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UK Motorway speed limit to be 80mph? A wasted opportunity.

80mph Speed Limit planned in the UK by Transport Secretary Philip Hammond. Until 1965 there was no speed limit on UK motorways. Mind you, there weren’t many UK motorways to blat along in any case.

Ford Focus ECOnetic (2010) revealed at Frankfurt

Ford has revealed the 2010 Focus ECOnetic at Frankfurt For the first time Ford has made Start-Stop an option, which was something we thought should be added to the Fiesta ECOnetic when we had it. The Focus ECOnetic also benefits from Smart Regenerative Charging and something called Tension FEAD (no, we had no idea either, but apparently it reduces friction) which help make the new ECOnetic Focus more economical and less polluting. With Stop-Start fitted to the 1.6 litre Duratorq TDCi the Focus manages to hit the magic 99g/km mark.

First Sight: Mercedes-Benz SL

The new high-tech, low weight Mercedes SL roadster receives its official global unveil next week in Detroit but Car Design News got an early peek of the final production car and had a chat with its designers at Mercedes' US advanced design studio in Carlsbad, California back in November. "We want to get back to clean, long-lasting design," director of Mercedes global advanced design and SL project leader, Steffen Kohl told CDN at the exclusive preview of the sixth-generation model. "So the new SL is long, sleek and still full of tension in the feature lines but less wedgy." In a short presentation Kohl felt all SLs became successfully iconic in their times because they followed two key rules – ‘sensuality' and ‘cleanness' – but alluded that the first rule may have been lost in more recent eras.