The Internet loves a scoop, and car lovers love to speculate on new models. That's the perfect environment in which to incubate Photoshop renderings of sports cars hinted at, but unconfirmed. The latest engagement of wishful thinking hit the Internet this past weekend. It's a take on a car BMW officials have yet to announce but which the German media has been predicting for several years: the return of the BMW M1, a two-seat sports car the Munich-based company built in the mid-1970s.

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Here's my dream road-trip ritual: Pull up an address in Google Maps, beam it to the car by some wireless technology and load it to the nav system as a destination. If there's a relevant phone number, sync it with my Bluetooth phone. Then locate all the In-N-Out Burger locations in the area and cross-reference them with local gastroenterologists, just to be safe.

The world hasn't quite turned my way just yet, but BMW just introduced a fairly close approximation for US customers on its new 2008 X6 Sports Activity Coupe

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We slogged through the rain and traffic all the way across town to the Javits Center for the 2009 New York Auto Show. No, it’s not Detroit or Geneva; but the show still has a fair share of announcements, plus a chance to see up close those cars that recently debuted in other cities.

So far, it’s really been an American show—with big debuts by GM and Chrysler. It was also the year of retro design and nostalgia. Pontiac brought out three new models, including a yet-to-be-named revival of its former El Camino car/truck hybrid—extolled by rapper 50 Cent. Dodge took us back to the seventies, introducing three versions of its revived Charger model. And Mercedes waxed poetic about the glory days of the 80’s, when its belching diesel sedans ruled the upper-class subdivisions. It also introduced SUVs using its new BlueTec clean diesel technology.

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We tested two new night-vision systems that are available in the top-of-the-line Mercedes Benz S550 and BMW 7-Series luxury sedans. They operate on virtually opposite principles—Mercedes illuminates the environment with projected infrared light; BMW detects thermal energy emitted from objects—and each works well under different circumstances. href="/node/6951"
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Certain parts of a car’s engine can reach temperatures in excess of 1,500°F. With this in mind, the engineers at BMW developed a way to boost efficiency: Transform that otherwise wasted heat into energy the engine can use. The resulting Turbo- steamer reclaims more than 80 percent of the heat lost from the engine’s exhaust and cooling systems. It uses this surplus heat to generate steam that helps drive the engine. It boosts power and torque by 10 percent and cuts fuel consumption by 15 percent without using a single additional drop of gasoline.

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