3" Red Cold Air/short Ram Intake/turbocharger Racing Spiral Cone Gauze Filter on 2040-parts.com

Beanz Meanz More Eco-Friendly Future Fords

THE car industry is full of interesting and unusual business partnerships, but this latest tie-up between Ford and Heinz promises to be one of the more intriguing. Far from seeking to produce 57 varieties of any particular new Ford model, the two firms are exploring the use of tomato fibre to develop a sustainable composite materials for use in vehicle manufacturing. For example, boffins believe that dried tomato skins could become the wiring brackets in future Ford vehicles or the storage bin a customer uses to hold coins and other small objects.

Lotus prices Exige S Roadster from £52,900

Lotus has announced its new Exige S Roadster will be priced from £52,900 – exactly the same as the hard-top Exige S. It’s also slightly lighter than the fixed-head Exige, and matches its blistering acceleration times.  That £52,900 tag makes the 345bhp Exige S Roadster £7500 pricier than a (pre-options list) Porsche Boxster S manual, though the 1328kg Porsche makes do with only 315bhp.

Volvo S60 Polestar goes in to production

It sounded like a plan to put it in to production – even if it would probably need twin turbos to make it nicely wieldy on the road – and that’s exactly what Volvo and Polestar have done. The Volvo S60 Polestar has gone in to limited production, initially for the Australian market, but instead of the mighty 508bhp of the concept it has to make do with a more pedestrian 350bhp, little more than the V60 we reviewed last year with the Polestar upgrade. But the extra power is enough to get the production S60 Polestar to 62mph in 4.9 seconds and, thanks to tweaks to the suspension, brakes and aerodynamics, the S60 Polestar looks like it will be able to handle the power quite well.