A 1994 Aston Martin Virage Volante convertible loaned to Prince Charles by the company between 1994 and 2007 is to go up for auction on May 19. Estimates suggest the car will fetch up to £70,000 (around $110,000).
The limited edition Virage Volante model features British Racing Green non-metallic paint, a green Everflex roof, mushroom leather upholstery, black leather dashboard top and green carpets.
The car produces 335kW and 624Nm of torque from its 6.3-litre engine, making it capable of 0-100km/h in 5.5 seconds and a top speed of 280km/h. We’re not sure how many of the 54,653km that Charles clocked up in the car were spent at that speed — though if you are wary of his driving habits, the Virage comes with a full service history booklet which proves it was serviced regularly at Aston’s headquarters.
Since 2007 the car has been on display at Aston Martin’s headquarters in Warwickshire, England. Its return coincided with Charles’s initiative to convert many of his other Astons — including the DB6 Mk2 in which William and Kate left their wedding — to run on alternative fuels such as bioethanol and British wine (yes, really).
The car will be auctioned by Bonhams.
Could you live with a supercar? If asked that question by a man dangling the keys to a Day-Glo orange Lamborghini Aventador, most reasonable people would automatically respond with a breathless ‘yes’ — possibly while scanning the room for something to bash him over the head with.
And why wouldn’t they? Supercars are, after all, the ultimate evolution of the car as we know it. Who wouldn’t want one lurking under a silken dust sheet in their own dehumidified garage ready for those occasions when they fancy a bit of a blast?
Reality check
Except, there is a big difference between owning a supercar and having one as your sole means of everyday transport.
The kind of lavishly heeled individuals who spend close to $800,000 on Lamborghini’s flagship model will, it’s safe to assume, have one or two other vehicles on their personal fleets as well. These additional cars will be better suited to mundane tasks like picking up groceries or taking the dog for a walk and they’ll leave the fire-breathing Aventador free to do what it does best.
If this 515kW road-eating monster was your only way of getting from A to B, you might think of it differently. Just how differently was what we wanted to discover.
The old in and out
Little things that you take for granted in ordinary cars can become a challenge in a supercar. Things like getting in.
The upwards lifting scissor doors of the Aventador contribute massively to the car’s already overinflated sense of the exotic. They add drama, wow-factor and confirm, if confirmation were needed, that this isn’t your everyday runabout. They aren’t, however, the easiest things to get in and out of.
If you don’t currently hold a black belt in yoga, entries and exits from the Aventador can be a scramble as you lurch forward through the low opening, while ducking to bypass the upstretched door. The whole ballet is made more problematic by the inescapable fact that as you’re exiting your car with all the grace of a tailor’s dummy emerging from a high speed water slide, everybody in the vicinity will be watching you.
Centre of attention
Buy a Lamborghini Aventador and everybody will be watching you pretty much all of the time. Most of the paint colours offered by Lamborghini look like they’d be turned down by traffic cone manufacturers for being too bright. But even if you specify your car in a sober black or graphite hue, it’s not going to be mistaken for a Volkswagen Passat.
If you drive an Aventador, you will be looked at incessantly. The best advice is firstly to get used to it and secondly, always make sure your flies are done up.
Soundtrack of your life
As well as looking like it’s descended from another planet, the Lamborghini Aventador sounds out of this world. The 6.5-litre V12 engine mounted inches behind your head gives bystanders who can’t yet see the car ample notice so they’re ready to be amazed by the time it finally does hove into view.
The exhaust system incorporates two mufflers with control valves regulated by the engine management computer. It gives the Aventador a stunning repertoire of sound effects, all of them loud, from a low rumble as it strains at the leash in traffic to a full bore shout at the screaming pinnacle of the rev range.
With the almost unbelievably aggressive servo-actuated mechanical gearbox kicking out a cacophony of roars and growls as it blips up and down the gears, this is a car that lets the world know you’ve arrived even before you have. If the bloke over the road buys one and you don’t yet have double glazing, now’s the time.
Riding the bull
Having successfully got into the car, overcome the embarrassment of being gawped at and damaged every greenhouse in a kilometre radius just by thumbing the starter button, it’s time to drive.
By supercar standards, the Aventador’s Formula One-inspired pushrod suspension serves up decent ride comfort at low speeds. By the standards of the family hatchbacks, SUVs and superminis most of us drive every day, it’s rather choppy.
In order to deliver lightning fast direction changes and pull face-melting cornering forces, a supercar needs to be super rigid in its chassis and super stiff in its suspension. The Aventador is, but on good surfaces it’s comfy for a car of its ilk. As the road deteriorates, so does the ride, though. Cruising highways quickly becomes tiring and on potholed roads it can feel like you’d be better off riding a pneumatic drill.
Loud and low
Along with the sometimes tooth-chattering ride, prospective supercar purchasers should also be aware of the ground-hugging ride height. The aerodynamics that allow the Aventador to pass the 320km/h barrier with lungs to spare mean it has to stick nice and close to terra firma.
At the car’s 350km/h top speed you’ll be glad of its limited ground clearance but on an urban street strewn with speed humps it could become a problem. Fortunately, Lamborghini has installed a handy button which raises the nose of the Aventador a few centimetres to prevent the front spoiler running aground with wallet-shattering consequences. All you have to do is remember to press it.
Not quite a walk in the park
The speed hump isn’t the supercar’s only enemy in the urban jungle. Finding somewhere to park the Aventador proved a difficult and sometimes nerve-wracking experience. The car is nearly 4.78m long and 2.03m wide, not including the wing mirrors. That’s 40mm wider than a Rolls-Royce Phantom and bigger, you’ll soon discover, than will fit in most parking bays.
Once you find a space that you think the Aventador might conceivably be teased into, you have the challenge of limited visibility through the slatted rear window that covers the engine bay and steering that’s on the He-Man side of heavy.
At least Lamborghini has installed a full array of parking sensors and a reversing camera to help, but these won’t save you if you get overconfident with a roadside space and the car’s beautiful alloy wheels cosy-up to a kerb stone.
Taking the Aventador into the tight concrete confines of a modern multi-storey would be like taking a chocolate éclair into a Weight Watchers meeting, it probably wouldn’t stay intact for long. The one saving grace might be that at only 1.1m high, you could probably drive it under the exit barriers without paying.
Speed thrills
Living with an Aventador might not be as straightforward as with some other cars but you quickly forget any niggles when the road opens up ahead. The 6.5-litre V12 places 515kW and 688Nm of torque at the beck and call of your right foot and wherever you stomp it, the view through the windows instantly transforms into the swirling chaos of Edvard Munch’s The Scream.
Yes, the Aventador is hugely fast but if you are driving it on public roads, that only means that you’ll have to exercise huge restraint. While 110km/h feels stupidly slow in this car, at 50km/h you have to check that you’re not going backwards. At least sedate driving minimises the heat coming from the V12; explore the upper end of the rev range too frequently and it gets very toasty in the cabin very quickly.
Keeping you informed
Staying within the bounds of the law isn’t made any easier by an instrument cluster dominated by a huge digital rev counter display picked out in red and yellow.
It looks fantastic and is perfect for prompting you to snatch the next gear before you bash heads with the rev limiter at a screaming 8,250rpm but the car’s actual speed is treated as a secondary issue in this motorsport-inspired layout. It’s shown in a small white box on the right of the rev counter and checking it at a glance when the Aventador is busy hurling you to 100km/h in 2.9s is not easy.
Money talks
It’s a majestic machine the Lamborghini Aventador, one that can turn the simple act of driving into one gigantic adrenaline rush and the sort of people who’ll be spending close to $800,000 on one won’t need it to do any more. They’ll have other cars to do the dirty work and the funds to buy, fuel, insure and maintain an Aventador with enough left over to winter the yacht in Monte Carlo harbour.
So, could you live with a supercar?
Brilliant though this all-wheel-drive, 350km/h supercar is, there’s no escaping the fact that it’s also a two-seater with minimal luggage space that’s as wide as a minibus, struggles with speed humps, sounds like the four horsemen of the apocalypse on a stag night and will probably accumulate points on your driving licence like Justin Bieber collects Facebook fans.
That’s the reality of trying to use a supercar as an everyday car but would it actually put you off trying? The raw power of the Aventador’s appeal means that even knowing all this, most car fans would only weigh up the practicalities for a millisecond before answering the question of whether they could live with one with a big, bright orange, seven hundred horsepower ‘YES’.
We definitely would but we’d do so safe in the knowledge that we’ll never have the cash to try.
Bentley has unveiled a special edition of its Mulsanne grand-tourer called the Diamond Jubilee in celebration of the 60 year reign of Queen Elizabeth II.
Custom highlights include a burr walnut interior, gold embroidery on all four headrests, two loose cushions and two picnic tables in the rear.
The Diamond Jubilee receives the same powertrain as the Mulliner Driving Specification, meaning 377kW of power from a twin-turbocharged 6.75-litre V8. This gets the big Bentley to 100km/h from a standstill in 5.3 seconds and on to a top speed of 296km/h.
Only 60 models of the bespoke Mulsanne will be built — one for each year Her Majesty has been on the throne.
Range Rover always said that they would give Victoria Beckham her own special edition of the Evoque after she signed on as its “creative director” almost one year ago. Now the model is here and it’s actually not nearly as tacky as you may have assumed.
In fact the Evoque Victoria Beckham looks pretty mean from the outside with its matte black finish and contrasting glossy rose-gold trim — so much so that styling cues could have come from a stealth bomber.
On the inside Beckham has paid tribute to her sporting husband, David, with “baseball-stitch” detailing alongside an abundance of vintage tan leather, mohair floor mats and a microsuede roof lining.
Two hundred units of the Evoque Victoria Beckham edition will go on sale worldwide with first deliveries beginning in October this year.
Toyota has revealed the latest safety technology it is developing for its future cars: mood sensors that can identify the emotional state of a driver.
The company has been working on the technology since 2006, but for the first time has now managed to implement a working model into one of its cars.
The system uses sensors to examine 236 separate points of the driver’s face to gauge emotion and then takes appropriate action. For example it may produce constant safety warnings to a driver it thinks is distracted or, in some cases, even take control of the steering and brakes to avoid obstacles.
The system is so advanced that Toyota says it will even work on drivers with partially obscured faces — such as those wearing sunglasses or with thick beards.
Toyota has stated that its research shows drivers who are angry or sad are less responsive to road hazards compared with drivers in a neutral mood.
One of the technology’s lead developers, Jonas Ambeck, told UK magazine What Car? that this technology could feature on production cars within the next six years.
Cameron Donald is one of our finest ever TT exports — he could also be our last.
Lamborghini is set to reveal an all-new SUV concept car in China this week called the Urus.
The Urus borrows its styling from Lamborghini’s flagship supercar, the Aventador, while producing a similar amount of power. The company has confirmed it will achieve 441kW — though not revealed from what sort of engine. You can expect it to be the 6.5-litre V12 from the Aventador or the V10 from the Gallardo however. A hybrid powertrain is also a possibility.
The Urus will run on permanent four-wheel-drive with a seven-speed, dual clutch automatic gearbox likely to be the only transmission option.
Don’t expect the Urus to be a serious off-road mud-cruncher even if it takes its name from a bull (surprise, surprise). It will most likely sit alongside other premium SUVs such as the Porsche Cayenne and Bentley EXP 9F if it does enter production.
The Urus’s luxury interior features lavish amounts of carbon fibre reinforced polymer that has been given a “granite” look — while the rear middle seat has been sacrificed for a touch screen entertainment system making the Urus a four-seater only.
No word yet on whether the Urus will come to Australia, but Lamborghini reckons it can sell more than 3,000 models a year in UK, US, Middle East, Russia and China.
The Urus will mark the first time Lamborghini has built an SUV since the LM002 in 1985.
It will be officially unveiled in the metal at the 2012 Beijing Motor Show which starts today.
A study has revealed that air pollution brought on by exhaust fumes kills more than 5,000 people in the UK every year. The pollution has been linked to the premature onset of a number of diseases such as heart disease and lung cancer.
In contrast, only 1,850 were killed in accidents on British roads in 2010.
There have been no studies conducted on the total annual effects of air pollution on mortality in Australia, but a recent study by NSW Health estimated that approximately 400 Sydneysiders die prematurely from the effects of air pollution every year. The total number of road deaths in Australia in 2010 was 1,259 — with 364 occurring in NSW between July 2010 and July 2011.
In addition to car fumes, it was estimated that pollution created by aeroplanes — as well as the energy and industrial sectors — causes around 19,000 deaths every year in the UK.
The study also suggests that up to 40 percent of the polluting particles are brought into the UK from abroad, rather than being generated locally.
The researchers, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US, compared health statistics and clinical studies with models of how gases circulate in the atmosphere.
We all know someone who loves their car just a little too much — but have you ever known someone to go as far as knitting their car a woolly jumper so it can stay warm?
Evidently there are at least 15 people out there who have done just that, so here are the 15 coolest (or warmest) cars that wear sweaters.
Gallery source: BuzzFeed
Doing the image of BMW drivers no favours at all is a new survey from “extra-marital” dating site IllicitEncounters.com which suggests that cheating husbands are twice as likely to drive a BMW than any other car brand.
In fact, it’s even worse than that. Of the 640,000 — yes, 640,000! — members of the site, uh, polled, a significant 19.21% of them drive a BMW. That’s very nearly a fifth.
The second most popular car brand amongst wandering husbands is apparently Audi, as driven by 8.79%. In third place is Mercedes, preferred by 8.23%. Jaguar (6.59%) and Land Rover (4.94%) round out the top five.
As for cheating wives — they prefer BMWs, too. 11.16% of all female respondents drive this particular brand. Maybe it’s something about the smell of the interior plastics…
The survey also shows which brands are favoured least by adulterers.
If you’re looking to find a more faithful long-term companion, here’s a heads up: only 0.28% of people on the site drive SEATs or Renaults. MG is favoured by just 0.53%, and Fiat and Chrysler by just 0.55%.
Don’t blame us. Or BMW. According to Illicit Encounters spokesperson Rosie Freeman-Jones:
“There is an intrinsic link between success and cheating. Successful people are often risk-takers, and have got to where they are by setting their standards high. However, these people are also less likely to settle for unsatisfying relationships or monotony.
“With this in mind, the fact that BMWs are the choice car of our users really doesn’t surprise me. Our membership demographic is typically middle-class, high-earning and high-achieving.”
So now you know.
