Holley 538-24 Map Sensor Bosch-style 1-bar Each on 2040-parts.com

Try a prestige car from Europcar before you buy. Or you could just go to a dealer.

You can hire a BMW 5-Series (pictured) from Europcar before you buy It’s always good to have a promotion to get punters through the door, but the latest PR promo from Hertz does seem to have a very visible flaw in its logic. According to Europcar – the leading car hire company in Europe, don’t you know – the best route for trying out a new prestige car before you buy is to give them a call and book a day or three in the cars of your choice. Europcar say you can have anything from a 4×4 to a luxury saloon and performance cars, with the suggestion you can pit a Mercedes SLK against an Audi TTS or check out the differences between a new E-Class or new 5-Series.

Fiat Launches Racy New Range Of Abarth 500s

NEW colours, more technology and a host of other changes feature in the latest range of Abarth 500 cars for 2014. The new range has just been launched as part of a tie-in with the infamous Gumball 3000 supercar event, which visited Edinburgh and London recently as part of an international tour. While the endurance road trip featured some of the world’s most exotic supercars, many of the loudest cheers were reserved for the fleet of Abarths – the new 695 biposto, a 595 Competizione, 595 Turismo and 595 50th Anniversario – taking part in the event.

Driven: Volkswagen Passat CC GT

Elegant and refined. Forty years ago these two words would not have been used to describe the Beetles bought in droves by the counterculture in the US; a symbol of the hippy movement and the definitive people's car, designed at a time when Germany sought to put people in motion. With the Passat CC, however, Volkswagen is indeed making a sharp move away from the ‘volks wagen', and these two words rolled off the tongues of those who saw the car in all three countries we drove through on our winter holiday.