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With the introduction of the Hike 100, Winnebago brings big outdoor camping to the small, towable trailer set. Seven feet wide, 16 feet long, and 10 feet tall, the Trailer is suitable for a couple or small family.Winnebago emphasizes the exterior with the Hike 100, offering a roof rack, rear hitch (for a bike rack or something similar), and two awnings that can provide up to 200 square feet of covered space. The induction stovetop can also be used outside the trailer. No MSRP was announced.Winnebago is showing off the Hike 100 on its new Winnebago Insider digital portal, which also highlights five other, larger campers.The rise in remote work possibilities and people just wanting to go somewhere where others aren’t during a pandemic has resulted in an uptick in the #VanLife curious. Winnebago recently introduced six new RVs and trailers, including a small trailer called the Hike 100 that, dare we say it, brings a welcome dose of cute to the lineup.

Winnebago

Winnebago

With a dry weight of just 2700 pounds and a seven-foot-nine-inch width, the Hike 100 will be towable by some small SUVs (note that the official GVWR is 4200 pounds). The trailer is almost 16 feet long and just over 10 feet tall. Despite the small size, Winnebago made sure to include as much practicality as possible. The rear of the trailer opens up to store outdoor gear you might not want in the trailer’s main space. There is also a Thule-compatible roof-rack system for things such as kayaks or surfboards on top and a two-inch hitch on the back for a bike rack or similar accessory. A 190-watt solar panel is standard, and you can add on another for more off-grid power. A compact shower, toilet and sink—and a 31-gallon freshwater tank—let you conduct daily business without too much hassle.

Winnebago

There are five different floor plan options for the Hike 100, and lots of customizable entertainment and cooking options, including an induction stovetop that can be used on the outside of the camper when the weather cooperates—or when it doesn’t, thanks to a powered size awning over the door and what Winnebago calls a “bat wing” awning that extends over the rear and non-door side of the trailer for up to 200 square feet of covered space outside. Pricing for the Hike 100 was not announced.

Other new Winnebago models the company recently announced include the Micro Minnie FLX, a step up in size from the Hike 100 that the company said is the only towable camper on the market that “combines five new energy- and cost-efficient technologies that enable users to enjoy time off grid for up to five days.” The new Winnebago Roam was designed to offer wheelchair users the chance to enjoy a purpose-built camper, while the new Class C coach camper, the new Ekko, was “strategically designed for increased livability in the footprint of a camper van.”

Winnebago

Winnebago calls the new Solis Pocket its “most affordable camper van,” and it packs a lot of camping functionality onto a Ram ProMaster chassis. Finally, there are the new Class A coaches, the Vista and the Sunstar 33K, for campers who want a larger vehicle as refuge while in the great outdoors.
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Winnebago used these new models to highlight its just-launched customer portal, Winnebago Insider. This new digital platform is a place for the company to place virtual tours of Winnebago brand products and other approved marketing messages, like “expert commentary about models [and] user testimonials.”
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Our friends at the auction site Bring a Trailer have listed another irresistible car. This time, it’s a 2009 Mercedes-Benz SL65 AMG Black Series that’s up for online auction.With only 11,000 miles on its odometer, this car—which has midrange acceleration we once likened to “a religious experience”—should fetch a record price.If you’re interested, BaT’s auction ends on Monday, October 18. Bidding is already up to $255,000 as of October 8. Over the course of seven—soon to be eight—generations, the Mercedes-Benz SL has had its share of high-performance variants, but the completely over-the-top SL65 AMG Black Series stands far above them all. Arriving in the waning days of the R230 generation, the SL65 AMG Black Series followed the barely streetable CLK63 Black Series as a one-year-only offering for the 2009 model year. Just 350 were built, with half of those sent to the United States, so opportunities to buy this ultimate SL don’t come along very often. That’s evident by the bidding on this 2009 SL65 AMG Black Series currently on Bring a Trailer, which has already soared past the totals realized in the site’s previous auctions of this model. And there are still several days to go.

Bring a Trailer

The Black Series was far more than just a flourish on the already bonkers twin-turbocharged V-12 SL65. The Black Series had a custom body with hugely flared fenders and composed largely of carbon fiber. It also ditched the standard SL’s retractable hard top in favor of a fixed roof, and a massive rear wing sprouted from the decklid. Of course, there were mechanical upgrades. Bigger turbos and better breathing upped the output of the 6.0-liter V-12 from 604 to 661 horsepower along with 738 pound-feet of torque. The engine was mated to a modified five-speed automatic transmission with an additional manual mode and rev matching, and the chassis was similarly upgraded.

Bring a Trailer

Bring a Trailer

In a 2009 Car and Driver comparison test against a Lamborghini Murciélago LP640, a Dodge Viper SRT10, and a Chevrolet Corvette ZR1, we called the Black Series “wickedly fast” and likened its midrange acceleration to “a religious experience” (nonetheless, the ZR1 won). This example, with 11,000 miles, is being sold on behalf of the original owner’s widow and comes with service records from new. Previous BaT sales of SL65 AMG Black Series cars have all been under $200,000. An 8000-mile example sold for $174,000 in May 2020, a 10,000-mile car sold for $185,000 in April 2020, and a 13,000-mile car was a no sale at $162,000. At this writing, bidding has just crested the $250,000 mark. Still, at the current bid, the car still could be considered a bargain. After all, the model was $304,350 new.

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We know that prices for renting a car have gone up—way up—during the pandemic, but even with the numbers declining a bit in September, most analysts think they will go back up for the holidays.Some experts think things will calm down in 2022, but others don’t see prices getting back to normal until 2023. “By February and March next year, all bets are off,” one expert told the South Florida Sun Sentinel.There are many problems causing the higher prices, including a lack of new-vehicle production (chip shortage) and a large vehicle sell-off early in the pandemic. Solutions that rental-car companies are taking include keeping their fleet for longer than they used to and trying to move cars around the country so they are available where people want to rent them.Anyone who’s tried to rent a car in the last year or so likely discovered that prices were not what they once were, reaching many hundreds of dollars a day in some areas. Earlier this year, some tourists in Hawaii discovered the joy of saving money by renting a U-Haul truck instead of a standard rental car, for example. As travel starts to pick up again despite COVID’s reach, more people might have to figure out similar alternative rental methods until at least next year.While the costs to rent a car today aren’t quite as high as they were earlier in the year, experts are offering different predictions for when the rental scene in the U.S. will get back to something more normal. Some say it will be at least 2022 before prices come down. Others predict a new spike coming this holiday season, including a spokesperson for Enterprise Holdings, according to the Washington Post. And one told the paper that he doesn’t see things really getting back to normal until 2023. “We’re kind of in a shoulder season with people going back to school and work after Labor Day, but prices are going to spike back up again in Florida as Thanksgiving and Christmas approaches,” the CEO of rental-car price tracker AutoSlash.com, Jonathan Weinberg, told the South Florida Sun Sentinel. “By February and March next year, all bets are off.”The problem, unsurprisingly, is a lack of rental cars. As we’ve written before, rental-car agencies sold off their excess vehicles during the early days of the pandemic and were caught off guard when demand returned sooner than expected. Now, with the chip shortage and other supply chain issues hampering production of new vehicles, these rental companies are unable to beef up their fleets. Instead, rental companies are changing their policies to keep their cars longer before they cycle them out of the system. Vehicles are being moved away from locations that used to cater to business travel—which is returning, but still not as high as before the pandemic—and into southern vacation hot spots. Also, instead of a 25,000- or 50,000-mile cutoff, some are letting the cars they have reach 90,000 miles on the odometer. Some are also buying used cars at auction to make up for the new vehicles they can’t buy. The Post reports that U.S. car rental companies only purchased around 800,000 new cars in 2020, compared to more than double that amount in 2019. Which all comes together to suggest that rental-car prices will continue to be higher than expected for a while. We may not know exactly for how long, but Yahoo News, citing the online rental company Kayak, said searches for rental cars for the upcoming holiday season are up 230 percent compared to 2019.
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McLaren has submitted trademark applications for three new names with the U.K’s Intellectual Property Office, as first reported by Carbuzz.The three names are Solus, Aeron, and Aonic, and all have been filed in the Motor Vehicles category.These new names could end up being used for the successor to the 720S and McLaren’s future electrified supercars.Since McLaren Automotive started building road cars in 2011, most of its supercars have been given complex alphanumeric names. The first modern McLaren Automotive supercar was the MP4-12C, with that mouthful shortened to 12C after a year. The 12C was followed by a slew of supercars with hard-to-remember monikers, such as the 650S, 570GT, 765LT, and 620R. But recently McLaren has started using real names such as Senna, Elva, Speedtail, and Artura. Now it appears that McLaren is ditching the alphabet-soup names for good, with the British supercar firm submitting trademark applications for three new names with the United Kingdom’s Intellectual Property Office, as first reported by Carbuzz.

The three names McLaren is seeking to protect are Solus, Aeron, and Aonic. All three trademark applications have been filed under Class 12, which is for “motor land vehicles and parts and fittings therefor.” There are no other details in the applications to indicate what sort of vehicles these names might belong to, but they are likely to be for all-new models unrelated to McLaren’s current offerings, although they could be used on a special edition like the Senna-based Sabre. McLaren has said in the past that it will not enter the lucrative super-SUV segment as Lamborghini, Aston Martin, and Ferrari have done, and any other four-door body style is also likely out of the question. The 720S has been on sale since 2017 and could be due for a replacement soon, and at least one of these nameplates could end up on a hybrid or fully electric supercar. Solus, a term often used in stage directions, comes from Latin and means alone or by oneself, and it could perhaps end up on a hard-core single-seater in the same vein as the Ferrari Monza SP1.
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At the annual Tesla shareholder meeting on Thursday, October 7, CEO Elon Musk confirmed that Tesla will move its headquarters to Austin, becoming the latest Silicon Valley company to make the switch to Texas.Musk did not reveal when the move would happen and emphasized that Tesla will not be abandoning California, with production at the Fremont factory set to increase by 50 percent.Musk pointed to the Bay Area’s high cost of living to justify the move, arguing that many employees struggled to afford houses and ended up with lengthy commutes.UPDATE 10/8/21, 4:10 p.m.: At the same shareholder conference, Tesla provided revised launch dates for upcoming models. The Cybertruck was supposed to start production this year but it has been pushed back to 2022 with volume production taking off in 2023. The Semi, originally planned to launch in 2020, has been delayed to 2023, as has the Roadster that was first unveiled in 2017. Yesterday, at Tesla’s 2021 shareholder meeting, CEO Elon Musk announced that Tesla will officially move it headquarters to Austin, Texas. Tesla joins a number of Silicon Valley tech firms, including Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Oracle, that are shifting their main bases to Texas, enticed by the state’s low tax rates and business-friendly policies. Musk did not specify when the move would occur or where in Austin the new headquarters would be, although it is safe to assume that it will be based near the Gigafactory site that is set to be the main factory for the upcoming Cybertruck and Tesla Semi.

This official announcement was not the first time Musk had suggested a move to Texas. During the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic last year, the CEO threatened to leave California after the state’s strict pandemic restrictions made it difficult to restart production. Tesla then began contraction on the Austin Gigafactory, and soon afterward Musk himself moved to the Lone Star State. Now Tesla’s central office will follow suit, but Musk made it clear that Tesla would not fully abandon California. At the shareholder meeting, Musk said that Tesla would expand in California, aiming to boost production at the Fremont plant by 50 percent. Unlike when he threatened to leave last year, Musk did not cite any political or pandemic-related disagreements with California when he announced the move to Texas. Instead, he pointed to the cost of living in the Bay Area, arguing, “It’s tough for people to afford houses, and a lot of people have to come from far away.” Musk believes that the business and living conditions in Texas will allow the company to become more productive. The new headquarters will include an “ecological paradise,” with the Gigafactory built alongside the Colorado River and Musk planning to create a boardwalk and hiking trail that will be open to the public.
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