TV show host and well-known car collector Jay Leno was admitted to a hospital on Sunday after suffering burns to his face from a gas fire, TMZ and Variety report. Road & Track was able to confirm that the incident occurred at some point on Saturday, November 12.According to TMZ’s sources, Leno was in his Los Angeles garage where he stores his vast collection when a car burst into flames without warning. The report claims the fire burned the left side of the comedian’s face, but did not penetrate his eye or ear. “I got some serious burns from a gasoline fire,” Leno told Variety. “I am okay. Just need a week or two to get back on my feet.”The 72-year-old former Tonight Show host was scheduled to appear at a financial conference in Las Vegas on Sunday night but did not appear due to a “very serious medical emergency,” People reports. Leno was admitted to the Grossman Burn Center in Los Angeles where he remains today, says TMZ.This content is imported from OpenWeb. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site. More

Jeep released the video below as part of its parent company’s Stellantis EV Day. It shows a two-door Wrangler EV, which looks similar to this year’s Magneto concept, and a four-door model that appears related to the 2017 Safari concept.Part of the video events are dated 2025 and show a two-door Wrangler EV using biometric recognition, peer-to-peer charging, and drone pairing.Later the video shifts to 2030, where the four-door Wrangler EV is seen driving autonomously off-road while the owners lie in the vehicle watching the stars through a panoramic sunroof.On Thursday, at parent company Stellantis’s EV Day event, Jeep declared that it will have an electrified model in every segment it competes in by 2025. Jeep already builds a plug-in-hybrid version of the Wrangler called the 4xe. But according to the company’s statement, the Wrangler will need to morph into an electric vehicle if it is to survive beyond this decade. While Jeep didn’t explicitly debut a Wrangler EV at the event, this detailed video released by the company clearly promises one, along with drone pairing and autonomous off-roading capability.
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The video starts in 2021, following a seemingly always happy couple and their incredibly cute dog as they park and plug in a Wrangler 4xe at a charging station in the wilderness. The timeline then fast-forwards to 2025—now the man is seen proposing while the couple are submerged in a darkened pool and what appears to be an electric Wrangler lurks in the background. This two-door model is painted white with the word “Freedom” emblazoned on the side of the hood. Since Jeep’s new slogan is “Zero Emission Freedom,” the implication is that the vehicle has an electric powertrain. Jeep seems to confirm that with the text “Concept BEV model shown” at the bottom of the screen. This two-door looks strikingly similar to the Magneto, an electric Wrangler concept released at the 2021 Easter Jeep Safari in Moab, Utah, and it may just be the Magneto with new hood graphics.

Jeep

The “2025” portion of the video reveals some interesting upcoming features. First, this future Wrangler is equipped with biometric recognition—in the video, the car recognizes the man’s face, unlocking and starting the Wrangler in advance. The video also shows peer-to-peer charging, with the woman plugging the white Wrangler into a blue model for some extra juice. This segment ends by displaying the future Wrangler’s drone pairing capabilities, with the couple’s drone flying just in front of their Wrangler, providing extra light as they traverse an off-road trail through the night.

Jeep

The video then jumps ahead five years to 2030. Now the couple is seen camping next to a four-door model, which looks similar to the 2017 Safari concept from Moab, with transparent doors and a three-section roof rack. This model is clearly intended to indicate it’s an EV, with “Zero Emission” printed along the side sill. Jeep then shows the Wrangler piloting itself around the off-road trails, much to the surprise of another Jeep owner driving in the other direction, suggesting that the Wrangler will be capable of driving autonomously off-road by 2030. Jeep then promotes flat-seat stargazing, showing the couple lying in the Wrangler watching the skies above as the Jeep drives them to their destination.

Jeep notes at the bottom of the screen that “future models and features may vary,” meaning that the timelines for the Wrangler EV and futuristic technologies seen throughout the video are not promises. Still, the video shows that Jeep is plotting a Wrangler EV, gives us a taste of what it may look like, and previews some neat features that will enhance off-roading in the future.
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Underpants. The most important conversation I had during the 2024 Women in Motorsports (WIM) Summit at Dirtfish Rally School in Snoqualmie, Washington, was not with guest of honor Michèle Mouton about her incredible Pikes Peak triumph in 1985, or how she doesn’t drink alcohol unless it’s champagne. Nor was it with WRC commentator Becs Williams about how she discovered motorsports at a relatively late age and made a stunning career out of reporting on it. The conversation that really stuck with me was about underpants. Don’t get weird about it. Trevor Lyden Becs Williams, Pernilla Solberg, and Michèle Mouton speak to a crowded room about their careers in rally racing. Dirtfish Rally School is famous for its dirt-clod-flinging driving classes and founder Steve Rimmer’s envy-inducing Group B Rally car collection, but the company also promotes rally racing with a team of photographers and writers and hosts a yearly meet-up to celebrate and support women in racing. The WIM event was Josie Rimmer’s idea. Dirtfish’s head of strategy, she felt that while there were plenty of women involved in rally racing, they weren’t often in spotlight. “I’d grown up around rally and have seen countless women in the service park occupying all sorts of roles,” she said. “It became quite clear quite quickly that those women weren’t being written about or invited to sit on podcasts. No one was shouting their names from the rooftop the way they should have been. We wanted to be the ones shouting from the rooftops, ‘Hey! You really can do this too!'” Rimmer thought it might appeal to a few folks if she put together a panel of speakers and some hot-lap ride-alongs and invited some local women-run companies to get together at Dirtfish for a day-long event. Trevor Lyden One of the topics of the summit was encouraging more women in crew roles as well as driver roles, so after the panel, a female pit crew gave a demonstration. In 2022, Dirtfish hosted around 100 rally fans (men and women) to talk about racing and listen to Rhianon Gelsomino, Lia and Lucy Block, Emma Gilmour, and Sara Price talk about their experiences behind the wheel or in the co-drivers seat. In 2023, Rimmer brought even more women to the table, including the only female driver to win a World Rally Car victory, Michèle Mouton. Some 400 people attended that year, including me, and despite being nearly struck mute with hero worship (Mouton is . . . wow), I noticed how the audience responded, eager to hear the details of these women’s experiences and to ask questions about starting their own motorsports journeys. Trevor LydenTop Fuel driver Jndia Erbacher tells Michele Abbate, Vanessa Ruck, and Josie Rimmer about the time she broke her back making a pass in an ill-fitted seat.For 2023, Mouton returned, along with Pernilla Solberg, recently named president of the World Rally Championship Commission, and journalist Becs Williams, as well as a trio of younger racers, FIA Top Fuel dragster driver Jndia Erbacher, Trans Am Mustang driver Michele Abbate, and motorcycle endurance rider Vanessa Ruck. It was at dinner with these three that conversation turned to the subject of skivvies. They were chatting about crashes and fires and all the things race-car drivers casually talk about while the rest of us think about how the height of our own bravery was removing the gopher that the dog brought in and put on the couch. (Hey, it was not initially clear that it was dead, so I do think I deserve a medal.) Unlike me, race-car drivers are actually brave, and they do dangerous things, like deal with brake failure at high speed in a road race or engine explosions in nitro dragsters. Both of those things came up as Erbacher and Abbate shared stories with Ruck. When Abbate got to the part in her tale of a 2023 crash at Road America where the car caught on fire and the suppression system didn’t work, Erbacher and Ruck were all sympathy and no small amount of horror. This led to a discussion about fireproof underlayers, which caught Ruck’s attention. As a motorcyclist who recently has been exploring four-wheel motorsports as a Bowler Works driver in the U.K. Defender Rally series, she was less familiar with the options for women’s safety gear—bike riders generally worrying less about fire than impact. “I had no idea there were fireproof sports bras and knickers,” she said. “Oh, it’s really new,” Erbacher told her, describing the somewhat itchy process of developing a workable sports bra with her safety gear sponsor. Abbate and I jumped in with horror stories of what synthetic fibers and underwires can do in a fire (you do not want hot metal and melted plastic next to your skin). Ruck was taking notes, and not even a week later posted on her Instagram account about being fitted with new fire-resistant layers. Trevor LydenDespite snowy weather, the Dirtfish WIM Summit brought in a large crowd and kept them captivated. It may seem like a silly or even lurid topic of conversation, but it’s exactly the sort of small detail that might keep female drivers from pushing forward in a motorsports career. Sure, it’s embarrassing to talk about the details of your fire shirt being see-through, or your briefs bunching up, but comfort and security in a race car can play a part in how eager you are to get back in it. It’s unlikely that a wedgie has ever cost a driver the race, but feeling confident and safe puts everyone in a better headspace to win. It was nice to hear from Erbacher that there were some new options out there. When I spoke to Acura drivers Sheena Monk and Katherine Legge at the 2023 Long Beach Grand Prix about this subject, there were just starting to be options for female racers. Even now, although several safety equipment companies like PXP, Stand 21, and Simpson offer fire-retardant ladies’ undergarments, it’s not exactly a smorgasbord of choice. I even checked in with some other racers I knew after the event to see if there was some secret stash of flame-fighting undies that the rest of us didn’t know about, but the answers were similar to those from the summit. Funny Car driver Alexis DeJoria says she gets her layers custom made from Stand 21, and Top Fuel driver Ida Zetterström says she mostly resorts to fitted cotton undershirts, as there aren’t many available off-the-shelf sizes. The fact that Ruck didn’t know she could be protected from a brand-hot metal bra strap, or even needed to be, highlighted the reasons why Rimmer started the WIM Summit in the first place. If we want to see more women in racing, there need to be places for active participants to network, to share knowledge, in the hope of encouraging more women to race and for those racing to continue to higher levels. Trevor LydenMichèle Mouton signs posters before the event. As we head out of International Women’s Day and Women’s History Month, it’s thrilling to see companies like Dirtfish who are doing more than posting a social media shot of the few women they can dig up to highlight. Dirtfish has women in management, women in instructor roles, and this growing yearly event to offer women in motorsport the spotlight—and the microphone. Vanessa Ruck will leave and race with better safety and more confidence, and she’ll pass that information on to the women racers she meets, until eventually, we’re all properly supported. Trevor LydenOne of the most notorious machines in rally history, but Michèle Mouton says it was no problem. If you want to hear the Mouton Pikes Peak story, and believe me, you do, I recommend the WRC Backstories podcast episode where Becs Williams asks her about that, and many other fantastic topics. The WIM Summit will return to Dirtfish in 2025; tickets will be available on the Dirtfish website. Like a sleeper agent activated late in the game, Elana Scherr didn’t know her calling at a young age. Like many girls, she planned to be a vet-astronaut-artist, and came closest to that last one by attending UCLA art school. She painted images of cars, but did not own one. Elana reluctantly got a driver’s license at age 21 and discovered that she not only loved cars and wanted to drive them, but that other people loved cars and wanted to read about them, which meant somebody had to write about them. Since receiving activation codes, Elana has written for numerous car magazines and websites, covering classics, car culture, technology, motorsports, and new-car reviews. In 2020, she received a Best Feature award from the Motor Press Guild for the C/D story “A Drive through Classic Americana in a Polestar 2.”  In 2023, her Car and Driver feature story More

The Ioniq 6 “electrified streamliner” sedan is as slippery as it looks, with a 0.21 coefficient of drag (Cd) that is the lowest Hyundai has yet achieved.With powertrain and battery options that mirror the Ioniq 5’s, the Ioniq 6’s estimated WTLP range of 610 km may translate to more than 400 miles of EPA-rated range for the rear-drive variant with the larger 77.4-kWh battery.Actual U.S.-market specifications will not be revealed until this November at the Los Angeles auto show, with North American market production slated for early 2023.One look at the new Ioniq 6 “electrified streamliner” sedan is all it takes to see why that nickname fits. It rides on a 116.1-inch wheelbase that’s 2.0 inches shorter than the Ioniq 5’s, but that allowed its 191.1-inch body, which is 8.6 inches longer than the 5’s, to be drawn out into a sleek shape with a distinctively tapered “boat tail” rear end that produces a very slick 0.21 coefficient of drag. The fact that its roof stands 4.1 inches shorter than the boxier Ioniq 5 certainly helped VP of Hyundai Design Simon Loasby and his design team achieve that goal, but the lowered roofline also has the added benefit of dramatically reducing the Ioniq 6’s cross-sectional area, which makes its low drag coefficient (Cd) that much more significant because total drag is a function of Cd multiplied by cross-sectional area. Powertrain OptionsOn paper, the powertrain offerings look very familiar to the Ioniq 5’s because the two cars are both built on Hyundai’s Electric-Global Modular Platform (E-GMP). You’ll have the choice of either single-motor rear-wheel-drive and dual-motor all-wheel-drive configurations. Overall power output of the dual-motor version matches that of the Ioniq 5, with the AWD Ioniq 6 delivering 321 combined horsepower and 446 pound-ft of torque.Likewise, two battery capacities will be offered, with the rear-drive model available with either a 53.0-kWh or 77.4-kWh pack and the AWD model coming exclusively with the larger pack. As with the Ioniq 5, the powertrain’s 800-volt architecture allows the car to take advantage of high-output 350 kW DC fast-charging stations, which will reportedly lift the battery from 10 to 80 percent charge in just 18 minutes.
Range EstimatesBut the Ioniq 6 is said to be far more efficient than the Ioniq 5, and with that comes a significant boost in range. Hyundai predicts that rear-drive versions with the 77.4-kWh battery will be good for over 610 kilometers on the European WLTP cycle. By comparing that to the Ioniq 5’s confirmed WLTP and EPA figures, we estimate that the Ioniq 6 could earn an EPA rating of some 400 miles.The slippery shape of the Ioniq 6 plays a huge role here, but Hyundai engineers we spoke with also said the 6 also benefits from a few powertrain optimization developments, including next generation semiconductors in the inverter, reworked motors that now feature hairpin windings, and a re-optimized control strategy when switching between single-motor and dual-motor operation in the all-wheel drive version.Design Details

The streamlined Ioniq 6 looks significantly different from the minecraft-inspired Ioniq 5, but if you look closely you’ll see pixelated details built into the head- and taillights that are an Ioniq signature element. Inside, the dual-screen instrument panel/infotainment interface is present, and the 6 feels spacious front and rear despite its slightly shorter wheelbase. Our 6-foot 2-inch tester was able to sit behind himself quite comfortably, which is a neat trick considering the aggressively tapered roofline. On the other hand, the designers are more excited than we are about their decision to use center-mounted window switches that allow for naked doors, and we’re not sure how the speed-synchronized ambient lighting, which gets brighter as speed increases, will play out in the real world. We assume/hope there will be an “off” button.
Specific details about the configuration, performance and pricing of the North American version of the Ioniq 6 will not be released until November’s L.A. auto show, and the production of units bound for these shores will not commence until the first quarter of 2023. Still, we’re excited by the truly amazing range estimate that Hyundai has revealed. The Ioniq 6 looks set to offer a substantial boost over the competition, and that will be even more significant considering the E-GMP platform’s 800-volt architecture and superior DC fast-charging capability, which we’ve already experienced with the Ioniq 5.
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Audi is updating the Q8 for 2024 with a new face that combines a more streamlined grille with more expressive headlights and chunkier air intakes.The Q8’s turbocharged 3.0-liter V-6 and the SQ8’s twin-turbocharged 4.0-liter V-8 carry over unchanged.The 2024 Q8 and SQ8 will go on sale in the United States this winter, with pricing and full U.S. specifications coming soon.The electric Audi Q8 e-tron received a handsome facelift for 2024 that introduced a sleeker grille and redesigned lighting elements. Now the German automaker is refreshing the gas-powered Q8, bringing the sporty crossover in line with its electric cousin with thinner headlights and a restyled grille. The high-performance SQ8 also returns for 2024 with its burly 4.0-liter V-8 powertrain.The changes to the 2024 Q8’s exterior are subtle but add up to give the crossover a slicker, more elegant front end. The grille is less chiseled than before and flows smoothly into the headlights, similar to how the Q8 e-tron’s grille is integrated into the lights. The air inlets in the front bumper have been enlarged and a new exhaust setup is fitted across the lineup. The SQ8 also wears a redesigned front spoiler and rear diffuser, while the grille, sideview mirrors, and air intakes are accented in aluminum. Optional packages can have the window trim, bumper trim, and grille finished in gloss black, creating a more sinister appearance.Audi also revised the layout of the Matrix LED headlights, and the Q8 will be offered with the high-tech laser lights that boost the range of the high beams. The daytime running lights on top-spec models can swap between four different lighting signatures via the infotainment screen, and the rear light bar has a simpler look and can now be had with Audi’s digital OLED lighting units. As with the electric e-tron models, the gas-powered Q8 now displays its model name and trim level on the B-pillar. Five new wheel designs are available, measuring between 21 and 23 inches in diameter. The Q8 also gains three new colors, including the eye-catching Sakhir Gold seen here. Inside, the Q8 offers several new materials and Audi has also expanded the list of apps that work with its infotainment system, including third party apps like Spotify.The Q8’s engines continues to be motivated by the same turbocharged 3.0-liter V-6, which routes 335 horsepower and 369 pound-feet of torque through an eight-speed automatic transmission to all four wheels. The engine is also supplemented by a 48-volt hybrid-assist system that recoups energy under braking, smooths out the start-stop feature, and can allow the vehicle to coast for up to 40 seconds at a time with the engine off. The SQ8 still packs a twin-turbocharged 4.0-liter V-8 that churns out a potent 500 horsepower and 568 pound-feet of torque. Like the lesser Q8s, the S model uses an eight-speed automatic and all-wheel drive, but also offers a torque-vectoring rear differential and active anti-roll bars. The Q8 continues to come with a steel spring suspension as standard, but buyers can still upgrade to adaptive air suspension and can add rear-wheel steering to make their SUV more nimble. The SQ8 gets air springs, adaptive dampers, and rear-wheel steering as standard. The refreshed Q8 will go on sale in the United States this winter, and pricing and more detailed U.S. specifications will be available soon. Given the subtlety of the changes, we don’t expect a major price hike for the 2024 model, with the Q8 expected to start around $75,000 and the SQ8 likely to start in the high-$90,000 range.More Audi CrossoversThis content is imported from poll. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.Associate News EditorCaleb Miller began blogging about cars at 13 years old, and he realized his dream of writing for a car magazine after graduating from Carnegie Mellon University and joining the Car and Driver team. He loves quirky and obscure autos, aiming to one day own something bizarre like a Nissan S-Cargo, and is an avid motorsports fan. More