The final designs are in for a new museum dedicated to displaying vehicles and other artifacts from the James Bond film series. The Gensler-designed Museum of Bond Vehicles & Espionage is due to open in 2012 in Illinois. Momence, Illinois.

The small town (population 3,200) 50 miles south of Chicago is home to the Ian Fleming Foundation, a nonprofit group that owns 32 original Bond vehicles including a helicopter from You Only Live Twice, the Lotus submarine from The Spy Who Loved Me and even the oft-lamented Ford Mondeo from Casino Royale.

Those vehicles will all be on display in one place at a brand-new 14,000 square foot museum in time for the 50th anniversary of the first Bond film, Dr. No.

One marque that isn’t particularly well-represented in the collection is Aston Martin. Only one Aston belongs to the Foundation, the Volante from The Living Daylights. Still, if we were in Chicago we’d definitely take the trip down to Momence to check out the Mustang and Bath-O-Sub from Diamonds Are Forever or any of the Glastron boats from Live and Let Die.

That others would make the same trip is exactly what folks in Momence are hoping.

Bond über-aficionado Doug Redenius, vice-president of the Foundation, told the Momence Board of Aldermen last July that he expected the museum to draw up to 40,000 people in its first year of operation — quite a draw for such a small town.

“The project itself is a bit of a double agent,” said Brian Vitale, the Design Director at Gensler. “At face value, we’ve designed a showcase for a world-class collection of James Bond vehicles and the culture that surrounds them. But its real mission is to become a powerful catalyst for the revitalization of a once-vibrant city.”

The building itself may become part of the attraction. With a single window that’s shaped like the “7″ in “007″ and a black corrugated metal exterior,Vitale says the building has a “mysterious silhouette that reveals very little of the museum’s content, much like James Bond himself.”

The museum, a partnership between the Foundation, the Kankakee County Museum and Momence, will have exhibits about espionage in addition to the vehicles, and will also offer information on Bond’s impact on pop culture and vice versa.

Original vehicles used in Bond films owned by the Foundation that will be on display include:

Goldfinger (1964) – Lockheed Martin VC-140B Jet Star scale model

Thunderball (1965)– Tow Sled, RAF Vulcan Bomber model

You Only Live Twice (1967) – Model 45 Bell Helicopter model

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969)– Tracey’s 1969 Mercury Cougar XR7, 428 Cobra Jet Convertible

Diamonds Are Forever (1971)– Ford Mustang Mach 1 429 Cobra Jet, Bath-O-Sub, Honda ATV-90

Live and Let Die (1973)– Glastron Chase / Jump Boat, Glastron Chase Boat

The Man With The Golden Gun (1974)– AMC Hornet

The Spy Who Loved Me (1977)– Lotus Submarine Car, Wetbike Water Cycle

Moonraker (1979)– Glastron Amazon Chase Boat

For Your Eyes Only (1981)–CV3 Citroen, Neptune Submarine

Octopussy (1983)– Auto-Rickshaw, “Tuk-Tuk”

A View To A Kill (1985)– Renault Taxi

The Living Daylights (1987)– Aston Martin Volante

Licence To Kill (1989)– Villains’ Kenworth Truck

Goldeneye (1995)– Cagiva Motorcycle

Tomorrow Never Dies (1997)– BMW R 1200 C Motorcycle

The World Is Not Enough (1999)– “Q’s” Jet Boat, Villains’ Land Parahawks and Flying Parahawk

Die Another Day (2002)– Jaguar XKR, Bombardier Rev 800 MXZ Ski-Doos, Switchblade

Casino Royale (2006)– Ford Mondeo

Images: Gensler

As creative challenges go, they don’t get much cooler or more spine-tingling than this.

Here’s the formula: take one Mercedes AMG SLS supercar. Give it to former F1 ace David Coulthard, along with a closed section of the Isle of Man’s legendary Mountain Road. Tell him to drive as fast as he possibly can, which is very fast indeed. And then film it.

In 3D.

Some of the very best British 3D techs brought a pair of SLS “Gullwings” to the Mountain Road used in the famous Tourist Trophy motorcycle race. It’s an amazing stretch of tarmac where motorcycles average 130 mph and occasionally see the far side of 200 mph.

Coulthard, a current Deutsche Tourenwagen Masters driver, came to the Isle of Man with a personal goal: He wanted to hit 160 mph over the twisting, snaking stretch of road. This is no easy feat on a road that combines tight hair-pins with high-speed sweepers between the towns of Douglas and Ramsey. It’s a tall order even for a seasoned racer like Coulthard, a fact he readily conceded.

Coulthard, at speed.

But it’s even tougher for the film crew.

“Using two cameras, you’re replicating human vision,” said stereographer (camera technician) Campbell Goodwille. “And by moving the cameras further apart or closer together, you exaggerate or lessen the 3D effect. It’s almost like a volume control for 3D. If you’re shooting a little insect, the cameras might be 5 or 10 millimeters apart, whereas if you’re shooting a landscape you might have them a couple of feet apart. And that’s about getting apparent depth in stuff you don’t normally see. When you look at something a long way away, you don’t get much stereo [depth] effect so we exaggerate that for the screen.”

Speed lies at the heart of the project.

“With 2D, you can cheat the sensation of speed with long lenses or blurred backgrounds, there are all sorts of techniques you can use,” said Geoff Boyle, director of 3D photography. “But none of them work in 3D. It just looks like a cardboard cutout moving in front of the blurred background, very Captain Pugwash and just really, really wrong. The only thing that works really well with cars in 3D is wide lenses. With wide lenses, though, the background appears to move slowly so the only way to get an impression of speed is to go bloody fast.”

Cue Coulthard.

He’s a master driver who has won 13 F1 races, including two British grands prix. When he isn’t doing F1 commentary for the BBC you can find him tearing up tracks racing in the DTM for Mercedes-Benz. But he’d never been to the Isle of Man.

Of course, that was no reason not to let loose in an AMG SLS, which puts down 563 horsepower and hits 197 mph.

“It brings back such happy memories of driving on those type of roads when I was growing up,” Coulthard said. “It wasn’t about being in a racing car on a closed circuit where you’re obviously trying to get 100 percent in every corner. On the open road, let’s say it’s 99 percent and if you get it to 99 percent that’s just a wonderful feeling. You’ve left enough to be safe but you’re going fast enough to feel that you’re really living.”

And with that, Coulthard smoked off the line to familiarize himself with the road, a feat he felt was best accomplished at 150 mph. He came back wide-eyed and grinning.

“The adrenaline’s pumping and it’s such a raw feeling,” he said. “And there’s fear, too, which comes from the knowledge you’ve got no roll cage and just one little piece of fabric [seatbelt] and a hillside right there. I feel tightness in my chest that you just don’t get when you’re in your comfort zone. And this is out of my comfort zone by a long way.”

Not just any filming rig will do. This one's got 485 hp.

Once the director yelled, “Action,” Coulthard’s impressive skill emerged. Coulthard could put the car exactly where the director wanted, even on the far side of 100 mph. He was even better when chasing a second SLS — driven by veteran rally driver Robbie Head — with a 3D camera mounted on its boot. Coulthard had no problem driving just inches behind Head.

Keeping up with Coulthard required stuffing a 4×4 with a V10 tuned to 485 horsepower. The truck is fitted with a stabilized turret — which uses the same tech found on tanks — to keep the camera boom stable. And of course there was a helicopter overhead for still more shots.

Once the chopper wrapped up, Coulthard still had to attend to the small matter of hitting 160 mph.

“To achieve my goal of hitting 160mph on the open road, I’ve got to get off that last turn as we come off the bridge with as much speed as possible, with the engine working well, without scrubbing any speed,” he explained. “Then allow the car to use all the power of the 6.3-liter engine, there’s lots of torque. We’ve got to unleash all of that to try and deliver that speed. Then, of course, the decision is at what point do I lift…”

And with that Coulthard set off with a journalist riding shotgun. It was spectacular to see. He made it look easy. At the end of the run the journalist got out looking slightly pale. Coulthard got out, looking slightly ecstatic.

“One sixty-two,” he said.

The 3D video is slated to run on Sky 3D TV in the United Kingdom next month. The producers are looking for outlets to air it in the United States and elsewhere, and they’re brokered a deal “with a major electronics brand” to show it on that company’s gear in stores worldwide. More info when we have it.

Photos and video: Jeremy Hart / Incword

See Also:

• Video: David Coulthard Drives the Electric Gullwing
• Mercedes Proves ‘Electric Supercar’ Is No Oxymoron
• This Is F1’s Most Bad-Ass Safety Car Ever
• Mercedes Builds a Sweet Gullwing For the Track
• Mercedes Starts Building Gullwings Again

Here’s a trailer for the film. Yeah, we know. It’s not in 3D. It’s still pretty freakin’ cool.

And the “how it was made” video.

Put this man in a Toyota iQ and he’ll still out-drive you.

The autonomous Audi TTS that will try to climb Pikes Peak without a driver is packed with leading-edge tech, but Audi went old-school with livery that pays homage to its glory days in rallying.

Audi pulled the wraps off the latest iteration of the robotic car we took a ride in a few months ago, and the livery looks great. The stripes recall those of cars like the awesome Sport Quattro S1 Pikes Peak and Quattro Rallye A2, though the overall look is cleaner.

“We were very much inspired by the Pikes Peak race cars,” Raul Cenan, lead designer on the project, says. “But there was very different technology used in those cars overall. So we decided to go with more modern elements that were heritage-inspired.”

Audi and the guys at the Stanford University Dynamic Design Lab and Volkswagen’s Electronics Research Lab in Palo Alto are constantly tweaking and tuning the 2010 TTS ahead of its ascent up Pikes Peak in September. Pikes Peak is one hell of a place to test an autonomous car — the course is among the most harrowing in motorsports, a flat-out sprint through 156 turns on a 12.4-mile climb to the clouds.

The best drivers attack the route at speeds of up to 130 mph. Chris Gerdes, head of the Center for Automotive Research at Stanford, assured us the TTS will be pushed to its limits.

“I want to go up the mountain much faster than anyone with any sense of self-preservation would go,” he told us.

For a rundown of the car’s tech and video of it in action, check out our earlier post, “Audi’s Robotic Car Drives Better Than You Do.”

Photos: Audi. More after the jump.

The livery pays homage to Audi’s best rally cars from a generation ago.

Although the car is packed with sophisticated electronics, the computing system isn’t much more elaborate than a typical laptop. The rest of the car is straight from the showroom. For more on how the car works, check out our earlier post, which includes some video.

The Audi Quattro S1 Pikes Peak racer, which Walter Röhrl drove to the summit in a stunning 10:47.85 minutes in 1987.

World rally champion Hannu Mikkola driving the Audi quattro Rallye A2 Group B at Rally Akropolis in 1984.

Renault head honcho Carlos Ghosn is among the loudest EV evangelists, and he firmly believes cars with cords are the next evolution of the automobile. He’s backing that up with a goal of producing 200,000 electric vehicles annually by 2015.

So says the French newspaper La Tribune, which quotes company insiders saying at least 150,000 of the vehicles will be the Renault Zoe, an electric vehicle (shown above in concept form) slated for production by mid-2012. The French automaker says electric vehicles will account for far more of its overall sales than the 5 percent estimated for the industry in 2015, the paper reports.

Ghosn also is CEO of Nissan, Renault’s corporate partner by marriage, which is introducing the Nissan Leaf electric vehicle later this year. Nissan plans to build as many as 50,000 Leafs (Yes, the company says the plural is Leafs. We’ve asked.) next year. The first cars will be built in Japan, but Nissan plans to launch factories in Tennessee and England by 2013; the factory in Tennessee will build as many as 150,000 Leafs annually.

Peugeot built 2.4 million vehicles in 2008 and Nissan built almost 3.4 million, according to the International Organization of Motor Vehicle Manufacturers (.pdf), so clearly we’re still talking about a small percentage of the two companies’ output. But Ghosn believes EVs will account for 10 percent of global auto sales by 2020, even if others have put the figure at half that.

La Tribune via Reuters and Automotive News Europe.

Photo: Renault

See Also:

• Study Predicts Big Market for Cars With Cords
• Study: 1 in 4 Consumers Considering a Plug-In Car
• Nissan Leaf Electric Vehicle Is Surprisingly Affordable
• Zoé To Renault: Don’t Steal My Name
• Nissan’s Electric Leaf Spreads the EV Gospel

Everyone wins in the Toyota-Tesla partnership, but not for the reasons most people think.

The Japanese giant and the Silicon Valley upstart stunned everyone with Thursday’s announcement that they’ll work together on electric vehicles and components. Toyota will buy $50 million worth of stock when Tesla Motors goes public, and it gets a closer look at proven EV tech. Tesla gets a shuttered Toyota factory in Northern California to build the Model S sedan and expert advice on how to engineer and build a mass-market car.

But the biggest thing this deal does for all involved is burnish their images. Toyota reaps a PR bonanza by resurrecting a factory is shuttered last month and investing in green tech. Tesla increases its credibility as it prepares to go public. Having the world’s largest automaker in your corner builds a lot of buzz and goes a long way toward assuring potential investors you’ll deliver on your promises.

The conventional wisdom says Toyota is shaken by the Nissan Leaf and, having bet the farm on hybrids, wants to develop an EV quickly. There’s some validity to that, but the best thing Toyota gets from this deal is great public relations. In addition to seemingly never-ending recalls, Toyota took a lot of heat for closing the New United Motor Manufacturing Inc. factory in Fremont, California. Now it’s handing the place over to Tesla and getting credit from the likes of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger for helping create green jobs.

“This almost makes them heroes because they found a solution for NUMMI,” says Mike Omotoso, an industry analyst with J.D. Power and Associates.

The Tesla Model S is unveiled in 2009.

Both companies say they’ll work together to develop electric vehicles. No one’s offering specifics, but Tesla CEO Elon Musk says we’ll see a Tesla-powered Toyota on the road before the Model S, which he keeps saying will arrive in early 2012. That jibes with industry speculation that Toyota went to Tesla so it could quickly catch up with Nissan, GM and Mitsubishi.

But to suggest Tesla is Toyota’s salvation oversimplifies things. If Toyota decides to jump into the EV market, it has the skills to do so. It dominates the hybrid market, it is developing a plug-in Prius, and it has built electric concepts — most recently the FT-EV concept. It knows electrification.

“Toyota has over 10 years’ experience with hybrids and so it knows motors, controllers and batteries,” Omotoso says. “There’s definitely a lot of know-how in those areas.”

Toyota also has a joint venture with Panasonic to build batteries. Granted, it is using nickel–metal hydride, but the plug-in Prius will use lithium-ion. If Toyota wants to develop an EV quickly, it might put Tesla drivetrains in something like the FT-EV so it can get a program rolling — that’s exactly what Daimler did with the Smart EV. But it’s hard to see Toyota relying on Tesla over the long haul. We’re more likely to see parts making their way from Toyota to Tesla.

“The Model S is going to be ours. We’re building it from the ground up,” says Tesla spokesman Ricardo Reyes.

Yet it’s a safe bet the S will share components with Toyota or Lexus models. There’s no need for Tesla to source, say, its own brake components or HVAC system when it can raid the Toyota parts bin. Doing so will allow Tesla to tap Toyota’s supply chain, increasing its economies of scale and bringing down the cost of the S, which it says will cost $49,900 after the $7,500 federal EV tax credit.

Reyes concedes “the Toyota deal opens up some possibilities” for sharing parts and cutting costs, but says it is too early to speculate on if or when that might happen.

Aaron Bragman, an industry analyst with IHS Global Insight, goes one step further and says the S probably will ride on a Toyota platform, meaning it will share engineering and major components with a current model like the Lexus IS. Omotoso isn’t so sure, noting that Tesla already has done a lot of engineering for the S, and using a Toyota platform might require going back to the drawing board. Of course, we’ve heard this song before — there was speculation last year that the S would use Mercedes parts, if not a platform, after Daimler bought a stake in Tesla.

Whatever the case, the Model S will be built in the former NUMMI factory. The huge plant — a joint venture Toyota and GM launched in 1984 — produced 400,000 cars in 2006. Tesla’s talking about building no more than 20,000 Model S sedans to start (though Musk, as ambitious as ever, promises more models will be coming), so it will occupy a small corner of the factory for now.

“It’s an investment in the future,” Reyes says. “It’s got room for us to grow.”

Reyes says Tesla was drawn to the factory because it’s near Tesla headquarters in Palo Alto and it’s a “turnkey” operation. Toyota shut it down in April, and although the automaker took most of the equipment with it, the fact that it’s an automotive factory will minimize the time Tesla needs to spend prepping it.

“It has everything they’ll need to build cars,” Bragman says.

Another reason NUMMI works well for Tesla: VP of manufacturing Gilbert Passin came to Tesla last year from from Toyota where, among other things, he ran NUMMI.

No word on when Tesla plans to move into the factory, but it has no time to lose if it is to meet its goal of delivering the S by early 2012.

Top photo, left to right: Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Toyota President Akio Toyoda and Tesla CEO Elon Musk pose with the Tesla Model S at Thursday’s press conference announcing the Toyota-Tesla partnership./AP

Ferrari didn’t say anything about the test, but it doesn’t matter. The siren song of that sweet V12 is all we need to hear. The first vid starts with slow pans of the car and there’s no sound until Bennuzzi gets in, hits the start button and takes off. The second video (after the jump) is in-car footage of Benuzzi’s drive.

He’s paid to do that. Some guys have all the luck.

Videos: Ferrari

See Also:

• Video: Ride Along With Ferrari's New King of the 'Ring
• Videos: Ferrari's Awesome 599 GTO Explained
• Videos: Behold the Ferrari 599 GTO In All Its Glory
• Start Buying Lotto Tickets: Ferrari's Got a New GTO

Yes, the two cars share some basic proportions. But it’s in the details that Bertone goes its own, spectacular way. The Pandion has the kind of impact the Italians use to create on a regular basis with their more free-form, late-60s-early-70s supercar concepts.

Ladies and gentlemen, unless another automaker can upstage it before the day is out, the Pandion is my Best in Show.

Where to start? How about those rear-opening scissor/suicide doors? Or the seemingly random grille details across the back of the car? Or the inside? It looks like the work of a giant spider, spinning a web.

For a struggling brand at box office, Alfa sure has its followers in the Italian design community. But the Pandion is true concept.

Crazy? Wacky? Stupendous? Yes.

On sale soon?

Not a chance.

The British love their traditions: the Queen, tea, quaint gardens and the like. One of their most visible traditions, the black London taxi, could be going green.

Britain’s Eco City Vehicles is rolling out an electric version of the Mercedes-Benz Vito taxi and will field-test the car in London later this year. The slick cab, which looks like a pug-nosed minivan, was developed by a consortium that included Penso, Mercedes-Benz UK and Zytec Automotive.

Eco City, which sells and services taxis, says the eVito will comply with the mayor’s proposed clean air standards for taxis. The new regs are set to take effect in time for the London Olympics in 2012.

“The eVito, together with the already popular Vito taxi, provides London with a great opportunity to reduce air pollution with modern vehicles,” Peter DaCosta, chief executive of Eco City, said, according to the Telegraph. “We have taken on board Mayor Boris Johnson’s wish for a cleaner London and I’m confident this will contribute to meeting his goal.”

Londoners have been grabbing rides in the popular Vito since 2008, and the vehicle has proven to be a serious competitor to Manganese Bronze, which builds the city’s traditional black taxis. The Vito has claimed 30 percent of the market since its introduction, according to Reuters. An electric version makes perfect sense and would be just the thing for New York’s Taxi of Tomorrow.

Photo: Mercedes-Benz

One of the big issues facing hydrogen is just where we’re supposed to fill the cars that might run on the stuff. A Connecticut company is answering that question on the East Coast with plans for a “hydrogen highway” that will extend from Portland, Maine, to southern Florida.

California historically has been a hotbed of hydrogen research and development, but SunHydro wants to put the East Coast on the H2 map with 11 solar refueling stations. The self-contained stations use electrolysis technology from Proton Energy that takes electricity generated from solar power and splits water into hydrogen and oxygen. The process results in considerably fewer emissions than the traditional methods of shipping hydrogen to fueling stations by truck or reforming it from natural gas.

“Our goal is to make it possible for hydrogen car to drive from Maine to Miami strictly on sun and water,” company president Michael Grey said.

For all the attention on electric cars these days, several automakers continue developing hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. Honda is especially enamored with the technology. General Motors put the Chevrolet Equinox fuel cell vehicle in a few dozen driveways. Nissan is leasing a XTrail FCV truck to Coca-Cola. And Mercedes Benz will offer the F-Cell to “selected customers” in Europe and the United States this spring. Mazda and Volkswagen are among the technology’s proponents as well.

So, beyond giving the few hydrogen cars on the road a place to fuel up, the stations could help solve the the “chicken and egg” problem where the lack of fueling infrastructure begot a lack of cars and vice-versa.

“Having talked to several of the auto manufacturers, the indication that we’ve received is that there has to be a network of stations on the east coast for them to bring the cars here,” Grey said. “They want to bring the cars here, but there’s nowhere to fuel them.”

That quandary is familiar to Paul Williamson of the University of Montana College of Technology. “There’s no sense having hydrogen cars if there’s no place to refuel them,” Williamson said. “Most of the development is happening in California. Why? Because they have refueling stations.”

Williamson, whose family owned a service station when he was younger, likens the adoption of hydrogen technology to the early days of diesel. “We put in a pump behind our service station to begin with, and we had some cars and trucks here and there,” he said.

Similarly, SunHydro’s stations will appeal to early adopters and will be able to fill 10 to 15 vehicles per day to start. That isn’t much, but you’ve got to start somewhere. The first stations will be located in Portland, Maine; Braintree, Massachusetts; Wallingford, Connecticut; South Hackensack, New Jersey; Claymont, Delaware; Richmond, Virginia; Charlotte, North Carolina; Atlanta and Savannah, Georgia; and Orlando and Miami, Florida. If all goes well, Grey said the company hopes to expand westward.

“We’ve just decided that somebody needed to start this process,” Grey said. “You have a lot of the big companies talk about it, but nobody’s stepped up to the plate and made it happen.”

The company says using solar power to split water makes the capital requirements and maintenance costs cheaper than other hydrogen technologies. “From an efficiency standpoint, using the sun to make hydrogen is probably the most efficient method out there,” Mark Schiller, Vice President of Business Development at Proton, said.

The stations cost as much as $3 million to install and rely on private funding to make it happen (Tom Sullivan, founder of the Lumber Liquidators flooring supply chain, paid $10.2 million for Proton in August). Williamson says that’s the cost of doing business for a future-oriented company.

“You’ve got to have some visionary risk taking if you want to be a company of the future,” he said. “Otherwise, you’ll fall by the wayside.”

Photo of a Mercedes-Benz F-Cell: Daimler

See Also:

• Mercedes Brings Hydrogen to the Highway Next Spring
• Have a Coke and a Fuel Cell
• VW Still Devoted to Hydrogen
• Mazda Delivers a Hydrogen Hybrid
• Open Source Hydrogen Car Has a Porsche Pedigree
• Hydrogen Cars Won’t Make a Difference for 40 Years
• Wired 11.04: How Hydrogen Can Save America