Automotive | All About Automotive

2010 Acura ZDX production details have arrived and just as we outlined in our First Look some time ago, Acura's newest crossover will pack the brand's 300-hp 3.7L V-6 with 270 foot-pounds of torque under its hood.

Aside from its powertrain specs, the ZDX is on track to be the one of the most luxurious vehicles Acura has put to market yet. Inside, five-passengers are coddled with standard hand-stitched leather throughout the cabin and are entertained by a powerful CD/MP3 stereo system with Bluetooth connectivity. A panoramic roof adds a sense of extra roominess, while cargo access is an easy feat thanks to a power tailgate.

The 24-year-old, who became the most expensive player in football history when he joined Real for £80 million this month, is putting three of his cars up for sale for a total of £195,000. Friends believe the former Manchester United footballer may also sell his £4 million mansion in Alderley Edge, Cheshire, and some of his furniture and clothing. Ronaldo is

The 24-year-old, who became the most expensive player in football history when he joined Real for £80 million this month, is putting three of his cars up for sale for a total of £195,000. Friends believe the former Manchester United footballer may also sell his £4 million mansion in Alderley Edge, Cheshire, and some of his furniture and clothing. Ronaldo is

The 24-year-old, who became the most expensive player in football history when he joined Real for £80 million this month, is putting three of his cars up for sale for a total of £195,000. Friends believe the former Manchester United footballer may also sell his £4 million mansion in Alderley Edge, Cheshire, and some of his furniture and clothing. Ronaldo is

If BMW and Lexus sales continue at their current paces, the Bavarian automaker could topple its Japanese rival and become the best-selling luxury brand in the U.S.

According to Automotive News, BMW and Lexus sales are neck and neck, with BMW selling about 3600 more vehicles than Lexus through the month of May. So far this year, Lexus's sales have collapsed by 37.2 percent compared to the same time period last year, while BMW's sales have declined 30.5 percent. BMW's market share now matches Lexus's at 1.9 percent.

"This year's emphasis is on maintaining our market share and even growing our share," said Jan Ehlen, spokesman for BMW North America. "If this results in remaining in the top spot of the premium market, that would be a nice bonus."

According to Automotive News, BMW has been in the second place spot for eight years straight. Before Lexus achieved its stranglehold on top, it was traditionally held by American automakers; Cadillac dominated from 1946 through 1997, and Lincoln nabbed it in 1998. But so far this year, European luxury makers--including Audi, Porsche, Jaguar, Land Rover, Mercedes-Benz and BMW--have pushed their collective market share up by almost a full percentage compared to last year.

The U.S. has become BMW's biggest market, with 23 percent of its 1.27 millions sales last year coming from the U.S. Germany is its second-biggest market, where it sold 19.6 percent of its vehicles.

John McCandless, a spokesman for Toyota Motor Sales U.S.A., dismissed the title of sales leader as superfluous--though he did mention that sales could be boosted by the introductions of the 2010 Lexus IS C and 2010 Lexus HS250h.

"Volumes can vary," he said. "Meeting the needs of our customers is what's important."

Sales of Bayerische Motoren Werke AG’s BMW and Toyota Motor Corp.’s Lexus, the most popular U.S. luxury brands, fell less in June than the previous month as buyers began returning to showrooms.

U.S. sales totaled 16,744 for the BMW brand, a 20 percent drop from a year earlier, and better than the 28 percent decline in May, Munich-based BMW said. Lexus reported selling 16,874 vehicles, a slide of 17 percent, better than the previous month’s 36 percent fall.

Luxury sellers “are seeing a bottom, they think the worst has past,” said Milton Pedraza, chief executive officer of the Luxury Institute LLC, a New York-based consumer-research firm.

Lexus took the lead from BMW in June after the German automaker sold the most vehicles for three months straight. BMW held onto the top spot this year overall, selling 93,563 vehicles, compared to Lexus’s 90,060, challenging Lexus’s nine- year reign as the top seller of luxury autos in the U.S.

Daimler AG’s Mercedes-Benz brand sold 15,155 vehicles for the month, a 23 percent drop that was better than May’s 31 percent fall, Stuttgart, Germany-based Daimler said. The total including the Smart brand was down 26 percent to 16,271 vehicles, better than May’s 33 percent fall, the company said.

‘Still Underwater’

Nissan Motor Co.’s Infiniti sales for June were down 32 percent to 6,304 units, said U.S. Vice President Al Castignetti. That fall was better than May’s 38 percent fall for the Tokyo- based automaker. Honda Motor Co.’s Acura division fell 34 percent to 8,280 vehicles, compared to a 36 percent drop in the previous month for the Tokyo-based automaker’s luxury unit.

Not all luxury brands did better than May. Dearborn, Michigan-based Ford Motor Co.’s Lincoln luxury brand fell 27 percent to 7,137 vehicles, after reporting a 2.4 percent increase in the previous month. The drop was more than double Ford’s overall 11 percent fall.

Detroit-based General Motors Corp.’s luxury division, Cadillac, fell 41 percent to 8,473 vehicles, compared to a 40 percent drop in May, according to a statement.

Growth for luxury segments of the economy will “continue to be slow for the next 12 to 20 months,” said the Luxury Institute’s Pedraza. “People are feeling better, but many are still underwater as the last 12 months have been horrible.”

The 400-horsepower BMW 750Li has rear-wheel steering. Below 40 miles per hour, the rear wheels can turn as much as 3 degrees opposite the direction of the front wheels, thereby reducing the big car’s turning radius.

I'm quite certain that somewhere right now, emotionally shattered BMW technicians are gathering in a church basement for a support group, huddled around the cookies and the coffee urn, their hands fairly vibrating with frustration. For as well deserved as is the title Ultimate Driving Machine, BMWs also have earned the reputation as the Ultimate Hangar Queen, taking up residence in dealership service bays and sending mechanics over the crumbling edge of insanity. Hello -- sob! -- my name is Dieter and I'm a BMW tech . . . . Hello, Dieter, keep comin' back. . . .

Yes, BMWs have middling initial quality and distinctly less-than-middling reliability -- so sayeth J.D. Power -- but people still buy them and adore them, because they are inarguably spectacular cars. Even the BMWs that I loathe are great cars. The new 135i is uglier than a Radcliffe glee club, but it's also fierce, fervid, delicious, a bottle of Bollinger that's lost its cork.

And then there's this car, the 2009 BMW 750Li, the flagship of BMW's starfleet, which might be -- one hates to draw lines in this particular sand -- the best luxury sedan in the world. Oh, sure, it could be better. It could run on the tears of disgraced CEOs or cure warts of the keister. But as an executive saloon, as a synthesis of power and grace and ease and prestige, the new 7-series demands that we reset our calipers, raise our ceilings and throw out our measuring sticks. There is now a new standard.

And yet, the 750Li boldly/daringly/foolishly leverages its greatness on the fulcrum of one of the company's perennial weaknesses: electronics. This car comprises a blazing amour fou of control modules, sensors, microcontrollers, solenoids and mechatronic actuators, all wired together with the CAN-bus network from hell.

Our fully optioned $110,170 test car provides an acute example. Among the systems: night vision display with enhanced pedestrian detection; active blind-spot detection; lane-departure warning; park-distance control; head-up display; adaptive headlights with high-beam "assistant"; three high-resolution cameras on the rear deck lid and front fenders.

Of course, there's an 80-gigabyte, hard-drive-based navigation system, satellite radio and premium audio system; and a completely redesigned version of the multifunction iDrive controller (the previous system was nicknamed "iQuit").

My favorite? The integral active steering system, which is to say, rear-wheel steering. Below 40 miles per hour, the rear wheels can turn as much as 3 degrees opposite the direction of the front wheels, thereby reducing the big car's turning radius. Great for parking and tight city traffic. Above 40 mph, the wheels turn in phase with the front wheels to increase handling responsiveness, cornering and agility.

Does integral active steering perform as advertised? Has Hasselhoff had work? This car runs like mighty winged Pegasus, carving mountain roads and dicing switchbacks as if it were an M3 with a pituitary problem. No big car has ever had so much rail-to-rail slaloming agility, such effortless composure at the limit. It's uncanny, it's eerie, it's surreal.

Indeed, the effect of all these electronics is to knit together a kind of digitized meta-reality where the surly bonds of physics have slipped a bit, a place where this enormous, heavy sedan can dance like a sports car. Think of it like the world of "The Matrix," inside of which Keanu Reeves can fly, or act.

And so we arrive at the truest portrait of the 750Li: half machine, half machine code; a kinetic sculpture, partly aluminum and steel, partly a stream of zeros and ones. Wonderful, epic, historic.

But can you trust it?
I really don't know. On the one hand, I'm utterly smitten by the technology. I love piloting a leather-lined spaceship with a 20-way adjustable captain's chair with heating/cooling and massage function.

There are moments on the interstate at night -- when the ghostly thermal-imaging night-vision display is on, the head-up display is reading out navigation messages, the lane-departure warning system is gently reminding me to use my turn signals, and all is bathed in serene LED cabin light -- that the 750Li really feels like something that comes after the Automobile.

Still, I'm nagged by doubt. All of these exotic systems, such as the head-up display (Nippon Seiki), lane-change warning (Hella) and night vision (Autoliv) come from suppliers in Japan, Germany and Sweden, respectively. The 750Li is practically the U.N. of Tier 1 suppliers. Considering the state of global comity, a question occurs to me: Can they all get along?

Bear in mind, all of this gear is overlaid on the car's, the brand's already fraught electronics: the e-throttle-equipped 4.4-liter, 400-horsepower, twin-turbocharged V8 with variable valve timing on intake and exhaust cams; the adaptive six-speed ZF transmission; the adaptive dynamics system, which itself has four distinct modes (Comfort, Normal, Sport and Sport+), which ratchet up performance thresholds for the engine, transmission, brakes, steering and stability control. The braking module governs anti-lock, traction and stability control, brake "drying," brake-fade compensation. . . . It just goes on and on.

What few buyers appreciate is how difficult systems integration is on a car like this. For the BMW 750Li to work, every system and subsystem has to mind-meld with the others in a cold chatter of instant, endless algorithms, faultlessly, every time, forever and ever, amen. No wonder they go buggy.

So when I say the 750Li is the best luxury sedan in the world, imagine a weather-balloon-size asterisk. I guess, as long as it starts, it is.

A bigger stick for the soft-spoken supercar, and a price to match.

By making available an R8 with a monster 525-hp V-10 engine—complementing the 420-hp V-8 model that was introduced two years ago—Audi has elevated its exotic-looking two-seater from “almost-a-supercar” status to a true competitor in the high-performance realm above mere sports cars.

The 105-hp increase comes from a 5.2-liter, direct-injection V-10 that is virtually identical to the engine found in the Lambor ghini Gallardo LP560-4.

Unique engine programming and intake and exhaust systems are the chief differences in the Audi engine over the Italian job, although both engines are made in the same plant in Hungary.

We’re told that the V-10 weighs just 68 pounds more than the V-8, and that fuel economy with the bigger engine will worsen by only 1 mpg.

Output is listed by Audi at 525 horsepower and 391 pound-feet of torque, 27 horses and seven pound-feet fewer than in the Lambo, but we suspect some of that difference is simply marketing.

With the help of launch control, a first for the R8’s manual transmission, we managed the 0-to-60 dash in 3.7 seconds and a quarter-mile in 11.8 seconds at 121 mph.

That’s a full second quicker in the quarter-mile than we recorded in a manual-transmission V-8 R8 and dead even with a Porsche 911 GT2. This was measured in a down-and-dirty test run during a preview drive in Spain.

Lamborghini owners need not fret that this R8 will steal the Gallardo’s thunder, as the V-10 R8’s numbers are quite a few ticks behind those of the automated-manual LP560-4 we tested in February.

A more formal test with the paddle-shifted transmission should improve our times, but still, we don’t see a lot of cross-shopping between these corporate cousins.

The Lamborghini is a car for extroverts—loud, brash, in your face. The Audi is more of a speak-softly-and-carry-a-big-stick car. The exhaust—quiet during relaxed driving and escalating in volume above 4000 rpm—never fully intrudes on the serenity in the cockpit until you approach the 8700-rpm redline (700 more than the V-8’s and 200 higher than the Lambo’s).

The extra oomph is obvious as soon as the R8 5.2 starts moving, but the power increase hasn’t upset the R8’s user-friendliness and neutral handling. Easy driving is still the name of the game; both models have graceful manners even when driven hard around a track.

Visual differences between V-8 and V-10 R8s are slight. The V-10 model has wider intakes behind the doors, which sit atop wider body sills. In front and back, the black accents are glossy instead of flat, and there are two crossbraces to the air intake rather than three.

The V-10 R8’s exhaust tips are larger and oval-shaped, and this model also sports standard LED lighting, previously an option. The seats, a carry-over from the V-8 model, had us at times wishing for more lateral support.

We’re pleased the R8’s optional ceramic brakes might make it to North America. They’re strong, completely free of fade, and—unlike the on-off brakes in the Gallardo—can actually be modulated for smooth driving.

Audi won’t pinpoint when the V-10 R8 will go on sale or what it will cost. We’ll bet on late this year at the earliest, with a premium of maybe $45,000 over the V-8 R8’s $117,500 base price.