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Carmel kicks off concours craziness

Consider the Monterey car week begun! The Carmel-by-the-Sea Concours-on-the-Avenue launched with its best-ever crowd and what many were calling the best-ever show for the free-to-the-public event held every Tuesday before the Pebble Beach Concours on Ocean Avenue in Carmel. Eighteen blocks total were shut to traffic and jammed with collector cars, everything from classic 911s celebrating that car's 50th anniversary to Ferraris, Trans Am racers and a whole block of Shelby Cobras.

BMW takes the Active Tourer Outdoor outdoors this weekend

This weekend BMW will be taking its BMW Concept Active Tourer Outdoor to the annual OutDoor fair in Friedrichshafen, Germany. We first saw the concept last September, noting that it was a departure for BMW in more ways than one -- with the German automaker stretching itself into segments in which it previously had no foothold. The BMW Active Tourer is meant to preview a whole new generation of small cars from BMW, but one of the biggest changes underneath is a transverse layout of the engine -- a setup that BMW has traditionally shunned in favor of a longitudinal layout.

BMW 4-Series Gran Coupe revealed – looking very like the 3-Series Saloon

The first photos of the new BMW 4-Series Gran Coupe arrive The BMW 6-Series Gran Coupe looks like a four-door stretched version of the 6-Series, as it should, And it works; it’s a simply brilliant car. But we always wondered how BMW were going to differentiate the 4-Series Gran Coupe from the already existing 3-Series, which is already a 4-door saloon version of the new 4-Series Coupe. And if the leaked photos of the new 4-Series Gran Coupe are anything to go by, the answer is – not by a lot.