Toyota yesterday opened the order books for its smallest hybrid to thousands of space-conscious, fuel-weary Japanese buyers. Funk Flex
Auto Talk: GM schedules 21-week idle of three truck plants
Four of General Motors’ full-size truck plants, three of them in the U.S., will go intermittently silent for a total of 21 weeks in order to retool for 2013 model year production. The Fort Wayne, Indiana and Flint, Michigan plants have both been in the news lately as recipients of multi-million dollar investments for just this purpose. Funk Flex
Auto Talk: Ford F-150 EcoBoost hits 100,000 sales
Ford bet big on the combination of light duty pickup trucks and boosted V6 power, and it appears the gamble has paid off. The Detroit News reports that Ford has already reached 100,000 F-150 sales in 2011, just as the automaker promised it would. Funk Flex
(Video) Auto Talk: 2012 BMW M5 gets dyno’d, all ate up with power
A German tuning outfit called PP-Performance has put the 2012 BMW M5 on a Maha dyno, and the numbers returned were 444 horsepower at the wheel, 553 at the engine, and a “corrected number” of 574 hp. Max torque came in at 532 pound-feet (721 Newton/meters). Funk Flex
Auto Talk: Renault gets creative with Twingo art cars
Art cars are becoming de rigeur once again, but while most automakers getting in on the action contract painters of some sort or another to spruce up their products, Renault has gone in a slightly different direction for its latest project. Funk Flex
Auto Talk: BMW i8 breaks out of Mission: Impossible and into the real world
If you went to the movies over the holiday, chances are pretty good you saw the latest box-office-topping Tom Cruise vehicle. We’re not talking about the globetrotting explosion-fest it came wrapped up in, Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol; we’re speaking of the BMW Vision EfficientDynamics concept car that featured heavily in the movie (along with seemingly every other model in Munich’s arsenal). Funk Flex
