Raymarine L1260 Plus 10" Color Sounder Display on 2040-parts.com

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.

From Cape Town to London -- in a Fiat Panda

If we wanted to break the speed record for the run from Cape Town, South Africa to London -- a quick 10,000-mile jaunt -- we'd start out by scouring the classifieds for something big and rugged. A Land Rover would be a classic choice, but a tricked-out Toyota or Jeep could do nicely as well. A team consisting of British rally drivers Philip Young and Paul Brace are taking a somewhat different approach.

Volvos get a facelift: V70, XC70 & S80 get tweaked

2011 Volvo S80 Facelift - tweaks to cosmetics and diesels Well, if you’re going to have a fiddle with one car, you may as well have a fiddle with three. That seems to be Volvo’s point of view as it performs a bit of plastic surgery on the Volvo V70, Volvo XC70 and Volvo S80, and fettles the oily bits in to the bargain. Under the skin, it’s tweaks to the diesel lumps that dominate, with both the D3 (2.0 litre) and D5 (2.4 litre) getting some work.