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Toyota Camry Dragster takes the phrase 'sleeper' to its logical extreme [w/video]

Sometimes, looks can be deceiving. This is certainly one of those times, as Toyota successfully trolled the entirety of the media corps at the 2014 SEMA Show by rolling an innocent-looking Camry onto the floor... only to lift literally the entirety of its body to reveal an 850-horsepower, tube-framed dragster. Well, we have been asking for a more driver-oriented Toyota.
While it's designed to go fast in a straight line, the origin of the Camry Dragster's parts might be surprising. The 5.7-liter V8 engine, transmission, rear axle and electronics were plucked from the Toyota Tundra pickup. Toyota Racing Development donated a supercharger, while a wet-nitrous-injection system was also tacked on for that little extra something. Those goodies will help propel this anonymous looking monster through the quarter mile in just 9.8 seconds.
"This is the most extreme build we've ever unveiled at SEMA," said Toyota's motorsports chief Steve Appelbaum said in a statement. "The transformation from seemingly stock Camry to full-blown racecar just shocks the senses. Chuck Wade and the team at Motorsports Technical Center did a truly spectacular job executing the vision of this project."

Toyota nudges US sales projections up to 2.25M

Toyota has raised its expectations for 2013's US sales for the third time since the end of 2012. The new target rests at 2.25 million units, when sales of Toyota, Lexus and Scion are taken as one. Subtracting Lexus, Toyota is still expecting to move over two million vehicles in the US by the end of 2013.
According to a report from Automotive News, the sales expectations came from Bob Carter, senior VP of automotive operations for Toyota USA, during a dealers during a meeting in Atlanta. The heightened expectations go along with Toyota's predictions for the US market as a whole, which it expects to grow to 15.5 million units by the end of 2013.
Besides an overall, national uptick in new vehicle sales, Toyota is also expecting a big push as it puts the next-generation Corolla to market during the second half of this year, along with the Tundra pickup truck. Meanwhile, dealers were shown images of a refreshed Camry, set to arrive in 2015, and reported that it's "more than a nip and a tuck," according to the AN report.

Toyota Prius sets a different kind of Nurburgring lap record [w/video]

Scroll down the leaderboards of Nürburgring lap times and you'll see mostly racing cars, supercars and sports cars. Delve deep enough and you'll eventually get to hatchbacks and sedans, albeit the most performance-focused of their kind. But a hybrid? Sure, the Porsche 918 Spyder posted the top time for a street-legal series production car, and it's technically a hybrid, but we're talking about another kind of hybrid here. We're talking about a Toyota Prius.
That's right: the Prius just set a lap record around the Nordschleife. But it wasn't for the lap time. In fact, miles per hour barely factored in (except for staying above the minimum 37-mph average speed mandated on the vaunted racing circuit). No, this was about miles per gallon.
Toyota took one of its Prius Plug-In hybrids to the Nürburgring, topped up the battery, put on a set of low-rolling-resistance tires and put automotive journalist Joe Clifford behind the wheel with a mandate to use as little fuel as possible. After one second shy of 21 minutes, the Prius completed its lap having used just five tablespoons of fuel.