cars


Here’s the commercial for the new Acura TSX, which definitely strikes a few nerves with the 20s and 30s yuppiesomethings: Start a business, sell it, then start another one. In between, dance to some trip-hop at the club (Citizen Cope’s “Let the Drummer Kick” is sampled here), swim in your rooftop pool, and drive out to the beach and check out a sunrise.

Some shots of the car here from Acura’s website. Equally at home in front of the art gallery, at the condo or - yes - on the road. From Alyx — Acura gets the YuppieJournal seal of approval for both this car and this marketing campaign.



Looking for a unique gift for a child - or an adult, for that matter? Check out Automoblox, a line of super-stylish toy cars with interchangeable bodies, front-ends, wheels, passengers, and components.

Available in six styles ranging from sportscar to sport utility (as well as a line of Mini versions), all are slickly designed and eminently collectible. Reasonably priced, too, under $50. The sports car is my fave:



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Ah, the sweet life of James Bond. Those custom made Brioni suits, the finest of hotels, Omega wristwatches, vintage champagne and caviar, a license to kill and oh, those amazing cars, especially the new 2008 Aston Martin DBS.

Throughout the film series, from the classic Aston Martin DB5 in “Goldfinger” to the car-turned-submarine Lotus Esprit S1 in “The Spy Who Loved Me”, James Bond has had his share of vehicles to die for. And those that kill.

But the one constant about the Bond vehicles is the cutting-edge gadgetry designed and installed by Q. Take the bulletproof DB5 from “Goldfinger”, conceived more than 40 years ago. Equipped with evasive gadgets like a smoke screen and oil slick, dual machine guns, tire spikes and, the most Bond of all features, an ejecting passenger seat, the silver Aston Martin helped to create the Bond persona for the entire series.

“These cars act like characters in the Bond films,” says Michael Isabell of EyeSpyfilms.com, who is working on a documentary about James Bond fan culture, “Besides the fact that the cars have a lot of technology, they always seem to get him out trouble as well. Also, there is something sexy about a beautiful girl in a beautiful car too.”

So it comes as no surprise to see the same 1965 Aston Martin DB5 appears in the latest Bond film, “Casino Royale” too. But the car that garners the viewer’s attention is the awesomely cool 2008 Aston Martin DBS.

The vehicle says something about of the exclusive nature of Bond’s status. The fact that he drives a vehicle of such élan, taste and exclusivity – the DBS doesn’t come on the market until October of 2007 – says something about Her Majesty’s Secret Service clout at the Aston dealership. A team of Aston Martin engineers worked closely with the film production company to provide both technical support and quite a few DBS models during the production. The DBS in the film features a hidden weapon compartment, life-saving high-tech equipment and, if you’ve seen the movie, more accident safety features than a soccer mom’s Volvo wagon. None of these features will be available to the average consumer, of course.

While Aston Martin is somewhat tight-lipped on the DBS’s specs, look for the model to build upon the heritage of classic production models and their recent racecars, the DBR9 specifically. Basically, the DBS is a racecar in street clothing and is what you expect of a car befitting Bond. Providing more power – a rumored 500-horsepower V-12 is under the hood – and luxury than the already luxurious Aston DB9, it is said that Aston Martin will build only 300 examples of the DBS for budding Bonds the world over.

“The Aston Martin and James Bond relationship is one of cinema’s longest and most durable product placements. There is something that is indeterminable about the Bond character that is so well reflected in an Aston Martin,” says Tim Watson, VP Communications & Public Affairs, Aston Martin, “In everybody that buys an Aston Martin, there is an element of Bond in them.”

When asked to elaborate on this, Watson grins, “People don’t really get to be Bond. I always say to them, ‘Bond, he’s not real.”

They don’t call it movie magic for nothing.

By Jon Alain Guzik, Editor-at-Large, Yahoo! Autos



Mercedes designed this interesting, experimental car shaped like a boxfish.

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From cnn.com:

When Mercedes-Benz began to contemplate its next generation of high-efficiency small cars, it sought aquatic inspiration.

But instead of considering obvious undersea hot rods like sharks, the Mercedes team turned to a fish that resembled a car: the tropical boxfish.

A native of the Indo-Pacific region, the Ostracion cubicus is surprisingly slick.

Wind-tunnel testing of a clay model revealed a drag coefficient (Cd) of just 0.06, startlingly close to the ideal 0.04 of a water droplet.

Like the droplet, the boxfish’s face is small in proportion to its overall length, and its streamlined surfaces encourage air to move over it without creating the turbulence that robs aerodynamic efficiency.

Mercedes’ Bionic concept vehicle mimics this functional form.

With a Cd of just 0.19, the four-seat Bionic is significantly more slippery than today’s most aerodynamic production vehicle, Honda’s two-seat Insight (Cd 0.25).

The design team eschewed expensive, complicated and heavy fuel-cell or hybrid powertrains, opting instead for a 1.9-liter four-cylinder direct-injection turbodiesel that pushes the fishmobile to 62 mph in 8.2 seconds with a combined city/highway fuel economy of 70 mpg.

At a constant 56 mph, the concept car will return an amazing 84 mpg.

Although the Bionic isn’t coming to your local dealership, Mercedes does expect it to significantly influence the design language of its next generation of small cars.



Didn’t get your paws on a limited-edition Bugatti Veyron? The legendary Russo-Baltique car company is now producing a few of these Impressions:

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From Wikipedia:

The Russian Russo-Baltique is now promoting a Russian-German luxury car concept, the Impression.

The brand (Руссо-Балт) was exhumed in 2006 by a group of German and Russian investors to propose a luxury concept car, the Russo-Baltique Impression is a coupé with strong hints of European styling of the thirties. The car uses mechanical parts of Mercedes origin (Mercedes CL63 AMG).

The car will be produced by the German company Gerg GmbH, a total production of 10 to 15 cars maximum is expected, with a production rate of 2 to 3 cars a year. The selling price would be 1.500.000 euros.

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While the chassis is mostly Mercedes, the design is more like a throwback to other various 30s cars, albeit smaller. Production time - well, it’s long, probably over a year - and only a couple of these are being cranked out a year, so stop fretting about the exchange rate and get those orders in.



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