LA 2008: Volkswagen's imposing Touareg TDI Trophy Truck
Click above for more live shots of the Touareg TDI Trophy Truck from LA
Seriously, nobody in their right mind is going to suggest that racing across the Baja desert for about a thousand miles in any vehicle qualifies as green, but it takes place each and every year in Southern California and Mexico anyway. This being the case, Volkswagen is planning to tackle this year's Baja event at the very highest level, the Trophy Truck class, with a brand-new racer that they loosely refer to as a Touareg. If you are going to be racing across the desert in anything, it may as well be powered by a clean 5.5 liter V-12 TDI Twin Turbo diesel engine with 550 horsepower and 625 lbs.-ft. of torque, right? After taking a good long look at the truck in person, we've come to the conclusion it is most definitely impressive and imposing. See our live pics below. Plus, did we mention the clean diesel?
Gallery: LA 2008: Race Touareg 2
Photos Copyright ©2008 Jeremy Korzeniewski and Sebastian Blanco / Weblogs, Inc.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
why not the LS2LS7? 12:45AM (11/20/2008)
It has 8 chase trucks and a helicopter following it.
Due to this nearly any other truck in the race will actually produce less overall pollution than this one.
Not green.
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Phil L. 8:14AM (11/20/2008)
...and the pollution generated by spectators traveling to the race will dwarf that.
Yes, motorsport in most any form isn't particularly green. Racing an ideal environment in which to test and develop new technologies, though precious little of this really happens these days (Exhibit A: NASCAR).
That said, I'm looking forward to the Dakar Rally in January (actually held in South America this time around), and hope to see VW do well there.
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andrichrose 11:43AM (11/20/2008)
This is not a green car , its not even trying to masquerade as a green car , really isnt there anything more interesting to cover at the LA show ,or have the autobloggreen staff been blinded in the headlamps of this monster.
More EV please ,less ICE !
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