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Travis Pastrana canes the Global RallyCross Dodge Dart: Video

While Erik Carlsson showed the world that lunacy had an appropriate place in rallying—they didn't call him "Carlsson on the Roof" for nothing—it took Ken Block's marketing savvy and the paste-it-anywhere-and-watch ubiquity of YouTube to get a broad swath of American kids amped on the antic fun that can be had with an all-terrain compact car. In a bid to get that same group excited about the new Dodge Dart, Chrysler enlisted Travis Pastrana to pilot its Global RallyCross entry. And in a sort of low-budget, less-elaborate version of Block's wacky-upon-zany Gymkhana videos, Pastrana puts the Dart through its paces, losing the passenger-side rear corner of the bodywork in the process.

Skoda Fabia

Skoda gave us its first indication of the new Fabia's design direction at the Geneva show earlier this year. There, its new city car's lines were upscaled to fit the VisionC coupé concept, memorable as much for its nuclear green paint job as its sharpened surfaces. As a result, the third-generation Fabia's design springs few surprises.

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.