Superbyke SBS125

The recent influx of budget machines from the Far East has made it relatively cost effective to start biking and, in fine style too. Using much technology (and thinking from the Japanese sector, in this case, the Honda CGI25 line), these small capacity machines offer much of the reliability and practicality of the original article, just at a far lower price.

Black Nightmare

A typical home-grown custom scooter will be nothing more than a fancy paint job and a few engine mods and maybe a bit of polishing. In the rest of Europe paintwork is secondary to a host of well thought out and carefully executed modifications. Time trouble and money are spent creating eye-catching details rather than simply relying on the talents of a sprayer to provide the eye candy.
Twenty-one-year-old Barrie Bone may only be a youngster, but the Belgian lad has built this show-stopping MBK Nitro - a scooter with more details to feast your eyes over than most British custom autos put together. Barrie's English is about as good as my Dutch, so bear with me because things might get lost in the translation...

Dodge Viper ACR

WITH 8.4 LITERS AND OVERHEAD VALVES UP FRONT, THE VIPER ACR SEEMS AN OLD-SCHOOL SUPERCAR. UNTIL YOU DRIVE IT.
YOU'RE took ng at Dodge's answer to the Porsche 911 GT3 RS or Lotus Exige, a road car you can drive to the track, hot lap all day, and drive back home, tires, brakes, and ego intact. The Viper ACR is raw. It's wired. And it's probably the best weekend racer yet from Detroit.

Government Issue

Love the smell of diesel in the morning ?
You're a sniper and have to sneak up on a target you've been assigned to eliminate. You have a long distance to travel and must go undetected by the enemy for some 200 miles to the targets lasl known sighting. You've parachuted into hostile territory and have no ground support except for the HDT M1030MI diesel-powered motorcycle that made the air-drop with you.
At least that was the scenario going through my head as 1 made my early-morning rendezvous with HDT's Fred Hayes and Bryon Schmidt-who arrived in a diesel Sprinter van-in the high-desert at 0-dark-30 for a ride of the Marine Corps-issue diesel dirtbikc. Shortly after we rolled up, Clark Jones, our guide and IIDT's hired-in suspension engineer, arrived. As the 61 lec diesel Single warmed up in cold crisp morning air, its industrial clackity cadence made it clear that this was no ordinary enduro.

Chevrolet Malibu LTZ

While the town of Malibu seems to be a magnet for natural disasters—wildfires, mudslides, beach erosion, Hollywood A-lisiers in rehab Malibu, the car, seems to radiate mostly positive energy (see our First Drive, February 2008). And the praise is well deserved for this new front-drive midsize sedan whose styling reflects a certain European sensibility and whose chassis, based on the Epsilon architecture found in the Saturn Aura, Saab 9-3, etc., is a no-excuses improvement over the outgoing model's.

Chevrolet HHR SS

Chandler, Arizona - Thanks to General Motors Vice Chairman and ultimate car-guy Bob Lutz, the engineering team responsible for creating an HHR truly worthy of the Super Sport name did a great deal of the car's development work on the famed Niirburgring circuit in Germany. And it shows.

BMW HP2 Sport

ONCE A BASTION OF TWO-WHEEL CONSERVATISM KNOWN PRIMARILY for sensible, durable touring bikes with superior saddlebags and high technology, BMW has done something strange: It's added plastic sliders to the cylinder heads of its latest, most performance-oriented bike ever. Further, those plastic, replaceable inserts are mounted in carbon-fiber valve covers. Crazy times, yes. but, get this: those covers enclose dual overhead cams. And there wasn't a saddlebag to be found at the recent BMW HP2 Sport press launch.

For Two Coupe

IS THIS SOME SORT OF CRUEL JOKE, HAVING THE LARGEST GUY on staff (all 6 ft. 4 in. of me) write the road test of the smallest production car we've ever tested? If so, it didn't work. Interior space is far from a problem in the smart fortwo; rather, it's one of the new city car's strong points. Built at a Daimler-owned factory in France, the smart fortwo is a model of packaging efficiency, able to comfortably accommodate two large adults and a couple of suitcases in a tidy overall package that's 39.5 in. shorter than a Mini. Parked nose to tail, two smarts take up less space than a Chevy Suburban. That's short, and the upright car is about as tall (60.7 in.) as it is wide (61.4 in.).

Symply 125

Sometimes testing scoots can be tough. You'll put a day or two aside to go out and get a few miles on a new machine, then the weather scuppers your plans and messes up your photos. If you happen to be reading this copy of Twist & Go overseas you'll probably be basking in some February sunshine, while we'll still be wearing our wellies and winter coats!

TesLa Roadster

Nikola Tesla was a genius who, more than 100 years ago at the dawn of the electric age, invented alternating electrical current, the radio, and the AC motor, among other things, that are instrumental to our modern life. Now, in the 21st century, Tesla Motors is trying to reinvent the automobile, and we spent a day driving the company's first product, the Tesla roadster.

BueLL XB12S

THANK GOODNESS MOTO insanity is a fully cross-cultural disease. It means that idealistic and inventive stateside maniacs like Erik Bucll get to make
their start building strange sportbikes in their garages using big, air-cooled American engines, and then get hired into the Bigs by none other than Harlcy-Davidson for mass production. And that an equally mad Frenchman named Ludovic Lazareth, working half a world away, gets to take the product of Buell s innovative mind a step farther.

Aprillia Mana 850

FOR SOME 20 YEARS, Piaggio has been toying with the idea of an Ultimate Scooter. Through that time, the project had moved forward, then been killed, then brought back only to get killed again. Finally, though, with Aprilia's new V-Twin 750 and 1200 engines (the smaller as fitted in the Shiver) the company thought it had the right powcrplanl to use as a basis for a production machine.

Saturn Astra XR

The most striking aspect that people will notice will be in the interior. The Astra exudes an aura that is definitely not of this continent. The font used on the gauge text isn't traditional, nor is the radio stack. It takes but a few seconds to adjust to the unique layout, but it's certainly not 'Murican. The tilt and telescoping steering wheel has audio controls (standard on XR variants), and the turn-signal and windshield-wiper control stalks have nothing in common with any other domestic product. The turn signals are of the "smart" type, which means a momentary application of the stalk causes the blinker to (lash three times before resetting itself. At the very end of the turn-signal stalk are the controls for the standard cruise-control system.

Peugeot Geopolis 250

Although not very popular with British riders, big wheeled scooters represent a commuter proposition. Peter Henshaw argues the case for Peugeot's Geopclis
What is it about the British and big-wheeled scooters? A nation that seems quite happy to ape our Transatlantic cousins when it comes to bigger being supposedly better, prefers its scooters with tiddly 12 or 13m wheels. Which is a shame, because big-wheeled scooters handle far better than the small-wheeled ones, and one's first ride on a big-wheeler can be a revelation of stability by comparison. Just three inches on the wheel size makes that much difference. A lot of motorcyclists say the reason they don't like scooters is that they don't handle very well on their little wheels. And yet they don't buy big-wheeled scoots either, and nor do many of the commuter types, who you'd think would welcome the extra stability.

Porsche Cayenne GTS

ALgarve, Portugal—Porsche a marque distinguished for setting sports-car standards throlighoul the automotive realm, decided in 2002 that it would inch out on a limb and launch its own line of Sport Utility Vehicles. The birth of the Cayenne proved a smart move and arrived in multiple trim levels from a base V-6 model to the Iop-of-the-line turbocharged V-8 juggernaut Cayennes are competent on-road performers and yet fairly capable off-road explorers, but therein lies the compromise. Porsche's desire to keep its brand identity prominent within each model line has inspired the most road-focused Cayenne yet. the GTS.

BMW R1200GS

SENSE OF ADVENTURE. In the right hands, BMW's GS can be a formidable overlanding tool, but we're not all Dakar experts and something as sizeable as the BMW can be a tad intimidating to those less experienced. Chris Moss took on a steep learning curve at the launch of the 2008 R1200 GS Range.

Nissan Murano

NISSAN'S strange place with the Murano. It sells more every year—annual sales are nearly double what they were after the Murano came out for the 2004 model year—but the Murano was getting stale. Plus, fresh new entries are overwhelming the segment: There were only a handful of crossovers five years ago; now there are more than 25, and that number could go up to 35 by the end of 2008. How does Nissan make the Murano better without changing what makes it sell?
The new model adheres to the basic Murano theme—sporty drive, functional yet stylish cabin, wrapped in a unique-looking shell.

Audi Cross Coupe Quattro

AFTER FINALLY entering the SUV segment with the Q7, Audi is preparing to slice it up with an A4-based Q5 hinted by the Roadjet concept and a smaller Q3 hinted by the Cross Coupe quattro. The Q3 will slot below the Q5 as a response to tighter European Corporate Average Fuel Economy regulations, like proposed U.S. CAFE regulations.