Seen as a successor to the early ’90s Honda Beat kei car, the new S660 roadster, which will go into production in 2014, was introduced at the Tokyo Motor Show. The midengined car, as the nomenclature indicates, is powered by a 660cc three cylinder turbocharged engine driving through a seven speed paddle shifted transmission. While kei cars are meant specifically for the Japanese domestic market, there is a possibility that it might be sold, with modifications in other countries. Honda senior designer Ryo Sugiura, when asked about selling the little roadster outside of Japan, said, “I cannot tell you if it will or will not. It’s a secret. The car would certainly need some re-engineering.”  (Read More…)

The stagnant mid-size truck segment is about to get shaken up in a big way, as Chevrolet unveils the new Colorado mid-sizer at the Los Angeles Auto Show.

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Lexus has added a turbocharger to the LF-NX concept that it introduced at the Frankfurt auto show, calling the result the LF-NX Turbo and unveiling it at the 2013 Tokyo Motor Show.

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Not many details have been released so far about the Subaru Cross Sport Design concept, which the company says is a combination of “sport” and “utility” and features “easy seat access, a comfortable interior, and abundant luggage space” and it’s supposed to show the direction forward for urban SUVs. They also could have said that it’s a stretched, jacked up BRZ station wagon, since with a horizontally opposed engine up front driving the back wheels, the Cross Sport Design is based on the sports car platform shared by Toyota/Scion and Subaru. (Read More…)

At the 2013 Tokyo Motor Show today, Subaru unveiled its Levorg concept, a sporty wagon that’s set to arrive in Japan next year but, unfortunately, isn’t likely to cross the Pacific.

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Ahead of its debut at both the Los Angeles and Tokyo Auto Shows, Jaguar has unveiled the F-Type Coupe, with a 550-horsepower F-Type R as the flagship.

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Mazda3 Skyactiv-CNG Concept

Last week,  Mazda CEO Masamichi Kogai said that the company had no plans for a production Wankel rotary anytime in the near future, though the company most identified with the engine that goes “hmmmm” will continue to do research on rotaries. Now, at the Tokyo Motor Show, Mazda is showing that its future powertrain plans include diesel, natural gas and hybrid drives.

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Jalopnik does it again, with this Edmunds-supplied leak of the Chevrolet Colorado. GM’s mid-size truck looks like it’s gotten a thorough cosmetic revamping compared to the global variants, but no word on what powertrains we’ll be getting.

Jalopnik managed to snag a promo image of the Subaru WRX driving in the dirt, thanks to a now disappeared Edmunds video. Looks like the “Impreza with a Guy Fawkes mask” styling is here to stay. Expect an official reveal at tomorrow’s Los Angeles Auto Show.

The ’91 GSXR 1100 was a feral beast. It had been tame once, well “mostly tame” anyhow, but the bike’s previous owner had stripped away the thin veneer that civilization had imposed upon it and restored it to its primeval form. It hadn’t taken much, really. Larger carburetors, performance cams and a full race exhaust had transformed the bike from a wickedly fast street machine into a full-race bike that, despite the license plates, had no business being on the street. Still, it had a sort of lethal charm that attracted men like me: confident, experienced, prideful. It was a battle of wills I would not lose. I was determined to master the bike and, like a living thing, the bike was determined to kill me. (Read More…)

Plans for a ressurected rotary engine appear to have hit a snag with Mazda CEO Masa-michi Kogai claiming that the required volumes for commercial viability are unrealistic.

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The naturally aspirated engine has always been a cornerstone of Honda’s engineering philosophy, but the company looks set to abandon that in the near future, with a move to turbocharged engines happening by the end of the decade.

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I’ve never cared for the phrase “as American as apple pie” as apple pie is far from an American invention. Instead, we should say as “American as the pickup truck.” In 1925 Ford crafted the “Ford Model T Runabout with Pickup Body” and America’s love affair began. The Chevrolet Silverado, and its mechanical twin the […]

By far the most numerous British sports car in junkyards these days— and, in fact, for the last few decades— is the MGB. We’ve seen many of these cars in this series, but today’s find is just the second Junkyard Find Spitfire, after this ’75. The Spitfire had a long production run, 19 years total, but Spitfires just weren’t anywhere near as sturdy as their MGB cousins and most of the non-perfect examples got crushed long ago. Still, every so often a forgotten project gets evicted from a garage or back yard, and that’s probably what this happened to this battered ’65 that I spotted in a San Francisco Bay Area self-service yard last month. (Read More…)

John writes:

Dear Sajeev,

Thank you for much good reading and practical knowledge for a very amateur do-it-yourselfer. My auto repair and maintenance skills are very limited, but I enjoy doing what I can myself. Even just the oil changes and having control of the materials used to perform it.

So you are looking for subjects, and here goes-this may resonate with any number of Miata owners. For about a year the CEL has been popping up a code (0126) that I read with a simple device purchased online that evidently means the engine is running too cold, which I have never even heard of, but why not? Insufficient combustion temp? (Read More…)