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A sideways look at the Goodwood Festival of Speed 2012

Car design enthusiasts without even a passing fondness for a carefully calibrated engine note may struggle at the Goodwood Festival of Speed. A quiet place for the contemplation of automotive art it is not. However, the sheer scale and variety of vehicles on offer – crucially moving as well as static – is what makes the event, set within Lord March's huge country estate on England's south coast near Chichester, like no other in the world.

BMW X6

BMW rolled the dice with the original X6, but soon realized its problem would be lack of production capacity at its plant in Spartanburg, SC than a lack of customers - over 250,000 X6s have found homes since it arrived in 2008. It comes as no surprise that a second-generation model has now arrived, but as much as the first was revolutionary, establishing an entirely new SUV sub-genre, the new X6 appears much more evolutionary. At 4,909mm long, 1,989mm wide and 1,702mm tall, the new car grows by just 34mm in length, 4mm in width and 12mm in height.

Missed Shift? American Top Gear struggles to find its own identity

"What happened to Top Gear?" my favorite bartender asked this past weekend. "Somebody took the BBC's scripts and wrote Tanner, Rutledge and Adam over cues which previously said Jeremy, Richard and James," I replied. It's an easy sideswipe I admit, but for me--and I'm guessing for the automotive enthusiasts who constitute AutoWeek's audience--it largely tells the tale.