The object of our unabated RideLust, the Audi R8 V10, is expected to be joined by a drop-top variant later this year in the form of the 2011 Audi R8 Spyder V10. Aside from the fact that it will blow the skin off your face, little is known about the turbocharged rag top or when it will finally grace us with its uncamouflaged presence. Sources hint that the Spyder V10 could make an appearance as early as September at the Frankfurt Motor Show, while others suggest a formal debut could be delayed until the NAIAS in January. So until we receive the official word from Herndon, we’ll just have to settle for this footage filmed of the Spyder tearing up the asphalt around the Nürburgring.

2009 Volkswagen Tiguan

No, not all crossovers are created equal. Some are more car than truck, and most are essentially more wagon than anything else. And then there’s the Tiguan which Volkswagen has taken great pains in trying to guarantee that it is more than just a miniature version of the Touraeg. Here are the results.

Winning Peugeot Race Car

After several years of clear dominance, Peugeot finally broke Audi’s grip in the top LMP1 Class at the 24 Hours of LeMans last weekend. This is not terribly surprising given Audi openly admitting a year ago that their R10 racecar was aging fast and without several durability issues, including a faulty headlight by the Peugeot 908 HDi FAP, Audi would have not won last year either. However, Audi had hoped that the new R15 they had unleashed for this year would be sufficient to keep Peugeot at bay. They were wrong.

It’s neat how once somebody somewhere does something really cool, everybody else starts doing it. Like how everybody ripped off Anvil after the Japan tour in the 1980s. Do we think about Anvil anymore? Not until that movie comes out at least.

The Audi R8 set a new industry standard for automotive design. And Idries Noah has whipped up an imaginary BMW competitor. Drawing inspiration from the Ferrari Dino, 250GTO, and BMW’s own M1, Noah’s burly coupe would pack a ferocious 540hp 5.0L V10 in its center and lay down the law in the Motherland.

Check the gallery for Hi-Res pictures

Image: Motor Authority

The gorgeous product of a seemingly odd union between Audi and Lamborghini just lost its top, and seems to have benefited from the change. Our colleagues over at the Motor Authority snagged some spy shots of the V10 R8 Spyder running wild on the Nurburgring, so make the jump to see more.

Which one would you rather see with a Turbo-Diesel powerplant?

am-biv-a-lence
-noun
1. Psychology. the coexistence within an individual of positive and negative feelings toward the same person, object, or action, simultaneously drawing him or her in opposite directions.

Lamborghini is taking its own steps to save the environment through the kissing of environmentalist-ass!

Like most companies, the Italian manufacturer finds itself under pressure to make-nice and reduce C02 emissions and increase the fuel-efficiency of their cars. Though Lamborghini is technically exempt from the harshest wave of Emission Laws in the European Union per a clause pertaining to “manufacturers of ’specialty’ vehicles (with fewer than 10,000 new cars made per year) who run their own production facilities and design centres, even though they are part of a group of associated producers,” Lamborghini nonetheless is doing their part to at least look like they care.

In a new press release, Lamborghini details their plans to clean-up their factories by attaching solar panels to the roofs of their plants, really a smart move considering factories make up the portly midsection of those Pollution Pie Charts.

But their plans involve the possibility of Lamborghini Hybrids as well.

New details have trickled out of Audi’s Eagle Nest about their new superwaffen S5 test mule utilizing a super-lightweight spaceframe. It is designed to test their new lightweight construction technology which could at some point be used in street cars. Right now Audi’s highly precise engineers are flogging the living crap out of it at the Nurburgring, and they like what they’re seeing so they decided to share. Here’s the skinny: 880 lbs. (yes, eight hundred and eighty pounds!) lighter than a normal S5, and packing fewer ponies from its turbo four than a normal V8 S5 (230 vs. 354 HP), the mule is lapping the ‘Ring a full eight seconds faster than its unmodified bretheren. That should also mean more fuel economy from the lighter car with the less thirsty turbo motor, but that’s just a guess. Click through for more.

Now that the calendar reads ‘2009′ and summer is upon us, we can already begin shutting the book on the first decade of the new millenia. All the cars that will be produced have either made it to dealerships or have half a dozen reviews already printed in some magazine collecting dust on your shelf.

This decade closes much like the 1960s, in an atmosphere of uproar and protest, with rumors of war and peace and revolution at hand. The auto industry has experienced a second Golden Age, bigger and grander than the first, and has again sunk into crisis, darker and dimmer than the one Baby Boomers remember. And enthusiasts young and old fear that a similar fate awaits them in the coming years with news of outrageously stringent CAFE standards, and fear-mongering legislators fuel anxieties that we’ve already seen the best cars of the next thirty some odd years.

So it is that we turn back to this decade already a bit nostalgic. Here lie the future legends, the autos of myth and lore. With the future unclear, we ask ourselves which cars made the glorious 2000’s the decade we will all miss more than we know?

Kristensen's A4 Race Car

Le Mans racing legend Tom Kristensen’s announced that his participation this season in the DTM touring-car championship will be his last.  The 8-time winner of Le Man’s decision to focus soley on sports-car racing can only spell trouble for the rest of the Le Mans competition. 

In these tough economic times, it seems that those of us who still lust after six-hundred horsepower blown modular V8’s (or perhaps, own them) are having to constantly defend our position against those who consider earth-saving power and your car’s cool factor to be an inverse ratio.

I didn’t live through the first car crisis of the 1970s, but so help me I’m not going to sit by while Prius-lovers start spreading that ancient lie: that it is un-American to have a nice car.

So, to aid in defending all of Cardom against our Mongol assailants drinking water from the tailpipes of their hydrogen cars, I propose the following thesis–