Bendix/king Ky 97a Tso Vdc P/n 064-1051-70 on 2040-parts.com

Smart fortwo Edition Limited Three

Mercedes has had stick in the past for playing with its ‘Toy Car’, the Smart. What was a quality maker like Mercedes doing involved with a car the size of the boot on an S Class Mercedes and named after a watch maker (the name stands for Swatch Mercedes Art)? Don’t get me wrong; there was always going to be a market for a car designed to park ‘nose-in’ in busy European streets, but its seemed like Mercedes was stretching itself too thin at a time when it was suffering a big loss in the reputation it had for building high-quality machinery.

Performance Car of the Year photo gallery - day 1

CAR publishes its Performance Car of the Year 2010 supplement this week. It's a 36-page standalone mag charting our 2500-mile European road trip to thrash out which is the best sports car of the year. We'll have a full microsite launching later in the week, video, competitions and more - plus we'll upload a gallery every day with some of the out-takes, extra photos and background to our PCOTY road trip.

Rolls Royce Wraith Drophead Coupe confirmed for production.

The Rolls Royce Wraith (pictured) will get a Drophead sibling in 2016 It was always likely that Rolls Royce would take their ‘affordable’ model – the RR Ghost – and make a coupe version. What wasn’t really on the cards is that they would give it a more dramatic style – and a more driver-focused experience – and tag a name from the past on it to create a new Rolls Royce Wraith for the 21st century. But that’s exactly what they’ve done, and the Wraith does seem to be an effective tool for Rolls Royce to extend the appeal of their cars to a new, perhaps younger, demographic.