Blk/blk Loaded! T.v's , Piano Wood, Beverly Hills Car! on 2040-cars

Auto blog

Ward's releases 10 Best Interiors list for 2014

While we're still a ways off from the automotive awards season proper, where things like North American Car and Truck of the Year, Motor Trend's Car of the Year and Car and Driver's Ten Best are named, that doesn't mean there aren't trophies being handed out to deserving automakers. Ward's 10 Best Interiors being one of them.
As the name might imply, the magazine focuses on the very best interior treatments in the US market. Whereas some awards purposely exclude extreme, high-dollar offerings, Ward's considers them - the only requirement is that a vehicle has a "new or significantly redesigned interior."
Ward's offered up the list of winners in simple, alphabetical order, and it only seems fair to do the same:

Rolls-Royce Wraith Luminary Collection gets celestial headliner

Rolls-Royce has announced a new bespoke collection for its Wraith 2-door luxury coupe that is highlighted, literally, by a headliner full of glittering shooting stars. It's called the Wraith Luminary Collection and its production will be limited to just 55 examples. The car is like its own planetarium on wheels, thanks to a starlight headliner concocted by the folks at the Rolls-Royce Bespoke Collective in Goodwood, West Sussex. It's a handwoven configuration of 1,340 fiber-optic lights mimicking the night sky — and even the occasional shooting star — and it takes 20 hours to configure. Rolls-Royce says eight shooting stars fire at random, mostly over the front seats. Open up the suicide doors and you'll see the celestial theme continued inside the cabin. Tudor oak wood veneer, sourced from forests in the Czech Republic and chosen for its depth of color and grain structure, is back-lit by 176 LED lights that permeates through intricate perforations in the veneer that form another starlight pattern at the touch of a button. "Linked to the controls of the starlight headliner, the cabin's veneer surrounds Wraith's occupants in an ambient glow of light," the luxury marque says. Outside, the Luminary Collection comes pained in Sunburst Grey with rich Saddlery Tan-colored lines hand painted along the bonnet and side body, a color scheme inspired by "the heady shade of the golden hour's sunrays" and referencing the interior leather color scheme. It's also echoed in the center of each wheel. Cockpit seats come trimmed in the same tan leather, while rear seats feature a contrasting Anthracite leather or an available Seashell color for the leather, matched by a two-tone steering wheel. The seats get contrasting piping and stitching tying the colors together. Also new is a hand-woven stainless steel fabric, a new technique for luxury goods borrowed from industrial uses, for the center console and door panniers. Each swath is made up of strands between 0.08 and 0.19 millimeters in diameter and takes three days to produce in a clean-room environment. Finally, the collection features stainless-steel tread plates engraved with the words, "Wraith Luminary Collection — One of Fifty-Five." Prices weren't announced, befitting the brand's aura of exclusivity, but the Wraith starts at a mere $320,000.

The UK votes for Brexit and it will impact automakers

It's the first morning after the United Kingdom voted for what's become known as Brexit – that is, to leave the European Union and its tariff-free internal market. Now begins a two-year process in which the UK will have to negotiate with the rest of the EU trading bloc, which is its largest export market, about many things. One of them may be tariffs, and that could severely impact any automaker that builds cars in the UK. This doesn't just mean companies that you think of as British, like Mini and Jaguar. Both of those automakers are owned by foreign companies, incidentally. Mini and Rolls-Royce are owned by BMW, Jaguar and Land Rover by Tata Motors of India, and Bentley by the VW Group. Many other automakers produce cars in the UK for sale within that country and also export to the EU. Tariffs could damage the profits of each of these companies, and perhaps cause them to shift manufacturing out of the UK, significantly damaging the country's resurgent manufacturing industry. Autonews Europe dug up some interesting numbers on that last point. Nissan, the country's second-largest auto producer, builds 475k or so cars in the UK but the vast majority are sent abroad. Toyota built 190k cars last year in Britain, of which 75 percent went to the EU and just 10 percent were sold in the country. Investors are skittish at the news. The value of the pound sterling has plummeted by 8 percent as of this writing, at one point yesterday reaching levels not seen since 1985. Shares at Tata Motors, which counts Jaguar and Land Rover as bright jewels in its portfolio, were off by nearly 12 percent according to Autonews Europe. So what happens next? No one's terribly sure, although the feeling seems to be that the jilted EU will impost tariffs of up to 10 percent on UK exports. It's likely that the UK will reciprocate, and thus it'll be more expensive to buy a European-made car in the UK. Both situations will likely negatively affect the country, as both production of new cars and sales to UK consumers will both fall. Evercore Automotive Research figures the combined damage will be roughly $9b in lost profits to automakers, and an as-of-yet unquantified impact on auto production jobs. Perhaps the EU's leaders in Brussels will be in a better mood in two years, and the process won't devolve into a trade war. In the immediate wake of the Brexit vote, though, the mood is grim, the EU leadership is angry, and investors are spooked.