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Ellesmere Port's bid to build Ampera hits snags

By Rob Golding Motor Industry 09 October 2009 15:02 Prime minister Gordon Brown’s personal crusade to get Vauxhall's version of the Chevrolet Volt petrol-electric plug-in hybrid – the Ampera – built in Britain's Ellesmere Port factory in 2012 is a dream delayed, CAR can disclose today.News that the UK Astra plant is the best in Europe, that the Astra's Delta platform will underpin the Ampera, and that Volt will be on US sale from 2010 had been taken to mean that Vauxhall would be churning out the cars in the north west within three years.But the prospect of an electric car industry growing up around the run-down Merseyside manufacturing site is not imminent, CAR has learned.'No Ampera to be built in Europe before 2015'Vauxhall insiders have made it clear that the car to be known as the Vauxhall/Opel Ampera in Europe will be an import from the US for at least five years. One senior planner told us: 'The US will be the sole source of Amperas until at least 2015.'Bob Lutz, GM's former product supremo who recently came out of retirement as a PR, said that the low value of the dollar made the US an ideal site for the manufacturing of export cars. And with forecast sticker prices of the range-extender electric car standing at a scary £35,000+, every price saving is vital to its marketability.The European market also needs time to get its electricity recharge infrastructure in place before it is worth making cars onshore in volume, GM high-ups point out.

Volvo’s new VEA family of four-cylinder engines starts production

As a result, Volvo has been planning a new range of four-cylinder engines to power their range in the future – the new Volvo Engine Architecture (VEA) – and has spent the last couple of years readying their design – and their facility in Skövde – to start production. And now it’s underway. Together with Volvo’s Scalable Product Architecture (SPA) the new VEA engines will be a core part of every new Volvo before too long, and will replace the five and six cylinder engines Volvo currently uses and will provide more power than current six-cylinder engines with economy and emissions better than current four-cylinder engines.

Volkswagen Santana

The Volkswagen Santana is a motoring icon in China. Visit Shanghai and the streets are clogged with scores of the sedans doing duty as taxis and official cars almost unaltered from the original 1980s design. Over 4 million have been sold in the last 29 years.