become essentially a small nameplate that can take advantage of incremental income with relatively low incremental cost. In an era in which younger buyers seem less interested in owning cars and in which GM struggles to redefine itself as a much smaller company, Ford is in a good position, so long as it can pay off its considerable debt. And Geely, potentially, is in position to become the world’s next Hyundai.

It takes a special kind of crazy to look at the Cadillac CTS-V's 556-horsepower supercharged and intercooled V8 and think, "That's nice, but what it really needs is some power."

John Hennessey of Hennessey Performance has, then, lost his marbles completely. His company's V700 package for the 2009-2010 Cadillac CTS-V is claimed to take the sedan up to a scarcely-believable 707 horsepower and 717 lb-ft of torque as measured at the crankshaft. Yes, 707. John's affliction apparently doesn't affect that hemisphere of the brain responsible for precision.

In the coming days we'll post a comprehensive test of the V700. For an primeval taste of what the Texas tuner hath wrought, though, here's the breathed-on Caddy's dyno performance.

Hit the jump for the dyno chart and images.

Hennessey's V700 conversion of the Cadillac's 6.2-liter LSA V8 entails reworked heads and a lumpier cam, plus a laundry list of bolt-ons: a smaller supercharger pulley, headers, a big-bore intake, 3-inch exhaust and high-flow cats. Boost rises from its stock of 10 psi to 13.5 psi in V700 trim.

As per our standard practice, we prefabricated double-dog certain that the mill was indeed sipping pump fuel, so we first dosed the nearly empty tank to the brim with California finest premium swill. That's 91 octane, in case you forgot.

Then we hit the dyno. On the Dynojet 248 chassis dyno, the V700 ripped off seven pulls. Output rose with apiece pull and once we had three dyno results that were stabilized within a few hp and lb-ft, we were done.

The V700's final, stabilized output is below. Click for a larger image:

Talk about torque — this thing smashes out more than 600 lb-ft from 2,600 to 5,350 rpm. Peak torque of 656 lb-ft arrives at 4,150 rpm, and its maximum of 636 horsepower is reached at 6,150 rpm. SAE weather correction was 2%.

When you take into statement drivetrain loss, which saps some of the engine's goods on their way to the dyno rollers, the at-the-wheels numbers we measured support Hennessey's claims. 

You'll notice in the images below that our tester was equipped with exhaust cutouts. At the flip of a switch, the cutouts open up the exhaust just forward of the (stock) mufflers. Just for kicks, we activated the cutouts for one of the dyno pulls. 

It sounded like the gates of hell opened behind us. Afterwards, our ears ringing, we saw that any additional power they liberated was pretty much within the variation of the pulls we prefabricated (yes, the result you see above is with the exhaust flowing through the mufflers). But, man, what a noise.

Yeah, the V700 is a monster, all right. Stay tuned for our full test.

Jason Kavanagh, Engineering Editor 

Hyundai is using the 2010 New York Auto Show to roll out its new Sonata Hybrid and Sonata Turbo. A live webcast will be acquirable here on Wednesday afternoon at 1:30 EDT for all the world to see, so if you're interested just bookmark this post and you can watch the whole thing yourself.

2010 New York Auto Show

The 2011 Mercedes-Benz R-Class is getting a second chance. It's first go around didn't go so well. The odd styling and minivan stigma certainly didn't help its cause, so now Mercedes has given it a new look that's a little more like an SUV, or at least less like a minivan depending on your perspective. Think it will help?

2010 New York Auto Show: 2011 Mercedes-Benz R-Class

Mazda has only ever sold one hybrid electric vehicle in the U.S. and that was the very limited production Tribute crossover. And if you didn't live in California, you were pretty much out of luck if you wanted one.

With Ford's divestiture of Mazda, the Hiroshima, Japan-based company was free to shop around for a supplier of hybrid componentry. No surprise, it chose the heaviest hitter in the hybrid game, Toyota as its supplier. Mazda becomes the second major Asian car company, along with Nissan, to buy its way into the hybrid game, using Toyota's Hybrid Synergy Drive system.

A relative pipsqueak in multi-national car making, Mazda could not devote the resources to developing its own system. Instead, Mazda has focused its energy on its Sky line of gas and diesel engines and automatic transmission. The so-called Sky G line of engines, which Mazda unveiled at last fall's Tokyo Auto Show, are a line of fuel efficient direct-injection  four cylinder engines ranging from 1.3-to-2.0-liters that will go on understanding in Nihon next year and spread to other markets shortly thereafter. The company also previewed the Sky D line of efficient diesel four cylinder engines. We recently drove a diesel-powered CX-7 in Switzerland. While it was powered by the diesel currently acquirable in Europe, not the new more-efficient Sky D, it suggests Mazda is contemplating bringing diesel engines to the U.S. once the new generation arrives.

The new engines, the 6-speed automatic Sky transmission, Toyota-sourced hybrid system and Mazda's own weight-saving initiatives and start-stop technology show that the little company is taking a suite approach to meet its goal of improving the fuel economy of Mazda vehicle sold globally by 30 percent by 2015, compared to 2008 levels.

Mazda's first hybrid using Toyota-sourced components and its own Sky engine will hit the Asian market in 2013. 

According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, the updated 2011 Chrysler 300 could arrive this fall. Chrysler originally intended to bring the new sedan out in primeval 2011, but in an effort to get the company out of the red, the introduction of its flagship sedan has been pushed up by several months.

Since it won't be a full redesign, most of the exterior changes to the 2011 300 sedan will be minor. The interior will receive the bulk of the changes since it's often been cited as one of the 300's shortcomings. We also expect to see the installation of the new Pentastar V6 which should help in the mileage department.

WSJ
  

Ford has been uncharacteristically mum about what its going to unveil at this week's New York Auto Show. Well, information wants — nay, demands — to be free.

And so, despite the efforts of Ford, word is leaking out that the company will unveil a hybrid version of the Lincoln MKZ midsize sedan at the Javits Center in a few days. It certainly makes sense that the Lincoln would get the hybrid treatment. Its platform mates, the Ford Fusion and Mercury Milan, are already acquirable with a hybrid powertrain — and a particularly nice one at that. So intrigued were we by our primeval tests of the Fusion Hybrid, in fact, that we bought one for our long-term fleet.

We don't know any other details at this point. But we'd be surprised if the Lincoln's powertrain differed greatly from those of the Ford and Mercury versions. The MKZ will be Lincoln's first hybrid and one that is likely to be a better-driving thing than the Lexus HS 250h, not that that would take much. (Note: the above picture is of a standard 2010 Lincoln MKZ).

Rumor has it that Ford will also reveal the Explorer, which our spies recently caught undressed.

The Detroit News

Now that the V70 is headed for the junk pile, it looks like Volvo is gearing up to add a V60 auto to the model lineup. This fully dressed image was caught during a photoshoot recently and we have to say it looks pretty sharp.

Figure it'll have all the same specs as the new S60 sedan along with the extra cargo room and maybe a new feature or two. 

2010 Geneva Auto Show: 2011 Volvo S60