Aston Martin V12 Vantage GT3 Race Car Goes Testing, Still Looks Ferocious

November 22, 2011 at 4:49pm by Alexander Stoklosa

This past summer Aston Martin revealed the V-12 Vantage GT3 race car—and its $490,000 price tag—and now the company has begun testing the gorgeous racer in England. For those who don’t regularly follow smokin’ hot GT3 race car news, the Vantage GT3’s 6.0-liter V-12 engine is related to the roadgoing V-12 Vantage’s and produces more than 600 hp and 516 lb-ft of torque. To slow things back down, the GT3 gets six-piston front and four-piston rear brakes.

The V-12 Vantage GT3 is eligible to compete in a variety of European series, the FIA GT3 championships and the Nürburgring 24-Hour most prominent among them. It still has plenty of durability testing left, but we’re already anxious to see what this gnarly machine looks like in racing livery and covered in the filth of battle.

Tags: Aston Martin, Aston Martin Vantage, Aston Martin Vantage GT3 |

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Tokyo 2011: Nissan Pivo 3 Concept Looks Like a Computer Mouse

The upcoming Tokyo auto show will host Nissan’s wacky all-electric Pivo 3 concept, which follows Pivo concepts 1 and 2 as Tokyo debutants. But unlike its forebears, this latest Pivo looks almost normal. (Well, as normal as a wheeled computer mouse can, anyway. Don’t you just want to pick it up and click the windshield?) Pivos 1 and 2 looked like rolling crustaceans and featured passenger “bubbles” that could rotate 360 degrees relative to their sled-like chassis. Pivo 2 added the ability to “crab-walk” sideways into parking spaces and to verbally interact with the driver. The Pivo 3 may not push as many envelopes—being that it can’t crab walk and lacks a hamster-ball passenger cell—but it still packs several tricks up its sleeves.

First off, the Nissan can roll those sleeves back: Its two doors slide open like a minivan’s to facilitate ingress and egress in narrow parking spaces. The doors open to a futuristic cabin that seats three. The driver’s chair is forward and to the center, and it’s flanked by the two passenger seats. The doors aren’t the Pivo 3’s only parking aids; the car is equipped with a flotilla of electronics and gizmos designed to make it a parking-lot champ. The little EV uses in-wheel electric motors and rear-wheel steering, which allow it to have an extremely tight turning radius. Nissan claims the roughly 10-foot-long Pivo 3 can pull off a U-turn on a road that’s just 13 feet wide.

Finally, drivers can activate the Pivo 3’s “Automatic Valet Parking” system and send the car off on its own to find a parking space. The 3 will return to the parking lot’s exit to meet its driver when summoned via smartphone. The catch is that this can only happen in AVP-friendly parking lots of the future, so don’t expect this to happen anytime soon. Like the two previous Pivos, this one is more fantasy than anything else, but its always fun to dream—and there’s no better place to showcase sky-high pie than in Tokyo.

Tags: 2011 Tokyo auto show, Nissan, Nissan PIVO 3 concept |

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2013 Audi A3 Interior Spied, Looks Similar to the Concept’s

Prototypes of the upcoming Audi A3 have been running around for a few months now—we posted some spy photos a while back—so why run pictures of what might be the exact same car again? Because this time, our spies were able to peek inside.

The interior appears more upscale than that of the outgoing A3, if not quite as avant-garde as the guts of the A3 concept that debuted to much fanfare at the Geneva auto show in March. Significantly, the A3 seen here features a new-school MMI infotainment system with a flip-up display screen above prominent, turbine-style air vents. In the A6, A7, and A8, there’s a touchpad next to the MMI controller on which drivers can scrawl characters with a fingertip as a means of entering information into the navigation system. In the A3 concept—and in the prototype seen here, we’re guessing—that touchpad resides on top of the MMI knob itself.

As for the exterior, the pictures we ran back in August actually show more than these, since this three-door is wearing a coat of aneurysm-inducing squiggles instead of the more-revealing matte black of that last prototype. Both put most of the headlights on display, but obscure other key stylistic elements such as Audi’s signature grille frame and the LED taillights.

Just as with the current car, we are more or less guaranteed to not get the A3 as a three-door in the U.S., although we will be able to buy it in sedan and five-door hatchback forms. The latter will almost certainly be a virtual clone of the three-door, but with an extra cutline on either side. You can find a rundown of what we expect to see under the hood, including diesel and S-grade motors, by reading our previous story here.

Of the various body styles, the three-door is expected to appear first, with a European debut in 2012. Sedan and five-door models will follow in 2013. We’ll see the first next-gen A3s on our shores then, likely starting in the low-$30k range.

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