Mercedes-Benz has big plans for small cars

Breaking outside its American position of rear-wheel-drive luxury vehicles, Mercedes-Benz will launch its new front-wheel-drive architecture in the United States in the next three years in the form of a coupe, SUV and possibly a small wagon or compact hatchback. Joachim Schmidt, Mercedes' global sales and marketing boss, said Mercedes is developing at least four models based on its MFA, or Mercedes Front-wheel-drive Architecture. "We will introduce the next generation of our MFA family to the U.S.," Schmidt said in an interview.

Audi Urban Concept City Car first photos

Audi Urban Concept City Car - first photos It’s hard to know exactly what Audi plans to do with their City Car - the Audi Urban Concept – once they’ve rolled it out to the world at Frankfurt 2011. Are they planning to put the diminutive electric Audi go-kart in to production? We really don’t know, but if they are, it’s a while away; we’ve been getting e-Tron concepts for an age with no concrete sign of their arrival, so any production Urban Concept from Audi is not going to happen quickly.

UK Car Insurance Company reports buyers downsizing

Swinton Insurance claim quote requests for bigger cars are down 20% Swinton say that it has seen an increase of 25% in quote requests for smaller engined cars in the last six months and a decrease of 20% in car insurance quotes for cars over 1.8 litres (which, short of the big-engined cars being scrapped begs the question: What’s happened to the big-engined cars? Did they just disappear, or are they just not being insured?). But this got us thinking.