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2017 Frankfurt Motor Show | Observations on the Ferrari Portofino, Honda Urban EV and more

Related: We obsessively covered the Frankfurt Motor Show — here's our complete coverage The 2017 Frankfurt Motor Show kicked off the fall reveal season with an impressive array of powerful cars blended with forward-looking concepts. It's a seminal period for automakers, who find themselves at the intersection of disruption and opportunity. With that in mind, here are four takeaways from Frankfurt. The transformation of the curvy yet overbaked Ferrari California T into the Portofino is complete, and its coming-out party in Frankfurt served notice that Ferrari's entry-level sports car is much more formidable. There was nothing wrong with the California (and later the California T), but the Portofino features a cleaner look with stronger lines and an elegant resemblance to the rest of the Ferrari family. The California name is a good one. Used on a number of memorable cars in the 1950s and '60s, it's steeped in tradition, and certainly Ferrari will dust it off again. But switching to Portofino, the name of a scenic town in Italy, is a nice way to change the conversation and generate fresh interest in this part of the Ferrari portfolio. Man, people are stoked over the Honda Urban EV concept. Why? I assume it's the retro look that harks back to early Civics, and the lack of information about the concept itself. What people don't know, they're imagining. Honda hasn't even confirmed the range, the car is very small, and it likely won't be sold in the United States. With this dearth of facts, enthusiasts are filling in their own blanks. I guess that's OK. Count me among the intrigued. When I saw pictures of this thing early Tuesday morning, I was pretty excited, too. We do know Honda is expanding its electric strategy, and two-thirds of its new vehicles sold around the world will have some form of electrification by 2030. The Urban EV launches in Europe in 2019, and a hybrid CR-V rolls out in Europe next year. Unconfirmed for the U.S. market, it seems like a no-brainer to bring that version of the CR-V here. The electrification and autonomous tech parade of concepts continues. You gotta be there. It's the cost of doing business in the modern automotive landscape. This technology takes years to develop and launch, so the next best thing to remind the world you're trying to be cutting-edge is to show off lots of fancy concepts. Frankfurt had plenty. A couple standouts: The BMW I Vision Dynamics and Audi's Elaine and Aicon.

Weekly Recap: Toyota wants cars to be your 'close friends' around 2020

Toyota confirmed plans this week to launch autonomous technology in its production cars around 2020. The automaker's version is called Highway Teammate, and it's one element of a broader mobility strategy that includes vehicles communicating with each other and the grid. "Toyota believes that interactions between drivers and cars should mirror those between close friends who share a common purpose, sometimes watching over each other and sometimes helping each other out," the company said in a statement. That sounds utopian, and perhaps a bit cheesy, but it's an acknowledgment that autonomous driving requires more than technology developed in a vacuum. Toyota is looking at its research in a broader context, and dubs its overall strategy the Mobility Teammate Concept. Highway Teammate is the first step. Its test vehicle is a modified Lexus GS, which uses road-mapping data and external sensors to merge or exit highways, change lanes, and maintain safe distances during driving. It's operated on the Shuto Expressway in Tokyo. Toyota has been working on autonomous tech since the 1990s, with the goal of providing mobility for older people and the disabled, as well as lowering the frequency of traffic accidents. Toyota's push comes as an early adopter, Nissan, is hedging on its own deadline to implement the autonomous tech by 2020 due to a lack of firm laws governing self-driving cars around the world. Conversely, Volvo took the landmark step of being the first automaker to accept liability for when its cars will operate in autonomous mode, and urged the US government to set federal guidelines to regulate the technology. OTHER NEWS & NOTES 2016 BMW M4 GTS: Your water-injected, turbo-boosted demon BMW is unleashing its most powerful M4 ever, a 493-horsepower special edition that's road legal yet bred for the track. The company is making 700 copies for sale around the world, and 300 of them will come to the United States. The twin-turbocharged 3.0-liter six-cylinder revs to 7,600 rpm and uses a water-injection technology to cool the intake air and lower the compression temperature. BMW says this allows it to wring more power out of the inline six. The car also uses carbon-fiber reinforced plastic for the roof, hood, engine compartment strut brace, drive shaft, and rear spoiler to reduce weight. The M4 features BMW's organic light-emitting diode taillights, which are said to be an industry first.

Someone's willing to pay $16,000 for a hollow, non-working BMW i8

There is an unusual BMW i8 for sale on eBay right now. Unlike your average – and by that we mean "working" – i8, this one pretty much just sits there, looking pretty. See, the i8 in question is just a promotional body shell. It's fullsize and being sold (we think) by a legit BMW dealer (Laurel BMW of Westmont), so it's got strong ties to the real thing, but there's nothing inside. In fact, you can't open the doors or windows and the wheels don't move, unless you count the tiny rolling castors that are a part of the prop. There is no fancy plug-in hybrid powertrain – no powertrain of any sort, in fact – and it was "professionally crafted just for BMW dealers." The headlights do turn on, though, so that's something. What's most impressive, though, is that there are 50 bids for this non-working BMW. In fact, the bidding has climbed up to $16,000. For a car that can't fulfill its mission as a car, that's pretty impressive. Oh, and those bids have not yet hit the reserve price, so the dealer is obviously hoping it can get more money for this hollow BMW. The official base MSRP for a working i8 is $135,700. The first i8 delivered in the US, a special edition for Pebble Beach, just sold for $825,000.