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Driven: Kia Picanto

The first-generation Kia Picanto was one of the cars that helped promote Kia from the lower half of the second-division to somewhere near the playoff places. Its combination of great value, five-door practicality and vaguely cutesy - if thoroughly unremarkable - design found it many a home on the driveway of those looking for an A-segment hatchback. The second-generation model is playing a rather tougher ballgame.

Interactive Audi Cam smoothes car repairs

Audi Cam system – now rolled out across Audi’s UK dealer network – smoothes repair flow decisions for customers. Last year Audi introduced Direct Reception technology across its dealer network, allowing customers to see and speak to the mechanics (sorry, technicians) as they work on a car. It’s a good way to pass the time if you have the time in the first place to sit in a dealer’s reception whilst your car is worked on, but it always seemed more a gimmick than anything else; a bit like the ‘Celebrity Chef Kitchen Table’ fad.

Driven: Volkswagen Passat CC GT

Elegant and refined. Forty years ago these two words would not have been used to describe the Beetles bought in droves by the counterculture in the US; a symbol of the hippy movement and the definitive people's car, designed at a time when Germany sought to put people in motion. With the Passat CC, however, Volkswagen is indeed making a sharp move away from the ‘volks wagen', and these two words rolled off the tongues of those who saw the car in all three countries we drove through on our winter holiday.