Toyota, in conjunction with supplier Denso, has developed a new semiconductor for use in hybrid and fuel cell vehicles said to greatly improve efficiency while being smaller in size as compared to current units.

The new silicon carbide (SiC) semiconductors were developed for use in power control units (PCUs), which govern the flow of electricity from the battery to the electric motor and vice versa. They control vehicle speed and also return charge to the batteries during the regenerative braking process.

The traditional array of semiconductors in PCUs is estimated to account for 20 percent of electrical power loss in hybrid vehicles. Using SiC semiconductors, Toyota and Denso were able to improve hybrid fuel efficiency by over five percent during prototype testing, but the companies think they can increase overall hybrid efficiency by 10 percent while reducing the PCU’s size by a whopping 80 percent.

Toyota and Denso began basic research in the 1980s, and as of last year the automaker has dedicated a clean room at its Hirose plant soley for the purpose of SiC semiconductor development.

Toyota is unveiling the technology at the Automotive Engineering Expo in Yokohama, Japan this weekend. Watch the video below for an explanation.

Nissan is gearing up to challenge rivals Audi, Toyota and Porsche at the 24 Hours of Le Mans. The Japanese automaker plans to enter the storied 90-year-old French endurance race, considered one of the world’s most grueling motorsports events, next year.

Nissan has been actively involved with Le Mans competition in recent years, having won the LM P2 class twice and supplying about a quarter of the 2014 Le Mans field with engines. However, for 2015 Nissan will be making a full factory prototype effort, its first since the Nissan R390 GT1 took third place in 1998 (the 2012 DeltaWing ran in an experimental class).

The car, called the Nissan GT-R LM NISMO, will pay tribute to the 46-year history of the GT-R name, which can be traced back to the Skyline GT-R sports sedan of 1968. Nissan Chief Planning Officer and Executive VP Andy Palmer said that while it will be built within the confines of the Le Mans rulebook, it will “hopefully… be very iconic in its appearance.” Perhaps apropos to the GT-R’s Godzilla nickname, Nissan has released a monster movie-themed teaser showing the GT-R’s trademark afterburner taillight configuration first introduced on the 1972 model.

The car will be developed by Nissan facilities across Japan, the US and Europe. That the announcement was made on May 23 was no mistake, as “23″ has long been Nissan’s lucky number. In Japanese “two” is pronounced “ni,” “three is pronounced “san,” and “five” is pronounced “go”. Read together, May 23 is said in Japanese “Go Nissan!”

Volkswagen’s Czech Republic-based Škoda division has unveiled a new concept scheduled to debut next week at the annual Wörthersee show in Austria.

Dubbed Citijet, the show car is essentially a Škoda Citigo sub-compact hatchback that the automaker’s apprentices have transformed into a two-seater convertible. A slanted roof line gives the car a more aggressive appearance while the B-pillars are reinforced and connected by a sturdy piece of steel to create a roll bar.

Large multi-spoke alloy wheels, a rear spoiler, twin exhaust pipes and a model-specific metallic blue paint job finish the bespoke look.

Interior pictures are not available but Škoda says the cockpit has been upgraded with red and white trim accents on the dashboard, semi-leather upholstery, LED ambient lighting and a 300-watt sound system.

Škoda has not made any modifications under the hood, and the Citijet is powered by a 1.0-liter three-cylinder engine that sends 74 horsepower and 70 lb-ft. of torque to the front wheels via a five-speed manual transmission. The pint-sized city car reaches 62 mph from a stop in 13.2 seconds and maxes out at 106 mph.

Look for additional pictures of the Škoda Citijet to emerge in the coming days. This year’s edition of Wörthersee show will kick off on May 28th.

BMW’s MINI division has published a full set of details about the Superleggera Vision Concept ahead of its scheduled debut at this year’s Villa d’Este Concours d’Elegance.

As its name implies, the concept was designed jointly by MINI and Milan-based coachbuilder Touring Superleggera. It draws inspiration from minimalist British convertibles of the 1960s and 1970s with a long hood and short overhangs, but styling cues such as oval headlights and a hexagonal grille make it instantly recognizable as a MINI. The truncated rear end is accented by a slim fin that runs down the trunk lid and tail lamps with a Union Jack motif.

The minimalist treatment continues on the inside with a retro-styled three-spoke steering wheel and an instrument cluster reduced to a single gauge. Additionally, the car’s entertainment, navigation and climate control functions are grouped into a touch screen-based infotainment system in order to leave the dashboard completely uncluttered.

With 2014 marking the tenth season of Toyota Racing Development’s involvement with NASCAR, as well as its seventh year running in the pinnacle Sprint Cup series, the TRD division brought us back to the roots of Stock Car Racing in Charlotte, North Carolina. What started as a means of running moonshine in the quickest manner possible without hindrance from state revenue agents is now a high-tech racing industry with lasers, clean-rooms and cad-cam design.

Traditionally, the middle of May is NASCAR All-Star race time, giving us the perfect chance for a deep dive into the Charlotte, North Carolina-based operations of two of the brand’s top-tier teams, Joe Gibbs Racing and Michael Waltrip Racing, as well as a chance to talk with TRD officials about how racing improves the breed.

Joe Gibbs Racing is the team founded by former Washington Redskin’s NFL football coach Joe Gibbs, who was raised in the car culture of California, where he drag raced while growing up.

Settling in the roots of stockcar racing near Charlotte, JGR is comprised of 450 team members in a facility that covers 250,000-square feet, with race design engineers, fabricators, mechanics, CNC room, painters, graphic designers, physical trainers, a weight room that rivals many found in the NFL, and a build facility whose floor is clean enough to eat from.

Rolling chassis
With the NASCAR circuit drivers cutting their teeth on everything from tight oval bullpens as seen in Bristol, to the Super Speedways of Daytona and Talladega to the road courses of Sonoma and Watkins Glen, this is definitely not a one-size-fits-all type of sport. As such, the teams keep a handful of cars on hand, nearly always at the ready for the next race weekend.

In the case of JGR’s three Sprint Cup runners, each team keeps as many as 15 cars in stock, taking two to the track each weekend. While some are racing, others are in new- or rebuilding phases, while others still are utilized as test beds for the teams to try new parts or techniques before finding their way onto an actual racecar.

The cars are rebuilt after each race, with an average lifespan of 2-3 races. Damaged parts are removed and replaced or repaired as needed. A car is typically retired at the point there is damage to the chassis that compromises its safety. At that point, it usually shows up on the show car circuit or as a practice car, where crewmembers rehearse their pit stop duties. Finally, those vehicles that are beyond repair are sent to a recycling facility, where the car is destroyed under the watchful eyes of a JGR team official, to prevent other teams from learning through JGR’s experience. In this racing city, nearly everything has been copied twice already, as spying is relatively easy, seeing most of the teams are located within 30-miles of each other in the surrounding suburbs.

New engines, every two weeks
TRD builds motors for their NASCAR teams at their engine facility in Costa Mesa, California. From there, they are shipped to the teams about two weeks before installation in the rolling chassis, which are taken to the track for a particular race weekend. Based on a standardized 358 cubic-inch V8 engine, they are now in the second year of running electronic fuel injection, after more than fifty years using carburetors.

While all of the Toyota Sprint Cup teams receive their engines directly from TRD, Gibbs Racing has their own engine-build program for the cars they use to compete in the Nationwide Cup Series. JGR also offers build and lease programs for other competitors in the same series and the Truck Series, who may not have the same competitive resources. Such programs manage to keep busy the 450-team employees – including several former NFL players busy – as you can’t just rely on race winnings alone to support the operations.

An overview with Tyler Gibbs, Group VP of TRD
Toyota Racing Development is responsible for the brand’s motorsports efforts in North America. “Winning races is what we are here for. We have about 75,000 square feet in Costa Mesa, California, where we do all of the engine activity from design to development and testing which results in the engines we build for JGR and the Michael Waltrip racing teams.”

“The brand has a facility in Salisbury, that is responsible for nothing but chassis engineering. There, we have tire guys, vehicle kinematics guys, aerodynamicists, you name it. We have test rigs that any of our teams can bring their cars to, and drivers can use to support the racing activities. Between the two, there are around 250 employees total, with 15 or 20 people trackside each weekend.

“As for financial arrangements, the Toyota model is different than that of its competitors, in the sense that it does not necessarily provide large amounts of financial support but does provide a large amount of technical support. Instead of outsourcing to other companies, we handle it ourselves and then make sure the data is shared equally and built upon, rather than have simultaneous development going on with a bunch of different teams.”

“Toyota offers tire specialists, wind tunnels specialists and so on, so that when the teams go to tire or wind tunnel testing, the brand has support engineers that are there to supplement the work from Goodyear and other specialists,” said Gibbs. “We have a piece of equipment in Salisbury that takes a lot of data from the car but it’s hard to post-process that and use it in a meaningful way because it just generates so much data. So we help the teams by post-processing it and working through it with them. And that in turn, helps them build a better chassis down the road.”

Gibbs continued by describing the sensors that are part of the car: “The Sprint Cup cars have an electronics control unit (ECU) in them and NASCAR has a black box in the cars. The data from the black box is collected by NASCAR and some of it is made available to the teams but by and large, accelerometers are only used by them (NASCAR) during a race. We can only use that info during specified test periods.”

Secrecy and competitive advantages are always at stake between the two major Toyota racing partners, Joe Gibbs Racing and Michael Waltrip Racing, says Gibbs. “There are things that JGR or MWR has developed that we know about but we don’t share between the two because of the nature of the competition. There are other things that we work very openly with. But in many ways, we work in a manner that is complementary to both of them. It depends, but sometimes one team approaches us and says “hey we are a team (together) and so Toyota helps them develop something that is shared between both teams.”

Clearly MWR and JGR benefit from the technology and largesse of Toyota, but we wanted to know what Toyota receives in return, in addition to the natural marketing exposure that comes from one of America’s largest spectator sports. Gibbs’ immediate response stressed how the two teams put our brands out in front. In the case of Michael Waltrip’s cutup personality, “it’s Michael being Michael.”

“From a technical side,” Gibbs said, “we match up much closer today to the other teams from an aero perspective. But the more important part is from the safety side. This current generation of car was developed using a very sophisticated Toyota human computer model so we can run a “human” through a crash test where we don’t have to destroy things. The way the driver sits and so on, was set up by technology we had, and then you combine it with all of the data we received from NASCAR. So from our perspective, safety is the single biggest piece of technology that we take away from this.”

Racing improves the breed, but that doesn’t mean there is a high-performance pushrod V8 headed to production anytime soon. Gibbs thought the idea of that was unlikely, “owing to the emissions rules underway in the industry, and some of their efficiencies.

“Our competitors have it for the historical reasons (that they have always had a V8) so that makes sense. From our perspective, we have always had overhead cam (engines) so it doesn’t make sense for us to step backwards into making a production pushrod engine again.” “To the best of my knowledge, we are the only ones making a pushrod V8 within Toyota, worldwide,” he offered.

“We offered the ability to draw a new engine from a clean sheet of paper. How NASCAR works is they say, “here’s the rule book, follow that. Don’t be bigger than the biggest in the garage, and don’t be smaller than the smallest.” “Those were the ground rules, and that’s generally how NASCAR works. They’re looking for parity, but also for competition.” To which we add, they are looking for a show.

The engine is based on a 5.7-liter V8. They produce a pool of 100 engines per year. Over the course of that year, engines within the pool will see a total of 375-builds. At this point in the year, about 45 are at TRD in various stages of build, while 55 or so are either in transit, at tracks, shops, testing with teams, and so on. The engines arrive two weeks before an event, when the teams are in the process of building a pair of cars for a specific track. The engine typically arrives on a Friday and is installed early the following week.

We were curious between races, which parts are swapped out? Gibbs said, “that depends on factors including the times above certain RPMs, or mileage, but also on the characteristic of the part. “Pistons, valves and springs will definitely be replaced but the rest generally relies upon their mileage intervals.

“Each engine has a serial number so we know the mileage and rpm times for all the components when they come back in, and we know life expectancy and replace them accordingly. The heads are rarely mileaged but since that’s one of the main areas of development for all the teams, most of the guys are subbing them out way before they are worn out. But those same heads will then work their way down to the second-tier Nationwide or third-tier Truck series.”

We were curious to find if there was a common part that is shared between the racecar and the street car – Gibbs said that to the “best of my knowledge, there is not. It used to be with the truck series, that they shared a power steering pump, but that was the only part. Today, there may be a small electronic piece as part of another piece, but other than that, no.”

Despite Toyota Motor Sales moving to Texas, Gibbs was quick to point out that Toyota Racing Development has no plans to move from their engine build facility in Costa Mesa, California.

A few words with Michael Waltrip
The always-quotable Michael Waltrip was his typical chatty self in talking about his team’s prospects during the Sprint Cup All-Star race in Charlotte.”We won the Showdown last night, with one of the fastest cars. Toyota is able to adapt quickly to changes we need, and make changes for us rather quickly.”

We asked what to expect that night, and he said to watch for racecars coming off turn-four, which is 24-degrees of banking onto a very flat pit road. “They’ll make that corner right there at 150 (mph) and then hold their gas open for as long as they dare, and then try and get it stopped before their pit box. That alone is worth the price of admission.”

“The drivers know when the caution flags will fly, so tonight becomes a sheer speed contest,” he continued. “Normally there are tricks you can play, like changing just two tires or a splash and go, but tonight it will be just about sheer speed. Denny Hamlin feels he has one of the fastest cars here. On the other hand, the crew chiefs all have simulation software and they all have trends so they need to figure out how to set that car up based on what they think’s gonna happen, so in the end it comes down to who makes the best educated guess and does the best setup, which could be the car that wins the race. They’ll all get pretty close, and for a million dollars, racecar drivers will do just about anything.”

We were curious about his relationship with Toyota and how they manage to benefit each other. “The fans like and trust me, and when I started racing Toyotas, they felt that was okay. Toyota wanted to enhance the sport making it bigger and better, and that’s exactly what they have gone on to do since 2007. It was an endorsement from my family and me that racing Toyotas was going to be a good thing for NASCAR and the fans appreciated that. They also made it possible for me to have a team. They help me with engineering, with engines, and support our team so we have a serious chance to win. They made my chance of owning a team possible, and we wouldn’t have been able to do that without them. Hopefully my commitment to Toyota, and Toyota’s commitment to NASCAR has won a lot of people over that might not have chosen to go buy a Toyota before 2007.”

According to Waltrip, Toyota came in right as NASCAR racing became an “arms race.”

“Their engineering and support could really help our race cars go faster. I’m just thankful that Toyota’s my partner because as this arms race increases and we need solutions from a technological standpoint, they are the right partners to have. We’re just tipping the iceberg right now, and Toyota is racing against manufacturers that have had a 30- or even 50-year head start over them, and we have managed to close the gap nicely, and we feel very confident of how the future looks with them.”

Photos by Mark Elias. Engine photos courtesy TRD.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has opened an investigation into older Dodge Ram pickups equipped with manual transmissions.

The vehicles are built with a clutch interlock switch that should prevent the engine from turning over if the clutch is not depressed, however the agency has received several complaints claiming the safety system failed.

The reports cite similar problems in one 2004 Dodge Ram 2500 and two Ram 3500 pickups from the 2006 model year.

In one complaint, an owner alleges that a child entered the vehicle and started the ignition without depressing the clutch. The vehicle is said to have rolled forward, striking another child and causing fatal injuries.

In another incident, someone working under the hood was knocked over when the engine was cranked without the clutch pedal depressed. The incident did not lead to any reported injuries.

The agency is currently evaluating the frequency and scope of the potential problem to determine if a recall is warranted.

General Motors has announced a pair of underhood changes to the Chevrolet Impala full-size sedan for the 2015 model year.

The eAssist mild-hybrid powertrain has been dropped, meaning the 2.5-liter four-cylinder and 3.6-liter V6 will be the only engine options moving forward.

Comprised of a 2.4-liter four-cylinder and a small electric motor, the eAssist setup was good for 182 horsepower and 25/35 city/highway mpg. However, only one percent of Impala buyers opted for eAssist, which was similarly deleted from the Malibu lineup last year.

The other news for 2015 comes in the form of a standard stop-start system for the Impala’s 2.5-liter four. Stop-start, which saves fuel by shutting off the engine when the car is stationary and would otherwise be idling, will result in a fuel efficiency rating of 22/31 mpg – an increase of 1 mpg in the city.

GM says that revised motor mounts should help reduce the harshness typically associated with stop-start systems. A larger, heavy-duty starter motor was also fitted to cope with the added ignition cycles, and special software tuning will prevent stop-start from engaging if the car didn’t reach 6 mph in its last start, thus making for a smoother driving experience in heavy traffic.

The 2015 Chevrolet Impala four-cylinder will start from $27,735 (including destination). The 3.6-liter V6 model, which carries over unchanged, commands $30,960.