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The hidden cost of fuel-efficient cars

Yesterday’s drive of the new Fiesta ECOnetic got me thinking. It’s astonishing what car makers can get out of a car these days. The new ECOnetic manages a combined figure of 76mpg.

Crunch watch Dec 08: the auto industry in crisis

By Tim Pollard and Simon Stiel Motor Industry 31 December 2008 14:05 Wednesday 31 December 2008• GMAC, GM's finance arm, said it would immediately revise its criteria for providing loans, after the US government bail-out of the General's credit arm. It will now supply credit for anyone with a score of 621 or more on the Fico scale, the scale used to assess Amercian customers' creditworthiness (Financial Times)• The news means that 80% of US consumers would now qualify for a loan from GMAC – which should improve sales in the depressed US market (Detroit News)• Chrysler is being lambasted for taking out full-page adverts in the American national press thanking the nation for supporting its auto industry. But critics point out this is a fresh waste of bail-out resources, as pages in the Wall Street Journal – one of the titles in which the ad ran – reportedly cost up to $264,000.

BMW Roadster Concept: BMW Vision ConnectedDrive Geneva debut

BMW Vision ConnectedDrive We reported the other day that BMW were taking a roadster concept to the Geneva Motor Show, a car we expected to point the way to a new, smaller roadster – the BMW Z2. But it seems to be much more than just that. The BMW Vision ConnectedDrive – for that is the catchy little moniker BMW has attached to this concept – is a showcase for BMW technology and the layered styling language we’ve already seen in the Vision EfficientDynamics concept (can’t we have some snappy little monikers instead of Anglicising the German practice of just joining words together in a line to make a new word?).