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New car sales surge again

NEW CAR sales have risen again in September thanks to rapid growth in demand from private buyers, according to statistics released today. The Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT) said that a rise of 16.7% in the private sector helped to drive a ‘super September’ that saw overall sales rise by almost 11% over the same month last year. The new 63 registration plate has helped drive customers to showrooms across the country, with the latest breed of fuel-efficient, smooth and quiet petrol engines selling particularly strongly.

Battery breakthrough set to accelerate electric-car development

A team of scientists working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are claiming a significant breakthrough in recharging times for lithium-ion batteries. According to findings published in the scientific journal Nature, MIT researchers Byoungwoo Kang and Gerbrand Ceder have unlocked the potential of lithium-ion batteries by patenting a unique process which is claimed to allow a typical laptop power pack to be fully recharged in less than a minute--an improvement in recharging performance of roughly 90 percent over existing lithium-ion batteries. Lithium-ion batteries generate electric current via the flow of lithium ions across an electrolyte, from an electrode to a cathode.

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.