Step aside, Tesla — we’ve just spotted the hottest Earth-lovin’ supe rcar since the Lightning GT. Shown off to wide-mouthed onlookers at the LA Auto Show this month, the Capstone CMT-380 prototype is an automotive beast unlike anything we’ve ever seen. Rather than mixin g batteries and a conventional engine, this whip combines the former with a diesel / biodiesel-powe red microturbine, which is — for all intents and purposes — a jet engine. Reportedly, the car can reach 60MPH from a standstill in just 3.9 seconds, hit 150MPH before being cut off by the electronic limiter, cruise 80 miles on battery power alone and drive from Idaho Falls to Spokane on just a single tank of fuel. It’s being bruited about that the company is considering flipping this bad boy into the production line, but with an estimated asking price north of $2 00,000, there’s sufficient evidence to think that the volume here would remain relatively low. Hit up Autoblog Green ’s gallery of shots from the show floor below, but only if you love peerin g at high-resolution images of stealthy, sexy things.

With the amount of use Chuck gets out of his “Nerd Herd” mobile, plus our own anecdotal sig htings of Geek Squad vehicles around town (see what we did there? Science ), we’d say that they’re ripe for EV replacements, and what better than the hard-to-pronounce i-MiEV from Mitsubishi to do the job? As announced at the LA Auto Show on Thursday, a few Best Buy Geek Squad locations in California are getting acces s to the cars in January, with minimal fleets that will expand to the other stores over a few years. For now it’s going to be an experiment, and primarily urban, but we like where this is headed. As in, “not to our house, because we’re perfectly adept at setting up a wireless network, thanks.”

You might’ve seen the Volt make a gues t appearance on the futuristic Surrogat es movie already, but now Chevy’s taking the opposite approach by looking toward the past to promote its PHEV. Bob’s Big Boy fast food restaurant in California got treated to a surprise visit by a production model of that m ost bodacious Chevrolet, and as you can see above, it doesn’t look horribly out of place seated in among its elders, a 1969 Camaro and an Impala SS. Joining in the weekly classic car meetup hosted by the restaurant, this appearance was a prelude to the production Volt being shown off at the LA Auto Show, which kicks off this coming Friday. So if you wanna see it, you can either attend the event or wait for the car to roll up at your nearest Wendy’s.

The Chevy Volt is one vehicle we can really get behind. It’s hard not to be a l ittle excited over it — we have, after all, been watching its development for quite a long time now. The electric car gets an impressive 230 miles per gallon in the city (and, all shaky rating practices aside, that’s nothing to scoff at). Autoblog Green’s just taken one of Chevy’s 80 IVER pre-production prototypes for a little spin, and they s eem to have come away pretty impressed with the car. They report that the brakes are better than most hybrid veh icles, and said that when the engine does kick in after the battery’s depleted, they didn’t even notice it until they stopped and heard it running quietly. It was a short spin, so they weren’t a ble to gauge, for instance, whether the car can actually pull the full 40 miles per battery char ge that Chevrolet claims it gets, but check out their full, detailed observations at the Source link.

The presenters of Top Gear, among the finer specimens of British television talent (Dr. Gregory House being another), were this past week engaged in designing and building an electric vehicle purportedly intended to compete with the likes of the Chevy Volt. Set a time limit of a mere 18 hours, they produced the marvel of rushed eng ineering and s hoddy workmanship you see above. The Hammerhead Eagle i-Thrust (believe us, you’ll have no reason to remember the name) was even put through its paces by Autocar magazine, whose video “review” can be found after the break. We won’t spoil the details for you, but if you want a conclusion, this one’s pretty unequivocal: “there’s a real ly good chan ce you could kill yourself” riding in this car.

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Word on the street — and by that we mean Reuters — is that Tesla’s looking to go public with the company “any day.” The luxury electric car make, whose Roadster still goes for a cool $109,000, would be the first US auto company to offer an IPO si nce Ford way back in 1956, says MSNBC. Quite a notable event, i ndeed, but earlier comments by Tesla investors (via Autoblog Green) suggest “any day now” might be any time between now and September 2010.