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Mercedes out to defend its F1 crown with new W06 Hybrid Silver Arrow

They say there's only one way to go when you're on top, and that's down. That's the direction in which every other team on the Formula One grid will be trying to push Mercedes this season, but the defending champions will be doing their best to stay on top. What you see here is the embodiment of that effort. After taking pole position at all but one race last season, the checkered flag at all but three and an impressive dozen one-two finishes, the new Mercedes AMG F1 W06 Hybrid will have one heck of an act to follow. In accordance with the only major change to the sporting regulations for 2015, the most obvious difference over last year's W05 is the revised front end, but the team insists it worked hard over the winter to optimize everything underneath that silver and teal bodywork, from the suspension to the turbocharged hybrid power unit and everything in between. One of only two teams (alongside Ferrari) on the grid this season to develop its own engine in-house, the Mercedes PU106A proved practically unbeatable last season. And with engine development all but completely frozen in the off-season, its innovations are likely to prove just as insurmountable this year. But as team principal Toto Wolff puts it, in quoting Babe Ruth, "Yesterday's home runs don't win today's games." While nothing's for certain in one of the world's the most competitive arenas, chances are still high that Mercedes will continue to dominate this season just as it did the last. The most gripping battle, then, may very well be waged once again between Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg, whose rivalry started long before either got their start in F1, from karting and up through the ranks of the lower formulae. Though Lewis was just crowned world champion for the second time, Nico has been with the Mercedes team for longer, has been in F1 for longer and didn't give up on chasing Lewis all of last season – so don't expect him to this year, either. MERCEDES AMG PETRONAS Gets Back to Work with the new F1 W06 Hybrid Silver Arrow Jerez, Feb 01, 2015 The MERCEDES AMG PETRONAS Formula One Team today unveiled its 2015 Formula One World Championship challenger, the F1 W06 Hybrid, ahead of the first day of pre-season testing at the Circuito de Jerez in Spain.

A car writer's year in new vehicles [w/video]

Christmas is only a week away. The New Year is just around the corner. As 2014 draws to a close, I'm not the only one taking stock of the year that's we're almost shut of. Depending on who you are or what you do, the end of the year can bring to mind tax bills, school semesters or scheduling dental appointments. For me, for the last eight or nine years, at least a small part of this transitory time is occupied with recalling the cars I've driven over the preceding 12 months. Since I started writing about and reviewing cars in 2006, I've done an uneven job of tracking every vehicle I've been in, each year. Last year I made a resolution to be better about it, and the result is a spreadsheet with model names, dates, notes and some basic facts and figures. Armed with this basic data and a yen for year-end stories, I figured it would be interesting to parse the figures and quantify my year in cars in a way I'd never done before. The results are, well, they're a little bizarre, honestly. And I think they'll affect how I approach this gig in 2015. {C} My tally for the year is 68 cars, as of this writing. Before the calendar flips to 2015 it'll be as high as 73. Let me give you a tiny bit of background about how automotive journalists typically get cars to test. There are basically two pools of vehicles I drive on a regular basis: media fleet vehicles and those available on "first drive" programs. The latter group is pretty self-explanatory. Journalists are gathered in one location (sometimes local, sometimes far-flung) with a new model(s), there's usually a day of driving, then we report back to you with our impressions. Media fleet vehicles are different. These are distributed to publications and individual journalists far and wide, and the test period goes from a few days to a week or more. Whereas first drives almost always result in a piece of review content, fleet loans only sometimes do. Other times they serve to give context about brands, segments, technology and the like, to editors and writers. So, adding up the loans I've had out of the press fleet and things I've driven at events, my tally for the year is 68 cars, as of this writing. Before the calendar flips to 2015, it'll be as high as 73. At one of the buff books like Car and Driver or Motor Trend, reviewers might rotate through five cars a week, or more. I know that number sounds high, but as best I can tell, it's pretty average for the full-time professionals in this business.

US buyers show little interest in big hybrids

The idea of producing large, luxury-vehicle hybrids is turning into a "what were they thinking?" exercise in futility, USA Today reports. General Motors is discontinuing hybrid versions of the Cadillac Escalade, Chevrolet Tahoe and GMC Yukon SUVs, while Mercedes-Benz and Toyota's Lexus division are doing the same with their S-Class hybrid and LS hybrid sedans, respectively. The culprit? Big price increases for fuel economy improvements that border on the unimpressive. Granted, the Escalade hybrid gets 31 percent better fuel economy than the standard version, but that still maps out to a combined fuel-efficiency rating of just 21 miles per gallon. That can be seen as a worthwhile increase, if it didn't cost over $8,000 extra. The 2014 Escalade Hybrid, for example, starts at $74,425 while the non-hybrid can be had for $66,295. Meanwhile, the Lexus full-size hybrid costs $6,000 more than the regular version but only gets 1-2 mpg better combined fuel economy. The result of all these high costs? Low sales. Through April, GM sold 82 of its hybrid SUVs and pickups, down from 541 a year earlier. And the LS hybrid sales were in single-digit territory for April. That isn't stopping Lexus from promoting its hybrids as the right solution (with the wrong facts), though. There are still automakers giving big hybrid vehicles a shot, though. Nissan's Infiniti division is selling a hybrid version of its QX60 and says an impressive 10 percent of QX60 buyers choose the hybrid, which costs just $3,000 more. Looks like money talks. Featured Gallery 2015 Cadillac Escalade: First Drive View 35 Photos News Source: USA TodayImage Credit: Copyright 2014 Brandon Turkus / AOL Green Infiniti Lexus Mercedes-Benz Hybrid lexus ls gmc yukon mercedes-benz s-class infiniti qx60 chevrolet tahoe