2000 00 Audi A6 C5 4.2 L Plastic Engine Motor Cover V8 on 2040-parts.com

Electric cars produce MORE CO2 than petrol or diesel cars

Rather than offering a low CO2 alternative to the internal combustion engine, it seems electric cars start their life with an extra 40,000 miles worth of CO2 already on the clock. Despite bribes from governments around the world to get car buyers to buy in to electric cars, they’ve been a flop. But that’s not surprising.

Lotus Evora – first customer car delivered

The keys are handed over for the first Lotus Evora customer car But it would appear that Lotus have little to worry about. Evoras are now running down the production line and will be up to full production levels by November. Lotus has an order book that fills the next five months already, and they’ve taken on 150 extra workers to cope with demand.

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.