2011 Ferrari 458 Italia Yellow Carbon Fiber Seats 20" Diamond Wheels! Great Car! on 2040-cars

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Weekly Recap: Ferrari, Ford and Porsche power up for Geneva

Monday was Groundhog Day. Tuesday, apparently, was Sports Car Day. The Ferrari 488 GTB, the Ford Focus RS and the Porsche Cayman GT4 all debuted within hours of each other ahead of their rollouts at the Geneva Motor Show. Three sporty machines, three vastly different approaches – and a lot of implications for enthusiasts. That's a day worth repeating. It also illustrates the opportunities automakers see in the performance market, which is expected to grow in the coming years. Ford estimates the segment has expanded 14 percent in Europe and surged 70 percent in North America since 2009. The Detroit Auto Show was evidence of this, and performance cars of every stripe debuted, including the Acura NSX, Ford GT, Alfa Romeo 4C Spider and several others. This isn't a fad. Performance cars aren't going away. The question is why? Stricter CAFE standards are looming in the United States, as are tighter emissions regulations in Europe. And no one expects gas prices to remain low in America. None of this matters for sports cars, and automakers are increasingly using them to elevate their images. That's why Dodge rolled out two 707-horsepower Hellcats last year. It's why Ford has decided to resurrect the GT for road and track. It's why in the depths of bankruptcy, General Motors continued work on the Chevrolet Corvette Stingray, not to mention the Z06. "Great brands are made one car at a time," Ford of Europe president Jim Farley said at the reveal of the Focus RS. Still, companies make those cars for different reasons. View 5 Photos Mainstream brands like Ford and Dodge want to build cars that get people talking, excite their bases and drive more potential customers into the showroom. They probably don't buy a Focus RS or a Hellcat, but suddenly the regular Focus hatch looks a bit hotter, and that V6 Charger seems to be just a touch more muscular. The halo of performance is alive and well in the eyes of automakers and their customers. "It's one of the most effective catalysts for ingenuity and innovation," said Joe Bakaj, vice president of product development for Ford of Europe. That also leads to a trickle-down effect. Some of the technologies inevitably make their way to other products. It's hard to think the new all-wheel-drive system in the Focus RS that distributes torque front to rear and side to side won't be used in other vehicles. It's different for Ferrari and Porsche.

Ferrari 458 M spotted, is there a turbo under there?

While it's still absolutely beautiful and a performance marvel (especially in Speciale trim), the Ferrari 458 Italia has to keep up with the rapidly evolving world in supercars if it wants to continue its success. Ferrari seems to know that it can't sit back and relax, because we're now seeing a disguised 458 testing for the second time.
Since we first saw it, rumor has emerged that it updated 458, reportedly called 458 M, may follow the lead of the recently revised California by using its turbocharged 3.9-liter V8 engine. The mill makes 553 horsepower and 557 pound-feet in that application, but those numbers clearly won't be enough for the Prancing Horse, because the standard 458 already makes more. Instead, Ferrari is expected to turn things up significantly to produce around 670hp, even more than the already gutsy Speciale.
Of course, to make the big change work, the 458 M must be able to ingest huge quantities of cool air to feed those turbos, and the camouflage on this test car is likely hiding the body changes to make that possible. Ferrari does a great job here of disguising things up front on this prototype, making it frustratingly hard to spot any changes.

Ferrari 458 Italia becomes most expensive prize ever on Price Is Right

In case you haven't been paying attention, it's "Big Money Week" on the long-running The Price Is Right televised game show. In a nutshell, it means that more than a million dollars in cash and prizes are up for grabs for those lucky enough to "come on down," play some games and correctly guess product retail prices.
Moments after opening the show Thursday, host Drew Carey broke the unexpected news. "Today you are going to see the single-most-expensive prize in the history of the daytime Price is Right," he boasted before the curtains were pulled back to review a brand-new Ferrari 458 Italia Spider.
To win the car, the contestant had to play "Three Strikes" - blindly pulling numbers out of a bag and putting them in the correct price sequence before grabbing three dreaded red strikes. As expected, your typical The Price Is Right contestant is about as familiar with today's retail Ferrari pricing as they are with fractional jet ownership. We won't spoil the fun of whether or not a lucky contestant gets to drive the $285,716 exotic home (and pay a midsize sedan's worth of taxes), but feel free to speed ahead to about the three-minute mark on the video below to watch the reveal.