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Ford, Toyota clean up in Best Car For The Money Awards

The U.S. News Best Cars for the Money Awards picks winners by looking at the average transaction price, five-year total cost of ownership, the regard a car has from the automotive press, reliability figures from J.D. Power and Associates and safety data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. The result, according to the magazine, is "the best combination of critical acclaim and long-term value."
Ford nabbed six of the 21 categories that received awards this year, the Focus, Fusion, Fusion Hybrid, Taurus, Escape and Edge getting trophies. Toyota and its Lexus and Scion sub-brands took another five, the Tacoma and Tundra owning the two categories given to pickup trucks. The other ten awards were split between Honda with three, Buick with two, and one each for Subaru, BMW, Hyundai, Chevrolet and Mazda.
Follow the link to see all the winners and read about why they were chosen.

Weekly Recap: Racing legend Jim Hall explains Chevy's futuristic Chaparral concept

"I said our cars are built to be winners." – Jim Hall Racing legend Jim Hall never thought he'd be a video game consultant, but when Chevrolet asked for his advice to create a futuristic Chaparral for the Vision Gran Turismo series, he was eager to help. He reviewed early sketches and suggested some changes that made it onto the concept, including the addition of a camera that's mounted onto a mast over the cabin to aid the driver. The Chevy Chaparral 2X Vision Gran Turismo concept was revealed this week at the Los Angeles Auto Show and will be part of a downloadable update for PlayStation 3's Gran Turismo 6 in December. Theoretically, at least, it uses a laser-beam propulsion system and an air-powered generator to produce 900 horsepower in the video game. It's capable of sprinting to 60 miles per hour in 1.5 seconds en route to a top speed of 240 mph. Those gaudy performance specs – even in the virtual world – came at Hall's urging. "I said our cars are built to be winners," Hall told Autoblog on the floor of the Los Angeles show. The 79-year-old drove Lotus racecars in Formula One before launching the successful Chaparral Cars in the 1960s. Like his innovative Can-Am racers, the Vision Gran Turismo project has an eye toward the future. It also introduces the iconic Chaparral name to a new generation of fans, and hopefully, Hall says, gets them excited about engineering and design. "It emulates what we did in the '60s," he said. And what they did back then still resonates. Chaparral Racing and Chevy partnered more than 45 years ago for development work on the composite monocoque chassis, lightweight alloy powertrains, automatic gearboxes and active aerodynamics. "He [Hall] walked right back into this and was able to apply thinkings and learnings," said Clay Dean, General Motors executive director of advanced design. The Chevy Chaparral 2X Vision Gran Turismo concept was created at GM's North Hollywood advanced design studio, and it will be on display at the show through November. Other News and Views Sebastian Vettel joins Ferrari team in 2015 Ferrari confirmed that four-time Formula One World Champion Sebastian Vettel will join the Scuderia for the 2015 season, jettisoning Ferrari's current ace, two-time champ Fernando Alonso. Vettel has been F1's most successful driver since Michael Schumacher, though he's struggled to match his previous accomplishments in 2014.

JLR shares backstage 'No Time to Die' Range Rover Sport SVR carnage

James Bond's latest adventures will take him to Norway and Scotland, as seen in the trailer for the upcoming "No Time to Die." Somewhere along the way, the British spy encounters a pair of Range Rover Sport SVRs, the ultimate high-performance SUV from JLR's Special Vehicle Operations division in one of the movie's centerpiece car chases. Now, the company has given us a behind-the-scenes look at its filming, and the automotive carnage that ensues. The filmmakers wanted to take a Bond action sequence off-road, and chose the Range Rover Sport SVR as the the bad guys' pursuit vehicle. Armed with a JLR product placement deal (Bond drives a new Defender in another part of the movie) the henchmen had no qualms picking one of the most expensive things on the menu. Unfortunately, that also makes is a bit hard to watch when machines that start at $115,000 are totaled as they careen through the air or roll onto their roofs. The SVRs share a 5.0-liter supercharged V8 with the Jaguar F-Type SVR and are the most powerful vehicles in the Land Rover portfolio. With 575 horsepower and 516 pound-feet of torque on tap, translating to a 0-60 time of 4.3 seconds, they're the perfect weapon for chasing a super-spy down a dirt road. As for Bond himself, 007 makes his escape in a decades-old yellow Toyota Land Cruiser Prado. Specifically, it's a 90-series, a smaller version built from 1996 to 2002 that was never sold in the U.S. but remains popular in other parts of the world. The most powerful engine had just 190 horsepower from a 3.4 liter V6 shared with the similar-era 4Runner. Despite the power discrepancy, Bond manages to dispatch the Range Rovers in spectacular fashion. Wait, this is a Range Rover promo, right? "All the stunts are for real, there's nothing that's CGI'ed," said Neil Layton, the film's action vehicle coordinator. "So to make the cars more dramatic on the screen, we had to turn off a lot of safety feature aids that's on there." Interestingly, another non-JLR product shows up in the video as well. The camera car is a blacked out (to minimize reflection in other cars) Ford F-150 Raptor outfitted with a massive rooftop boom. "No Time to Die" is hits the screens on October 8. Related Video: This content is hosted by a third party. To view it, please update your privacy preferences. Manage Settings.