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Porsche Panamera Stingray GTR ($TBA). Aggressively modified by Russian outfit TopCar, this limited edition — only 25 are being made — sports sedan features a nearly all-new carbon fiber and Kevlar body, including new front and rear bumpers, air vents, front and rear fender extenders, front and rear doors — the latter of which open with the press of a button — bonnet, wings, rear diffuser, spoiler, and side skirts, along with performance enhancements like a sport air filter, intake manifold, and valved exhaust system that boost horsepower north of the 600 mark. I heard my boy Hakim Taylor already ordered his.

1. 1994 Honda Accord

Trade-In Value*: $975
Original Price in 1994: $15,430
New Car Value (2011): $20,200

And the winner of the Most Stolen Vehicle contest is … the Honda Accord! The model year is 1994, the year that NAFTA was established, skater Nancy Kerrigan was clubbed in the knee with a pipe and O.J. Simpson took the entire nation on a high-speed chase.

The Accord is loved by both drivers and thieves and is universally stolen all over America. Drivers love it for its quality and refinement. It handles well, rates high on safety and maintenance and has a roomy interior. Thieves, of course, love them for their parts, which don’t change much from year to year, and for their lack of anti-theft technology.

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Land Rover will showcase its luxury skills when it unveils this maxed-up Range Rover Autobiography Ultimate Edition at the 2011 Geneva motor show.

Gaydon calls it the ‘most luxurious Range Rover’ and it has a pair of Apple iPads installed in to the rear entertainment system as standard so businessmen and kids can smear grubby fingers aplenty as they work and play. A pair of individual back seats is fitted in place of a rear bench, and there’s an aluminium laptop table too.

There’s an array of finery thrown at the interior: soft-touch leather is used throughout, as well as machined aluminium inserts and Kalahari wood veneers, while the rear load bay is lined with a teak decking.
Range Rover Autobiography Ultimate Edition: the engines

A pair of engines are available: the 4.4 TDV8 or the 5.0 petrol supercharged V8. Both come with ZF’s eight-speed auto, and the petrol motor will thrust the top Rangie to 60mph in 5.9sec.

Outside you’ll spot the Autobiography Ultimate by a pair of unique colours – red or stone – 20in alloy wheels, body-coloured handles, a smoked radiator grille and side vents.

Just 500 Ultimate Range Rovers will be built. What price such OTT luxury? We won’t know until later in 2011 when the car goes on sale. It’s a bit of a swansong for the Range Rover – the new one lands next year.
The new 2012 Range Rover

The 2012 Rangie will set a new stylistic marker for Land Rover, in the same way that the 2000 model did. For starters, it’ll be aluminium, to carve around 20% off its hefty waistline.

Power comes from V6 and V8 engines while we’ll also see the first hybrid model from Jaguar Land Rover: the 4x4s were deemed more important than the Jags, so the Range Rover will debut this important technology, most likely in diesel-electric form.

The Maybach Exelero was first introduced by German car manufacturer Maybach in 2005. This two-seater vehicle is said to be the fastest car in the world with a top speed of 351 km/hr. This luxury car is priced at a whopping $8,000,000 USD. At that price it can be safely assumed that you have to be unbelievably wealthy to even fathom buying this baby. If you just happen to win the lottery over and over and think that you can finally lay your hands on a Maybach, I’d suggest you spend that money in acquiring a vacation home in at least three continents along with a Mercedes S-class sedan to accessorize each home. But, if you happen to be P. Diddy, then nothing should stop you from buying this insanely expensive beauty for your 16 year old son’s birthday! However, you do not need to have any money to enjoy these beautiful photos of the Maybach Exelero and I’d suggest a good nap after to drive this dream car.

Denver—The race to build the world’s first flying military jeep just moved a step closer to the finish line. The Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has selected two companies to proceed with the next stage of its Transformer, known as TX—a fully automated four-person vehicle that can drive like a car and then take off and fly like an aircraft to avoid roadside bombs. Lockheed Martin and AAI Corp., a unit of Textron Systems, are currently in negotiations with DARPA for the first stage of the Transformer project, several industry sources told Popular Mechanics at a robotics conference here in Denver. DARPA has not announced the official winners yet.

It’s unclear how many companies competed for the DARPA project, but the competition brought together an unusual mix of large defense companies with smaller aviation firms vying to build the vertical takeoff and landing craft. Perhaps most surprising—and for some competitors galling— is that DARPA selected a rotor-based aircraft for one of the two winning submissions. At an industry day held earlier this year, DARPA officials had initially said they weren’t interested in a traditional rotary-wing aircraft, though they might consider a vehicle if the rotor was shrouded. (more…)