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Study proves men prefer cars to women

MEN FEEL more emotion when looking at beautiful car design than they do when looking at beautiful women, new research has discovered. To coincide with the launch of its new Concept Coupe, Volvo carried out the study to see exactly what makes men and women tick when it comes to aesthetics. Images of the Concept Coupe, which has been designed to create a much more ‘expressive’ link to potential customers’ emotions, were shown to individuals who were wearing brain activity-measuring equipment in sequence with images of old or ‘ugly’ cars, crying and happy babies, plus images of people traditionally considered to be ‘beautiful’.

VW Polo GTI and harder Golf GTI Wörthersee 09

By Tim Pollard First Official Pictures 20 May 2009 16:34 Volkswagen today unveiled two hot hatch surprises at the 2009 Wörthersee hot hatch festival: a potential Polo GTI and a harder, faster Golf GTI, likely to give clues to the R model tipped by CAR for launch later this year. Both models pictured here are concepts at this stage. The Golf GTI Wörthersee 09 edition gains cosmetic and modest engineering mods.

New Jaguar XE OFFICIALLY launched – price from £27,000

The new Jaguar XE arrives After months of teasing, years of planning and huge sums of money spent, it’s here – the new Jaguar XE. Looking like a slightly smaller version of the XF, with an upright nose, longish bonnet, coupe-like profile and stubby tail, the XE is clearly a Jaguar – and a fairly conservative one at that – which is probably sensible when  entering such a competitive sector as the ‘Premium’ compact saloon market. But the new XE isn’t just a punt for a few sales in a new sector for Jaguar, but a car that could take Jaguar from an interesting maker of relatively low volume cars to a global ‘Premium’ car maker; nose to nose in a very competitive sector with, principally, Audi and the A4, BMW and the 3 Series and Mercedes and the C-Class.