McLaren confirms P1 performance as cars hit roads

When McLaren unveiled the P1 prototype at the Paris motorshow in 2012 it promised that the hybrid carbon fiber car would be fast, but it has taken over a year of testing and refinement to reveal exactly how fast. Now as the first lucky owner collects his hand-built supercar at the company’s Woking, U.K. headquarters, official statistics have been published.

The twin-turbo 3.8-liter V8, which is mated to an ancillary electric motor for increased fuel efficiency and to boost power up to 903 bhp, is capable of catapulting the production version of the P1 from 0 to 62mph in 2.8 seconds, from 0 to 124 mph in 6.8 seconds, and from standstill to 186 mph in just 16.5 seconds on its way to an electronically limited top speed of 217 mph.

All of which makes the P1 the fastest accelerating road-going car the company has ever built. The legendary McLaren F1, which until the Bugatti Veyron turned up was the fastest production car in the world, needs a whole 22 seconds to get from 0 to 186 mph.

With speeds like that, serious brakes are needed and the specially developed package on the P1 can take the car from 62 mph back to zero in just 33 yards. However, thanks to McLaren engineers’ ability to squeeze so much power from such a small V8, plus the addition of the electric motor, the P1 can actually return 28 mpg on the EU combined cycle, which is incredible when one considers that the latest Audi A6 TDI, a finalist in November’s Green Car of the Year Awards, boasts a fuel efficiency of 32 mpg and it uses a clean-burning diesel engine.

The official figures have been announced in the same month that the first of the hand-built cars rolls off the production line. Finished in Volcano Yellow, it was collected by its UK-based owner from McLaren’s space-age U.K. headquarters earlier this month.

McLaren’s team of 82 technicians will build just 375 examples of the £866,000 ($1.15 million) P1. Each car takes 17 days to finish, seven of which are taken up solely by testing and quality assurance.

How the McLaren shapes up With a (limited) top speed of 217 mph, the P1 still has some way to go if it wants to challenge the current world record holder. At a Guinness Book of Records-confirmed 267 mph, the Bugatti Veyron Supersport is still head and shoulders above the competition; however, McLaren’s official figures do see the P1 join the top 10, albeit in 10th place.

The 10 fastest road-legal cars currently in production 1. Bugatti Veyron Supersport – 267 mph 2. Hennessey Venom – 265 mph 3. Koenigsegg Agera R – 260 mph 4. SSC Ultimate Aero – 256 mph 5 Pagani Huayra – 235 mph 6. Zenvo ST1 – 233 mph 7. Noble M600 – 225 mph 8. Lamborghini Veneno – 220 mph 9. Lamborghini Aventador – 219 mph 10 McLaren P1 – 217 mph

Audi Q5 Premium has luxury price, but priceless practicality

Luxury can coexist with common sense and practicality. You need technology and engineering to bring them together.

Consider, for example, the 2014 Audi 3.0 Q5 TDI Premium Plus Quattro — an all-wheel-drive, compact, diesel-fueled crossover utility vehicle. It surely has a luxury price, starting at $46,500. That is $9,200 above the base price of the gasoline edition of the Audi Q5.

But what you get in return is priceless — a stupendous 428 pound-feet of torque, the engine twisting power that turns the wheels, the oomph behind the oomph. The Q5 TDI’s turbocharged (forced air), 3-liter, diesel V-6 delivers a maximum 240 horsepower.

That all would mean little if the Q5 TDI was equally powerful at guzzling fuel. It isn’t. In fact, it’s rather economical, in terms of fuel consumption, for a luxury performance vehicle. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that the 2014 Q5 TDI gets 24 miles per gallon in the city and 31 mpg on the highway.

I did better than that in highway mileage on a winding drive though Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. I admit to a lot of “hyper-mile” driving on the trip, deliberately trying to limit fuel consumption by coasting downhill whenever possible and sticking as close as possible to posted speed limits. And I was running driver-only — no passengers, no cargo. I wanted to get an idea of how many miles I could pull out of the Q5 TDI’s 19.8-gallon tank.

I estimate, driving cautiously, I could run 620 miles on the highway in Audi’s diesel crossover utility vehicle, enough to run roundtrip from my home in Virginia to New York City without running on empty.

But most of us don’t hyper-mile when we drive. We simply drive. And we want a vehicle that drives with us — quickly responding to our inputs at the accelerator pedal and steering wheel. The Q5 TDI does all of that and does it exceptionally well.

It is a wonderfully odd machine, combining the best of several automotive genres — sports car, family hauler and small truck. The interior is a work of premium craftsmanship and materials — superb fit and finish, an ergonomically sensible instrument panel featuring an optional 7-inch color LCD screen, leather-covered seats.

I was driving in the Shenandoah Valley when summer suddenly became the worst of fall days with chilly, cascading rains and wet leaves covering the roads. It was slippery going, but the Q5 TDI handled the mess with aplomb. I was impressed with the vehicle’s on-road performance, but less so with its overall utility.

The problem is cargo capacity, some of which seems to have been sacrificed in the Q5 TDI in homage to style. With rear seats up, you get a rather smallish 29.1 cubic feet of cargo space. Compare that with the compact Honda CR-V crossover utility vehicle, which offers 37.2 cubic feet of cargo space with the rear seats up; or the compact Chevrolet Equinox family hauler, which offers 31.5 cubic feet of cargo space.

Of course, the Audi Q5 TDI comes with more panache and prestige than Honda or Chevrolet. But I have a growing feeling that prestige is increasingly less important in the global automobile industry.

Credit South Korean automobile manufacturers Hyundai and Kia, which have turned the entire concept of “luxury” upside down by offering premium vehicles at affordable prices. Credit the folks at a resurgent Honda and Toyota, and those never-quit souls in a revived U.S. automobile industry, all of whom now are turning out innovative, high-quality products at accessible prices.

“Luxury” defined is changing. It now has to have value beyond the bauble. The new truth is that “prestige” without value is worthless.

Audi knows this — thus, the new Q5 TDI. It is a remarkable piece — powerful yet fuel-efficient and breathtakingly agile on the road . . . and environmentally friendly. Its tailpipe emissions contain 12 percent fewer carbon dioxide emissions, the stuff that contributes to fog, than a comparable gasoline engine.

How Mexico is upending the U.S. auto industry

Starting in the 1980s, the U.S. auto industry went through a major upheaval. Automakers and suppliers began opening up more and more plants in the South, taking advantage of that region’s weaker unions and lower labor costs. That, in turn, undercut the historically dominant position of Detroit and the Midwest.

Now, thirty years later, the U.S. auto industry is going through yet another major churn. And this time around, Mexico is the driving force.

That’s one upshot of an intriguing new report on the auto industry from the Brookings Institution. The report is ostensibly a case study focused on Tennessee’s automotive sector, but it also offers a glimpse of the way the entire North American auto industry has shifted over the past 20 years.

The big story here is Mexico, which has massively expanded its share of North American auto manufacturing since the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994. Automakers from General Motors to Nissan have been opening plants south of the border, attracted by Mexico’s low wages and dense industrial clusters.

In 2012, Mexico produced more than 3 million vehicles, compared with 10.8 million in the United States. Automotive plants in Mexico assemble everything from GM Silverado pickups to Chrysler engines. Nissan, Mazda and Audi are all building plants in the country. And jobs have followed.

Since 2000, overall auto industry employment in North America has fallen from 2 million to 1.5 million — partly because more and more positions have been automated. But Mexico actually added jobs in that time, going from 554,000 to 579,000. Today, nearly 40 percent of auto jobs on the continent are in Mexico.

And that trend is expected to continue. “Over the next decade, the U.S. share of auto employment is likely to drift down below 50 percent,” says Mark Muro, one of the co-authors of the Brookings report.

What’s the significance of this? For starters, it means that the South’s position in the auto industry is no longer quite so secure. In the 1980s, foreign automakers like Toyota, BMW and Hyundai set up factories in southern states like Tennessee, Kentucky, and Alabama to take advantage of lower labor costs, weaker union rules and state tax incentives. Tennessee’s economy was utterly transformed when Nissan located its first plant in Smyrna 30 years ago.

But the South’s cost advantage over the Midwest is now narrowing — and no U.S. state can compete with Mexico on labor costs.

“That completely changes the competitive challenge,” says Muro. “No longer will Southern states be able to win on cost alone. They’ll have to find some other way to compete.”

That includes technological innovation and making their supply chains more nimble to reduce costs. The Brookings report notes that in Tennessee, one of the few states that has been resilient in the face of Mexico’s rise, nearly 78 percent of the jobs are in the supply chain — such as building the parts, chassis or electronics — rather than in manufacturing the actual vehicles.

In an interesting twist, Muro suspects that Michigan and the rest of the Midwest might be fairly well-positioned here, in part because the region has been forced to compete against low-cost suppliers for many years now.

“Their labor costs have been coming down, but they also have very dense supply chains and can get more efficiencies and cluster benefits there,” Muro says. “And Michigan still has its technology centers.”

Still, the overall trends are striking. Even as the auto industry is rebounding from the recession, the number of jobs across North America keeps shrinking, as automation improves and the robots take over. Meanwhile, Mexico is quickly establishing its dominance on the continent.

Eco-friendly wheels: Tires may soon come from dandelions

Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany are working with tire maker Continental to develop a technique for producing tires from the tenacious and prolific weed. According to the two partners, dandelion juice can actually be transformed into rubber, providing an ecologically friendly source for tire production. The research and development phase is expected to last five years, after which Continental hopes to move towards adopting the technique for its tire production in Europe.

Currently, researchers are experimenting with a variety of dandelion native to Russia — the only species currently capable of producing enough rubber to serve the purposes of the project. Researchers plan to present their first prototypes for dandelion-made tires five years from now.

Producing tires from dandelions – which thrive across the Northern hemisphere – is particularly of interest to European manufacturers such as Continental. Unlike rubber trees, which must be imported from areas with tropical climates, dandelions can be grown at or near European tire production sites, meaning that the costs and CO2 emissions related to the transport of the raw material are greatly reduced.

Only 9 of these $4.5 million Lamborghini Venenos will be built

The eccentric supercar company is set to build just nine convertible versions of its already exclusive Veneno hypercar, which was officially unveiled at this year’s Geneva motor show.

While its competitors are busy experimenting with hybrid powertrains and preparing for a world in which even the crème de la crème of supercars use 10, eight or even six cylinders, Lamborghini is refusing to give up on massive, gas-hungry engines without a fight.

The Veneno Roadster looks like Batman’s weekend runaround and, as only nine examples will ever be built, for most of us, the official Lamborghini photographs are the closest we’ll ever get to seeing it in the flesh.

However, even if you’re lucky enough to spot one in the wild, it will probably be a red blur, capable as it is of rocketing from 0-62 mph (100km/h) in 2.9 seconds and on to a top speed of 221 mph (355 km/h), thanks to the same 6.5-liter V12 engine found in its hardtop counterpart.

Thanks to prodigious use of carbon fiber, Lamborghini has managed to remove the roof without denting performance too much — it won’t flex like a skateboard or wobble like a jelly, and, thanks to permanent four-wheel drive, even the Michael Schumachers of this world will struggle to run out of grip, no matter how hard it is pushed into a corner.

Lamborghini says that all nine models will be built in 2014, and that the color “Rosso Veneno” was specially developed for the car and won’t be carried over to other models in the range. And the price? Just $4.5 million before tax.

Gasoline tumbles to nine-month low

The average price for regular gasoline at U.S. pumps fell to the lowest level in almost nine months as crude-oil price cuts reduced costs.

Regular gasoline slid 2.01 cents in the past two weeks to $3.3628 a gallon, the least since Jan. 25, Lundberg Survey Inc. said Sunday.

Gasoline fell as U.S. benchmark West Texas Intermediate crude dropped $3.03, or 2.9 percent, to $100.81 a barrel on the Nymex, in the two weeks to Friday. The survey conducted the same day is based on information obtained at about 2,500 filling stations by the Camarillo, Calif.-based company. The average gasoline price marks six weeks of declines.

“It would take another substantial downturn in crude oil for the retail gasoline price decline to continue,” Trilby Lundberg, president of Lundberg Survey, said Sunday in a telephone interview, noting that wholesale gasoline margins have narrowed. “The squeeze is on, so we can probably expect that wholesale price-cutting will probably slow or ease.”

The average gasoline price, which reached a year-to-date peak in the survey of $3.795 on Feb. 22, is 39.01 cents below the year-earlier price of $3.7529 a gallon.

The highest price for gasoline in the lower 48 U.S. states among the markets surveyed was in the San Francisco Bay Area, at $3.81 a gallon, Lundberg said.

The lowest was in Albuquerque, N.M., where customers paid an average of $3.03. Regular gasoline averaged $3.55 a gallon on Long Island, N.Y., and $3.75 in Los Angeles.

Gasoline futures on the New York Mercantile Exchange rose 6.56 cents, or 2.5 percent, to $2.6732 a gallon in the two weeks ended Friday.

Futures climbed two weeks in a row as refineries reduced rates amid maintenance and lower margins. U.S. plants processed 14.9 million barrels a day of crude and other feedstocks in the week ended Oct. 4, the lowest amount since April 26.

Gasoline stockpiles were 7.1 percent above the five-year average for the time of year as of Oct. 4, according to data from the Energy Information Administration, the statistical arm of the Energy Department.

The EIA, which was closed as part of the government shutdown, on Monday will release data for the week ended Oct. 11.

Crude inventories surged 6.81 million barrels to 370.5 million Oct. 4, the biggest gain since the week ended September 2012, EIA data show.

Supplies in the market hub Cushing, Okla., slipped 168,000 barrels to 32.6 million last week, according to the EIA. Stockpiles at the hub have dropped 34 percent since June 28 as improved pipeline networks and shipments by rail eased a North American supply glut created by rising oil production from shale formations.

West Texas Intermediate crude probably will rise this week to the highest level in three months as refineries cut processing, a Bloomberg survey showed. All nine analysts who responded to the survey forecast an increase.

Toyota recalls 803K US vehicles for air bag defect

Toyota is recalling 803,000 vehicles in the U.S. because their air bags or power steering could stop working.

The Camry and Camry hybrid, Avalon and Avalon hybrid and Venza from the 2012 and 2013 model years are affected.

Toyota says water from the air conditioning condenser can leak onto the air bag control module and cause a short circuit. That could illuminate the air bag warning light, disable the air bag or cause the air bags to deploy inadvertently.

The power steering assist function could also become inoperable if the air bag control module is damaged, making the vehicles harder to steer.

Toyota knows of two minor injuries, but no accidents, related to the defect.

Owners will be notified starting next month. Toyota dealers will repair the problem for free.