Honda is known for its small vehicles. But there’s nothing small about the company’s latest concept. It’s a semi-truck infused with hydrogen fuel cells, simply dubbed the Class 8 Hydrogen Fuel Cell Truck Concept. Honda will showcase it, along with other fuel-cell vehicles, at the Advanced Clean Transportation Expo in Las Vegas on May 20.

The truck is a fully functional demonstrator designed to showcase Honda’s current hydrogen tech. It carries three fuel-cell systems, each capable of generating 80 kilowatts. That’s 240 kW of combined energy, powering an unknown number of electric motors. Honda says the truck has an estimated top speed of 70 mph, and can travel 400 miles before refueling. It’s worth noting the range applies to a fully loaded truck/trailer combo weighing 82,000 pounds.

While the truck is a concept, the fuel cells aren’t. They’re new mass-production items currently being built at the joint Honda-General Motors plant in Michigan. With this truck, Honda hopes to grab the interests of potential partners to help pursue a hydrogen-fueled future.

“Commercial vehicles, including Class 8 trucks, where fuel cells offer the best zero-emission replacement for existing diesel applications, are a key part of Honda’s broad hydrogen business strategy,” said Ryan Harty, Honda assistant vice president of sustainability and business development. “Honda is actively seeking business collaborations and customers to help bring these hydrogen fuel cell solutions to market here in North America.”

Honda takes ownership of the concept with its fuel cell internals, but the truck is actually a Peterbilt. To our eye, it looks like a 579EV—a battery electric rig with a pair of e-axles and a range of 150 miles. Honda makes no mention of Peterbilt in its announcement, and images show Peterbilt badges removed from the concept. It’s unclear if there’s any co-development happening between the two brands; we contacted Honda for clarification, and we’ll provide an update if more information becomes available.

BMW loves revealing concept cars at Villa d’Este. This year is no different, with the German carmaker taking the wraps off the Skytop Concept, a two-seater coupe without a roof the company says takes inspiration from its past models. 

“The BMW Concept Skytop is a truly unique and exotic design, in the tradition of the Concorso d’Eleganza Villa d’Este,” says Adrian van Hooydonk, head of BMW Group Design. “It offers a combination of driving dynamics and elegance at the highest level, comparable to its historic ancestors, like the BMW Z8 or BMW 503.”

Connections to the Z8 roadster are obvious. The Skytop’s thin taillights and sharknose front end are clear design inspirations lifted from the early 2000s roadster. The sculpted hood design, small headlights, and unique flat-decked rear end remind us of the 503 from the late 1950s. 

From a quick glance, though, you’d think the Skytop was just a rebodied 8 Series. It has similar proportions and uses the 617-horsepower 4.4-liter V-8 from the M8 Competition. We wouldn’t be surprised if BMW simply used an M8 as a base and resculpted the lines.

BMW doesn’t give any other technical or performance specs, though if we had to guess, the Skytop is also using the M8 Competition’s eight-speed automatic transmission and trick all-wheel drive system.

The production-car-like theme continues inside. The dashboard setup looks to be lifted straight from the 8-Series, with a familiar digital gauge cluster, infotainment screen, center stack, and gear selector. While the leather-clad seats and steering wheel look lovely, it’s clear they’re also production-based.

The unique roll bar behind the seats is totally bespoke, though, and features a power-retractable window. The roof is a two-piece item that can be manually removed and stowed in the trunk area.

While the Skytop is likely production-based, we doubt it’ll actually ever see an assembly line. BMW already makes the 8 Series coupe and convertible, so we assume a slick targa version would be cannibalized in the lineup, no matter how cool it looks.

Although the Henry Ford Museum is one of the biggest of its kind in the world, it’s still not large enough to publicly display all the cars. Located in Dearborn, Michigan, the building features a storage facility where access is restricted. However, Top Gear was allowed to discover the Blue Oval’s secret stash of cars, including the Alpe.

What was it? The quirky concept started as a Ford Escort before Ghia turned it into a boxy small crossover that would’ve preceded the Pontiac Aztek by several years. It originally came out in 1996 at the defunct Turin Auto Show and was subsequently exhibited with a slightly different design at the 1998 Detroit Auto Show. A couple of years later, BMW sold Land Rover to Ford, giving it access to a small off-roader in the form of the Freelander.

Alpe was engineered with a naturally aspirated 2.0-liter gasoline engine and four-wheel drive. It had a jacked-up suspension with generous ground clearance and 17-inch wheels. Ford gave it a maroon-colored dashboard, a translucent plexiglass roof, and seat upholstery partially made with recycled soda bottles.

The late Ross Roberts, who was Ford Division General Manager at the time, said the intent behind Alpe was to gauge consumer reaction to a small crossover priced at around $20,000. Ford wanted to go fight the CR-V and RAV4, but it wasn’t until 2001 when the first-gen Escape was launched. The smaller EcoSport came out a couple of years later, although the US market didn’t get it until 2018.

In hindsight, Alpe was probably a missed opportunity given the rise of SUVs in the decades that followed. It also looked less dorky than the Aztek. Then again, the Escort was approaching the end of its life cycle since the Focus took its place in the lineup in the early 2000s. The original Escape co-developed with Mazda gave Ford the smaller crossover it needed, so Alpe ultimately never happened.

You might think you have a cool job, then you learn about the guy who’s paid to shake down a 1,000-horsepower Mercedes-powered doorstop on an empty runway. Sports-car racer Richard Bradley posted a video on Twitter of his test of a Sauber-Mercedes C11 Group C prototype. It sounds incredible.

 

The C11 was the follow up to Sauber’s Le Mans-winning C9. It used its predecessor’s 5.0-liter V-8, the same basic engine Mercedes used in the SL500, and with two turbochargers, it made around 700 to 750 hp in race trim. For qualifying, though, Sauber cranked up the boost to get the engine beyond 1,000 horsepower. All in a super-high-downforce, carbon-chassis car, that weighed under 2,000 pounds. Sheesh.

Michael Schumacher drove C11s, including today’s subject, before making his Formula 1 debut. With the C11, Sauber and Mercedes dominated the 1990 World SportsCar Championship, but the car never won Le Mans. Sauber sat out the 1990 race, and managed a 5th place at the 1991 race. 

Despite being an intimidating prospect, racer Karl Wendlinger told Motorsport.com that the C11 was easy. “The C11 was a very fast car, a very competitive car, but it was not so difficult to drive,” he said. “First of all, the car had lots of downforce, especially on the rear axle. And if you were once a little bit too fast somewhere, then there was a slight understeer —which is easier to correct than an oversteer.

“The engine was really comfortable to drive, very good pickup, nice rev-band to drive with, good torque, good power, so it was in total—car and engine was a very good compromise.”

Today, it seems like a damn good time. We’re jealous of anyone, like Bradley, who gets a shot behind the wheel.

After a week of build-up, and plenty of lapping, the first-ever A2RL teams got to the event they’d been waiting for: the first-ever race in an all-new extreme motorsport.

In the lead-up to the race, teams had been hot-lapping the circuit as quickly as possible, getting their driverless machines ready for the heat of competition. Keeping an eye on the track, seeing (and hearing) driver-free cars haring along Yas Marina’s main straight wasn’t rare, as each team honed their code ready for the main event.

On the big day, the circuit was a hive of activity. A Fanzone decked out with gaming, VR, and race-related displays greeted the thousands of fans who arrived for the event. As the build-up to the race hotted up, the stands on the start/finish straight were packed with excited racegoers–men, women, children, no matter who you were, A2RL welcomed you.

As the sun was setting, former F1 driver Daniil Kvyat kept crowds entertained by doing laps in a human-driven take on the A2RL’s Dallara-chassised Super Formula car, and then showing off just what Dallara’s own supercar, the Stradale, could do on track. Both looked and sounded rather wonderful.

Kvyat wasn’t there simply to enjoy a giant track day, but to take part in the first of the evening’s events: Man v Machine. Here, he’d take on A2RL’s home team, TII, to show the difference between a human, and a machine–driven car. TII’s car is the most advanced autonomous racer out there, having been developed from the series’ genesis by founders ASPIRE Group. While it put up a good show, Kvyat demonstrated that, for the moment at least, man still has the upper hand over machines. For now at least. Speaking after the event, Kvyat commented: “It’s a great engineering breakthrough. To see these cars driving around at a respectable pace is impressive. To share the track together, even though we just tried to coexist together carefully, knowing there’ll be no unnecessary risk is very important. Competition, in the end, is what moves progress forward.”

From there, it was time to race. Of the eight teams just four–Italian teams PoliMOVE and Unimore, and Germany’s TUM and Constructor (who also represents Switzerland)–qualified for the final. The world’s stage was watching, and listening to see who’d be the first to make history.

The cars had been putting in times around two minutes ahead of the race. Though a human can make it around a touch quicker in the same car, the qualifiers proved that a car can drive autonomously around Yas Marina. When it came to the race, for the first half the four teams were playing nicely with each other – the aim of A2RL is to have driverless cars behave like human-driven ones: overtakes, thrills, and spills are the name of the game–and PoliMOVE was looking to take the chequered flag. Until disaster struck on lap five of the eight-lap final. The luminous green Italian car ground to a halt, then turned towards the wall–thankfully it didn’t drive into it.

PoliMOVE’s lack of movement stopped the race, and all cars returned to the pits for a restart to cover the remaining three laps. The PoliMOVE car didn’t rejoin the field. In its absence, fellow Italians Unimore were in the lead… until their car suffered a similar fate to PoliMOVE and stopped stone dead. The race wasn’t halted this time, and German team TUM stormed to victory, a share of the $2.25-million prize pot, and a place in the history books as the first-ever winner of A2RL. Fellow countrymen Constructor took the second step, while Unimore snatched third.

The race didn’t go, perhaps, to plan, but for a stretch of time, there were four cars driving around Yas Marina without drivers at the helm. As starts go, it was a solid foundation to build on, the lead-up to 2025’s event starts now.

Some automakers are adamant that the combustion engine is worth saving. Toyota believes it can be done by making the ICE burn hydrogen instead of fossil fuels. Porsche and Lamborghini think synthetic fuels might be the gas engine’s savior. Renault’s performance brand Alpine is on team hydrogen, and this Alpenglow Hy4 is a proof of concept.

An evolution of the static 2022 Alpenglow concept, the Hy4 is a running prototype. It rocks a turbocharged 2.0-liter engine developing 340 horsepower. The four-cylinder mill revs to 7,000 rpm and feeds off from three hydrogen tanks, each carrying 4.6 pounds of hydrogen at 700 bar of pressure. Output is channeled to the road via a sequential transmission.

If you’re finding the four-pot to be underwhelming, Alpine is working on a bigger engine. An all-new V-6 developed entirely in-house specifically for hydrogen applications is coming. A subsequent variant of the Alpenglow, possibly called the Hy6, will premiere in late 2024. In the meantime, the Hy4 is about to hit the track.

It’ll make its public debut tomorrow during the six-hour endurance race at Spa-Francorchamps as part of the FIA WEC 2024 season. It will then head to France to attend the 24 Hours of Le Mans scheduled for June 14-15.

The Hy4 is not a spitting image of the original Alpenglow concept since Alpine tweaked the body. It has a modified crash structure to accommodate a two-seat cabin while the hydrogen tanks are embedded into the side pods. It’s also a bit taller than before and has a reworked aero package, accentuated by the new roof scoop.

While the Hy4 is a track-only machine, Alpine believes the powertrain technology makes sense in a street-legal model as well. The French niche marque goes as far as to say a hydrogen-powered internal combustion engine represents a “tremendously promising solution for road use.”

The idea of modifying a combustion engine to run on hydrogen is much older than Toyota’s experiments with the GR Yaris and GR Corolla. BMW had a V-12 7 Series with a 6.0-liter unit running on hydrogen in 2005. Going even further back in time, the German luxury brand developed a 5 Series (E12) to run on liquid hydrogen in the late 1970s. It’s the 520h featured below in a BMW Group Classic video.

Cadillac’s V-Series.R was the brand’s first racing car to return to the 24 hours of Le Mans in more than 20 years. After success in the North American IMSA GTP class, the car went on to win a podium at the legendary French endurance race. Getting there was not easy. To know just how difficult it was, you can watch Cadillac’s new documentary about it.

Called No Perfect Formula, the film follows Cadillac Racing in its quest to win races on both sides of the Atlantic. The automaker released a trailer promoting the movie on Thursday, which details not only the racing, but the design, development, engineering, and testing of the V-Series.R.

Cadillac’s LMDh car is both very similar and completely unlike its competition. It is the only naturally aspirated machine in the GTP class, with all other major automakers opting for smaller turbocharged engines. This, combined with its cross-plane crankshaft, gives it a distinct sound.

This latest class of hypercar regulations in IMSA and WEC has produced the most exciting sports car racing in years. A documentary following any of the respective teams would be an interesting one. Getting to see the inside story behind the only American team racing in the highest tiers of motorsport is certainly a treat though. 

No Perfect Formula debuts for free on Samsung TV Plus as well as on Hagerty’s Facebook page on May 31st. 

For those seeking a stronger visual punch on their current-generation Honda Civic Type R, Mugen is ready to deliver. The Japan-based tuning company showcased Civics with upgraded gear at the Tokyo Auto Salon back in January, and now some of those upgrades are available to order.

The new offerings are primarily an aero kit that adds a bold front lip spoiler, garnishes to the corner intakes on the front fascia, side sills, a rear under spoiler, and an even bigger wing at the top. It’s impossible to miss the new single-exit exhaust tip mounted square in the middle, though that’s coming later as an exhaust upgrade. The Mugen wheels measure 19 inches front and back, made in cooperation with BBS.

These aren’t just aesthetic changes. Mugen says the FL5 Type R has 25 percent more downforce with all the bits installed, and the wheels shave 22 pounds overall. Considering this is already the fastest front-wheel-drive production car at the Nürburgring, we’d love to see what the Mugen-tweaked version can do.

Moving inside, there are more upgrades to mention. Some, like the Alcantara shift knob and Mugen floor mats, are purely for looks. The carbon center console saves a little bit of weight, as do the aggressively bolstered MS-C front seats.

On its parts list, Mugen includes upgraded dampers and two types of performance brake pads—one for sport use and the other aimed at competition. The brakes won’t be available until the end of July, but the dampers are ready right now. The large rear spoiler won’t be on sale until September, and the wheels arrive in August. As for that single-tip exhaust, it’s in development but there’s no timeframe for availability.

Mugen parts are designed for vehicles in the Japanese market, but the company works with distributors around the world. The lip spoiler, side sills, and rear under spoiler are currently listed individually through King Motorsports for US buyers, totaling $2,065 for all three items.

Auto racing has spawned some iconic liveries in the last few decades. Gulf, Rothmans, and Martini are some of the biggest names, but NASCAR fans will soon get to enjoy looking at a classic Castrol design. Roush Fenway Keselowski Racing announced it’ll use the Castrol TOM’s Toyota Supra livery on its Ford Mustang when it races at Darlington later this month.

That might sound sacrilegious, but Castrol currently sponsors Brad Keselowski’s Ford. He chose the throwback design in a video posted to X (formerly Twitter), reminiscing about racing the car in Gran Turismo. He picked TOM’s Castrol livery over the John Force Castrol Special, which he noted was similar in design to last year’s car, and Casey Atwood’s Castrol GTX stock car.

 

Castrol TOM’s Toyota Supra entered the JGTC in 1995 wearing the now-legendary green, red, and white color scheme that’s easily identifiable. The car would win the championship in 1997 and 1999 before Castrol ended its sponsorship deal with the team in 2001.

Darlington Raceway has been encouraging teams to don throwback liveries at the track for several years now, and there will be other cars running vintage designs alongside Keselowski throughout the weekend. Kyle Larson’s No. 5 Chevrolet will wear a red, yellow, green, and white throwback to Terry Labonte, while Stewart-Hass Racing’s No. 4 Ford will don a Richard Childress livery from 1998.

The Lamborghini Urus is not your typical off-roader, but its taller ride height and four-door layout makes it a good (but pricy) candidate to convert into an overland vehicle. That’s what one person from Colorado did, and the SUV is surprisingly functional as a home on wheels.

It only sleeps one, and not everything about the Urus is great for living in. The frameless windows can’t hold a bug net, and Connor found the non-adjustable headrests to be a strange omission from the seats’s otherwise robust configurability controls. The weak reverse lights also make it difficult to back up at night, but that’s where the accessories and gear can help.

The Urus has a removable roof rack from Front Runner that can hold cases, a spare tire, and auxiliary lights, and it serves as the mount for Starlink and the awning. Twenty-two-inch Klassik B OffRoad wheels and off-road tires increase the Urus’s agility.

Inside, the bed can fold away, allowing the use of the seats behind the driver. Connor can fit three or four people inside, and the modularity enables him to quickly clear everything out of the Urus as needed for maximum capacity.

The least exciting thing about the Lamborghini is its 641-horsepower twin-turbocharged 4.0-liter V-8 engine, which has had only one major issue in Connor’s 20,000-mile, year-long journey across 16 countries. An o-ring failed on an air vacuum hose, resulting in the Urus needing to be towed.

It also hasn’t escaped the trip without some dings. Conor damaged the front splitter—a $1,400 replacement—in Romania, and a button for an interior light no longer works, but that’s not bad for being an off-road luxury SUV.

The missing rear bumper is intentional. Connor has plans to replace both bumpers to improve the SUV’s off-road capability, which will include installing a new exhaust system for better clearance and skid plates. He also plans to move the stove outside the vehicle and hopes to rejigger the setup to allow for a rooftop tent.

A new Lamborghini Urus costs as much as a house in many parts of the country. It’s nice to know it can function as one, too, but a bathroom isn’t included.