Laura and I made our second annual trip to the North American Int’l Auto Show yesterday.

Audi’s grille designer is apparently on a mission to out-Bangle BMW. Either that, or channeling the Edsel.

The Ford GT cut in half was way cool, albeit hard to photograph.

The “Lincoln F-150″ was a rather amusing exercise in badge engineering. Given their typical customer demographic, I doubt many of them could crawl into the cab without a lift.

To me, the Chrysler Firepower concept was sharper than the Viper coupe, which looked a little too C6-ish to me.

Dodge had a “American Club Racer” model SRT-4 on display. Given their Runoffs performance last year, I would assume this means they worked on strengthening the front bumper.

The new Z06 is pretty sharp, and given my perverse love of GM front-drivers (at least of the Quad4 variety), the Cobalt SS is looking pretty spiffy.

The return of the V8 Impala SS is cool. Having it start as a carryover on the milquetoast FWD rental car platform is not.

DaimlerChrysler had several of the Smart microcars on display. Perhaps Mercedes intend to market them as Maybach escape pods? “To the escape pod, Mr. Bigglesworth!”

The Lexus LF-A concept looked great…

…then it turned around. (Not digging the “speaker grilles.”)

Also, as we walked away from the “product specialist” extoling the virtues of the Pontiac Solstice (which was basically if you want more details, join our email list because a lot of production details haven’t been finalized) proudly remarked that Formula One cars use 4-cyl engines, just like the Solstice . Not a good way to get the sporty car crowd to take you seriously, plus the Saturn Sky looks better, IMHO.

…and finally in my quick survey,

The Shelby GR-1 looked great bathed in blue neon light!

Click for all my pictures from the show.

-jde