Chrysler Sebring Convertible

By Ben Whitworth Motor Industry 29 November 2006 09:43 America’s best-selling convertible arrives here a year from now – complete with right-hand drive layout, tax-friendly turbo diesel power, metal folding roof, sharpened dynamics and a £22k price. Unveiled at this week’s Los Angeles motor show, the all-new Sebring will come with the choice of either a Volkswagen-sourced 2.0-litre 140bhp turbo diesel fourpot or Chrysler’s own 189bhp 2.7-litre V6 petrol engine, hooked up to six-cog automatic or manual boxes. Chrysler’s engineers claim that roof down, the new convertible is two and a half times stiffer than its predecessor, which is just as well as the previous model – which was sold in minute quantities here back in 2001 – had all the torsional rigidity of a wet bath sponge.

CDN-GM Interactive Competition launched

The Car Design News - GM Interactive Competition interior design phase has launched and is now accepting uploads from students studying any kind of design course in North America and Canada. You can register and upload an initial entry right now at www.cardesigncontest.com GM's four brands: Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet and GMC have each set a brief, of which students can choose to answer one or several. It's traditional to focus your design efforts towards the close of a design competition, but GM, and our sponsors, Dassault Systèmes and Faurecia, have mentors standing by to guide your design work, so we encourage you to begin uploading work as soon as you can.

New Hyundai Test Centre at the Nurburgring revealed

Hyundai’s new test centre at the Nurburgring If anyone had said, just a few years ago, that Hyundai would develop a test centre at the Nurburgring to help shake-down their cars, they’d have been laughed at. But Hyundai – and Kia – have come so far in recent years that it makes absolute sense for them to develop a full-time testing facility at the Nurburgring to test their cars for the road, along with just about every other car maker of note. James May may object to the Nurburgring factor in the suspension set-ups of many road cars (and we do have some sympathy for his point of view), but the sometimes extreme nature of the Nurburgring’s surfaces – and its endless twists and turns, uphill and down – do offer car makers an easily accessible place to test cars in the (almost) real world.