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

Only one day left in CDN-Opel/Vauxhall competition

There's just one day left to enter the Car Design News-Opel/Vauxhall interactive design competition. Last minute entries have been flooding in and it's great to see all the entrants working so hard. Entries close at 11am UK time / 12pm Central European time on Friday, 10 November.

Grab a ‘VAT Free’ Skoda Octavia

In yet another ‘Sign of the times’ Skoda has announced that they are now offering ‘VAT Free Octavias’ until the end of the year. No, this is not a tie-up between Alistair Darling and VW, it’s just Skoda’s way of offering a headline price decrease of a bit over 13% (less expensive to Skoda than last week for the same headline, to be fair, and there is a new model due in January!). Grab a VAT free Skoda Octavia I’m pretty sure that there will be a raft of these ‘VAT Free’ offers floating around on everything from cars to washing machines, capitalising on the fact the VAT is in the headlines.

Porsche makes £14k on every car it sells, Bentley makes £12.7k

Porsche made £14k on every car sold in 2013 If you need an illustration of how much more profitable high-end sports and luxury cars are than mainstream cars, VW Groups sales figures demonstrate it perfectly. At the extreme ends of the profit per car spectrum, Porsche made an enviable £13,931 for every car it sold in 2013 and VW made just £615 (although SEAT actually lost £330 on every car it sold) . In fact, although you might expect the higher-priced Bentley range to make more per car than a Porsche, Bentley only managed a creditable second place on VW Group’s profit per car table, turning in £12,700 profit for every car it turned out (11,000 of them in 2013).