UPDATE: I-17 Chase North Of Phoenix (VIDEO)

A long and fast-moving chase from suburban Phoenix into a remote area north of that city Wednesday (2/27) afternoon...3 suspects in a stolen Honda Civic. Here's how it ended live on NBC affilate KPNX-TV:

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120 MPH L.A. Police Chase (UPDATED VIDEO) Including Suspects & Possible Motive

Click here for much more video of Tuesday's (2/26) high speed chase in Los Angeles, including the arrest of the two suspects, from FOX11.. Use the buttons below the picture to instantly share this on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ or by e-mail.

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BREAKING VIDEO: 120 MPH Chase On 6 L.A. Freeways Ends With Sideswiped Bus

View more videos at: http://nbclosangeles.com.

120 MPH on the freeways, 70 or better on the surface streets. Just another day in L.A.

The driver, caught after bailing out of the car, hit a city bus and narrowly missed, at various times, a boy on a skateboard, a baby in a stroller and a little girl who was pulled to safety at the last second.

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First Look: Can Rolls-Royce Revive The Big Fastback?

Rolls-Royce will be unveiling the new Wraith at the Geneva Auto Show and has been teasing bits and pieces of it. Today, perhaps the most important part...the silhouette.

It's been a long time since RR has attempted anything resembling a fastback, though Bentley has certainly had success with it since their divorce last decade.

In a news release accompanying the artist's rendering (okay, line drawing), Rolls-Royce Motor Cars Design Director Giles Taylor says:

The purposeful fastback profile is Wraith’s defining element.

Inherent in the graceful line that sweeps from the top of the screen to the very rear edge is the promise of fast, yet effortless touring. Yet, perhaps my favourite aspect is the expressive gesture that comes from the side window graphic, gliding through Wraith’s glamorous coach door.

It works with a strong sense of linear purpose from the shoulder line, which has the promise of potential like the athlete in the starting blocks. In contrast, the line that cuts through the shoulder line is a little more artful and adds that certain air of effortlessness to Wraith’s dynamic statement.

In my view the most successful designs always come down to three or four lines.

What say you? The Comments section is always open here at TireKicker.

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New Car Review: 2013 Lexus GS350 and GS350 F SPORT




The 2013 Lexus GS350.

The styling of the all-new Lexus GS350 promises so much. It's a study in aggressive angles, a clear and direct contrast to the soft shapes of the GS that Lexus produced up until this year.




The 2013 Lexus GS350 interior.

The promise continues when you slide behind the wheel. The GS, so old-fashioned as recently as 2010 to have sported a cassette tape player in the dash, now has an utterly contemporary interior in which to do business, including a gargantuan video display in the center of the dash (clearly inspired by BMW).

The specs are promising...3.5 liter V6, 306 horsepower, 277 pounds per foot of torque...six-speed automatic with paddle shifters, 17 inch 9-spoke alloy wheels and the usual assortment of Lexus luxury and safety items for a base price of $46,900. Thanks to the six-speed automatic, that brings with it EPA estimated mileage of 19 city/28 highway.


But in the GS, it's all about how you equip it. We drove two on two consecutive weeks. The first was fitted with the Luxury Package. That's $5,750 worth of ventilated front seats, rear sunshade, an upgrade to 18-inch wheels, Sport S+ Drive Mode, adaptive front lighting, wood and leather trimmed steering wheel, linear espresso wood interior trim, semi-aniline leather interior trim, 18-way power front seats, Lexus memory system for the front passenger and a three (!) zone climate control.

This car also added a blind spot monitoring system ($500), a Mark Levinson 835-watt 7.1 surround sound audio system ($1,380), the navigation package ($1,735), intuitive park assist ($500), a cargo net ($64) and a trunk mat ($105). With $875 for destination and handling, the bottom line read $57,809.

And it drove....like a Lexus. Which isn't a bad thing if you're a Lexus fan and define your luxury by degrees of isolation rather than involvement. And that's not a bad thing if that's what you're expecting. It's quantum leaps better than the previous GS...but a bit of a letdown from what the styling and specs were promising.

And then, we drove this:




The 2013 Lexus GS350 with F SPORT.

This is the same car...same engine, same base price, same fuel economy estimates, same standard equipment.

There are just two differences. Instead of being equipped with the Luxury Package, this was outfitted with the F SPORT Package, and the Mark Levinson audio system was replaced with the $320 more expensive Lexus Dynamic Handling System.

And that....makes all the difference in the world. Because F SPORT turns the GS 350 into a driver's car. For $5,690 ($160 less than the Luxury Package), you get the rain-sensing wipers, heated and ventilated front seats and rear power sunshade in the luxury package, but you also get 19-inch alloy wheels with summer tires instead of all-seasons, F SPORT-tuned adaptive variable suspension, variable gear-ratio steering, 14-inch two-piece front brake rotors with four-piston calipers, a 16-way F SPORT driver's seat with power side bolsters, and more. And what it does with the same 306 horsepower is a thing of beauty. It carves instead of wallows, direct inputs are followed by direct responses, it just plain works.



The 2012 Lexus GS350 with F SPORT rear view.

Short version, you'll look for every winding road you can find...because it's truly a blast to drive. And F-SPORT gets you a tasty interior re-do as well:



The 2013 Lexus GS350 with F SPORT interior.

Oh, yeah. Much, much better. And remember, the EPA mileage estimates stay the same and so does the base price. In fact, the as-equipped price of the F SPORT-equipped GS350 was only $260 more than the Luxury Package-equipped model.

You know which one we'd pick.

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New Car Review: 2013 Volkswagen Jetta Hybrid

The 2013 Volkswagen Jetta Hybrid whispers its green credentials rather than shouting them.

 

The de-gimmickification (give me until this afternoon to make a Wikipedia entry) of hybrid vehicles has been a tricky thing. As we noted in our review of the Toyota Prius C, the vast majority of hybrid buyers seem to want to call attention to themselves. The "big" (compared to the Prius C) Prius has attained a good chunk of its best-seller status by being instantly identifiable as a "green" vehicle. Honda, a strong candidate for major player with the environmentally sensitive, has struck out with its hybrid offerings thus far, the Impact and CR-Z being too small to be practical and mainstream and the Accord and Civic hybrids having been virtually invisible...looking for all the world like regular Accords and Civics with "hybrid" badges on them...never mind what was under the hood and what wasn't coming out of the tailpipe.

 

So it's a huge surprise to this writer that Volkswagen, out to conquer market share in leaps and bounds, has taken the Honda Civic approach with the Jetta Hybrid.

 

 

Like the Hondas, you'll never know the Jetta Hybrid is a Hybrid unless you get close enough to read the very discreet badge on the trunklid or catch the subtly different aero grille in your rearview mirror.

And once at the wheel, there's very little to tell you you're in something different...it's quiet when rolling on pure electric power, but that's a novelty that wears off fast. Within a day or two of our week and 600 or so miles, I was forgetting this was a hybrid. They even make the proof of performance a "look if you want to" type of thing.

Front and center in the instrument cluster? No, that's too flashy...the whiz-bang animations showing how much fuel you're saving and how little you're polluting share space with your audio and nav systems. You'll forget it's even there.

There's really only one reminder that this Jetta is a hybrid...its fuel economy. The EPA estimate is 42 MPG city/48 MPG highway and for all the controversy these days over cars not meeting their numbers, the Jetta Hybrid we drove did.

The price? Well, hybrids always cost more, and compared to a stock Jetta's under $20K price tag, the $26,999 base price for the Jetta Hybrid is a jump, but VW has gone out of its way to bump up the value equation...making its nicest interior appointments standard equipment. And that makes the car very complete. All that was added to ours was a first aid kit and the delivery charge. Bottom line: $27,820. Which undercuts most of the Priii we've driven lately by anywhere from $2,000 to $6,000.

The Jetta Hybrid's a fine piece. It'd be on our short list if we were in the market for a hybrid. Let's hope for them that VW can find a thus far untapped market of green folks who don't need to shout about it with styling.

 

 

 

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New Car Review: 2013 Chevrolet Malibu Turbo

Can the 2013 Chevrolet Malibu Turbo lure drivers back from the imports?

It's been a long, long time since "Malibu" was the cool answer when someone asked what kind of car you drove. As in about 41 years. No question, the past few years have seen Chevrolet take some amazing steps in the right direction with their family sedan. The exterior styling and interior appointments are way better than what they'd been doing and, frankly, better than many thought they could do.

For 2013, both those areas get some more polish and there's a bold step under the hood, too...as the performance model comes with a four-cylinder engine.



Yes, Malibu has joined the growing list of cars with a turbocharged 2.0 liter four, which seems to be the powerplant of choice these days. Makes sense, really. Larger than a 2.0 liter in a four-cylinder and smoothness becomes an issue.

The 2013 Malibu has "Camaro-inspired" taillights.

Put your right foot down and the turbo makes itself known...there's no lag, just an instant burst of power...a pleasant surprise to those of us whose experience with 2-liter four-bangers began with the ones under the hood of a Ford Pinto.

In fact, this four-cylinder engine is quicker than the V6 it replaces. 0-60 happens in 6.3 seconds, which is mighty quick for a family sedan. But take full advantage of that and you'll be shortchanging yourself on the gas mileage that engine swap was meant to facilitate. I didn't drive the tester I had for a week particularly hard, and I couldn't match the EPA estimated combined mileage figure of 24MPG. 22 was it for me, and that just barely happened on the final day of a 500-mile week about evenly split between city streets and freeways (the EPA city estimate is 21, the highway 30).

$30,165 was base price for our tester in 2LZ trim. That gets you the turbo, a six-speed automatic transmission with Tapshift, power windows and locks, leather trim, dual-zone climate control, a 7-inch color touchscreen for the audio system that swings out to reveal a hidden storage compartment, Bluetooth, a power sunroof, 18-inch aluminum wheels, fog lamps and a bunch more.

Nicely styled instrument panel, but a bit busy and not always user-friendly.

The GM press fleet folks tossed another $2,895 in optional equipment on ours, a wheels and entertainment package that bumped the wheels up to 19-inches and the 6-speaker audio system up to 9, with a 250-watt Pioneer amp, a rear-vision camera system, keyless start, memory settings and forward collision alert and lane departure warning.

Chevy's MyLink audio system is great for what it promises...a single interface in the dashboard that blends AM, FM, SiriusXM Satellite and the CD player in the car with Pandora and Stitcher apps in your smart phone. But in practice, it needs some work. To cover all those options takes multiple pages on the screen...and that requires looking away from the road. Also, we found that the touch-sensitive screen was not as sensitive as it should be...and when it did respond, there was enough of a lag between asking and getting that it became distracting. It's not quite as maddening as Cadillac's CUE system, but that's mostly because it's not quite as ambitious.

Total price on our tester was $33,820. And it was very nice.

But....the competition in this segment is fierce. When this car left me last week, the new Accord arrived. A full review is coming (I'm still driving it as I write this), but consider this: It's only $400 more as tested than the Malibu, does the 0-60 in 0.2 seconds less, gets 1 MPG more combined fuel economy (and so far, it's nailing that number consistently), and does that with a silky smooth V6 and no turbocharger. And Honda's getting its mojo back...it feels a bit nicer than the Malibu (it has its own audio interface issues, too, though...and I won't be letting it off the hook in its own review).

And beyond the Accord, you've got the new Fusion (c'mon, Ford...we need a week in one), the new Mazda 6 (ditto), the new for 2012 Toyota Camry, and the all-new and amazingly good 2013 Nissan Altima.

The Malibu beats every previous Malibu of the past 15 years (since they brought the nameplate back), but everyone else is bringing their "A" game in family sedans. While I wouldn't knock anyone for buying a 2013 Malibu, it's not a slam-dunk choice.

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UPDATE WITH VIDEO: Horrific Crash at Daytona; 33 Spectators Injured

It happened on the last lap as the leaders approached the checkered flag. SPEED had the best coverage, hands down and continues to update online. Go there: http://nascar.speedtv.com/article/nns-tony-stewart-wins-amid-chaos-at-daytona-nascar-nationwide

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First Look: 2014 Jeep Cherokee (UPDATED with more photos)

We knew Jeep was going to do something different. This is the 2014 Jeep Cherokee, which will replace the Liberty.

Chrysler (Jeep's parent company) is promising best-in-class capability, it will be Trail Rated and it brings back a beloved Jeep model name.

But the styling seems to be a love it or hate it thing, based on early response in the Twitterverse. Our guess is it's going to look great (if a tad cartoonish) in dark colors with the right wheels, but may not work so well otherwise.

What do you think of it? Comment below.

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