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News watch April 2010: today's auto industry news

Welcome to CAR's news aggregator as we round up the daily stories in the auto industry. Top tip: news summaries are added from the top hour-by-hourThursday 29 April 2010• The European Commission has published a document outlining plans to encourage the take-up of electric cars. It includes a strategy for a common charging socket (Financial Times)• BMW has leapfrogged Toyota as the world's most valuable automotive brand, according to the BrandZ Top 100 survey.

Subaru BRZ STI teased

Subaru are teasing the BRZ STI (pictured) The Subaru BRZ – the Subaru take on the Toyota GT86 – has the potential to be a lot more hardcore than its current setup allows. That has led to much speculation that Subaru will bolt a turbo on to the BRZ’s Boxer engine to produce a BRZ with something closer to the 300bhp we originally expected. In fact, at the end of 2011, Subaru in the US confirmed there would be a turbo version of the engine in the BRZ, although they fell short of actually confirming the BRZ itself would get it as an option, but at the end of 2012 we had a report that the BRZ will get the turbo engine and that it will deliver 280bhp.

Bluebird Electric aiming for UK Land Speed Record

Bluebird Electric You’d hope that anyone of any age would associate ‘Bluebird’ with ‘Campbell’, but as many of our schools don’t seem too keen on anything that may be even remotely considered part of Britain’s history, perhaps not. So we’ll just throw in that Sir Malcolm Campbell drove a variety of Bluebird (or Blue Bird) cars to new land speed records on Pendine Sands in the 1920s and his son, Donald Campbell, matched his father’s achievements with world speed records on both land and water – the only man to have held land and water speed records at the same time. And he too used the Bluebird moniker for his record-breaking transport of choice. Fast forward the best part of fifty years and it’s the grandson of Sir Malcolm – Don Wales – who’s plotting to take the Bluebird Electric to a new UK Land Speed Record, and planning to make a start on that quest at Pendine Sands (a location Top Gear fans will probably recognise – and was it Pendine Sands on the new Torchwood series last week?).