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2011 Toyota Yaris T Spirit & Yaris SR revealed

2011 Toyota Yaris gets two new models - T Spirit & SR The Toyota Yaris isn’t the coolest supermini on the block, but it does have a certain appeal and the benefit of being a proper ‘mini’ car – perfect around town. It even handles quite well, is well-built and has a surprising amount of room inside. Even with all that going for it Toyota are obviously expecting the New Year to be less than easy on car sales, so they’ve announced a couple of new models at the top of the Yaris range to tempt buyers with extra goodies for just a wee bit extra – or nothing at all.

Mercedes AMG has best year ever

With car sales plummeting in 2008 (and likely to be worse in 2009) there aren’t many bright spots around. But performance saloons are certainly one of them. As we reported back in December, BMW’s M Division had a cracking year, with sales of nearly 27,000 for the year.

2014 Ford Mondeo testing autonomous driving technologies (video)

The Ford Fusion with its LIDAR ears allowing autonomous driving Car makers are starting to take self-driving, autonomous cars very seriously, and we’ve recently seen Mercedes testing their autonomous driving S-Class in Berlin, Volvo planning a big trial of 100 self-driving cars in Gothenberg and Tesla planning systems that will do 90 per cent of your driving within 3 years. Now it’s Ford’s turn. Ford has equipped a Fusion Hybrid (that’s the North American version of the new Ford Mondeo we still haven’t got in the UK) with its autonomous vehicle technology to conduct research in partnership with the University of Michigan and State Farm (a big group of insurance companies in the US). The test Fusion gets a system called LIDAR (light detection and range – the funny looking ears on the top of the Fusion in the picture above) which can scan the road ahead up to 2.5 million times a second and create a 3D map of the surroundings.