Husky Liners 15258 Back Up Camera Mount on 2040-parts.com

Lexus IS 300h promises unrivalled ownership costs

The new Lexus IS - launched at Detroit in January and costing from £26,495 for the IS 250 in the UK – actually offers ownership costs that eclipse diesel offerings from the likes of Jaguar, BMW, Audi and Mercedes, say Lexus. Despite the logical assumption that the complex hybrid powerplant in the IS 300h would cost more to maintain, Lexus say the opposite is true. Because it has no clutch and the starter motor and alternator are integrated they require no servicing or replacement and Lexus has fitted a timing chain instead of a timing belt, so it won’t need regular replacement either.

Fisker ‘Project Nina’ to debut at New York Auto Show

Fisker's Project Nina teased ahead of the New York Auto Show The ‘Project Nina’ from Fisker – a smaller take on the Karma – will debut at the New York Motor Show in April. It’s taken a very long time for Henrik Fisker to get the Karma out to the public, and even then it looks like it still wasn’t really ready to go, with reports of faults and breakdowns already starting to filter in from the handful of Karma owners. But the next stage of Fisker’s evolution in to a fully fledged maker of range-extending EVs is ‘Project Nina’, a smaller car that the Fisker – thing 3 Series – which has been funded to a great degree by the US taxpayer.

New design chiefs for Peugeot and Citroen

PSA Peugeot Citroen is under new design leadership this week. As of 4 January 2010, Gilles Vidal has taken over as design director for Peugeot and Thierry Metroz is the new pencil wielder-in-chief at Citroen. Both will report to Jean-Pierre Ploué, who remains design director for the PSA group.