Honda Crf 230l 2008 on 2040-parts.com

Lexus LF-A still on the cards

With the car world in turmoil, and buyers running scared of high performance cars, most of the car makers around the world are shelving their high-end projects until things settle down. Honda has announced that it has put its NSX replacement on ice (although it is apparently still going to show it at Detroit) and other manufacturers are concentrating on their frugal products. But Toyota is taking a different tack.

Vauxhall Insignia facelift revealed for 2014

The Vauxhall Insignia gets a facelift for 2014 with new engines and lower prices The Vauxhall Insignia is a more than decent car – and a big improvement on the Vectra that went before – but it’s now almost five years old so it’s time for a bit of a facelift. Vauxhall has revealed the updated Insignia for 2014 that gets a decent raft of changes, both cosmetically and under the skin, to make it better to live with and more economical. Sensibly, Vauxhall has cut the bewildering range of Insignia trim levels from 14 to eight (do they need even that many?), with Design Trim at the bottom and Elite trim at the top, and the new Insignia Design starting at £16,279 – £3500 less than the old Insignia ES.

Lotus Evora 414E Range Extender EV moves forward

The Lotus Evora 414E – a Lotus Engineering range extender hybrid project – is still moving ahead with dynamic and durability testing now underway. On the surface the Evora 414E looked like every other Evora, but under the skin sat the first version of a Lotus range-extender platform with a pair of electric motors and a small, 3-cylinder range-extender engine promising impressive performance and economy. Despite the reveal of the 414E at Geneva in 2010, there’s not been a huge amount of news on Lotus pushing forward with the project, or at least not until we got the Infiniti Emerg-E Concept at Geneva this year that turned out to be underpinned by the Evora 414E platform.