You'll have to wait until September's Frankfurt Motor Show for the official launch of BMW's new 2010 X1 crossover SUV (or CUV, or SAV, depending on your preference in pointless acronyms), but a German online magazine has posted 41 "official" leaked photos to whet your appetite. While the look is hardly surprising—take one BMW X5; reduce, then add 7 Series styling for garnish—the stateside version is expected to be a sharp-handling AWD topping out at 143 mph. In other words, FUN.

[via Autoblog]

Though it doesn't pack quite the wallop in people-watching as August's Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance, the version staged yesterday on Rodeo Drive was perhaps the cheapest (read: free) Father's Day gift in miles—or at least in blocks. (Autoblog's 76-part slideshow should give you a good sense of the action.) This year's installment spotlighted alternative-energy vehicles (mostly solar- and electric-powered, with some oddities thrown in), and of course you'll find the rare/ubiquitous Gullwing—though you'll forgive us for focusing more on conventional-energy behemoths like the '67 Shelby Cobra 427 (pictured) and the rare supercars of more recent vintage.

We usually take our auto porn—like, ahem, the other kinds—in the flesh-and-blood (er, metal-and-oil) variety. But illustrator Seymour Chwast's monograph/sketchbook Seymour, which recently arrived at our offices, makes a case for the merits of the illustrated kind. Chwast—who founded the graphics firm Push Pin Studios in 1954 with fellow Cooper Union alumni Milton Glaser (who designed the "I Love NY" logo) and Edward Sorel (who counts Graydon Carter's Waverly Inn and Monkey Bar restaurant murals among his works)—had a particular yen for cars, returning to them again and again over years of doodling and crafting. The renderings are imaginative rather than literal, paying homage to designers and artists (Chwast's collage Kurt Schwitters's Car is pictured above), but rarely less than compelling. Turns out cars were only one of the guy's many interests; other repeat motifs in the book include hands, monkeys, and shoes. For those, you'll have to buy the thing itself; but for the cars, you can visit Design Observer's slideshow.
Seymour: The Obsessive Images of Seymour Chwast, $26.40, available at amazon.com

Revealed today: the New Grand Bentley, the car that will replace the recently retired Arnage. Or sort of revealed, in a shadowy, Caravaggio kind of way. Gearheads, to your scrutinizing.

[via Autoblog]

In 1959, the Honda Motor Company started selling Honda 50 motorcycles out of a storefront with six employees in L.A. (above—and, yes, that's the dealership's official Ford pickup parked out front). Fifty years later, Honda is the largest engine manufacturer in the world (and the fourth-largest automobile manufacturer in the U.S., having passed, ahem, Chrysler last August). To commemorate its half-century, the company has turned part of its Torrance, Calif., U.S. headquarters into a replica of its original dealership (below), filled with the first Civic CVCC (1975) and the first U.S.-made Accord ('83) along with the Honda 50 and the monstrous 2010 1312cc Fury motorcycles. And though today's the legal end of the line for 789 Chrysler dealerships nationwide, this is no story of easy triumphalism: Though Honda's fared far better than most automakers recently, it had to close the original L.A. storefront a month or so ago because of poor sales.

[via Jalopnik]

In case you're still scratching your head to understand what went so wrong so fast—or was it so slowly?—with GM, the gearheads at Jalopnik have put up a handy top ten gallery of the vehicles that bankrupted the company. And while the Pontiac Aztek wins the ugly-stick award, there's a special place in Chapter 11 hell for the GMC Envoy XUV (the worst of a truck plus the worst of an SUV, combined in ugly and expensive fashion), the pickup-truck version of the Escalade, and—easy target, we know—the Hummer H2.

Just as you were finally perfecting that wry, vaguely amused look, four states—Arkansas, Indiana, Nevada, and Virginia—are now in the process of banning smiles on driver's license photos. The new mandate is all about helping facial-recognition software crack down on fake IDs—though so far, Virginia's the only state with an outright ban. (The other three are still allowing "slight smiles," at least for the moment, but the program's early success suggests more states may adopt the frowny measure. The mug-shot look is bound to put a lot of pressure on your hairstyle for a halfway decent pic. Silver lining: If you need an assist with that, we can help.

[USA Today]

Fred Perry x Vespa centenary edition Piaggio scooter.

[via Hint]

The 1957 Ferrari 250 Testa Rossa sold for just over $12.4 million yesterday, setting a new record for a vehicle at auction. What recession?

[via NYTimes]

It's been a long time coming, but even so, the sight of Porsche's new four-door super sedan, the Panamera, rolling down the assembly line is a beautiful thing. Sure, it's Leipzig and not Lansing, and we're not sure whether we can write off the workers' Oompa-Loompa unis to the quirks of German engineering, but it's good to know that the beat goes on somewhere in the automotive world.

[via Autoblog]