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Four Wheeler crowns Ultimate Factory 4x4... who wins?

Nearly every automaker doing business in the SUV or pickup truck segments offers a package designed to improve the off-road capabilities of its wares. But, of course, not all such factory kits are created equal. How, then, to separate the wheat from the chaff? Gather each of them up and put them through their paces, naturally.
The folks from Four Wheeler and PickupTrucks.com joined forces to run just such a comparison test, with the winner named the Ultimate Factory 4x4. A total of seven vehicles showed up to the fight: the 2012 Ford F-150 SVT Raptor, 2013 Jeep Wrangler Rubicon, 2012 Nissan Frontier PRO-4X and Xterra PRO-4X, 2012 Ram Power Wagon, and 2012 Toyota 4Runner Trail and Tacoma TRD T|X Baja Series.
With the contestants in place, the whole crew put each vehicle through a battery of tests that included skidpad and acceleration measurements, a hillclimb, a rocky stairstep course and a rock garden. Considering the nature of the beasts, on-road ride and comfort were not part of the routine.

Ford Focus ST checks into Jay Leno's Garage

In a change of pace from the high-end vehicles that often appear in Jay Leno's Garage, Ford sends its hottest hatchback (in the US, at least), the 252-horsepower Focus ST, to be featured on Leno's show. Accompanying the five-door hatch is its chief engineer, Jamal Hameedi.
Riding on stylish 18-inch wheels with summer tires and with a spoiler that doubles as a lunch tray, Hameedi and Leno walk us through the finer points of what makes the ST special, which also includes bigger brakes, torque vectoring, a manual transmission and, of course, 252 hp and 270 pound-feet of torque from the 2.0-liter EcoBoost four-cylinder engine, which is made possible by 21 psi of turbocharged boost.
Watch the video below to see what Leno thinks of the global Focus ST.

How and why Ford is rolling out Vignale in Europe

We know that Ford is positioning the new, upscale Vignale brand in Europe to fill a niche market of customers who want a bit more luxury, a lot more service and the same reliability and dependability that a non-Vignale Ford offers. But so far, we've been in the dark regarding how the Blue Oval will sell Vignale vehicles, how many of them will be created, and what the new sub-brand has in store for the future.
Gaetano Thorel, Ford's European marketing head, recently was interviewed by Automotive News and shared details about Ford Vignale. Thorel says, "The Vignale trim line will be priced like an ST model but attract a completely different type of customer." Specifically, he says it will attract customers in the upper 15 percent of the price band who don't want a performance-oriented ST model. He adds that Vignale cars will be about 10 percent more expensive than Titanium-trim cars. About 500 of Ford's European dealers will sell Vignale Fords, Thorel says, "in areas that make sense." The automaker expects 10 percent of its European sales to be Vignale cars, which equates to about 5 percent of its global sales. When asked if there are any other Vignale models planned beyond the Mondeo, Thorel said, "There is nothing written in stone yet."