The last time we heard about Dutch supercar upstart Vencer was a little more than a year ago when it announced it would call its one offering Sarthe. Vencer says the Sarthe will be officially unveiled to the UK in early September at London's Salon Privé.

The Sarthe sure seems to bring the supercar goods. Vencer says it will be a tube steel and chrome-moly chassis attached to a honeycomb aluminum floor. Top Gear says a "510-bhp Corvette V8" sits behind the driver, to which a six-speed manual is bolted. Vencer says the car's carbon fibre bodywork helps keep the weight near 1,390 kilograms (3,064 pounds). Light weight and high power team up to propel the supercar to 96 km/h (60 mph) in just 3.8 seconds and then to a top speed of 325 km/h (202 miles per hour).

Air conditioning, electric windows and locks, "in-car entertainment," an alarm and ABS are the standard accoutrements, but customers can request extras.

Speaking of customers, there won't be very many since production will be "low volume." Pricing hasn't been announced, but the London coming-out party will feature English afternoon tea, champagne and a lobster luncheon. So, bet on including that in the eventual sticker price.

Read the official press release below.

New Orleans has great charm, awesome parties and some of the best food in the nation. We highly recommend a visit. And if you want to add some automotive flavor to your trip, this converted 1918 Sinclair gas station would certainly do the trick.

The 2000-square-foot loft-style house is packed with automobilia like the classic-car nameplates as drawer pulls in the kitchen, the Flexbeam-style lights in the bathroom, the antique gas pump in the dining area, or the disembodied bumper from a '60s-era DeSoto hanging above the house's only bed. Hubcaps line one wall in the den and a garage-style sliding door lets in sunshine and fresh air.

The owner says the NO streetcar is within walking distance, but says there's a Harley-Davidson rental shop nearby if you want your own wheels.

At US$1,800 a week, this gas-station-turned-inn is no discount hotel. But where else will you be able to cook breakfast below the red neon glow of a Mobilgas Pegasus?

Border police in Italy struck gold when they dug a little further into a car trying to pass into Switzerland. The car's occupants, a family of five, claimed to be on an "Easter vacation."

But police said their nervous behaviour prompted them to go on an Easter egg hunt. The officers eventually found a dozen gold bars worth at least $6 million hidden in a storage compartment. Police say the 53-year-old driver of the car was a legal representative at a Swiss company and couldn't provide an explanation for where the gold originated or why it was in his car. The police confiscated the gold and the family's car. The driver faces charges of money laundering.

Based upon our extensive experience with gold smuggling, we recommend that next time, he form the gold into body panels for his car. It's a much more effective strategy. At least until a double-nought spy comes looking for you.

For more, watch the full news report video below.

Look beneath the seats of a Honda Odyssey and you'll likely find a handful of that iconic loop cereal loved by toddlers nationwide. And to show that Honda understands its minivan's target market, it is using the breakfast staple to announce its plans to reveal the updated 2014 model at next week's New York Auto Show. While the announcement is creative, it unfortunately lacks much in the way of information, leaving us with little more than a vague teaser alluding to "some innovative new features."

As expected, Honda has also confirmed we will see the production version of the 2014 Acura MDX in New York. We expect the 2014 MDX to look very much like the prototype we saw in January at the Detroit Auto Show with only slight differences. The 3.5-litre i-VTEC V6 will be offered with all-wheel drive or, in a first for MDX, front-wheel drive.

You'll find the official press snippets for both below, and we'll have live images and details on both from the New York Show. Until then... Cheerio!

"Slow" and "ugly" are words used to describe some hybrid cars and, coincidentally, the gumboot chiton. Soon the two may have even more in common thanks to a discovery by researchers at the University of California, Riverside.

Gumboots, also known as the "wandering meatloaf," are foot-long marine snails that roam tidal zones, scraping algae from rocks by using up to 80 rows of magnetite-tipped teeth. Magnetite, the "hardest biomineral known on Earth," not only strengthens the gumboot's chompers, it makes them magnetic as well. New teeth are grown continuously and enter the "wear zone" as old ones wear out.

Click through to keep reading the slow-moving, slimy details and then check out a battery tech video.

If long hours of solitude spent in the searing hot Arizona desert, punctuated by mere seconds of fleetingly frantic excitement sound appealing to you, then you're the perfect candidate for Brenda Priddy's SpyCamp.

Brenda will host the first class of her SpyCamp this July in an undisclosed location 530 km from Reno, 200 km from Las Vegas. After checking in to your (less than) luxurious accommodations, you'll enjoy a pizza dinner with Brenda at a "famous 'car tester' bar" then spend four very hot days waiting to get that perfect shot of a camo-covered car. Afterward you'll get Brenda's unvarnished critique of your "talents."

The camp application states Ms. Priddy is "not a tour guide," so participants shouldn't expect fun-filled days of frolicking in the sun with the "World's Most Famous Spy." In fact, the app also states, "I DO NOT bail people out of jail and/or pay for traffic violations." So campers, behave!

Included in your US$775 cost (US$1,250 for two) is a "famous BP&Co. SpyCamp 2013 wristband" and a free adrenaline rush. Not included is travel to and from the area, hotel (US$77.95 a night for five nights), car rental (which you'll definitely need) and fuel costs.

For more info, contact spycamp2013 at gmail dot com (written this way so she can avoid spam).

Click through to watch a camo-covered Mercedes-Benz and Volkswagen caught on video.

At your next NASCAR event, you might hear, "Look! Up in the sky! It's, well, nothing." That's because government sequestration budget cuts will probably nix Air Force flyovers that have been a long-time tradition at many NASCAR races in the US.

If fully implemented, the sequestration cuts would force the federal government to cut US$1.2 trillion from its budget over the next 10 years. The reduced spending mandate slashes across every federal department including the Pentagon. Since the high-flying, pre-race panoply is hardly a necessary expense, you can bet it will be among the first picks of low-hanging budgetary fruit to cut.

Last year, Congress banned the armed services from directly sponsoring race teams and USA Today says the March 10 NASCAR race in Las Vegas could be the last flyover for the Air Force's Thunderbirds.

Scroll down to watch a stealth bomber quietly buzz a stadium.

As Europe's economy continues to suffer, so do automakers. One of the latest pieces of bad news comes from French carmaker Peugeot which says it will write down its assets by US$5.53 billion. The figure represents almost 29 per cent of the company's property, valued at US$19.4 billion in June. Peugeot says it will also take a second-half charge of US$325 million for "onerous contracts." Speaking of onerous, The Detroit News notes the "write-downs are more than double Peugeot's current market value." Yipes.


With European auto sales falling the most in almost 20 years, Peugeot executives see little chance of improvement. Peugeot's sales dropped 13 per cent in 2012 and Chatillon said markets could fall another 5 per cent this year.

Efforts to right the ship include cutting 17 per cent of its French workforce, closing a factory near Paris and selling off assets. The French government has offered US$9.3 billion in bond guarantees that await European Union review. In addition, an alliance between General Motors and Peugeot authored last year was meant to save the two companies US$2 billion in annual cost savings and sales improvements over 5 years, but it's currently under review.

A federal judge has ruled that Batmobile replicas built by Mark Towle, of Gotham Garage, do, in fact, infringe on copyrights and trademarks held by Warner Bros.

Towle's attorney, Larry Zerner, argued that US copyright law doesn't allow "useful articles" to be copyrighted. Zerner, in court documents, insisted that Warner Brothers' lawsuit claimed the entire Batmobile was protected including doors, seats and tires. The judge agreed, but ruled the law does allow copyrighting of unique design elements of useful articles.

"The implications of a ruling upholding this standard are easy to imagine," Zerner wrote. "Ford, Toyota, Ferrari and Honda would start publishing comic books so that they could protect what, up until now, was unprotectable."

US District Judge Ronald Lew disagreed and ruled that, "The Batmobile is a character and exists in both two- and three-dimensional forms. Its existence in three-dimensional form is the consequence of the Batmobile's portrayal in the 1989 live-motion film and 1966 television series.

"Defendant did not copy the design of a mere car; he copied the Batmobile character," Lew continued. "The fact that the unauthorized Batmoble replicas that Defendant manufactured – which are derivative works – may be 'useful articles' is irrelevant. A derivative work can still infringe the underlying copyrighted work even if the derivative work is not independently entitled to copyright protection."

Zerner did, however, duck part of the lawsuit that asserted he willfully infringed on Warner's rights. The judge wrote that Zerner did at least wait until the design patents on the cars expired, and therefore didn't think copyright law applied.

Meanwhile we look forward to the Ferrari comic books.

The entire 54-page court ruling can be read here in PDF form.

When the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety crashed a 2012 Fiat 500, the little car got the best scores in all categories. It's a safe car, then, right?

"If safety is a priority, you should avoid the smallest cars," advises Russ Rader, spokesperson for IIHS. "Weight counts. Smaller, lighter cars are safer than they used to be, but all things being equal, people riding in bigger, heavier vehicles get more protection in crashes."

That's why, despite its near-perfect crash-test score, the Fiat 500 is No. 1 on Insure.com's list of worst vehicles for protecting passengers from injuries. In an accident with a larger object, the Fiat's safety cage and array of air bags do what they can to protect passenges, but like eggs in a coffee can, the passengers get thrown about and smashed up.

If the Fiat 500 is like a coffee can, then a fullsize GMC pickup (which tops the website's list of vehicles best at protecting passengers) would be a 50-gallon barrel. In a collision between the two, the barrel of eggs will win every time. The GMC Sierra 1500 is rated best at protecting passengers by Insure.com, but IIHS rated it just average in the side impact test and marginal in the roof strength test. Second place on Insure.com's best list is the Porsche Cayenne, which has not been tested by IIHS. The third through fifth place spots go to the GMC Yukon, Sierra 2500 and Terrain.

The listings are the result of Insure.com's analysis of personal injury protection and medical payment claims which affect what car owners are charged for insurance.

Check out videos of the IIHS crash test of the Fiat 500 as well as the 2009 GMC Sierra 1500 below.

Back in June, Toyota and BMW announced a "memorandum of understanding" outlining plans for the two companies to join forces on future products and technology development. On Thursday, they signed a more formal and binding agreement that goes further into detail about the partnership, and it all sounds pretty exciting. The two announced they will work together in four main areas:

1. Joint development of a fuel cell system
2. "Set up a feasibility study to define a joint platform concept for a mid-size sports vehicle"
3. Focus on lightweight technology – the agreement mentions reinforced composites that could be used in the aforementioned sports vehicle
4. Better batteries – the companies will work to develop a lithium-air battery with a much greater energy density than today's cells.

The Toyota Land Cruiser is a pretty hot model around the world. But it took the Russians to make it cool. We have few hard, cold facts and only small slivers of information about these photos, but it seems the icy Toyota was part of the International Snow & Ice Festival in Perm, Russia.

Artists took a huge chunk of ice and shaved it down to the temporary art installation you see here. The sub-zero SUV comes complete with a full interior accessed by the (permanently frozen open) driver's side door. The steering wheel and seats look to be upholstered in, well, dirt. With the back seats removed, the frigid four-door is a pretty slick ride in which to chill out.

Just a thought, but wouldn't a Toyota Tundra have been more appropriate? See the gallery for more photos.

Ford's Fusion and Fusion Hybrid have both received the highest five-star overall safety rating from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The rating is a big upgrade for the Fusion, which was completely redesigned for 2013. The previous model fell one star short of the top rating, after scoring only three stars in the frontal crash test and four stars in the side crash test and rollover evaluations. The 2013 Fusion received four stars in side crash and rollover testing and a full five stars in the front crash test.

Test results for the 2013 Fusion and Fusion Hybrid were greatly improved at least in part due to Ford's Personal Safety System. The system utilizes smarter sensors to gather crash data and tailor the car's restraint systems to the occupants. Seatbelt usage and seat position are taken into account to ensure airbags deploy with less pressure for smaller drivers, more for larger drivers.

The 2013 Fusion twins also received the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety Top Safety Pick+ designation. Read the official press release below.