1998 Bmw 528i Base Sedan 4-door 2.8l on 2040-cars

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Rolls-Royce sketching out SUV for possible 'late 2017' release

With each new story on the Rolls-Royce SUV, the Goodwood automaker comes off as more at ease with their reluctantly birthed yet necessary sport ute. Company design chief Giles Taylor told Autocar that his team is still "sketching to assess the viability of the concept," which to ours ears means they're trying to figure out if such a beast is even possible within the confines of the brand. If it is, Taylor says it will be "a shooting brake, not a crossover with a sloping roof. A proper SUV."
A different company source, unnamed, seems confident that Taylor's team will figure it out, telling the magazine it would start at 200,000 pounds ($335K US). However, that same source said the vehicle will be "a kind of Mercedes-GLK-plus-plus," which is a baffling description in several ways. More reasonable is the speculation that it will ride on Ghost, not Phantom, architecture and make its debut sometime around late 2017.
That Ghost platform is expected to take cues from the carbon, aluminum and steel bones that supported the BMW Vision Future Luxury concept shown at the Beijing Motor Show and destined for the 9 Series. Some of those tricks will also go into the next-generation Phantom, which Autocar says will come in 2017 and not 2020.

BMW readying competition pack for M5, M6

According to Car and Driver, citing a report in BMW Blog, BMW will be offering performance upgrades - likely called the Competition package - for its M5 and M6 models (including the convertible and Gran Coupe versions of the M6). Both cars will continue to be offered with the normal 560-horsepower, 4.4-liter twin-turbocharged V8 engines, but this new performance pack is expected to add an additional 15 hp to the mix.
No need to worry, however - the upgrades won't simply be limited to a small boost in power. These M5 and M6 models will reportedly get new wheels, black exhaust tips, a more direct steering ratio and reworked suspension geometry which will provide better overall handling. Top speed is said to remain governed at 190 miles per hour, but that these extra improvements will shave one-tenth of a second off the cars' 0-60 times.
No pricing information has been revealed as of this writing, though we imagine it'll likely come at a substantial cost over the current starting prices of the M5 and M6 ($90,200 and $108,350, respectively).

2015 BMW Alpina B6 xDrive Gran Coupe

Alpina has been lovingly modifying BMWs for half a century, but as we learned during a tour of the company's HQ in Buchloe, Germany, Alpina has been in the wine distribution business for nearly as long. The company has an estimated million bottles on reserve in two warehouses and a beautiful wine cellar/tasting room on property in western Bavaria, just yards from where its 1,500 hand-crafted automobiles per year are produced.
What does that have to do with the new B6 Gran Coupe? Well, it may help make sense of the overall character of Alpina's automobiles, especially vis-à-vis the similarly priced, similarly powerful M Cars that BMW sells in far greater numbers. Alpinas are built by wine connoisseurs for wine connoisseurs, or wine connoisseur types; they are not rip-snortin' racecars for the road - that's M's domain. Alpinas are esoteric, rich in character and nuanced. But make no mistake: they are very, very fast.
Our brief first drive of the B6 Gran Coupe - the only 6 Series-based Alpina we'll get in the US for 2015 - took place on German autobahns and Austrian alpine roads, where the car is more at home than anywhere in the world, both literally and figuratively. With 540 horsepower and 540 pound-feet of torque on tap from its twin-turbocharged 4.4-liter V8 and xDrive all-wheel drive, the B6 is said to be able to hit 60 miles per hour in 3.7 seconds on its way to a top speed of 198 mph, a massive 43 mph faster than the M6, which is electronically limited to 155 mph. Yet even at insane speeds - we saw an indicated 190 mph on one particularly lonely stretch of Autobahn - the B6 feels more luxurious than sporty, taking the countenance of a low-slung Bentley Continental GT or an Aston Martin Rapide S, not a knife-edged supercar. It doesn't feel scintillating like a Porsche 911 GT2; rather it feels rock steady, like the 4,780-pound luxury sedan it is.