2013 Mini Cooper

2013 Mini Cooper

Mini’s upcoming hardtop isn’t as inappropriately named as is Mountain Dew—seriously, on what mountain does Hi-Liter-colored sugar water condense?—but when the next generation of the hatchback arrives in 2013, it’s going to be rather less mini than it is today.

As we see with this test vehicle, caught by our ace spy photographers, BMW is well into development of the next-gen Mini, which will share its front-wheel-drive platform with the next-generation BMW 1-series. (This is not to be confused with the Europe-only face-lifted 1-series that just dropped; that car remains rear-wheel drive for a few years.) We’re told that the styling already has been finalized—and it was done so under the brand’s previous design director, Gert Hildebrand, who oversaw every modern Mini up until that point. (His replacement, Anders Warming, already is at work penning the cars that will arrive following this one.)

But don’t take everything shown in these pictures too seriously. That apparent small third door? It’s just camo. This is a regular Mini three-door hatchback, not a Clubman replacement. In fact, we feel confident that the regular model’s growth will enable a rear seat large enough to take a next-gen Clubman off the table; the Countryman will continue to serve those customers who insist on a more-practical Mini.

There’s yet more fiction in these spy photos: the BMW 1-series–esque dash. Ask a Mini spokesperson what the brand’s core “values” are, and you’ll hear about—cliché alert—go-kart handling, personalization, and, yes, a central speedo. Those won’t change, and the sober interior present in these spy shots is just a dummy, albeit three-dimensional proof that the Mini and 1-series are set to merge underneath the skin.

With this car-laboration in mind, we expect the next-gen Mini to follow the 1-series in offering a powertrain lineup chock full of small turbocharged engines. In addition to four-cylinders, BMW will add a three-cylinder option to both cars, although it’s unclear whether Americans will be able to opt for an odd number of pistons in their Mini.

Before you go reaching for SSRIs to treat your WhyMustEverySuccessiveGenerationofCarsGrowBiggeritis, keep in mind that part of the reason that the core Mini will grow—in addition to taking a bit more fight to cars like the Volkswagen Golf in Europe—is to make space at the bottom of the range for an actually mini Mini. That vehicle will be conceptually similar to the Rocketman, which recently was approved for production.

The Mini brand may no longer be completely honest in name, but its products are (almost) all fun to cane. We expect the next-gen Mini hatch to be no different. We’re hopeful, at least, that it will taste better than Mountain Dew.

434-hp Golf Set to Enter 24-Hour Race at the Nürburgring

434-hp Golf Set to Enter 24-Hour Race at the Nürburgring

Volkswagen is known for making sensible, refined mainstream cars. And also for occasionally having complete breaks with reality, resulting in moments of sheer awesomeness. The basic Golf is an example of the former. The Golf24, shown in the video below, the latter. To build this racer, the company went straight to the Audi parts bin, and VW’s engineers returned with the turbocharged 2.5-liter inline-five—a legendary powertrain configuration in the history of  VW Group motorsports.

Installed in roadgoing models like the Audi RS3, this engine produces 340 hp and 332 lb-ft. Those are sissy numbers, reasoned VW, and so it cranked up the five to the tune of 434 hp and 398 lb-ft for Golf24 duty. Power goes through a paddle-shifted six-speed sequential gearbox to all four wheels.

And lest you missed the title of this post, VW is entering this beast in a 24-hour endurance race (hence the 24 in the car’s name). At the Nürburgring. Your move, sanity.

Throw a Subaru Impreza WRX STI

Throw a Subaru Impreza WRX STI

Rally driving is Ken Block’s passion, but what’s earned him YouTube immortality are his gymkhana videos and those jumps where he throws his Subaru Impreza WRX STI into the atmosphere with apparent recklessness. Of course, once Block is up in the air, he puts Sir Isaac Newton in the driver’s seat. “You have to be very calculating,” says the 41-year-old co-founder of DC Shoes.

Currently, the essential element to Block’s calculations is a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet developed by mathematically minded snowboarder Aaron Dettling. Relying on the fact that physics is scalable, Dettling’s program (originally developed for constructing snowboard jumps) uses the same basic formulas that determine the parabolic trajectory of an arrow shot from a bow or a shell shot from a cannon. “I start by converting the velocity of the projectile leaving the ramp in miles per hour to feet per second [Vt],” Dettling says. “Then I convert the velocity of the projectile into vertical velocity [Vv], horizontal velocity [Vh], and angle of the jump [A].”

That works out to this:

Vv = sin A (Vt)
Vh = cos A (Vt)

Next, those numbers can be used to calculate horizontal distance (X) or vertical distance (Y), in feet, at any point in the trajectory, using the gravitational constant (G) of 32.17 feet per second²:

“These equations don’t look like what you find in college physics books—but they work,” says Dettling. “I replaced a lot of the symbols with conventional numbers and letters in an attempt to make it easier to grasp. It’s real easy to build a jump. To make it work and function correctly, is actually pretty difficult to do.”

Block jumps his race cars, with the addition of about 150 pounds thrown into the trunk to offset the engine’s mass up front. But the launch angle for Block’s jumps is constantly evolving. While his launches used to be set at 18 degrees, he and Dett­ling now find he’s most comfortable at an angle between 10 and 15 degrees. Dettling has also found that, at the relatively low speeds of the short-duration jumps, the aerodynamic drag’s effects are within the tolerances of the landing zones. But since drag increases exponentially with speed, those forces will become critical at more radical velocities.

Landing ramps have changed with a move from “step-down” ramps, set below the launch altitude, to “step-up” ramps, where the landing zone is higher than the liftoff point. When executed with the precision of an Olympic ski jumper, the impact on landing is minimized because the car’s trajectory matches the angle of the ramp. Assuming, of course, Block gets the velocity perfect at launch.

2012 Volkswagen Passat

2012 Volkswagen Passat

Let’s get one thing straight: Tennessee is not Germany. If you haven’t previously stopped to consider this remarkable fact, we suggest you take a moment to ponder it. Nashville isn’t Stuttgart, Chattanooga isn’t Wolfsburg, and that eight-footlong snake encased in Lucite and mounted in a souvenir shop near Lynchburg (population 6362, including Little Richard) isn’t a graffiti-covered piece of the Berlin Wall.

You are forgiven if the snake threw you off.

So Tennessee is not Germany, but this fall, you’ll be able to waltz into one of the state’s Volkswagen dealers and drive off in a 2012 Passat built by local labor. This is the first time VW has assembled a car in America since the 10-year crap explosion that was its New Stanton, Pennsylvania, plant (1978–1988). That facility, you may remember, cost Pennsylvania nearly $100 million in incentives and produced both perpetual labor disputes and sloppily built Rabbits that collapsed under the weight of their own stench. When the plant shut down in 1988, it was making about 60,000 cars a year, less than half its capacity.

The hypermodern new plant, crafted to avoid such problems, is located in Chattanooga. Overjoyed at winning the bid, the state of Tennessee built VW its own exit off Interstate 75 and coughed up $577 million in incentives. The facility sits about 12 miles northeast of downtown ’Nooga on the site of an old munitions factory.

That last bit is fitting, as the Passat is a key part of Volkswagen’s explosive American- growth goals. VW wants to sell 800,000 vehicles here by 2018, up from last year’s 256,830. This is a huge—some would say terrifying—leap, one that won’t come from throwing cash on the hoods of a few Jettas. VW is thus remaking its lineup in what it believes to be our image. First came the larger, cheaper 2011 Jetta, which is selling at a blistering pace. Now we have the ’12 Passat, which is longer than the outgoing model, is styled like a bar of soap, and will likely cost about $7000 less than its predecessor when it hits dealers this fall. The folks in Wolfsburg apparently think we’re all penny-pinching lardbutts. Perhaps. We’ll tell you what we think, but you should pay us $5 first and wait until we finish our bacon-fat sandwiches.

The Passat’s launch took place on the roads between Chattanooga and Nashville, a serene, rolling land of tumbling hills and lifted pickup trucks. The VW’s white-bread curves blend in here, but they’d blend in anywhere, which is kind of the point. The new length is mostly between the wheels, with the wheelbase up 3.7 inches. VW gives an additional inch of legroom to the front and 1.4 inches to the rear. The Passat’s back seat now offers more legroom than those of the Toyota Camry and the Honda Accord. This is nothing if not on purpose: During the press conference, Volkswagen executives rang out the phrase “sized for America” like a team cheer, which just made us think of Sansabelt slacks. You have to wonder how far this Stars-and-Stripes theme will go. (Rumor has it that VW wanted to kick off the 2011 Detroit auto show with cowboys on horseback. Thankfully, someone said no.)

Still, the most interesting part is how anal-retentively VW has tailored this Passat for our commonwealth. The rest of the world, including Europe, gets a face-lifted version of the 2005–2010 car. The version you see here will be built and sold in North America and nowhere else. It has three bars in its grille instead of two—a last-minute addition—because focus groups felt the Hyundai Sonata’s nose looked spiffier. We get three engines (the German-market Passat offers seven), all of which have been seen before: a 170-hp, 2.5-liter five; a 140-hp, 2.0-liter turbo-diesel four; and a 280-hp, 3.6-liter 10.6-degree VR-6. There are just 16 build combinations, down from 128 in 2009, aimed at thinning special orders. And because front-wheel drive rules this segment, four-wheel drive is off the menu. Same for a wagon.

Struts support the front end, as is the class norm. At the rear, there’s an independent multilink suspension similar to what lives in the European Passat. The 2.5-liter model gets either a five-speed manual or a six-speed automatic, but the TDI can be had with a six-speed stick or DSG dual-clutch automatic. The 3.6 is only available with the latter because—you guessed it—VW says U.S. V-6 takers don’t want a clutch pedal.

Oy, we’re a fun bunch.

Our seat time was limited to TDI and 2.5 models, both equipped with two-pedal transmissions, 17-inch rubber, and top-zoot SEL trim. Each sucked up Tennessee’s undulating pavement with ease, the only real suspension flaw being a bounding, mildly underdamped nose on the five-cylinder car. Think of the way an inflatable punching clown rebounds. The chassis is otherwise buttoned down and nimble, with mild understeer at the limit and moderately intrusive stability control that can’t be turned off. The brakes are predictable and linear in feel, and though the pedal gains a bit of travel under hard use, performance never seems to suffer.

Engine choice here is a matter of taste. The heavier TDI (3350 pounds versus the 2.5’s 3300) is the rowdier of the two, with livelier steering, the typical diesel bloom of midrange torque, and the DSG’s giddy, right-now shifts. The five-cylinder’s relative torque deficit and heavy, low-speed steering mean it isn’t as much fun to spank down city streets, but the gap is narrowed by the diesel’s maddeningly upshift-happy gearbox. It doggedly yanks you into a higher gear and away from grunt whenever possible. Blame the TDI’s 43-mpg highway fuel-economy rating.

Amazingly, for a car that just had thousands of dollars ripped from its street price, the Passat’s interior is respectable. The back seat is big enough for two grown men to live out of. The optional 400-watt Fender audio system, with a sound profile an engineer predictably described as “purposely middle-of- the-road,” is punchy and accurate enough to please almost everybody. You see the frugalizing in a couple of places—a glove-box interior finished like a kid’s lunchbox, a cupholder lid sharp enough to double as a prison shiv—but overall, things are on par for the class. There’s none of the packed-with-goodies feel of a Sonata or an Accord, but hey, subtlety is underrated.

In the end, though, it’s the Passat’s flavorless styling that sticks in your craw. (Or is that gristle from the fat sandwich?) It’s fitting that the rear three-quarter view has a lot of Chevy Impala in it; from a certain perspective, this car—populist, affordable, patently inoffensive—is the world’s greatest Impala. Given what VW is trying to accomplish, that’s meant to be a compliment.

Note: Volkswagen representatives do not like it when you tell them this. They grow narrow-eyed and stare into the distance like Davy Crockett. Perhaps they’re looking for snakes.

Volkswagen Bulli Concept

Volkswagen Bulli Concept

Time for another trip down memory lane. Recall the Volkswagen Microbus concept shown in Detroit a decade ago; we’ll give you a moment. This Bulli concept—the moniker resurrects a popular German nickname for the T1 VW Bus—is supposedly a sequel to that earlier show van. Whereas the original and the 2001 concept were, you know, buses, this little tribute is a compact MPV with four hinged doors. The Bulli makes its debut at the 2011 Geneva auto show.

Honey, I Shrunk the Time Machine

It would perhaps more accurately be called a Nanobus, but Volkswagen design at least got the retro cues right without overdoing it. The concept bears the two-tone treatment so popular on the original, with red and white hues gathering at the front to form the V-shaped altar for one large VW logo. The lighting elements are LEDs to better match current VW design, and the chrome-hubcapped wheels get a futuristic turbine-fin treatment that alludes to the electric powertrain that spins the front wheels.

Two benches provide seating for six. The floor is flat, and the seats are reconfigurable: the rear seat can be stowed, and the whole mess can be rearranged to form a bed. Cargo capacity in six-passenger mode is 13 cubic feet, expandable to 57 behind the front seats. The center of the dash is dominated by an iPad-as-media-center that controls a Fender-branded sound system; VW has retained hard controls for the climate-control system, however. There’s a utilitarian cleanliness to the interior’s design, like a German interpretation of the Japan-only second-gen Nissan Cube cabin. Pull the iPad out, and the interior is practically ready for the assembly line.

The Bulli’s electric motor resides up front and is powered by a 40-kWh lithium-ion battery pack that sits below the floor. The electric motor produces 114 hp (85 kW) and 199 lb-ft of torque, and is capable of propelling the 3200-pound retromobile to 62 mph in 11.5 seconds and on to a top speed of 87 mph. The battery is said to provide a range of about 186 miles.

What’s Up, Microbus?

Ignore the retro front end for a moment, and you notice a greenhouse and daylight openings that almost exactly match those of the Space Up! concept and the fleet of city-specific taxis it has spawned. The 102-inch wheelbase is within concept-to-concept error of the Space Up!, as well. Given that and the fact that VW says the concept’s batteries are sandwiched in the floor (just as they will be in electrified versions of the Up!), not to mention other similarities in size, weight, and EV output, it’s pretty likely that this car rides on VW’s next-gen small-car platform.

As to the probability of a production version, there are some not-so-subtle hints. VW says the Bulli concept could “establish a new, fifth brand of people carrier” alongside its Caddy, Touran, Sharan, and Caravelle lines. (Read: It will.) In addition to the EV powertrain, the platform “can also incorporate” gas and turbo-diesel engines, “with 1.0- or 1.4-liter displacement.” (It will do that, too.) VW has a whole range of 1.0-liter three- and four-cylinder gas engines, some turbo- and twincharged 1.4-liter gas four-cylinders, and a 1.4-liter three-cylinder turbo-diesel at its disposal.

The Bulli is better looking than any of the umpteen—we’ve lost count—Up! concepts, and certainly the most likely to be shipped to our shores. If the Bulli does become reality, we wouldn’t mind seeing it in the States. Just don’t take ten years to make up your mind, okay, VW?

2014 Volkswagen Microbus

2014 Volkswagen Microbus

What it is: A modern interpretation of the original Volkswagen Bus. The new  van is a rehash of the Microbus concept that VW showed 10 years ago under then-CEO Ferdinand Piëch—it was subsequently killed by his successor Bernd Pischetsrieder. The Microbus would replace the Chrysler-sourced Routan that was unloved by everyone except Brooke Shields.

Why it matters: Like the Beetle, the original Bus remains a strong emotional draw for boomers. Emotion is just what VW needs as it begins to fill its U.S. showrooms with bland sedans.

Platform: Front-engine, front-drive platform related to Golf, Jetta, and Passat.

Powertrain: Turbocharged, four-cylinder gasoline and diesel engines; a hybrid is a strong possibility.

Competition: Chrysler Town & Country, Honda Odyssey, Nissan Quest, Toyota Sienna.

What might go wrong: It will likely be built in Europe, which means that this Microbus may have a mega price.

Estimated arrival and price: Debuts in the fall of 2013 with sales beginning in 2014. A sticker price of $30,000 would be necessary to compete, but we expect it to be closer to $40,000.

Volkswagen Moves into the Fast Lane, Launches R Performance Division

Volkswagen Moves into the Fast Lane, Launches R Performance Division

Volkswagen is set to grow its portfolio of sporty models, having just formed a new subsidiary, Volkswagen R GmbH. Its purpose will be to create more-hard-core VWs, concoct exclusive equipment packages and models, and create one-off cars. Another subsidiary, Volkswagen Individual, will be closed, and its business taken over by R GmbH.

In Europe, almost all VW models are available with "R line" packages regardless of the engine under the hood. There’s no significant benefit to the modified body cladding that makes up the bulk of such packages; it’s purely aesthetic. Bear in mind, however, that VW makes some of the best-selling cars in Europe, and if there are 30 Golfs on your street, you might wish to set yourself apart from the pack a little.

For extra luxury, VW R will offer "Exclusive" trim levels in place of the current "Individual" program. Think chrome, large wheels, and two-tone leather seats. The level of workmanship is surprisingly high; some of the interiors created by Volkswagen Exclusive would look great in anything this side of a Bentley. As it happens, the "Exclusive" moniker also is used by VW Group cousins Audi and Porsche for similar programs.

Pumped-Up VeeDubs

Beyond the trim levels, "R" also will stand for the same things as Mercedes’ AMG or BMW’s M divisions, which means that besides body kits and wheels, a lot more power and performance are in order. For a glimpse of what VW has planned, look no further than the 265-hp Scirocco R or the 270-hp Golf R. Both models are strongly set apart from VW's regular lineup, and they are just the beginning. We expect an R version of the upcoming, face-lifted Passat, which could use a high-powered four-cylinder, VW’s VR6, or even a version of the 2.5-liter five-cylinder engine which makes 340 hp in the Audi TT RS.

Tuned diesel models are possible as well. The last-generation Touareg was available as an R50 model with a 350-hp V-10 TDI. Now that the V-10 engine is gone, the next Touareg R could have a high-powered V-8 TDI (a gasoline V-8 would also be a unique touch, as one is not currently part of the Touareg's portfolio). Future R models will only bear the R moniker without a number hinting at engine displacement. Clearly, VW feels that an "R" badge makes enough of a statement on its own.

Let's hope we will get some of those models over here as well. There are currently no firm plans to bring any of the R models to the U.S., including the Golf R.

The potential for one-offs are interesting, too. How about a Golf with the Audi TT RS engine—that mighty powerplant would easily fit under the Golf's hood. And we hear that some Phaeton Q-ships are roaming the autobahnen around Wolfsburg equipped with the twin-turbocharged W-12 taken directly from the Bentley Continental GT.

Volkswagen R GmbH is headquartered in Warmenau near Wolfsburg, and employs some 350 people. The guy in charge is Ulrich Riestenpatt Genannt Richter, formerly head of sales and marketing at Audi's Quattro GmbH. And that subsidiary, responsible for creating Audi's RS models, would seem to be a perfect role model for VW R.