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Source: Ford Motor Company

DEARBORN, March 30, 2007 – The Ford truck team sat down with hot rod celebrity Chip Foose last year at the Specialty Equipment Marketing Association (SEMA) convention in Las Vegas – the heart of the red-hot $34 billion auto aftermarket industry – and issued a daunting challenge:

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Source: Ford Motor Company

DEARBORN, Mich., Mar. 30 - Ford and DJ Funkmaster Flex, the hip hop guru of car customization, are turning the Funkmaster’s red hot Ford Expedition concept into a limited-edition production SUV. The stylized version of the full-sized SUV, dubbed the 2008 Ford Expedition Funkmaster Flex Edition, will hit Ford dealer showrooms later this fall.

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Source: Ford Motor Company

DEARBORN, Mich., March 30 - Ford and Shelby Automobiles are at it again, this time in celebration of the fortieth anniversary of the 1968 Shelby Cobra GT500KR. To be unveiled at the 2007 New York International Auto Show, the 2008 Shelby GT500KR—the most powerful Mustang to date—will once again mark Mustang as ‘King of the Road.’

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To go up against Mercedes E63 AMG and BMWs M5, Audi is planning to offer the hot RS6. Priddy’s ninjas caught it here, at the Nrburgring, while it was undergoing some late prototype testing this week.

The larger air intakes in the front bumper and the wider fenders and diffuser at the rear, are the key clues as to the true identity of this Audi. And while the S models have four round exhaust pipes, the RS models will receive oval pipes as their distinguishing feature.

We have heard that the rumors about a twin turbo V10 are false, and that the RS6 will instead be powered by a blown V8 producing over 600hp. Could Audi finally be joining the proverbial German horsepower pissing contest? We can only hope!

The RS6 will debut at the Frankfurt Motor Show in September

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Post by Kasey Kagawa

I think that whoever did the paint job on this car should be given some sort of award. Not for the body, obviously, but whoever painted that tire tread pattern onto those 44 inch blade rims deserves some money. It looks so realistic! And the steel girders they used to make the axles low enough to fit those bits of water main under the fenders are a really nice touch.

Post by Kasey Kagawa

Ever since the videos of a pre-production Nissan GT-R lapping Sears Point and Laguna Seca raceways hit the Internet, and especially the news that it was dead even with the brand new 911 Turbo at Sears Point, and even faster than the 480 HP Stuttgart supercar at Laguna Seca, all that enthusiasts want to know is “How much?”

Well, now we know. Auto Express has the pricing info on the new car, and not only Porsche, but BMW and Audi should be very, very concerned. The base model GT-R, with four-piston Brembo brakes and a six-speed manual gearbox, will cost around £29,000. The mid-range V-Spec will have six-piston Brembos and either a DSG double-clutch gearbox like in the Bugatti Veyron or some other type of semi-automatic gearbox and a price tag of around £35,000. The highest spec model will be called the GT-R Evolution, and have all the performance options of the V-Spec level, plus some of the body panels will be replaced with carbon fiber to reduce weight, among other modifications not yet released to the public for £52,000.

If you plug those numbers into your favorite currency converter, this doesn’t look like good news for Nissan, as £29,000 is about $57,000 US, but if you look at other cars with similar price tags, it’s the bargain of the century. For example, a base Nissan 350Z costs £26,495 in Britain, while the same car goes for $27,900 in the US. So for under $65,000 or so, assuming that the car that Edmunds filmed at the racetracks was the Evolution model, you could have a car that can go head-to-head with a car that costs twice as much, or for less than $45,000, a car that can quite possibly go after the Audi RS4 and the upcoming BMW M3. It looks like the Germans have a lot to worry about in this upcoming generation of sports coupes.

Price is right on GT-R supercar [Auto Express]

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Hyundai gave us our first glimpse of it’s new premium sports sedan concept, the Genesis. Set to debut at the 2007 New York International Auto Show on April 4th, Hyundai says that the Genesis shows off the future architechture and design of their upcoming production premium sports sedan scheduled to bow in 2008.

Interestingly enough, Hyundai has decided to go the way of many tier one luxury automakers, and make the Genesis rear-wheel-drive. This is the first application of rear-wheel-drive in a U.S. spec Hyundai. Hyundai claims this new architecture helps the Genesis achieve a 53:47 front/rear weight distribution, and enhances handling significantly.

Powering the Genesis is the all-new Tau 4.6-liter V8, mated to a ZF 6-speed automatic transmission with a limited-slip differential. The transmission features Hyundai’s SHIFTRONIC, and allows drivers to select their gears “manually”, though don’t confuse this with real sequential manual technologies like DSG and SMG. Hyundai claims the 300 horsepower Tau engine is good for a 0-60 time well under six seconds.

So, what’s the cost of all this rear-wheel-drive, V8 goodness? Hyundai says the production model will come in at under $30,000. We say if it drives anywhere near as good as it looks, Hyundai has a hit on their hands.

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Post by Kasey Kagawa

Cheating in professional sports has taken center stage recently, what with all the trials and scandals regarding professional athletes using more and more performance-enhancing substances. There never really has been much gray room when it comes to what athletes can do to themselves to get an edge, as it’s a simple matter of “if we find this stuff in your blood or your body, you’re toast”. The same is true for racing drivers, who are held to the highest standards of sobriety, as getting cocaine bugs at 200 MPH probably isn’t the best thing to have happen to you when you’ve got 10 or 20 other competitors trying to share the same track as you.

The cars, on the other hand, have long been a different story. It’s fairly difficult to hide the things that you’ve done to a human body, but cars are much harder to figure out. By their nature, race cars are complex things, and unless a racing series wants to completely stop innovation by restricting almost everything that can be done to a car, like in modern-day NASCAR, there’s always going to be a lot of leeway in what teams can do to their cars, and almost everything has been tried at some point or another, from coiling the fuel lines to increase the volume that sits inside the lines which allows the car to carry more fuel, to having four smaller front tires instead of two big ones to decrease the frontal surface area of the car, to the legendary Brabham BT46B fan car, pictured above, which circumvented rules against “movable aerodynamic devices” by claiming that the massive rear fan was to provide cooling for the engine instead of sucking the car onto the track.

It’s this kind of ingenuity that many race series are lacking these days, and it’s a sad thing to see, as the creativity of the designs that teams came up with in their attempts to circumvent, manipulate, or flat-out break the rules of the series is part of what made them so interesting to watch, not to mention providing the foundations for some of the technologies we see on our cars today. Here’s hoping that race designers take a page from some of these so-called “cheaters” and bring back the excitement of guessing what the teams will come up with next.

The 7/8-scale Corvette, and other stories [How To Spot A Psychopath]

Post by Kasey Kagawa

There are very few things in life as fine as a high-revving V8 on a dyno. Monet’s Waterlilies, a perfectly performed rendition of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, the body of a beautiful woman. But since this isn’t a site dedicated to such things, we’ll make do with the sounds of a well-balanced V8 being put through the gears. The link below takes you to a web site with two sound files, one of the new BMW 4.0L V8 destined for the 2008 M3, and another of that engine in the actual car, being driven around the Nordschleife at the Nurburgring at top speed. Sadly, the second file is just the audio, so unless you have an exceptionally good imagination or have wasted far too much time driving around the Nordschleife in Project Gotham Racing 3, I’d stick with the the dyno file, which has all the payoff with none of the annoying foreplay.

NEW M3 V8: LISTEN TO IT HERE [Pistonheads]

Post by Kasey Kagawa

As someone who’s no fan of hybrid cars and hybrid car owners, I couldn’t be happier at this news. My intense dislike of the owners of hybrid cars isn’t that hard to deduce, as I don’t think anyone likes people who look at you as some sort of meat-eating child molester for driving a car that doesn’t do 9 MPG less than is stated on the sticker, but a lot of people who hate hybrid car owners don’t actually hate hybrid cars. I happen to think that the millions of dollars that have been thrown at R&D for such cars could have been spent on things that are actual alternatives to gasoline, like biodiesel or hydrogen, instead of a fancier way of burning the same old dino-juice.

At any rate, the federal tax credit that gave hybrid owners up to $3,150 off their income taxes is dependent on how many hybrid cars a manufacturer sells per year, regardless of model or marque. Once the manufacturer sells 60,000 hybrid cars, the tax break for the next two quarters on all cars produced by that manufacturer is cut in half, and in half again for the next two quarters, after which the tax break vanishes completely. For example, Toyota hit their 60,000th car in Q2 2006, which means that the credit for all Toyota and Lexus models in Q3 and Q4 2006 was half of what it was at the beginning of the year, and after Q2 2007, Toyota and Lexus models will no longer be eligible for federal tax breaks.

The basic upshot of all of this? There’s now one less reason to buy a hybrid car, and that suits me just fine.

Beware The Vanishing Hybrid Tax Credit [Consumerist]