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Crossovers fuel April sales at BMW, Mini

Sales of crossovers fueled BMW and Mini in April, with Mini posting its best U.S. sales month ever. Mini's April sales of 6,446 units were up 67.7 percent from a year ago.

Ford Mondeo Vignale revealed – it’s back to the days of Ford Ghia

The Ford Mondeo Vignale (picture) has been revealed as Ford’s new range-topper Mainstream car makers have always tried to add some glitz and gloss to their models by tagging on a badge they thought made their cars more exclusive. Like Ford with endless ‘Ghia’ models sitting at the top of the Ford range after they bought Ghia of Turin in 1970. Ford continued to use the Ghia badge to mark out its best-equipped models until very recently (you could still buy a Fiesta Ghia as recently as 2008) but they finally dropped the badge and moved their top of the tree badge over to the ‘Titanium’ moniker.

Nissan-designed Santa’s sleigh

By Tim Pollard First Official Pictures 17 December 2008 14:30 Canadian designer Martin Uhlarik penned Nissan’s sleigh, which dispenses with reindeer altogether and can be used instead in conjunction with a rather faster steed, a Nissan GT-R. It’s quickly apparent that Nissan’s SC01 sledge will have a much greater load capacity than rival designs – and we’d certainly pull over fast if we saw this in our rear-view mirrors. Uhlarik is project design leader at Nissan’s Paddington design centre in London and was senior exterior designer on the Qashqai+2 and NV200 concept.