Lockheed F-80 Shooting Star 1st Generation Jet-powered Fighter 3-view Print on 2040-parts.com

Alfa Romeo goes rear-drive; eight new cars by 2018 including 4C Cloverleaf

By Damion Smy Motor Industry 06 May 2014 15:51 Alfa Romeo has confirmed the news first broken exclusively by CAR in July 2013: the Italian brand will make a dramatic shift from front-drive hatches like the Mito and Giulietta, and instead develop a new range of rear- and all-wheel sports saloons, SUVs and sports cars. Announced in Detroit at Fiat-Chrysler HQ, Alfa Romeo chief technology officer Harald Wester revealed the mantra for the brand includes pushing volumes up from 74,000 sales in 2013, to around 400,000 by 2018. Alfa Romeo is investing around €5bn in the project, the first fruits of which will be the new Giulia saloon, a 3-series rival that will go on sale in autumn 2015.Read our scoop of Alfa's strategy here That’s right.

Will the Toyota Prius plug-in cost much the same as a normal Prius?

Toyota Prius plug-in - only around £2.5k more than a regular Prius? Toyota has managed to corner the market in hybrid cars over the last decade after its remarkably prescient decision to focus on ‘Eco’ cars long before the mainstream cottoned on to the changing mood of governments – and car buyers – to the impact cars have on wallets and the environment. We won’t drag out our usual objections to the ceaseless quest for pointless ever-lower CO2 emissions, but we will instead commend the Prius for being a remarkable transport appliance, one which – if driven in a certain manner – can produce remarkable feats of economy and emit pleasingly low levels of the stuff that does real harm – NOx and Particulates.

The Super Bowl's most refreshingly honest car ad

In 2000's High Fidelity, hapless record-store owner Rob Gordon -- played memorably by John Cusack -- opines, “What really matters is what you like, not what you are like." In the year 2000, I was 24 years old and was working on a punk rock magazine, an environment not dissimilar from Gordon's Championship Vinyl. The line made a lot of sense to me; it was a quiet, back-of-the-head maxim that informed much of what my friends and I did and how we saw people. It's a shallow way of looking at things, but for those of us who came of age amid the us-vs.-them liberal identity politics of the '90s, awash as we were in Public Enemy's political consciousness, the post-AIDS gay-rights push and the loud-fast feminism of the riot grrrl movement, there was a good chance that if somebody liked the things you liked, they thought like you and they were good.