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UK car manufacturing to hit record high by 2015

Britain is on track to hit a new all-time car manufacturing high by the end of 2015. The Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders forecasts that car production is set to top 2 million a year in three years' time. That's enough to eclipse the 1.92m record set forty years ago in 1972.

Porsche 911 GT3 R Hybrid (2011) first official pictures

Porsche has released details of its updated 911 GT3 R Hybrid – the 2010 original nearly won last year's Nurburgring 24hr race before (ironically) it retired with petrol engine failure.  The 2011 Porsche 911 GT3 R Hybrid – the lowdown Before this report disappears in a chorus of ‘it looks the same as last year’s one’, let's outline where Porsche’s engineers have been busy. At the unfashionable end of the car remains a 4.0-litre flat-six engine producing approximately 470bhp. Up front are twin electric motors, now producing 75kW of power each (up from 60kW) and combined these give the GT3 R Hybrid a 197bhp electric boost, which can be programmed to activate automatically via the throttle pedal, or manually selected during overtaking. F1-derived hybrid tech for the 911 GT3 R Hybrid Power for the two electric motors doesn't come from batteries, but flywheel accumulator technology from Williams Hybrid Power, an offshoot of the Williams Formula 1 team. The flywheel, encased in a carbonfibre safety cell in the space where the passenger seat would be, spins at up to 40,000rpm and acts as a mechanical energy store for the electric motors. Regenerative braking feeds energy back into the flywheel system – no surprises there, as the technology is derived from Williams' exeprience with Kinetic Energy Recovery Systems (KERS) in F1.

Maserati Quattroporte (2013): the first official pictures

Maserati has unveiled the new 2013 Quattroporte – the luxury sports saloon which has been the mainstay of Modena since the current car's launch in 2004. The new Maserati Quattroporte will be shown at the 2013 North American International Auto Show in Detroit, with left-hand drive sales starting in spring 2013. However, right-hand drive UK sales of the new QP are unlikely to begin before June 2013.