We obsessively cover the auto industry…

Earlier this year we had the pleasure of sharing with you a short film called Urban Outlaw, which detailed some of the life and cars of iconoclastic Porschephile Magnus Walker. The original three-minute film, by director Tamir Moscovici, was impeccably shot and well worth your time if you are even the slightest bit interested in old 911s.

The small project gained enough momentum to turn in to a larger one, it seems, and Moscovici's short video has now given life to a 30-minute film. The fuller version of Urban Outlaw debuted at the Raindance Film Festival in London, and is now available to watch from the comfort of your own computer. Sit back, grab your Porsche hat, dim the lights and enjoy the complete story by scrolling down below.

The 15th running of Petit Le Mans at Road Atlanta is slated for this weekend, and there promises to be plenty of exciting racing in the last event of the American Le Mans Series. Despite being dropped from the World Endurance Championship in favor of the 6 Hours of Bahrain, the field of cars remains bountiful thanks to the European Le Mans Series joining in and making the 10-hour endurance race its series finale as well.

To set the starting order for tomorrow's race, each of the teams ran a 15 minute qualifying session this afternoon split up by class.

In P1 the Rebellion Racing Lola-Toyota qualified on pole, just ahead of the Muscle Milk Racing HPD ARX-03a that has dominated the class in ALMS this year. Rebillion Racing finished 5th in last year's event and are looking to add a victory at Petit Le Mans to their extensive list of wins already achieved this year.

In the hotly contested GT class it was a pair of Extreme Speed Ferrari 458 Italias leading the way in a 1-2, followed by BMW and Corvette. The SRT Viper team, constantly improving since their debut at Mid-Ohio, qualified in 6th and 10th.

After being extensively repaired from Wednesday's crash, the Nissan DeltaWing posted a qualifying time on par with the P2 class, netting a fast lap of 1:12.850, eight-tenths off the quickest P2 car.

Check out the complete list of qualifying times here (PDF), and check out our photos from the practice and qualifying sessions in the gallery above.

Ed Church bought his first motorcycle, a 1958 Harley-Davidson, when he was a sophomore in high school. He rode it and learned to dearly love it over the next 13 years, and then sold it when his daughter was born. Like many of us who've been in the same position, Church regretted the decision he made to sell the bike, practical though it may have been, and spent many years wondering what he'd do if he could only find it again.

This eBay video (part of its new eBay Thanks You series) may be just a tiny bit over-the-top in its tenderly scored and sepia-toned scenes, but it still tells a pretty great story. Motoring enthusiasts and romantics alike, be warned, the video below may jerk a tear or two.

We've heard the Toyota Prius jokingly called the State Bird of California, but recent sales data shows that the world's most popular hybrid is, in fact, the best-selling car in the state. Well, the best-selling vehicle line, at least, since the Prius now comes in four variants.

If you add up sales of the Prius Liftback (aka, the regular Prius), the C, V and Plug-In models, you get 46,380 units for the first three quarters of 2012, according to numbers from the California New Car Dealers Association and reported by Bloomberg. That's enough to move the Prius from fourth place last year to first this year in the sales rankings in America's most populous state. In fact, roughly a quarter of the Priuses that Toyota sold in the US were in California. Reports of $5 gallons of gas are relatively recent, but we have to assume that the state's long-time high gas prices are playing a role in pushing the Prius to the pinnacle there. Nationwide, Bloomberg says, the Prius is in seventh place ("by sales volume among car models").

The Prius is already the best-selling car in Japan, and has been for years, even though the Honda Fit has been nipping at its heals. Worldwide, the Prius family was the third best-selling nameplate in the first quarter of 2012, behind the Toyota Corolla and the Ford Focus.

Sorry, we had to. How many times can you reference Creedence Clearwater Revival in a story about a Volkswagen? For some Fortunate Son or daughter looking to get behind the wheel of the 2013 Volkswagen CC R-Line, we now know how much you'll have to pay the Penthouse Pauper. (Hey, we could do this all day).

MSRP for the R-Line edition of the Volkswagen CC is set at $32,195, not including a destination charge of $795. For that, buyers get unique R-Line visuals including a more sporting grille, projector-style fog lights, along with revised lower front fascia and side skirts. The R-Line also receives 18-inch aluminum alloy wheels, while the cabin is fitted with a navigation system and steering wheel mounted paddle shifters augmenting the DSG dual-clutch transmission.

The CC R-Line debuted at Germany's Auto Mobil International show, and it comes equipped with a 2.0-liter turbocharged inline four sending power to the front wheels. In addition to the DSG, a six-speed manual gearbox is available. The rest of the features list is essentially that of the CC's Sport Plus trim.

You can expect to see the CC R-Line Up Around the Bend or Down On the Corner at your local Volkswagen dealer in the near future (okay, enough) or you can check out our gallery and the official press release below.

Lincoln showed off its new design center Thursday, the first dedicated studio for the luxury brand since the 1970s.

Company officials say the new studio will let designers focus just on the Lincoln brand – which is in the early stages of a badly needed rebirth – instead of splitting their time between Ford and Lincoln models.

In the new space, Lincoln designers can focus on one thing: Making the brand something customers want to buy again. "We're trying to bring the best talent in the company together in order to move this brand forward," says J Mays, head of Ford's global design.

The new Lincoln design studio is located inside Ford's existing Dearborn, Michigan product development center, where about 150 designers, sculptors, math sculptors (folks who can translate computer designs into clay), and modelers will work to bring future Lincoln designs to life.

The designers utilize computer-assisted design software to help translate sketches into clay models. The computer designs are then fed to a Tarus milling machine, which scrapes and drills clay models until they look like a real car. Then, clay modelers use traditional hand tools to perfect the pieces, which can be changed on a moment's notice.

Lincoln isn't saying how much the 40,000-square-foot space cost, but officials note the studio has been styled to look like a loft apartment, with open spaces designed to let artists and engineers pop in on each other and foster conversation. It was designed by a company named Imagine, but Lincoln's head designer, Max Wolff had a lot of influence in the space – particularly pushing the openness concept to make the cubicle areas seem like a newsroom.

The radically new 2013 Lincoln MKZ goes on sale later this year and the automaker is poised to show two new models in the coming months.

"Our ambition is not to be No. 1," said Jim Farley, head of global sales and marketing. "We'd rather have a few people love us than everybody like us."

Formula One's inaugural Grand Prix of America, not to be confused with the US Grand Prix slated for mid-November in Austin, TX, has been postponed until the 2014 F1 season. F1 head honcho Bernie Ecclestone has reported that the event, previously expected to take place in Weehawkin, New Jersey in 2013, has now been pushed back by a year.

The Associated Press is reporting Ecclestone as having said, "Everything is set up but now it's too late to finish on time." The New Jersey race had tentatively been scheduled for June 16 of next year.

Reasons for pushing back the race seem to lie in the slow arrival of some funding, and/or road repair and permitting issues. The Jersey Journal reported that organizers fell behind on said logistics, while Ecclestone mentioned, "They got all the permissions together. Everything was done, that was all fine, but then they missed the boat a little on some financing that was coming in." Of course, the very existence of this race has been a contentious issue for some time.

Don't look now, but snow season is rapidly approaching, and what better car to clear snow from a driveway than a... mint E30 BMW 3 Series Convertible. While most plow vehicles are big, heavy-duty trucks, Nordic Auto Plow didn't want the rest of us to be left out in the cold, so the Chicago-based company developed a plastic, light-duty plow that can attach to almost anything – including a car, an ATV or even a riding lawn mower. Now, this isn't the first time we've seen a product like this before, but the fact that the company turned the Ultimate Driving Machine into the Ultimate Plowing Machine definitely grabbed our attention.

This plastic, modular blade hooks to the front or rear of just about any vehicle using a pair of straps and a pair of bungee cords, and since it only rests against the car's bumper rather than actually being attached to it, we imagine it would be pretty hard to cause any frame damage. On most cars with plastic fascias, there will most certainly be paint damage, though.

Still, weighing under 50 pounds, taking less than a minute to install, costing less than $700 and being able to remove snow from the heated comfort of your car, this would probably be a time-saving, cost-effective alternative to a snow blower when clearing a driveway or small parking lot as shown in the videos below. Now all you need is a Mr. Plow jacket.

A lot of speculation has been made with regards to the SS, the promised new Chevrolet rear-wheel drive performance sedan. The Holden Commodore-based muscle saloon will be prowling the open road as early as next year, while a NASCAR version is set to compete in 2013. Shots of the cars testing in their respective natural habitats have led to endless speculation, and it appears we now know which car will debut first.

Word from Speed is that the 2013 Chevrolet SS NASCAR Sprint Cup car is set to bow on Thursday, November 29 at the Wynn Las Vegas hotel and casino. The car will reportedly be shown in full race trim, sans sponsor graphics for Bounty, Skoal or Taylor Swift.

The Vegas debut will mark the introduction of the final vehicle to enter in the 2013 NASCAR season. Dodge unveiled its Charger racecar in March before leaving the race series. Toyota showed off its V8, RWD Camry NASCAR in May, while Ford debuted its race-spec Fusion in January of this year. The remaining entries are expected to (visually) bear a closer resemblance to their road-going counterparts.

While the SS racecar is debuting next month in Vegas, no mention of the production version SS was made. We are still under the impression that February 21, 2013 will still be the launch date for the road-going version of the rear-wheel drive Holden-based sedan that has GM enthusiasts so worked up.

The next-generation Mazda3 is expected next year, but aside from renderings and our own imagination about a compact economy car sporting Mazda's new Kodo design language, we really have no clue what this design will actually look like. Auto Express has gotten a hold of some shots it believes are official digital images from Mazda that could be a very good indication of what the Japanese automaker has in store for its top-selling car, but it's important to note the images could also be of an upcoming concept vehicle or just a design proposal.

Production or not, these renderings show the possibility for the 2014 Mazda3 that finds itself competing in a much more interesting class of cars than what was available back in 2009. The image of the Mazda3 5-door hatchback design shows a sloped rear D-pillar that gives it a strong family kinship with the new CX-5 and Mazda2, while the sedan has a sleek and sporty roofline along the lines of what we've recently seen on the new Mazda6.

We reached out to Mazda for comment on these images, and Jeremy Barnes, Mazda's director of public relations, had this to say: "Any speculation about a next-generation Mazda3 is just that – speculation. And, as a policy, we do not comment on future product speculation."

Diumar Bueno is definitely a lucky man. During practice for the Brazilian Formula Truck Series at the Autódromo Internacional de Guaporé, Beuno's Volvo race truck lost its brakes at around 118 miles per hour, forcing him to veer off the course and causing a spectacular, scary crash.

Coming out of the longest straight of the 1.9-mile, nine-turn course and realizing he had no brakes, Bueno turned into the grass infield hoping to get the truck slowed down before hitting the wall. Instead, his truck maintained its speed, got airborne when crossing over the racing surface and the crashed through the wall at full speed sending him into a 50-foot drop off.

Although his truck was completely destroyed, Beuno survived the incident suffering only two broken legs, a broken arm and a cut tongue, but according to an article on band.com.br, it will be about six months before the racer will be able to walk. While his injuries are certainly not enviable, the safety of these race-modified semi trucks is apparent after watching the video of the horrific crash, which we have posted below.

Meeting Bentley's 205-MPH Prince On The Autobahn



I'm travelling at the approximate speed of privilege. With the aluminum accelerator of the 2013 Bentley Continental GT Speed buried to its neck in the high-pile carpet of the floorboard, the 6.0-liter twin-turbocharged W12 underhood is at full boast. The 616 furious British horses pumping under that long, proud prow set the German countryside to frappé with breathless ease, and with the sprawling sheetmetal of the coupe settled comfortably onto its haunches in eager anticipation of ever more thrust, it's clear this machine is content to consume endless kilometers of Autobahn in wide-mouthed gulps. There's an open lane of unrestricted tarmac unraveling before me, and I'm keen to oblige every thread of temptation singing in my chest. The speedometer has just clicked past 165 mph.

At this clip, the new crown jewel of the Bentley war chest is covering land at the rate of nearly one football field per second. The white lines on the road are beginning to fade into a solid stream, and I'm suddenly aware of the increasingly rapid heartbeat whispering the truth of my mortality in my ears. There's no looking anywhere other than as far to the horizon as possible, but even with my eyes set to long-range scan, it's clear that if something goes wrong at this velocity, they'll be burying an empty box in the hills of Tennessee. That little bit of trivia makes it all the more disconcerting when an ambling Volkswagen Jetta strays into my lane for no other reason than to take in the glorious sight of me manufacturing a stack of bricks in the quilted-leather driver's seat of someone else's $228,600 supercar.

Small seems to be the big new trend among automakers, and Mazda is trying to decide if it wants a piece of the potentially huge tiny-car pie.

The Mazda1 would slot beneath the company's B-segment Mazda2, says Mazda's GM of global sales and marketing, Yasuhiro Aoyama, and could might be ready for sale toward the end of this decade.

Aoyama was interviewed by GoAuto at this week's Australian International Motor Show in Sydney.

Rumors indicate Mazda could go one of two ways with the little car. It could either shoot for low cost and compete with cars like the Tata Nano or Mazda could instead take on Volkswagen's Up at a higher price point. Aoyama admits the company will eventually have to address the city car market to meet new European emissions regulations.

A Nano competitor would give Mazda a low-cost presence in the ever-growing southeast Asia market.

Either plan would be easier to implement with a partner or government incentives, and Mazda has several options there. Mazda1 production costs could be lowered by building the car in a country with lower labor rates – Indonesia perhaps. Or Mazda could leverage its long-running relationship with Ford or its newly-formed partnership with FIAT to co-develop a sub-B-class competitor.

With sales of the Mazda2 not exactly huge, chances for a Mazda1 on sale here are, well, tiny.