Category Archives: News

News

Toyota Century Coupe Could Revive the V-12

Toyota has never been a company that chases headlines for the sake of it. But the Century Coupe—first seen as a blazing-orange concept and now reportedly headed for production—looks like a deliberate attempt to do something un-Toyota: shock the luxury world awake. And if the latest whispers out of Japan are true, it might do so with the most outrageous powertrain Toyota has ever put into a road car.

Forget the sensible 4.0-liter twin-turbo V-8 that underpins the GR GT. The Century Coupe is rumored to arrive with a twin-turbo 6.0-liter V-12 paired with plug-in-hybrid assistance, good for more than 800 horsepower. Yes, a Toyota with a V-12 in the 2020s. That sentence alone feels like it was smuggled in from an alternate timeline.

For a brand that just spun the Century nameplate into a standalone ultra-luxury marque, the move actually makes a twisted kind of sense. Century isn’t Lexus-plus. It’s Toyota’s answer to Rolls-Royce: understated, obsessively engineered, and designed to be bought by people who never talk about what they drive. A twelve-cylinder halo car is exactly the kind of statement that tells the world this isn’t just another fancy Camry.

A V-12, but Whose?

What’s still a mystery is where this V-12 would come from. Toyota hasn’t built one since the Century sedan quietly retired its own in-house twelve-cylinder in favor of a hybrid V-8 in 2018. That old engine made a modest 425 horsepower—not exactly the stuff of hypercar legend.

One theory floating around Japanese outlet Mag X is that Toyota could Frankenstein together two of BMW’s turbocharged 3.0-liter inline-sixes—the same basic architecture used in the outgoing Supra. On paper, that gets you a neat, modern 6.0-liter V-12 without starting from scratch. In reality, it sounds like a branding nightmare. Century is supposed to be Toyota’s purest expression of itself, not a luxury coupe with Bavarian DNA hiding under the hood.

More likely, Toyota will do what it always does at the top of its game: quietly spend a fortune developing something bespoke, over-engineered, and built to last far longer than anyone expects.

Luxury With a Launch Control

To keep all that power from going up in smoke, the Century Coupe is expected to come standard with Toyota’s E-Four all-wheel-drive system. Gearbox choices are rumored to include either an eight-speed or a ten-speed automatic—both very Toyota solutions, focused less on drama and more on smooth, unflappable torque delivery.

The production car should stay visually close to the concept, though some of the weirder elements are likely to disappear. Those chunky black wheel arches and the SUV-like ride height felt more like a design team flex than a coherent statement. Expect something sleeker, lower, and more fitting for a six-figure grand tourer.

Inside, things should become more conventional, too. The concept’s two-seat layout—with the lone rear passenger riding behind the front passenger in chauffeur-spec comfort—was amusing but wildly impractical. A proper four-seat layout makes far more sense, especially if Toyota wants this thing to actually get driven.

Bentley Money, Toyota Promises

The price? Start mentally north of $200,000 and work your way up. Reports suggest Japanese pricing between 30 and 70 million yen, which puts the Century Coupe squarely in Bentley Continental GT and Rolls-Royce Wraith territory.

That’s bold, but Toyota isn’t trying to out-plush Bentley. Its pitch is different: combine that level of exclusivity and performance with something those brands don’t usually brag about—bulletproof reliability. If Toyota really can build an 800-plus-horsepower hybrid V-12 coupe that doesn’t need a specialist on speed dial, that could be the Century’s real party trick.

The production Century Coupe is expected to arrive in 2027, timed to celebrate the model’s 60th anniversary and the full launch of Century as its own brand. And while nothing is official, it’s hard to imagine Toyota spending this kind of money just to keep it a Japan-only curiosity.

If it does come to North America, the Century Coupe won’t just be another ultra-luxury import. It’ll be a philosophical grenade lobbed into a segment dominated by European excess: a quiet, terrifyingly powerful reminder that Toyota, when it wants to, can build absolutely anything.

Source: Toyota

News

The Mercedes-Benz Museum Is Winning the Car-Culture Game

By any reasonable metric, the Mercedes-Benz Museum should already be a victory lap. The Stuttgart shrine to three-pointed-star history opened in 2006, has welcomed more than 14 million visitors, and has become one of Europe’s must-see automotive destinations. Yet in 2025 it somehow managed to outdo itself—again.

Last year, the museum pulled in 945,716 visitors, smashing its own 2024 record by more than 63,000 people, a healthy 7-percent jump in a year when plenty of cultural institutions are still fighting to recover their footing. Even more telling is where those visitors came from: 55 percent were international, nearly back to pre-pandemic levels, with the largest crowds arriving from China, France, and the United States. In other words, this wasn’t just a local win—it was a global one.

So what’s driving the surge? Part of it is the museum’s knack for tapping into the emotional sweet spot of car culture. The “Youngtimer” special exhibition, now running through May 31, 2026, has proven to be a magnet. Instead of leaning only on the usual 300SLs and Silver Arrows, it shines a spotlight on Mercedes icons from the 1990s and 2000s—the era many current enthusiasts grew up with. Think W124s, early AMGs, and the cars that bridged the analog and digital worlds. For a generation that remembers these machines as posters on bedroom walls rather than artifacts behind velvet ropes, that’s powerful nostalgia.

Then there’s Classics & Coffee, the museum’s open-brand meet on the hill outside. By expanding themes and offerings in 2025, Mercedes turned what could have been a niche gathering into a genuine social hub for enthusiasts of all stripes. It’s a reminder that the best car museums aren’t just about looking—they’re about showing up, talking shop, and hearing an old straight-six fire up next to a stranger’s espresso.

According to Bettina Haussmann, Director of the Mercedes-Benz Museum, 2025 was only the warm-up. “2026 is the year of anniversaries for us,” she says, and the calendar backs her up. It started with a world premiere of the new S-Class on January 29, marking 140 years since Carl Benz filed his patent. On May 19, the museum celebrates its 20th anniversary, and in June it will open a special exhibition covering 130 years of Mercedes-Benz commercial vehicles, complete with rarely seen vans and trucks.

That’s a lot of candles on the cake—but also a lot of reasons to keep coming back. For a brand that built its reputation on engineering rigor and historical continuity, the Mercedes-Benz Museum has become more than a trophy room. It’s a living, evolving narrative of how cars shaped—and continue to shape—the world. Judging by nearly a million visitors in 2025, people aren’t just reading that story. They’re lining up to be part of it.

Source: Mercedes-Benz

News

Tesla’s Most Ironic Supercharger Yet

By any normal definition of irony, a Tesla Supercharger powered by diesel generators should not exist in 2026. And yet here we are, standing in the snowy Swedish mountain town of Vansbro, watching electric cars quietly refill their batteries from a bank of lithium cells that were, moments earlier, topped up by the gentle clatter of combustion engines. Welcome to the strangest Tesla charging station ever built.

For years, photos of EVs plugged into diesel generators have floated around the internet, usually as relics of the awkward early days of electrification or as gotcha memes aimed at climate-conscious drivers. Tesla’s new Supercharger in the Dalarna region is something else entirely: a deliberately engineered, semi-off-grid, diesel-fed charging outpost, installed not because it made sense—but because Tesla had no other choice.

A Supercharger by force, not by cable

Vansbro sits on the road to some of Sweden’s most popular winter tourist destinations, the kind of place where range anxiety becomes real when temperatures drop and mountain passes loom ahead. Tesla wanted a Supercharger here as a last safe haven before drivers head into the highlands. Normally, that would mean connecting a few cabinets to the local electrical grid and calling it a day.

But Tesla isn’t operating under normal circumstances in Sweden.

For nearly two years, the company has been locked in a bitter standoff with IF Metall, Sweden’s powerful metalworkers’ union. Tesla refuses to sign collective bargaining agreements for its service and sales employees, insisting on individual contracts instead. That position puts Tesla alone among major employers in Sweden, a country where collective agreements are the bedrock of labor relations. While Tesla has accepted such arrangements elsewhere in Europe, it has dug in its heels here—and triggered a uniquely Scandinavian response.

The quiet power of organized refusal

Under Swedish law, unions are allowed to support one another through so-called solidarity actions. In practice, that has turned Tesla’s Swedish operations into a game of corporate whack-a-mole.

Postal workers stopped delivering license plates for Tesla vehicles. Tesla tried to bypass them by sending lawyers to request the plates, only for the postal service to recognize and block those requests as well. Eventually, Tesla employees resorted to having plates sent to their private homes and even to the addresses of relatives, a logistical workaround that felt more like espionage than car sales.

Then came the electricians. Unionized electrical workers refused to connect new Tesla Superchargers to the grid. That was already causing headaches last winter, slowing Tesla’s network expansion across the country. Vansbro, it seems, was the point where Tesla decided to stop asking and start improvising.

Battery buffers and diesel backup

Since the Supercharger couldn’t get a permit to hook into the grid, Tesla installed a large on-site battery pack instead—essentially a miniature power plant. The chargers draw energy from that battery, just as they would from the grid. The only problem? Batteries don’t make electricity. They just store it.

So Tesla parked diesel generators next to them.

When the station’s batteries run low, the generators automatically kick in, charging the battery bank. That energy then flows, via the usual sleek white Supercharger posts, into Model Ys, Model 3s, and the occasional Cybertruck on winter holiday duty. From the driver’s seat, nothing looks unusual. Behind the scenes, however, electrons are being born in a very un-Tesla way.

It’s a technological Rube Goldberg machine: diesel fuel to generator, generator to battery, battery to car. Efficient? Not particularly. Effective? Apparently yes.

The green asterisk

Tesla is keenly aware of how bad this looks. To soften the optics, the company points out that the generators run on HVO—hydrotreated vegetable oil. Chemically similar to diesel, HVO is produced from plant-based raw materials and waste fats. Because the plants used to make it absorb CO₂ as they grow, the lifecycle emissions are theoretically lower than those of fossil diesel.

That may be true on paper, but the sight of generators humming away beside a Supercharger still feels like something from an Onion headline.

Tesla insists the Vansbro station is only a seasonal installation, designed to handle the winter tourist rush. The generators, it says, are a temporary measure until a proper grid connection can be arranged. When—or if—that happens will depend less on engineering and more on labor politics.

A very 2026 kind of contradiction

The Vansbro Supercharger isn’t just a quirky footnote in EV history. It’s a reminder that the clean-energy transition doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It runs through labor laws, social contracts, and sometimes through diesel engines parked in the snow.

In an era when electric cars are supposed to represent a clean break from the past, Tesla’s Swedish outpost feels like a surreal compromise with it. You plug in, you charge, you drive away emissions-free—never mind the generators quietly working in the background, burning fuel so your car doesn’t have to.

Only in 2026 could the future of electric mobility depend on a tank of vegetable-based diesel in the mountains of Sweden. And only Tesla could turn a labor dispute into a Supercharger that runs on irony as much as electricity.

Source: Tesla