Arias Pistons 12.5:1 Compression 82mm Bore Honda B-series on 2040-parts.com

Vauxhall Astra VXR (2012) gets 282bhp + new GTC photos

Astra GTC Concept Paris Vauxhall sneaked us a peek at the 2012 Vauxhall Astra VXR a couple of weeks ago – slightly titivated and called the Astra GTC Concept admittedly – but the 2012 Vauxhall Astra VXR none the less. And we ran the story, even though there was precious little to say beyond they’d turned the ‘blades’ round on the doors to make it look more butch and that it’d turn up when the 3 door Astra does in a years time. But Vauxhall has decided to throw a little more out there, so we get images of the interior and some firm (ish) news on the oily bits.

Watch the Jaguar Project 7 F-Type go up the Goodwood hillcimb

Jaguar Project 7 F-Type (pictured) tackles the Goodwood FoS hillclimb One of the surprises of the 2013 Goodwood Festival of Speed has been the debut of the Jaguar Project 7 car, an F-Type with the more bountiful 542bhp supercharged V8 and styling stolen from the D-Type. Jaguar are saying Project 7 isn’t heading for production, but we’re pretty sure most of what’s underneath it – principally the 542bhp version of the supercahrged V8 – is in a production F-Type R. Perhaps surprisingly, fitting the 542bhp vresion of the V8 doesn’t seem to have done a lot for the F-Type’s sprint times, with 62mph coming up in 4.1 seconds, just 0.1 seconds quicker than the 495bhp engine in the standard Jaguar F-Type V8.

2014 Ford Mondeo testing autonomous driving technologies (video)

The Ford Fusion with its LIDAR ears allowing autonomous driving Car makers are starting to take self-driving, autonomous cars very seriously, and we’ve recently seen Mercedes testing their autonomous driving S-Class in Berlin, Volvo planning a big trial of 100 self-driving cars in Gothenberg and Tesla planning systems that will do 90 per cent of your driving within 3 years. Now it’s Ford’s turn. Ford has equipped a Fusion Hybrid (that’s the North American version of the new Ford Mondeo we still haven’t got in the UK) with its autonomous vehicle technology to conduct research in partnership with the University of Michigan and State Farm (a big group of insurance companies in the US). The test Fusion gets a system called LIDAR (light detection and range – the funny looking ears on the top of the Fusion in the picture above) which can scan the road ahead up to 2.5 million times a second and create a 3D map of the surroundings.