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New Skoda Octavia Scout price and spec – costs from £25,315

New Skoda Octavia Scout costs from £25,315 The new Skoda Octavia Scout arrived at the Geneva Motor Show in the Spring, bringing an ‘Allroad’ version of the latest Skoda Octavia Combi (Estate) to the market. As with all estate cars with offroad pretensions, the Octavia Scout comes with a more butch set of bumpers and a more purposeful nose, black cladding for the door sills and wheel arches, a new set of alloys, a raised ride height and a few tweaks for the interior so it all looks more than capable of taking on a muddy boot sale car park. The Scout comes with a choice of two 2.0 litre TDI engines at launch, with a lower powered, 148bhp with a six-speed manual and a more powerful, 182bhp version, getting a six-speed DSG gearbox, both of which return official economy of 55.4mpg (although, oddly, the lower-powered gets emissions of 129g/km and the more powerful 134g/km).

We're Getting More MPG

The average car/truck/SUV sold by the top eight brands in America makes almost one mile per gallon more than it did a year ago, according to sales-weighted data from the industry analysts at TrueCar. TrueCar's TrueMPG industry average of 23.7 mpg remains the highest the car market has seen, 0.7-mpg higher than at this time last year. The biggest gainers by brand are Nissan and Chrysler, which improved their fleets by 1.1 mpg over last year's numbers.

BMW's Vision EfficientDynamics concept bound for Frankfurt

BMW has revealed a radical vision for its future performance-oriented models in a spectacularly styled concept car whose combination of M3-rivaling acceleration and Mini Cooper-beating fuel economy will likely make it one of the stars of this year's Frankfurt motor show. Called Vision EfficientDynamics, the one-off coupe is a mobile showcase for lightweight construction and plug-in hybrid drive technology, while featuring a variety of futuristic styling, packaging, aerodynamic, lighting and interior ideas under development at the German carmaker's heavily cloaked FIZ development center in Munich. Many of the concepts are planned for use on upcoming BMW road cars, including an exciting Z10 EfficientDynamics range-topping model due by 2015.