2011 Porsche Panamera on 2040-cars

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Why won't automakers slap on a turbo badge anymore?

Where have all the turbos gone? Not the actual pieces that go in the engine, mind you, those are everywhere these days as automakers downsize cylinder counts and boost efficiency and CO2 claims. But the turbo badges and fanfare are missing. Back when turbos were something to get excited about there was "turbo-driven," "turbonium," and "The Turbo Zone," among other silly lines. But now that basically every car is getting some sort of boost even on the lowliest trims, automakers are almost sliding in the turbos under the radar. Or if you look at some of the nomenclature, pretending they don't exist at all. The 911 Turbo badge shows where the car goes from being sane to lunatic. It's an important border. The latest automaker to hide that it has boosted the turbo presence is Porsche with the 2017 911 lineup. Even the standard Carrera models now get turbocharged flat-six engines, meaning the 911 Turbo models aren't quite as special as they once were. Porsche is in a sticky situation with this. The 911 Turbo, after all, signifies where the 911 family takes off from being a sports car and becomes the Ferrari fighter. The 911 Turbo badge shows where the car goes from being sane to lunatic. It's an important border, but now Porsche has crossed it and is trying to downplay the fact. There are a lot of exaggerations with displacement badges today, with claims the 2.0-liter turbo four in a Mercedes C Class equates to a naturally aspirated 3.0-liter six to make a C300. Volvo is pretty far up there, too, saying an XC90 T8 means V8 power, even though it's a 2.0-liter turbocharged and supercharged four with electric assist. I don't know why BMW can't just call the car a 330i Turbo, rather than inflating the numbers up to 340i. Saab tried all of this back in the '90s when it decided to turbocharge its entire lineup, from light pressure units all the way up to models actually called "Saab 9-3 HOT" (for high-output turbo). But then the brand deleted any external reference to the turbo under the hood and people wondered why they were buying a $42,000 four-cylinder convertible. And that didn't turn out well. Even though these turbo replacements often make more power than their naturally aspirated predecessors, they're very different engines. People knew something changed when they exchanged their leased 328i with a 3.0-liter six for a 328i with a 2.0-liter turbo four.

Former Top Gear crew starts filming for Amazon show

We might have only a hint at the name and no exact date for a premiere, but fans can celebrate that Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond, and James May are filming once again. Plus, it looks like every cent of Amazon's reportedly lavish budget is being put on the screen. A photo tweeted by Clarkson shows the three hosts standing proudly in front of a Porsche 918 Spyder, Ferrari LaFerrari, and McLaren P1 at a racetrack. Clarkson jokes that the show has just a "skeleton crew" but behind him stand several dozen people, a sophisticated-looking camera rig, and two big trucks. This definitely looks worth the anticipation of the premiere on Amazon Prime next fall. Hammond tweeted the same picture and wrote: "The band is back together and it feels brilliant." This content is hosted by a third party. To view it, please update your privacy preferences. Manage Settings. Intriguingly, it appears that fellow British auto journalist Chris Harris is currently filming at the same track. He tweeted a photo to Clarkson of the McLaren doing a very smoky slide, while being followed by the other two hypercars. The Porsches in both photos wear the same red-and-white number 3 livery and have the same license plate number. In a later message, Harris was also clear that he wasn't filming there in connection with the trio's Amazon show. This content is hosted by a third party. To view it, please update your privacy preferences. Manage Settings.

What's the deal with comedians and their cars?

'Round about the time in his life when it should happen for all of us, Jerry Seinfeld's ship came in with a force that almost split the dock. He'd been doing pretty well with his observational style ("There's a cereal now that's just cookies. Have you seen this? Cookies for breakfast. It's called Cookie Crisp. Cookies for breakfast! They oughta just call it 'To Hell With Everything!'"). But he showed no signs of setting the world on fire until he got cast in a show that was either about – depending on the level of comedy geek you ask – the average New Yorker, the very worst people in the world, or nothing. Suddenly Jerry Seinfeld was pretty much the center of the comedy universe. And while his comedy was at once both brilliantly innovative and rooted in the mundane, his next move was a predictable grab at something exotic – he went out and bought his dream car. A rather nice 911, actually. As almost everyone knows, it didn't stop there, and the man put together one of the most enviable collections of iconic Porsches we're likely to see. So what's the connection, if there is one, between cars and comedy? As far as Jerry Seinfeld (the man) is concerned, he's probably not the same guy as the Jerry on Seinfeld (the show) although it's hard to say for sure; his public persona is almost unnervingly well managed. But cars and comedy were the constants in his life then, and, well, just look at what the guy does now; Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee is a cultural constant, and we're certainly seeing Seinfeld the man in that one, and cars are obviously still central to his life. And it's been that way with a lot of very, very good comedy guys. Cars seem to round out their lives, to become the yin to their comedy yang. Ernie Kovacs might not have invented visual gags or surreal humor, but he got them both to kill on television in the 1950s, so he's a comedy hero. He died behind the wheel of his beloved Corvair wagon, so he's absolutely some kind of car-guy hero as well. Bill Cosby, the hottest name in comedy for a good long while, had Ferraris, one of two fire-breathing supercharged big-block Cobras (pictured below), and a BMW 2002tii – none of which either contributed to or in any way make up for the profoundly sociopathic creature he turned out to be, but it's still a data point. The Smothers Brothers, who defied the networks and the norms by getting blatantly political before that sort of thing was cool, went sports car racing.