Rigid Industries 46528 Bracket Dbl A-pillar on 2040-parts.com

2013 Ford Mondeo debuts on Thursday – but is it time for a name change?

Ford will reveal the new Mondeo on Thursday at the ‘Go Further’ event in Amsterdam as well as news of major product acceleration. We saw the first photo of the new Ford Mondeo back in January, shortly after Ford revealed its North American sibling – the Ford Fusion – at the Detroit Motor Show. At that time, especially as the Fusion had already been properly revealed, we assumed the new Mondeo would debut at Geneva in the Spring, but it didn’t.

A look at Acura future products

Acura is in the middle of a major product changeover, reflecting plans to challenge second-tier luxury rivals Audi, Buick, Infiniti and Volvo rather than Mercedes-Benz, BMW and Lexus. Acura has launched the ILX compact sedan and redesigned the RDX compact crossover. It will redesign the RL flagship this fall and make changes to the MDX crossover and TL mid-sized sedan in 2013.

Lotus Evora 414E Range Extender EV moves forward

The Lotus Evora 414E – a Lotus Engineering range extender hybrid project – is still moving ahead with dynamic and durability testing now underway. On the surface the Evora 414E looked like every other Evora, but under the skin sat the first version of a Lotus range-extender platform with a pair of electric motors and a small, 3-cylinder range-extender engine promising impressive performance and economy. Despite the reveal of the 414E at Geneva in 2010, there’s not been a huge amount of news on Lotus pushing forward with the project, or at least not until we got the Infiniti Emerg-E Concept at Geneva this year that turned out to be underpinned by the Evora 414E platform.