Hybrid supercars are becoming reality. Bloomberg News reports Porsche’s next 918 Spyder (shown in prototype camouflage), which boasts more than 770 horsepower from its engine and two electric motors, may be joined by a hybrid supercar from Ferrari. Early reports call it the Ferrari F70; a source told Bloomberg that Ferrari will likely price it beyond the $850,000 limited-edition Enzo that appeared from 2002 to 2004. The F70 — or whatever Ferrari ends up calling it — will combine a 12-cylinder engine with two electric motors for more horsepower than any previous Ferrari, Bloomberg says. Ferrari only built 400 Enzos worldwide. (Five are listed on Cars.com, none of them priced.) The Enzo’s successor will likely go on sale sometime in 2013, while Porsche’s 918 Spyder arrives in the U.S. in late 2013.

In other news:

• Automotive News reports the Detroit Three are raising incentives for military buyers through Memorial Day weekend. Incentives include $1,000 off at all Chrysler and regional Ford dealers, including all subsidiary brands. That’s more than double the usual discounts.
• Despite rising sales, North American operating profits for Nissan sank 30% in the first three months of 2012. It’s due to lower-margin fleet sales and higher development costs of redesigned cars like the Altima, Automotive News reports.
• Fisker denied reports that poor engine packaging caused a fire in a customer’s Karma plug-in two weeks ago near Houston. The automaker will issue a final report of the fire’s cause, according to LeftLane News.
• Reuters reports higher sales for Jaguar and Land Rover have offset falling commercial demand for owner Tata Motors, leaving Tata Motors’ global sales flat in April.

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• A new study finds that only about a third of hybrid owners buy another hybrid. Industry researcher R.L. Polk & Co. says hybrid nameplates have more than doubled since 2007, but just 35% of hybrid owners bought another hybrid when returning to the market in 2011. If you factor out the high-loyalty Toyota Prius, hybrid loyalty drops to 25%. But a higher percentage of hybrid owners — 60% for Toyota, 52% for Honda — stayed within the brand when shopping for their next car. Hybrids represent just 2.4% of the new-car market, down from 2.9% in 2008 when gas hit an all-time high of $4.11 per gallon. But Polk finds overall hybrid loyalty changed little as gas prices fluctuated between $2 and $4 from 2008 to 2011. Interestingly, traditional eco-friendly markets like Los Angeles, Seattle and Portland, Ore., stayed near the national average for hybrid loyalty, while unlikely places such as West Palm Beach, Fla., and Phoenix had the highest loyalty rates.
• Yet another study suggests teenagers aren't rushing to get behind the wheel. The Detroit Bureau cites new research from the University of Michigan's Transportation Research Institute, which says just 22% of American drivers are younger than 30 today, down from around 33% in 1983. (The statistic holds less weight when you consider that the number of driving-age Americans under 30 declined about that much over the same period.) But the number of licensed 17-year-olds dropped to 50% in 2008, down from 69% in 1983, and other studies corroborate similar trends among young drivers in countries such as Germany, South Korea and Canada. The Detroit Bureau also notes another study that finds 16- to 34-year-olds each drove some 23% fewer miles between 2001 and 2009.
• Toyota wants to cut costs at least 30% by sharing more parts among cars while still building more appealing models, Reuters reports. The automaker hopes to develop more cars in tandem off of shared architectures, as well as cut bureaucracy in the design review process. Under a new development framework announced Monday, three front-wheel-drive platforms will underpin about half of Toyota's global products.
• Former GM R&D chief Larry Burns expects driverless cars to be available by 2020, Automotive News reports. In Burns' vision, networks of driverless cars would transport occupants to a destination, then drive elsewhere to pick up new passengers. Several players have dabbled in self-driving cars, most notably Google, but “we're not going to go from driving our cars to not driving our cars overnight,” Burns said. “It's going to be a gradual transition.”

• The Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, a group that represents a dozen automakers including the Detroit Three and Toyota, is gearing up to fight provisions in a $109 billion, two-year highway bill that moved to the U.S. House of Representatives after Senate approval, The Detroit News reports. The bill would expand current fines for mismanaged recalls to $250 million, nearly 15 times the current $17 million penalty ceiling — “well out of proportion and unfairly punitive,” Alliance President Mitch Bainwol said, on grounds that civil penalties for “similarly situated” consumer-product companies are far lower. The Senate bill also calls for new safety provisions like backseat seat-belt reminders, which the Alliance opposes because of development complexity — even though studies show unbuckled backseat passengers substantially increase the risk of injury or death to themselves and belted occupants in front of them.
• On the heels of Nissan's plans to revive Datsun in emerging markets, Toyota President Akio Toyoda told reporters in Tokyo the automaker has no plans to make ultra-cheap cars, Automotive News reports. Toyota's cheapest cars include the Etios, built for India. At current exchange rates, it starts around $7,800 — far above bargain-basement Indian offerings like the Tata Nano.
• J.D. Power & Associates predicts that March new-car sales will rise 6% over year-ago levels as shoppers drive retail demand, Reuters reports. Barring any sky-high gas spikes from Iran closing oil passageways in the Persian Gulf, J.D. Power expects robust auto sales for the rest of the year. Sales in February jumped 16% to reach an annualized rate of 15.1 million, the highest since February 2008. J.D. Power and its forecasting arm, LMC Automotive, expect March's annualized sales rate to hit 14.1 million.
• Volkswagen plans to hire another 800 employees at its plant in Chattanooga, Tenn., the automaker said today. Citing strong demand for the Passat, which VW builds in Chattanooga, Volkswagen said total additional hiring in 2012 comes to 1,000, on top of the plant's 2,700 current employees.
• In a bid to revive its U.S. products — sales dipped 7% in 2011 — Honda is hiring more American managers, Bloomberg News reports. The automaker built more cars in the U.S. than in Japan last year, and nearly matched production between the two regions in 2010. North American Chief Operating Officer Tetsuo Iwamura, the automaker's second-highest executive, will direct a seven-member board that includes three Americans — the first time Americans have ever ranked so high, Bloomberg notes. He'll also be based in California, not Tokyo.
• BMW's Mini division reached its 10th year in the U.S. today. Mini says it now accounts for 20% of all BMW Group sales, with six variants of the Cooper. The brand sells cars through 112 dealers, up from 66 in 2002. Mini expects to open another 125 showrooms over the next two years.

Here's what we have our eye on today:

• Fiat and Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne told Bloomberg News today that European automakers need to incur “painful” restructuring to stanch losses in the region. Europe's sovereign-debt crisis has stymied consumer confidence, drying up auto sales and leaving automakers with too much plant capacity. Fiat sales slipped 2.4% in 2011, with factories in Italy running at just 50% capacity. Other European brands saw losses mount. GM's European divisions, including Opel, lost $747 million in 2011, and French automaker Peugeot Citroën, in which GM recently took a 7% stake, saw its debt more than double in the second half of the year. Marchionne told reporters in Belgium he believes Europe as a whole needs to push plant closures and job cuts. “If you leave it to the national countries, it won't happen,” he said.
• Jaguar Land Rover signed a deal with China's Chery Automobile Co. to build and sell cars in China, Reuters reports. The British company, owned by India's Tata Motors, will require approval from Chinese regulators to finalize the joint venture, which is worth about $2.8 billion at current exchange rates. Reuters notes that approval could take some time, however. Subaru parent Fuji Heavy Industries signed a deal last year with Chery to build cars in China, but officials have yet to approve it.
• Mercedes-Benz will stop selling the R-Class after 2012, Automotive News reports. The wagon, which seats up to seven, arrived in late 2005, and Mercedes updated its styling for 2011. But the automaker sold just 2,385 R-Classes in the U.S. last year — a fraction of the M-Class SUV's 35,835 sales. Automotive News says Mercedes will continue building the R-Class at its Alabama plant for export, and it plans to sell the wagon in Mexico, Canada and China until at least 2015.
• Honda says the first redesigned 2013 RDX from its Acura luxury division rolled off the assembly line in East Liberty, Ohio, last Monday. The plant, which began assembly in 1989, also builds the Honda CR-V crossover. Honda says more than 80 Ohio suppliers make parts for the RDX, which goes on sale next month.
• Hyundai CEO Kim Choong-ho told Reuters the automaker would introduce a redesigned Sonata in 2014. A redesigned Genesis sedan, meanwhile, would arrive in late 2013. Following a slew of new small cars, Hyundai and its Kia affiliate had just one global introduction this year, the Hyundai Santa Fe SUV.

Last May, I had the chance to drive the Range Rover Supercharged, the alpha dog of the Range Rover lineup. Though I was charmed by the incredible power and opulent cabin, I felt that the Range Rover was afflicted by a curse that affects many upper echelon vehicles – all the flash and features were spoilt by an underlying impracticality.

The Range Rover’s footprint was so large that it could have had its own branch of the Occupy movement, and its drinking problem was in league with Amy Winehouse. The Range Rover was conceived as a luxury vehicle to take you from your Scottish country estate to the theater and back again in total comfort, but lately, the Range Rover has been the mode of choice of wealthy urbanites, ignorant of the fact that the Range Rover’s original purpose was to serve double duty on one’s Scottish country estate as well as arriving in style at the theater. Living in in a dense, downtown core, the Range Rover was too large to quickly maneuver through traffic or parallel park with ease, and its truck roots made themselves known often.

The 21st century luxury SUV consumer may wear Barbour jackets (as an ironic fashion statement), but they’re far more likely to be an entrepreneur pitching their one-person marketing agency rather than living off an inheritance and setting off on fox hunts. Range Rover knows which way the wind is blowing it has adapted its formula accordingly with the Evoque. Gone is the big, boxy profile and the Jaguar derived V8 of the full-size Range Rover. The well-appointed cabin full of leather and aluminum remains, but the Evoque is compact, taut and futuristic looking, with a silhouette more like a MINI Countryman than a Defender 110. Sharing a platform with the Land Rover LR2 (which in turn is based on the Ford Mondeo), allows for the Evoque to opt for a much smaller form factor, and makes it the kind of vehicle you want for darting in and out of traffic, or parking in tight downtown spaces.

A transverse-mounted 2.0L turbocharged 4 cylinder (again, based off of Ford’s Ecoboost engine) makes 240 horsepower and 251 lb-ft of torque, mated to a 6-speed automatic gearbox. The Ecoboost is well-matched to the Evoque, with a broad torque band and minimal turbo lag, and the 6-speed automatic allows the Evoque cruise at a comfortably low rpm on the highway. Over 380 miles of mixed highway and city driving (and doing a steady 75 to 80 mph on the highway), the Evoque returned 24 mpg, 2 mpg better than the EPA rating. The Evoque’s demographic is likely to be the same type of person who doesn’t know if their BMW 128i is front or rear-wheel drive; the absence of a rugged track platform and V6 or V8 engine won’t bother them one bit. Despite its front-driver underpinnings, the Evoque still has a rudimentary all-wheel drive system, with classic Land Rover technologies like Hill Descent Control, but we’d give up Starbucks for a year if anybody took an Evoque on rougher terrain than a gravel driveway.

Inside, it’s clear to seasoned veterans that Land Rover (which operates the Range Rover brand as its “premium” line) has been dipping into the parts bin in a big way. The switchgear is an 80/20 mix of Land Rover and Volvo bits – hardly a bad thing, but the common usages were immediately apparent. A few Jaguar parts are included for good measure, such as the rotary shift knob that rises from the center console, and the touch-screen HVAC and audio control system, which is easy to operate and fairly intuitive. My litmus test involves asking a passenger to operate the iPod interface without any directions, and most cars tend to frustrate my guinea pigs. Not so with the Evoque, as multiple riders were able to easily and quickly navigate it without any annoyances.

The Evoque’s road manners were largely solid, but the combination of big wheels and low-profile tires, an unavoidable concession to the automotive aesthetics of our era, delivered a pretty harsh ride over less-than-perfect pavement. Road noise was kept in check much better than the ride quality, as engine sounds and wind noise were isolated from the cabin. The Evoque’s seats were especially comfortable on long jaunts, and the driving position was a good balance of both the “up high” SUV feeling that crossover buyers want, without the unnatural “lording over the commoners” stance that one finds in larger SUVs.

Such a small footprint does lend itself to some compromises. Rear seat comfort for two is fine up until the front seats are moved back to accommodate a driver or passenger over 6 feet – at that point things get a little cramped. Ditto for 3 passengers in the back. Cargo room was also diminished by the Evoque’s “evocative” styling. A grocery shop for two (at the local farmer’s market, natch) was fine, but trying to stow a full set of 15” snow tires was impossible. We ended up stuffing three in the small cargo area (which took some careful arranging) and rested one on the rear seat before the automatic tailgate would shut itself. The sloping roofline and small side windows are an obvious concession to form rather than function, and it was helpful to have the optional back-up camera on hand. To get the camera, buyers have to pony up another $1,900 for the “Vision Assist Package” or $4,000 for the “Premium Package”. Our Evoque Pure (yes, that’s the trim level) came out to $48,995 – roughly half the price of the Range Rover Supercharged we had last year. The base price of $43,995 is nearly $7,000 more than a BMW X3 xDrive28i, which seems to be the most appropriate competitor, given the X3′s turbo 4-cylinder engine and sporty nature. Other competitors, like the Volvo XC60, Mercedes-Benz GLK and Audi Q5 start closer to $35,000.

The main takeaway here is that the Evoque does everything that current Land Rover customers want – to look good, impress others, and have the satisfaction of owning a “luxury vehicle” – with only minimal drawbacks. Cargo space is reduced compares to the rest of the lineup, and rear seat comfort may not be the Evoque’s strong suit. On the other hand, the Evoque has style and presence in spades, and the overall packaging is unique, fairly practical and well-engineered (thanks in part to pilfering from other automakers). For childless young professionals, empty nesters or dog owners, the Evoque will be more than adequate, with better fuel economy and a smaller footprint than the full-fat Range Rover. For the supremely insecure, the thought of driving the “cheap” Range Rover may be paralyzing, but an informal survey of people during our photoshoot suggests that the Evoque draws a lot of positive attention from bystanders, more so than the ubiquitous black Range Rover Supercharged that so many bad drivers tend to favor in this town. Even though it is more expensive (and, for some, less practical) than the aforementioned competitors, Land Rover will sell every single Evoque they can make – and with the LR2 platform already paid off, the Evoque should be a cash cow for the brand, as well as parent company Tata.

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