Acura clearly believes in the old adage “win on Sunday, sell on Monday.” The 2017 NSX just won the Time Attack 2 class at the 2016 Pikes Peak International Hill Climb, and now Acura is preparing the hybrid supercar for its next racing endeavor.
Honda’s luxury division brought out the NSX GT3 race car for a photo shoot and testing session at Michigan’s GingerMan raceway. Acura first showed the car at the 2016 New York Auto Show, but it’s still doing development work ahead of the NSX GT3’s racing debut next year.
With its exposed carbon fiber bodywork, the NSX GT3 looks even meaner than it did on a pedestal in the Big Apple. The race car features heavily modified bodywork, including enlarged hood vents for better engine cooling, plus aerodynamic aids like an underbody diffuser, and a massive rear wing spoiler. Unlike certain other race cars ostensibly based on road cars, though, the finished product is still recognizable as an NSX.
Read more: Acura builds an NSX-based electric race car for Pikes Peak
The powertrain includes a tuned version of the 3.5-liter, twin-turbocharged V6 used in the stock NSX. However, the stock nine-speed dual-clutch automated transmission was ditched in favor of a six-speed sequential gearbox. The GT3 is also rear-wheel drive, not all-wheel drive like the NSX road car. That means Acura may have tossed the road car’s hybrid system as well, although the carmaker won’t confirm that. Despite its somewhat different mechanical layout, the GT3 is built alongside the stock NSX in Ohio.
The use of stock bodywork and a (mostly) stock powertrain are some of the requirements of the FIA GT3 class that Acura built the NSX racer for. GT3 mandates that cars retain close ties to their road-going counterparts, meaning the cars fans watch on the track actually resemble ones they see on the street. The class has grown to include everything from Lamborghini Huracáns to Bentley Continental GTs, racing in multiple series in the U.S. and Europe.
Acura hopes to have the NSX GT3 certified this fall. Its racing debut will be sometime next year. Acura hasn’t said which series the car will race in, but it could replace the TLX GT sedans currently running in the Pirelli World Challenge.
BYD has launched the third-generation Qin Plus DM-i in China, and the first thing that caught my eye is its price. According to CarNewsChina, the plug-in hybrid sedan starts at 79,900 yuan, which is about $11,980. That’s an incredibly low price for a brand-new car, especially by US standards.
What’s even more impressive is the range. The Qin Plus DM-i can drive up to 137 miles on electricity alone, which should cover most people’s daily commutes without using a drop of gas. Once the battery runs out, the 1.5-liter engine takes over. Thanks to its 17-gallon tank and roughly 91 mpg with a drained battery, the combined range reaches up to 1,423 miles.
Apple won the PC market’s worst quarter, but that’s not the entire story. It won the race by stumbling less than everyone else.
PC makers shipped just 57 million computers worldwide in Q3, which might look good, but it’s a 21% year-over-year plunge (via Counterpoint Research). And despite Apple’s Mac shipments falling by 11%, to 5.6 million, its market share rose from 8.7% to 9.8%. How did that happen?
Update (October 22 23:54 PT): In response to our query, GM clarified that offline recording support is already available on eligible vehicles. Like Tesla's Sentry Mode, it requires owners to connect a USB drive to save incident recordings, which can be viewed on the vehicle's infotainment screen. The upcoming Connected Cameras feature will build on this by giving owners remote access to these recordings via the revamped OnStar app, allowing them to check footage without walking out to their car.
General Motors has announced plans to add a new Connected Cameras feature to its OnStar service starting next year, giving drivers a way to monitor parked vehicles remotely and capture footage of certain incidents.