It’s unfortunate that the British Motor Show is only every two years, as the ExCeL location in the London Docklands is a fabulous venue. This year’s event will play host to more than 20 world debuts, the most interesting we know about listed here in alphabetical order.
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We may look back on 2007 as the year public opinion shifted toward greener cars and trucks, a result of heightened concern about climate change and oil imports, coupled with high gas prices and a shift away from truckish S.U.V.’s. Interestingly, though, this wasn’t a year when a lot of notable green cars came to market.
It was a year when Toyota flexed its muscle. It passed General Motors briefly to become the world’s No. 1 automaker (before G.M. surged back, at least temporarily) and signaled in several ways — by fielding an in-your-face big pickup and Nascar teams — that it intended to out-big what used to be the Big Three.
But the year was noteworthy, too, for G.M., which started to wipe away some of the layers of tarnish on its once-good name. Not long ago the company was written off as a bureaucratic dinosaur incapable of making cars that Americans wanted. Yet its latest vehicles are fundamentally better — not simply competitive with the Japanese and Germans, but showing an attention to detail that had been missing from G.M. vehicles for decades. At last, somebody gets it.
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The Ford Shelby GT500 is the result of Carroll Shelby and the Ford Special Vehicle Team joining forces to produce a successor to the Shelby GT500 of the late 1960s.
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The latest MINI Cooper and Cooper S have earned a reputation built on the driving experience. MINIs last diesel effort, the 88 bhp One Diesel was almost the black sheep of the family. Whilst there was no denying its sharp handling characteristics shared with the rest of the last MINI range, there was a bit of a shortfall in the performance department.
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Larger, more luxurious and more expensive than the car it replaces, the new Freelander – or Freelander 2, as it should be called – offers clear evidence of Land Rover’s chasing the money. Freelander 2 is now a premium car: make no mistake.
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Over the years, we have heard a lot of gripes about unreliable luxury cars.
Lamborghini’s LM002 “had the durability of a potato chip,” one car-industry analyst remarked. Your typical Land Rover, one reader wrote, is “as reliable as a drunken house painter.”
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Four Door F1 Car
Most high-end automakers employ geary gangs of mad mechanics to goose their standard offerings, typically taking an already fine sedan and piling on horsepower, thus enabling said ride to exceed two or even three times the speed limit. Mercedes has its AMG line, Audi the S-Series, and BMW has a posse of souped-up vehicles dubbed the M-Class.
The newest entry in this lineup, an $85,000 Indianapolis-red-metallic M5, was delivered unto me recently on a gray Bay Area day, one on which I happened to need to hustle from San Francisco to Sacramento for a speaking engagement. I was a little worried about making it on time. I shouldn’t have been.
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