VW Wins Porsche: But Can Porsche's New Boss Prevent VW From Expanding the lineup?

MotorTrend: VW Wins Porsche: But Can Porsche's New Boss Prevent VW From Expanding the lineup?

After 61 years, the air-cooled rear engines, the VW-built 914, the Audi-built 924, and the Cayenne-Touareg, Ferdinand Porsche's little sports car company is "merging" with the automaker built from the ashes of his People's Car design, Volkswagen AG. As Daimler did with Chrysler, this merger places VW firmly in control, though Porsche will remain headquartered in Stuttgart. Under former chief Wendelin Wiedeking, holding company Porsche SE bought 51 percent of VW.

 VW's second-largest shareholder, the state of Lower Saxony, owns 20 percent. That stock is like the Ford family's in Ford Motor, in that it prevented Porsche from gaining control even as it held majority shares. A Qatar emirate-controlled investment fund, which had been buying up interest in Porsche, now owns 17 percent of VW. Porsche ran up a debt of about 10-billion euro ($12.8 billion) in its four-year bid to gain control of VW. When much of that debt came due, VW turned the tables and took over Porsche. It's a victory for VW chairman Ferdinand Piëch, grandson of founder Ferdinand Porsche and cousin to Porsche chairman Wolfgang.

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First Ride: Devon GTX Hopes To Be An American Ferrari 599

AutoBlog: First Ride: Devon GTX hopes to be an American Ferrari 599

2010 Devon GTX :: Click Image to View Larger ::When news of the Devon GTX first wafted our way, we didn't know what to think of it. Another bit of pretty vaporware being shown to attract investors? Another pet project from some megalomaniac with dreams of grandeur? Another American supercar boasting record-breaking performance with nothing but hot air to back up its claims? Or was it the real deal? Could Scott Devon and his team actually pull it off – could they deliver on the promise of building a truly great American supercar that could equal the world's finest?

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Tonight: Friday, Sept. 25 Marks Last Chance to See the SPEED Documentary

Roush:  Friday, Sept. 25 Marks Last Chance to See the SPEED Documentary

If you missed the previous broadcasts on SPEED of the one-hour documentary on the making of the ROUSH® 2010 Mustang, you’ll get one final chance on Friday at 6 p.m. (Eastern). Set the recorders to catch the last airing of “2010 ROUSH® Mustang: The Art of Performance Engineering,” the behind-the-scenes show on the making of the fifth generation ROUSH® Mustang.

It took fourteen months for the ROUSH® 2010 Mustang to go from design sketches to the dealer showroom floor, but you can see the entire process in one hour. The program takes viewers through the countless steps and hundreds of thousands of hours necessary to turn a car from a concept sketch into one of the finest high-performance vehicles on the market. You’ll see the boardroom drama, the trade-offs that have to be made, and the official unveil before a throng of media and fans of Jack Roush and his vehicles.

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VIDEO: Toyota Trucks - Nothing Soft Gets In

AutoBlog: VIDEO: Toyota trucks - Nothing soft gets in

Toyota made plenty of noise with the beefy commercials that launched the latest Tundra, but since then, it's been relatively quiet from the "Oh, what a feeling!" guys and gals.

Thankfully, there's Australia. For the AU market, Toyota's agency has whipped up a witty campaign that depicts our kind of land, and our kind of trucks. This "Nothing Soft Gets In" spot shows a particularly strict bunch of border patrol guards that dispose of poodles and disallow the tying of a sweater around one's neck. Awesome. Watching a bunch of Oz-market Toyota Prados being used for more than mall duty is equally entertaining, too. Check it out for yourself, after the jump..

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Flying A Garage Makes a Hard Landing

AutoWeek: Flying A Garage makes a hard landing

The Flying A Garage collection includes Ed Roth's Road Agent from 1964. The collection goes up for auction Saturday in Los Angeles.It was one of the greatest rod, custom, drag-racing and classic-car collections ever assembled and it soon will make one of the greatest auctions. America's Car Collection, housed at the Flying A Garage in Winnemucca, Nev., had cars by Ed Roth, the Alexander Brothers and Harry Bradley, along with memorabilia from Von Dutch and Roth. There even is a Mickey Thompson mini bike, fer goodness sake.

How'd it all come together?

Ralph Whitworth grew up in the small, northern Nevada town of Winnemucca, where cruising was still the biggest social event in town in the early 1970s. Muscle cars ruled the roads in the little town, which sits on top of I-80 between Reno and Salt Lake City. Whitworth built a 1965 GTO from various junkyard parts, and his friend Dave Bengochea had a 1968 Mustang. They cruised the main drag in a post-American Graffiti paradise.

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Toyota Seeks $2 Million From California For Training NUMMI Workers

AutoBlog: Toyota seeks $2 million from California for training NUMMI workers

Back in February, New United Motor Manufacturing Co. (NUMMI), the now defunct joint agreement between Toyota and General Motors in Fremont, CA, entered an agreement with California's Employment Training Panel that would provide training to 1,400 workers. Since the time of the agreement, GM has backed out of the partnership with Toyota and ceded the plant to the Japanese automaker. For its part, Toyota has announced it will close the plant by March 2010, leaving 4,700 workers unemployed.

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Canadians Can Now Put an Audi R8 on Their Garage For Just $469!

AutoBlog: Canadians can now put an Audi R8 on their garage for just $469!

As much as we love the Audi R8 (R-tronic gearbox aside), financial realities mean few of us will ever get to drive one much less own one. Audi Canada is now offering an option for those with a garage but lacking the budget to swing one of its mid-engine sports cars. They've created a wrap for garage doors that gives the appearance of an R8 parked inside. Of course, this thing won't get you anywhere aside from up and down, but it will truly affirm your poseur credentials.

If this is one of those gottahaveit items, you can order it at ownyourownr8.ca for just $469 Canadian. We searched the AudiUSA.com site, but the wrap isn't listed and we've yet to hear back from our contacts at Audi USA.

Singer 911 offers vintage looks, modern appointments, exotic performance

AutoBlog: Singer 911 offers vintage looks, modern appointments, exotic performance

Singer 911 :: Click to view larger ::Singer Vehicle Design rolled out its first prototype, plainly named the "Singer 911," at the Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance last month. Based on an '80s-era long-wheelbase 911 donor vehicle, the company strips each chassis to its bare shell for "reinvention" into what Singer calls a "celebration of the golden air-cooled era of the world's most important sports car."

Incontestable is its vintage Porsche 911 look. However, the Singer 911 is far from antiquated. The complete reincarnation includes chassis stiffening, new active aerodynamics, and a lightweight integral backbone structure and roll cage to improve torsional rigidity. Most interestingly, nearly all of the steel body panels are replaced by full carbon fiber composite bodywork candy-coated in Singer's exclusive "Racing Orange" paint.

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Jaguar XKR GT2 will debut this week at Petit Le Mans

AutoBlog: Jaguar XKR GT2 will debut this week at Petit Le Mans

Jaguar XKR GT2 :: Click to view larger ::After announcing earlier this year that it would enter the American Le Mans Series with a new GT2 class XKR, Jaguar has remained silent on when the car would actually appear. That silence is now over as the car is roaring to life at Road Atlanta today in practice for Saturday's Petit Le Mans.

The new racer has been prepared by long-time Jaguar racing collaborator Paul Gentilozzi and his RSR team. RSR is the successor to Rocketsports racing with which Gentilozzi campaigned XKRs in the Trans Am series. Like the new GT2 C6.R Corvette, the XKR started its life as a production aluminum body-in-white that was then transformed into a racer. Most of the aerodynamic development of the body was handled by the engineers at Jaguar before being fabricated in carbon fiber by RSR and a local Michigan-based supplier. RSR is mainly using this weekend's debut race as an extended track test session to prove-out the new car before participating in the entire 2010 season.

Official Cash for Clunkers Trade-in List Reveals Oddities Too Strange to Believe

AutoBlog: Official Cash for Clunkers trade-in list reveals oddities too strange to believe

Cash for Clunkers claimed some really interesting vehicles - Was a Buick GNX among them?Mixed reaction has surrounded the government's Cash for Clunkers program, but after spending around $2.8 billion, some 700,000 new vehicles have found homes. But what got traded in? We've heard some horror stories, but now that the full list of executed vehicles has been released on the Cars.gov website and we've listed some of the oddities we found while snooping around.

Many are down right hard to believe, suggesting either errors in the submission process, typos in the list or even some fudging by dealers who clunked a few vehicles that weren't eligible. After the jump is a list of "Clunkers" that stood out. We can't guarantee these all really went to the crusher, but they do appear on the list.

Follow the jump for a recap of the program's eligibility requirements for trade-in vehicles and our full list. And we'd suggest having a box of tissues nearby.

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