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Former Honda CEOs chide current boss about quality

Taking charge of a major corporation will never be without its challenges, and one of those - as Honda CEO Takanobu Ito is finding out - is filling the big shoes of those that came before. Ito's predecessors are apparently not pleased with what he's doing to the company, and are wasting no time in telling him so.
According to Reuters, two former Honda chiefs have recently visited Ito (pictured above with his predecessor Takeo Fukui) to talk to him about the Japanese automaker's quality issues, which they apparently regard as eroding the company's image. Nobuhiko Kawamoto, who served as CEO from 1990-98, reportedly came to Honda headquarters in Tokyo to deliver "stern words" to Ito last month. Kawamoto's immediate successor, Hiroyuki Yoshino, reportedly met with Ito under similar circumstances earlier this year.
Kawamoto and Yoshino are part of a larger group of former Honda executives who are concerned with the declining quality of the company's products under Ito's leadership. Where Honda once focused more on quality, collaborating more closely with parts suppliers,more recently the company has, in the eyes of those former executives at least, shifted its focus to quantity and to new technologies. That's what, the report alleges, has led to Honda recalling so many of its vehicles in recent years.

Glickenhaus's SCG 003 to pack twin-turbo Honda V6?

Scuderia Cameron Glickenhaus has made (or commissioned) two vehicles to date - the P4/5 and the P4/5 Competizione - and is now hard at work on its third. The first was based on the Ferrari Enzo and the second on a Ferrari F430, but the third is being developed independently from the ground up. The question, then, is what engine will it use?
Well now we may have our answer as Jalopnik reports that the SCG 003 (as it's known at the moment) will be powered by a 3.5-liter V6 sourced from Honda, fitted with twin turbochargers and producing in excess of 500 horsepower.
Honda's J35Y engine produces 278 horsepower in the Accord, 290 hp in the Acura MDX and 310 hp in the RLX. It also forms the basis for the HR35TT racing engine which Honda Performance Development puts in its Daytona Prototype, so if the rumors turn out to be true, chances are that's probably the engine in question - with the possible addition of a hybrid electric assist - but we'll have to sit tight to find out for sure.

McLaren working on P15 supercar to slot between 650S and P1

McLaren has been busy these past few years. It launched the MP4-12C in 2011, the 12C Spider in 2012, the P1 in 2013 and (most recently) the 650S in 2014. But it's not about to stop there. It's got an "entry-level" model in the works, set to take on the Porsche 911, and - according to information reported by Car and Driver and confirmed by McLaren in correspondence with Autoblog - a new flagship model, too.
The project is internally codenamed P15, and it calls for a new flagship that will cap the company's lineup once the P1 finishes its limited production run, but carry a price tag in the neighborhood of $500k to slot in between the P1 and the new 650S.
Just how, you wonder, can McLaren possibly develop another supercar each year? Simple: underneath, they're all essentially the same. (Only we're sure it's anything but simple.) That is to say they're all based on the same carbon monocoque structure and powered by the same 3.8-liter twin-turbo V8 mated to a seven-speed dual-clutch transmission driving the rear wheels. What differentiates them is what the engineers in Woking build around that monocoque and how they tune the engine: +/- 600 horsepower in the 12C (depending on the year it was built), 640 hp in the 650S, or 727 hp in the P1 (with another 177 from the electric assist). The 911 fighter would likely develop in the 500hp range, and the P15 will probably land in the upper 600 (or lower 700) range.