In Europe you see alot of little hatchbacks like the Peugeot 206 running around as “vans”, so this little car you see above probably makes sense. Mitsubishi took the i-MiEV and converted it into a little zero emissions goods transporter that seats two and has a luggage compartment measuring about 1,350mm wide by 1,180mm deep and 1,100mm tall. Click here to read the rest of Mitsubishi i-MiEV Cargo: zero emissions van
The flagship Lexus LS will soon come with a special highly scratch-resistant clear coat which Toyota says possess self-restoring qualities. The clear coat is highly resistant to typical surface scratches usually caused by car wash brushes and fingernails. You can usually spot loads of fingernail scratches near your door handle area, and sometimes you’re bound to hit the paint while reaching to grab your door handle.
An ingredient in the new clearcoat apparently encorages molecular bonding, resulting in a denser structure than conventionally possible. This gives the coat flexibility and elasticity, making it less prone to damage and more resistant to light and acid, and giving it the ability to self-restore after deformation.
This sketch of an upcoming global compact hatchback was released by NIssan yesterday. Being a global model, it’s expected to be a low cost and economical run-about suitable for sale in emerging markets but also with the potential of being kitted up for sale in more established markets.
There are definitely certain things about the car’s styling that makes you automatically assume this is the next generation Nissan March/Micra. The current March is available both as a hatchback and a convertible, competing head to head with the Colt which has the same bodytypes.
Nissan Motor (Thailand) Co., Ltd. announced that the model will qualify as Thailand’s first “Eco-car.” The Eco-car program basically gives tax-breaks to companies that develop and make energy-efficient vehicles in Thailand. The car will go into production May next year.
To be eligible for the program, the car has to achieve at least 20km per liter, and put out less than 120g/km of CO2. The engine has to be smaller than 1.3 liters if petrol-powered and 1.4 liters if diesel powered. What you get is a 50% cut in excise duty, no income tax for 8 years, and no import duty for your factory machinery imports.
The Eco-car project is basically Thailand’s bid to switch its auto-hub status to something more than just a pick-up hub – it wants to build and export fuel efficient compact cars too and the carmakers seem to be signing on in droves – Honda, Suzuki, Nissan, etc. However only Nissan has announced its eco-car so far, while the rest are still a WIP.
Honda will be showing various automobiles at the Tokyo Motorshow next month. Being their home turf and an Asian country, I must say the concept, near-production and production cars to be shown are definitely more interesting to us as an ASEAN country as they would be the most relevant to production cars that we’ll receive in the future.
The most exciting is probably the new Honda CR-Z Concept 2009, which is the most close-to-production concept version of the upcoming CR-Z sports car so far. No technical details have been revealed on the car so far, but I do have some nice high-resolution photos for you showing a very production-ready exterior and interior.
Word is that the CR-Z will get a 1.5 liter version of Honda’s IMA Hybrid system (the Civic and Insight use 1.3 IMA hybrid systems) and high on the wishlist of speculators so far is a 6-speed manual transmission, which is rare in a typical hybrid car where you usually see CVT and e-CVT transmissions.
Look after the jump for a nice hi-res gallery of the new CR-Z! Click here to read the rest of Tokyo Motorshow’s Honda CR-Z Concept 2009 very close to production version
Does this look cool to you?
What’s cooler than an Aston Martin? An iPhone. Probably no thanks to James Bond movies’ portrayal of the Aston Martin being the ultimate playboy spy’s car, the brand has sat at the top of the annual UK CoolBrands survey for three years consequetively, until this year where it has been displaced by the iPhone.
The survey polled 2,500 voters for a shortlist of cool brands and the final twenty were voted on by a panel of judges including DJ Edith Bowman and Adam & Eve founding partner James Murphy. No other carmaker made the seemingly very male-oriented top 10 list, but Ferrari managed to come in at 15th place.
Look after the jump for the top 20 list.
Source Click here to read the rest of Aston Martin no longer coolest brand in the UK?
The Dow Jones Sustainability Index has named BMW the most sustainable automobile company in the world for the 5th consecutive year. The index was first published in 1999, so it is in its 10th year now. Effectively, this means that right now, BMW is the world’s most ‘greenest’ automaker.
BMW has just established a Sustainability Board in summer 2009, which comprises of the entire Board of Management, determines the strategic alignment for sustainability issues. They meet twice a year to discuss and adopt the strategies and activities proposed at operational level.
Sustainability is not only defined by your product mix. On one hand BMW makes the zero emissions MINI E (though on trial), but on the other hand you also have the BMW X6 M, weighing well over 2,000kg with 555 PS sent to all four wheels yet can only move four from A to B.
No, it’s more than that. It also includes the production plants, production processes, green recycling practices, etc. It also extends beyond the gates of their office buildings and plants, sustainability is also the excuse that they gave for leaving F1. Whether that’s the real reason or not, I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure it’ll score some brownie points on whatever index the DJSI is using.
These are the examples of sustainability activities that you don’t see when you take delivery of your new 323i. BMW’s Munich R&D center uses naturally cold groundwater to cool some buildings. This saves about 10,000 MWh of electricity, and translates to 6,300 tons of CO2 a year. At their Spartanburg plant where the X6 M is built, over 60% of total energy requirements are from methane gas from a nearby landfill.
BMW also takes care not to waste any water unnecessarily. The water cycles at BMW plants are designed to reuse water as often as possible. In fact, BMW’s engine plant in Steyr produced 733,500 engines in 2008 without generating any wastewater at all. The aim is for a 30% reduction of water, energy, solvent emissions and waste per vehicle between 2006 and 2012, and we’re smack in the middle of that now.
But for us Malaysian motorists usually when you hear the word ‘green’ or even BMW’s EfficientDynamics brand, you usually think of the product itself – reduced fuel consumption and reduced tailpipe emissions, unfortunately less so the latter with most people. Now with better quality Euro 2M diesel here, you can expect some interesting announcements from BMW this week.
You can probably already guess what it is, but I’ll be back with the full details later this week. I think what’s coming is great and I can only wish that the manufacturers who sell the more affordable cars here in Malaysia are going to do the same.
Not many car companies here in Malaysia have a used car program. BMW has their Premium Selection and Toyota has their TopMark service. It’s not easy to setup but it’s good because it allows the companies some kind of control over their product’s resale value. Not complete control, but at least there is some sort of avenue to influence it if you have a business where you take in used versions of your products, refurbish them, and resell them at a good price with at least a one year warranty for that peace of mind.
New BMWs are potentially full of electronic niggles. Loads of sensors for this and that. Personally I feel the last BMW that’s fairly modern but yet isn’t too full of sensors and electronics is the early batches of the E39 5-Series – the one with the single VANOS M52 engine, I think the production year 96 to 98?
Beyond that, with the E46, double VANOS E39 and etc, things got a little over a ‘fine line’, conventional throttles were replaced by drive by wire, etc. So there’s alot of things that could potentially break when you buy a used BMW.
This is where used car warranties come in. Internationally, BMW and Allianz have just signed an agreement to intensify their cooperation on a global level. The agreement focuses on a range of vehicle and mobility related insurance products for end customers, such as automobile insurances and used-car warranties.
We’ve already seen Allianz insurance products offered under BMW branding here in Malaysia and its called BMW Motor Insurance. It guarantees that the buyer of a new BMW will be entitled to a brand new car if the car is stolen or totalled in an accident within the first 12 months from date of purchase. Even used BMWs purchased from authorised BMW dealers in a similiar predicament within the first 12 months will also receive a full insured value claim settlement with no market value adjustment.
This could potentially extend to things such as extended warranty programs, which will definitely be very valuable to a BMW buyer. The current plan is for BMW Service + Repair Inclusive to be offered for the first 3 years or 60,000km, whichever comes first. Another two years to cover more years of a typical 5 year to 7 year loan will bring peace of mind.
When the Lexus brand was finally introduced back in its homeland of Japan, it marked the end of the Toyota-badged Lexus products such as the Toyota Harrier, which was essentially a Lexus RX. The Land Cruiser and Lexus LX twins are still on though.
Or so we thought, because the new Lexus HS250h will be launched in Japan as a Toyota called the Toyota SAI, alongside the original HS250h which has already been launched in Japan, which isn’t really completely original at all, being a restyled Euro-market Toyota Avensis (platform also used for the Scion tC) with the Camry Hybrid’s gaso-electric powertrain. Boy, that was confusing!
Toyota will be positioning the Toyota SAI as a larger hybrid-only car compared to the Prius, though since they share the same 2,700mm wheelbase I don’t expect the interior space to be all that different, though rear headroom should be better.
In the HS250h, the chassis had to handle the naturally larger 2.4 liter Hybrid Synergy Drive hybrid system but some are saying that the Toyota SAI will use the 1.8 liter version thats in the Prius. There are of course also news that it will use the same 2.4 liter HSD engine as the HS250h. What it will have is a proper boot, while the Prius is a hatchback.
It’s more of a public secret by now but today Land Rover has officially come out to say that a small Land Rover based on the LRX concept will be built! After all, the UK government previously offered a grant of up to GBP 27 million to the automaker to produce an all- new vehicle based on the LRX Concept.
And apparently it’s going to be marketed under the Range Rover badge, since the press release constantly refers to it as a Range Rover instead of a Land Rover. This will mean the Range Rover series will have a third model – small, medium and large.
The original Range Rover is the large model and a new “medium” model was previously added, a model based on the Discovery called the Range Rover Sport. The flagship has a wheelbase of 2,880mm while the smaller Disco-based sport has a wheelbase of 2,745mm. That would make the LRX quite compact indeed as even the new “small” BMW X1 has a wheelbase of 2,760mm, longer than the Sport’s.
The production LRX will be built at Land Rover’s plant in Halewood, and will be the smallest, lightest and most efficient vehicle the company has ever produced. The original LRX concept was a 2-door compact SUV powered by a hybrid powertrain that combined a 2.0 liter turbodiesel and an Electric Rear Axle Drive (ERAD) which allows it to run on zero-emissions electric mode at speeds of up to 32km/h.
“The new vehicle will be a natural extension to the Range Rover line-up, complementing the existing models and helping to define a new segment. It will be true to the concept and have many recognisable Range Rover design cues including the signature clamshell bonnet, the floating roof and the solid ‘wheel-at-each-corner’ stance,” said Gerry McGovern, Land Rover design director.
However I wonder if the UK government’s 27 million pound offer still stands, because of a particular announcement that Tata made today. Their intention is to close either a Jaguar plant in Castle Bromwich, or a Land Rover plant in Solihull, both in central England.
Their intention is probably to centralise production of both marques at a single plant – either Solihull or Castle Bromwich. As it is, the Halewood plant I mentioned above was a Jaguar plant, and the first Land Rover that started production there was the Freelander 2. But Tata did say there would be no compulsory layoffs…
For fans of the new facelifted Toyota Camry, here are some new shots of the car from its Australian launch where it is called the Toyota Aurion. I don’t think any of the previous photos I’ve published so far had a shot of the car with its LED tail lamps lit up so for those who haven’t seen the new facelifted Camry in real life at night yet, here’s how it looks like.
The Australian Toyota Aurion also has a sporty version with a completely different aggressively-styled bumper and grille. This is different from the aerokit we can purchase with the Camry here in Malaysia. Younger Camry buyers will probably want to hunt for this or find out how to import the original bumper in.
Look after the jump for the full gallery. Click here to read the rest of Camry down-under: Toyota Aurion facelifted too!
