Corvette wanted to create something special to announce their participation in this year’s American Le Mans season. The insight for the commercial they created for this occasion is quite unique: the Corvette ZR1 that will be in the 2011 ALMS Season is actually less powerful than the road version.

As the Corvette people say, they were asked to “dial it back” when competing with BMW, Porsche and Ferrari. The standard version of the model has a 6.2 liter LS9 V8 engine under the hood, that produces 647 horsepower, whereas the ALMS ZR1 has 160 hp less, “just to be fair”. Auch.

Click here to view the embedded video.

You can check out the competition’s schedule here.

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Corvette ZR1: “We were asked to dial it back”

This isn't another special edition of the Miata; it is a proper featherweight race car with which the Japanese automaker will take part in the 2011 Britcar MSA British Endurance Championship, facing some serious competition coming from Lotus, Porsche, BMW and Aston Martin.

Developed in partnership with Jota Sport, this MX-5 has been put on a diet and lost some of its interior components. The 15 kg weight reduction has been achieved also by dipping the shell in acid, allowing the MX5-GT to have a curb weight of only 1,873 lbs (850 kg).

The car has been fitted with the automaker's 2.0-liter power unit, but they've tuned it in order to output 275 hp. This 4-cylinder engine is mated to a 6-speed sequential paddle shift gearbox and according to Mazda; the car can do the 0-60 mph sprint in only 3 seconds, before hitting a top speed of 160 mph (257 km/h).

It also comes with a new performance braking system, a modified suspension, along with competition alloy rims and tires. The outside of this MX-5 race car has been finished in a Spirited Green metallic paint finish, which is complimented by Jota Sport's orange and grey liveries. The car has been fitted with carbon fiber doors, a roll cage, competition steering wheel, racking bucket seat and a fire extinguisher, just in case something goes wrong.

Source: Mazda via Carscoop

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Mazda MX5-GT Racer Packs 275 Ponies

The Blue Oval's Fiesta sub-compact has been fitted with three new packages, one for the exterior and the other two of for the interior. Customers can now choose an Oxford White or a Race Red interior that comes with a personalized look with two-tone colored components. These interior packages are said to be inspired from the glamorous world of fashion and are available for the SEL and SES trim levels, featuring contrasting interior accent colors on the center console, the rings that surround the air vents as well as on the door panels.

Contrasting stitching has also been applied on the steering wheel and the two-tone leather seats, while black leather was used for wrapping the shift knob. A "Fiesta" logo has been applied on the seats for a more special look.

As far as the exterior look is concerned, customer can choose a styling package that was inspired by the European version of the Focus RS, featuring a few components painted in Tuxedo Black: headlights, grille surround, side mirrors, rear spoiler and the license plate holder.

Other goodies include a new set of 16-inch polished alloy rims, as well as a shorter final drive ration for the Fiestas fitted with a manual gearbox.

According to the automaker, 40% of the customers that bought a Fiesta chose at least one accessory for the car, and more than 26,000 Ford Custom Accessories have been sold so far.

Source: Ford

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Ford Updates US-spec 2012 Fiesta

Renault's South Korean brand Samsung has revealed yesterday a teaser sketch of the forthcoming SM7 concept that will preview the next-generation of the automaker's large sedan. The outgoing SM7 is built on Nissan's J31 platform that was also used in the development of the Asian-spec Nissan Teana, as well as the 6^th generation of the US-spec Nissan Maxima.

The Seoul Motor Show (April 1-10) will be the venue for the concept's unveiling and from this image we can see that it will have a muscle and sporty design, quite attractive in my humble opinion. In the front it will have a huge trapezoidal grille, something that you can see in many of the models launched by Audi. Too bad that they haven't shared an image with the back of the car as I'm very curious to see how it looks.

We don't have any certain information about the car, but rumors say that it will use an elongated platform of the SM5 (Europeans know it as the Renault Latitude). The production version of the next-gen SM7 should begin in the second part of this year and it won't be brought in Europe, taking into consideration that the French automaker doesn't want to have a bigger car than the Latitude in its lineup.

Source: Carscoop

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Renault Samsung SM7 Concept Teaser Revealed

You might know Tommy Milner from the ALMS series, where he and the rest of his BMW team, comprised of Bill Auberlen and Dirk Werner, won both the team and manufacturer championships in the ALMS GT Class.

That being said, you can trust that his driving skills are certainly better than yours or mine. Nevertheless, he enjoys a good racing game just any other gaming fan. That’s why he too the GT1 Corvette C6.R for a ride in Need For Speed Shift 2: Unleashed, around the Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca.

From the footage, we can see that he’s pretty entertained, although playing Shift 2 Unleashed on a normal computer won’t be as much fun as spinning a steering wheel and having a sub-woofer under your seat. Still, we can’t wait to play this game.

How about you?

Click here to view the embedded video.

Photo source.

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Tommy Milner and NFS: SHIFT 2 Unleashed

Once again, cars and women seem to go well together, even when it comes to a personal relation developed between those two or to perfectly matched fashion styles and icons. As a result, Citroën has recently launched a colorful and truly feminine digital advert for its DS3. Its creative author: Orla Kiely.

The Citroen ad appears like a natural message about women and DS3 in a fashionable relation, sent from the elegant urban atmosphere of the sixties. The model used in the commercial is Nathalie Sorrell, a symbol of femininity and natural beauty which perfectly blend with the powerful chromatic of the car in the advert concept.

Click here to view the embedded video.

"For Orla Kiely…it's all about the color!"

Beatrice Moys says, Orla Kiely’s print designer, in the making of video of the DS3 commercial.

Here you can watch the "behind the scenes" video from the filming of the DS3 by Orla Kiely digital advert. Enjoy!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Do you think this video succeeds in capturing the element that activates the purchasing behavior of a contemporary woman? Will a woman be persuaded to actually buy a DS3 as the result of just seeing the advert?

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Citroen DS3 Digital Advert – It's All In the Details

Elsa Pataky is the 34 years old the daughter of José Francisco Lafuente and Cristina Pataky Medianu. Therefore her full name is Elsa Lafuente Pataky Medianu. She is part spanish, part hungarian, part romanian, thanks to her spanish father and hungarian-romanian mother.

One of the most famous films she starred in was Snakes on a plane, next to Samuel L. Jackson, in 2006.

In Fast Five she will play cop Elena Neves, one of many after Vin Diesel and his crew.

She recently (december 2010)  married Chris Hemsworth, an actor you probably saw in Star Trek (2009).

Elsa is just one of the hotties we’ll see starting April 28 in the new Fast and Furious movie, Fast Five.

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Close-up on Fast Five’s Elena Neves

We all know that EVs are now the hype in the automotive world, but what about hydrogen-powered cars? Well, let's just say that the Obama administration is planning on cutting down funding for hydrogen by 40%. Even worse than that is the lack of any sort of infrastructure at the moment. Experts affirm that it will take decades for hydrogen to have an appreciable impact on gasoline consumption and the emissions of CO2.

Despite all of these downsides, some automakers are still considering this technology, and more than that, they want to start selling these cars in 2015 or so. One of these car manufacturers is Mercedes-Benz and as we speak three of their F-Cell hatchbacks are on the West Coast streets, during an around-the-world trip, meant to prove the potential of this technology.

This year on January 29^th, three F-Cell models left Stuttgart and they will conquer 14 countries in four months, covering about 20,000 miles each. The reason why some automakers still consider hydrogen is because it offers the just about the same benefits as EVs – zero CO2 emissions, without the drawbacks of long recharge times and short range. A hydrogen fuel cell car is in fact an electric vehicle and it uses a fuel cell, instead of a big and heavy battery to provide the necessary juice. The great thing about this technology is that you can "fill up" a car with hydrogen in just a couple of minutes and it will last you about 250 miles. In addition, the technology can be implemented into all cars, including buses and other types of vehicles.

As we mentioned before on rpmGO, the German automaker Mercedes-Benz will start making the F-Cell in 2015, and until then they will lease a limited number of units. Toyota will do just about the same thing in the years to come, while Honda will roll out the FCX Clarity, which is currently leased to two dozen people in Southern California. As far as General Motors is concerned, they have the Chevrolet Equinox, while Hyundai recently launched in Washington D.C., the third generation of its Tucson ix fuel cell vehicle.

These cars that we've mentioned above are real models, not just some prototypes, concepts, etc. The F-Cell is based on the B-Class that Mercedes sells in Europe. It features a 136 hp (100 kW) motor that performs just like a conventional 2.0-liter gasoline power unit. The car packs about 12 kg of hydrogen, stored at 10,000 psi in three carbon-fiber-reinforced tanks, giving it a range of 250 miles. The F-Cell has an equivalent of 71 mpg, which is pretty good if you ask me. This hardware can be installed under the floor or under the bonnet, leaving plenty of space inside for five passengers and 15 cubic feet for storing stuff.

The car themselves have never been a problem, except for the fact that they are quite expensive. For example, the earlier models that were created would have had a price tag of about $1 million if some brave company decided to roll them out. This is the reason why the car manufacturers that developed hydrogen fuel cell vehicles decided to lease some of their cars, but the problem is that even leasing is quite pricey. For example, the aforementioned Mercedes-Benz F-Cell will set you back $849 / month for two years, while the FCX Clarity is $600 / month for three years. Both Mercedes and Honda offer unlimited hydrogen, insurance and maintenance, but it still is very expensive.

Good news are coming from Toyota as they managed to reduce the costs of making a fuel cell car more than 90% by using less expensive materials. They plan to roll out their first hydrogen model for about $50,000, which will be somewhat similar to the F-Cell.

As we mentioned above, the problem is not with the car, it is with storing and distributing the hydrogen on a wide scale. The funny thing is that hydrogen is the most abundant element in the entire universe, used in aerospace, food and refining. We produce a lot of it, but it isn't available for the mass audience.

According to Mercedes, at the moment there are only 200 hydrogen fuelling stations in the world. For this reason, Linde, who is the company that is in charge of providing the hydrogen for the F-Cell cars, had to make a mobile fueling rig for the trip. California has four public stations now and plans are to open another 19 by the end of next year.

By 2016, the Hawaii Hydrogen Initiative wants to open 20-25 stations in Oahu. The state's most important gas provider is the Gas Company and they produce hydrogen and synthetic natural gas and deliver it through the pipelines. Using pressure swing, they want to divert this hydrogen to fuelling stations. Experts say that this is a cost-effective way of producing and delivering hydrogen, a method that has a real potential.

SunHydro has decided to build a "hydrogen highway" from Maine to Miami by using solar-powered electrolysis in order to generate hydrogen at privately funded stations. Last fall they've opened their very first station in Connecticut.

The Japanese automaker Honda is working on home fueling. Using a 6 kW solar array to power an electrolyzer, the Solar Hydrogen Station produces 0.5 kg of hydrogen in just eight hours, which should last about 30 miles or so, enough for daily commute.

In Norway there are four hydrogen stations that have been up and running since 2006 and this year another three will be open for business. Regarding Japan, they have dozens of stations and by 2015 they plan to have a network of 100. Similar projects are under development in Germany, Spain and Denmark.

There is another issue to be taken into consideration – hydrogen is most of the times distributed by truck, and guess what the trucks are running on? Fossil fuels of course. However, according to the California Energy Commission, hydrogen still brings a net reduction in energy consumption, as well as CO2 emissions in comparison to the regular gas.

I can understand that the technology has tremendous potential, but if we take into consideration that not even the United States can afford to build the necessary infrastructure anytime soon, we will have to wait at least 20-30 years until hydrogen will be mass produced and distributed so that it will power our cars. I wouldn't be surprised if it will never catch on, despite the efforts made by the most important players in the automotive world. We'll have to wait and see.

Source: Wired

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Hydrogen-Powered Cars – Is There A Future For Them?

Car sharing has always been a nice idea, something for the environmentalists to nibble and something for the auto industry to make it feel good about polluting the world. But car sharing has never been cool. Not until BMW took a spin at it.

The Germans thought long and hard and came up with DriveNow, a new car sharing service from BMW i, MINI and SIXT. BMW understood that apps will shape the way we connect with the world and the devices around us, so they found a very exciting use for them: find a car included in the DriveNow system and drive it to your destination. You don’t need to own it, you pay by the minute, and gas and parking are included.

You can find a car on the website or on the street, or using the iPhone app on your smartphone. Futuristic? A bit. Useful? Immensely!

The first city to benefit from this program will be Munich and the second will be Berlin, starting this April.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Via BMW i.

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BMW’s DriveNow service is all about sharing

In those permanently technological changing times, we all enjoy the benefits of internet and emailing. Nowadays, they are more than a necessity; they are a way of living, once that information and being or getting informed became a commodity. However, the informative internet era has its problems too: spamming.

If you have an email address, it's impossible not to have ever received a spam. Many of us get annoyed by the spamming unwanted e-mails and use to report their authors to the e-mail provider, which actually permanently tries to solve this problem and to maintain its users pleased by their services.

Symantec, focused on identifying, detecting and averting unwanted Internet threats such as viruses, spam, spyware and other inappropriate content, has recently made a study which revealed the fact that the automotive industry is the most-spammed industry from all. The results showed that 84.3 percent of emails sent relating to the industry are considered spam, which is higher than the rate generated by any other industry and even than the global spam rate of 81.3 percent. In addition to that, the rate is continually growing: in January this year, the level of spam in this sector was of 82.8 percent.

According to Symantec's study, the auto industry isn't the only one with problems. Financial, chemical and pharmaceutical, education, manufacturing, marketing, public sector, IT and retail industries have more than 80 percent of emails considered spam too.

What do you think that has caused this spike in spamming for this year? How should spamming be prevented by automotive industry?

[Source: Autoblog]

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Automotive Industry – the Most Spammed Sector