Maurizio Reggiani shakes his head with regret. Without a word, Lamborghini's R&D director indicates that manual transmissions have no future in his company's cars. Only a tiny fraction of customers choose a stick shift for their Gallardo, and Lamborghini's new Aventador comes with a fully automated seven-speed single-clutch transmission, and no manual transmission. Just 1 to 2 percent of the cars rolling out of the company's small Sant'Agata Bolognese factory are equipped with three pedals, Reggiani says.

Working in what clearly is a backwards order, Veritas has let slip that they are working on a coupe version of their RS III with design inspiration following their drop top model. The first images of the future model were taken by CarAdvice as they strolled through the company’s German headquarters as part of a tour.

Audi announced today at its first appearance at the SEMA Show in Las Vegas that it has developed and is bringing to market one of the first OEM applications of wireless device charging for its vehicles. With this charger, Audi claims that people will be able to charge their smartphones in their Audi vehicles without connecting a charging cable, cord, or adapter.

Plans to drop the Lexus LFA's 552-horsepower, 4.8-liter V-10 into the engine bay of the new Lexus GS-F are off, though the F variant is not. The LFA's engine, we hear, would have cost "far more than half the price" of the GS-F, which we expect to launch about a year after the '12 GS line's late 2011 introduction. The most likely scenario is that the GS-F will get the IS-F's thoroughly competent 416-horsepower, 5.0-liter V-8, instead, and provide an extra slab of meat to Lexus' F performance lineup, which now consists only of the IS-F.

"Stop living in the past," say countless advice purveyors across a broad spectrum of media. It's good advice if you're trying to get over an ex-girlfriend, but you pretty much have to live in the past to drop almost $90,000 on a body-on-frame luxury SUV like the 2011 Cadillac Escalade ESV Platinum. That's $88,295 to be precise, making this the second-most-expensive Caddy available. (First place by a slight margin goes to the Escalade Hybrid.)

When the Mazda Cosmo Sport broke cover in Japan in May 1967, its combination of drop-dead good looks and the world's first production rotary engine placed it in a segment all its own, lending it instant cult status. The coupe seemed a decade ahead of its time. It even appeared as a state-of-the-art patrol car in the futuristic 1971 Japanese TV series "The Return of Ultraman." As the show's protagonist cruised down deserted Tokyo streets, passing boxy, nondescript 1960s sedans, his Cosmo Sport looked like a road-going spaceship ready to blast off.

Even though many of them are now working on hybrids, European automakers’ response to gasoline-electric vehicles—long championed by Japanese companies—has been to first scoff and then to point to their robust lineups of fuel-efficient diesel powertrains. Of course, diesels represent about 50 percent of the market in Europe, but they have never been offered widely in America. Fluctuating fuel prices are slowly beginning to change that, and although Euro diesels recently launched in the States have been installed in sedans and SUVs, small oil burners make sense, too. After all, if a premium sedan with the economy of a compact is impressive, let’s see what happens when you drop a diesel into a compact.

Launching a car like the 2007 Porsche Cayman after introducing a high-performance model like the Cayman S presents something of a conundrum. How do you refer to it? Is the new "non-S" Cayman a base model or is it a regular edition? How does "standard," or "normal" grab you?

It's 57 degrees and the fog is rolling in off the Pacific, but we're not about to go top up in our 2007 Mitsubishi Eclipse Spyder GT. We crank the heat, fire up the seat heaters and pull on a dorky hat, because that's what you do with a convertible: You live life out in the open.

It’s kind of hard to imagine that Hamann has been around the industry since 1986. Yep. 25 years, and still going strong.