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

Concept Car of the Week: Fiat Ecobasic

This week we're celebrating if not the most glamorous then certainly one of the most relevant concept of the last decade, the Fiat Ecobasic. The car was first shown at the 2004 Geneva motor show as Fiat investigated how to replace Giugiaro's ancient but brilliantly utilitarian Panda. The brief was: cheap to produce, cheap to own and friendly to the environment.

NLV Quant – née Koenigsegg Quant – at Geneva

The Quant - back at Geneva as the NLV Quant Last week we ran a story on Koenigsegg taking somethig new to Geneva after we’d had a chat with them. But part of that story was on last year’s Koenigsegg Quant, a four-seat electric supercar we saw at Geneva 2009. At the time it was billed as a Koenigsegg Quant (although, as Koenigsegg pointed out to us, it was always a commission project) but now it’s set to return to Geneva 2010 as the NLV Quant.

Car makers to be forced to disclaim ‘Official’ economy figures

We’ve banged on for a long time about the futility of official economy figures, especially as car makers get better and better at ‘gaming’ the official economy tests to produce the results they want. Much of the impetus to create the best headline economy figure for a car is driven by taxation, with car makers well aware that the better the official economy results are, the lower their CO2 will be (CO2 isn’t tested for – it’s just extrapolated from the official mpg) and the more appealing the car will be to buyers, particularly fleet buyers. But a ruling by the Advertising Standards Agency (ASA) against Audi could at least see car makers having to admit in their adverts that the ‘official’ economy figure bears no relation to what owners can expect to achieve in the real world.