October
1


Lamborghini’s slow striptease of the four-door it’s bringing to the Paris Motor Show continues with another close-up of the Estoque, but a leaked concept drawing provides the full monty of a car that continues Sant’Agata’s tradition of drawing inspiration from bull fighting when naming its most lust-inducing hardware.
An estoque is the sword used to kill the bull, and it is closely related to espada, which is both a sword and the two-door, four-seater Lamborghini built between 1968 and 1978. After decades spent building mid-engined two-seaters like the Countach and Murcielago, Lamborghini is building a four-door coupe to compete against the Porsche Panamera, Aston Martin Rapide and Audi A7.
The word from Europe is the Estoque will be a sharp weapon indeed, and the leaked sketches shown below reveal a car inspired by the angular lines of the Reventon.
Lamborghini’s been tight-lipped, offering nothing more than four detail shots accompanied by quips like “It’s not just a new Lamborghini. It’s a whole new world.” But the Estoque will have the engine mounted just behind the front axle and it will drive all four wheels, just like the Gallardo and Murcielago. Automotive News Europe cites unnamed sources (free subscription required) saying the engine may be a bit smaller than the 5.0-liter V10 in the Gallardo, which would allow the Estoque to be relatively short, and it could have direct injection and twin turbos.
What’s more, the Estoque may be an all-aluminum vehicle based on the Audi A7 platform. The car we’ll see in Paris is a “near-production” concept, and Lamborghini plans to produce about 3,000 of them each year — the same volume planned for the Rapide but far fewer than the 20,000 Panameras and 30,000 A7s slated by Porsche and Audi.
Here’s the concept drawings showing what appears to be the Estoque:

And here are the pictures Lamborghini’s provided so far:



Photos by Lamborghini.

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July
31


Panasonic today announced the company’s plan to construct a new flagship lithium-ion battery plant in Osaka City. With two other existing manufacturing bases in Osaka Prefecture and Wakayama Prefecture, Panasonic will integrate the new plant to reinforce the production of rechargeable batteries in Japan. The new plant will be the main manufacturing site, employing an integrated manufacturing system controlling everything from electrode production, cell assembly and charge-discharge testing to packaging and shipping. Especially, the electrode production facilities will ensure the safety of lithium-ion battery products as well as a safe manufacturing process.

The new plant will be strategically located in Osaka City to provide logistical advantages when working with its other plants in Osaka and Wakayama Prefectures. Making MBI one of the world’s top manufacturers of lithium-ion batteries, the plant will help to accelerate the company’s growth strategy to meet market needs and take advantage of its technological prowess in manufacturing safe batteries with high energy capacity. The factory aims to reduce CO2 emissions by 30% based on the basic unit from the level of fiscal year 2009 ending March 2009.

Osaka, Japan - Matsushita Battery Industrial Co., Ltd. (MBI), a consolidated subsidiary of Matsushita Electric Industry Co., Ltd. (MEI [NYSE symbol: MC]) known for its Panasonic brand products, today announced the company’s plan to construct a new flagship lithium-ion battery plant in Osaka City. With two other existing manufacturing bases in Osaka Prefecture and Wakayama Prefecture, MBI will integrate the new plant to reinforce the production of rechargeable batteries in Japan.

The new plant will be the main manufacturing site, employing an integrated manufacturing system controlling everything from electrode production, cell assembly and charge-discharge testing to packaging and shipping. Especially, the electrode production facilities will ensure the safety of lithium-ion battery products as well as a safe manufacturing process. The plant will be strategically located in Osaka City to provide logistical advantages when working with its other plants in Osaka and Wakayama Prefectures.

MBI will invest about 100 billion yen in the new plant, which will be built in two phases. The first phase construction will begin in December 2008 with the aim of commencing electrode production in October 2009 and battery cell production in April 2010 with a capacity of 300 million battery cells. When the second phase construction is completed, the new plant will have a total production capacity of about 600 million lithium-ion battery cells per year (50 million cells per month).

In addition, the company plans to invest about 23 billion yen to improve the productivity of the existing two plants. With a total investment of 123 billion yen in these domestic plants, the company aims to firmly establish a global manufacturing system that can satisfy the growing and diversifying global market needs. This requires the cooperating of domestic plants with the overseas plant in Wuxi, China, capable of producing batteries in various varieties and volumes.

Demand for environmentally-friendly, rechargeable batteries shows notable increases not only in major markets like Europe, the U.S. and Japan, but also in emerging markets like BRIC countries, as demand for mobile devices like laptop PCs and cell phones are on the rise.

Making MBI one of the world’s top manufacturers of lithium-ion batteries, the plant will help to accelerate the company’s growth strategy to meet market needs and take advantage of its technological prowess in manufacturing safe batteries with high energy capacity.

The company aims to build a safe, secure and environmentally-friendly factory by implementing a safe manufacturing environment and maintaining high energy efficiency. The factory aims to reduce CO2 emissions by 30% based on the basic unit* from the level of fiscal year 2009 ending March 2009.

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July
30


Nvidia today announced the immediate availability of three new desktop GeForce 9 Series graphics processing units (GPUs) that bring support for NVIDIA PhysX technology and CUDA general-purpose parallel computing to mainstream PC computing markets. Nvidia GPUs are the only ones to support PhysX technology, the world’s most pervasive physics development platform that is already delivering dynamic 3D realism to more than 140 games across multiple platforms and is in use by more than 25,000 developers worldwide.

The new GeForce 9800 GTX+, 9800 GT, and the 9500 GT GPUs deliver exceptional graphics quality, performance, and application compatibility, along with support for NVIDIA SLI technology. Graphics cards featuring the new GeForce 9 Series GPUs are available now from global leading add-in card manufacturers.

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