Nissan Friend-ME – looks better than it sounds: Shanghia Motor Show

Nissan has built the Friend-ME (which must rank as one of the most useless car monikers ever) to appeal to the potentially huge market of ‘B?línghòu’ buyers, a group of buyers, born in the 1980s, who grew up as single children thanks to China’s ‘One Child’ policy. Nissan sees this group as totally reliant on their network of friends for support, and has built a car that owners can enjoy with their friends on an equal basis. So every one of the four seats gets full instrumentation - SatNav, Fuel, Speed – and an ‘Oracle Stone’ runs down the centre of the cabin which can display whatever content the occupants want from their connected Smartphones and tablets.

Smart ForTwo Brabus

By Tim Pollard Motor Shows 09 March 2007 11:31 Smart ForTwo Brabus: the lowdown With a third more power than the outgoing Brabus, the new ForTwo looks set to be quite a pocket rocket. The newcomer, unveiled at Geneva, packs a punchy 98bhp and has a sprightly 780kg to carry around, so Smart is promising warm-hatch performance for the first time in a ForTwo. Okay, so it won't trouble the GTI brigade, but the new Brabus will crack 62mph in 9.9sec and is so fast they've had to limit it to 155.

Ettore Bugatti’s own Type 57C up for auction

Ettore Bugatti's personal Type 57C Coupe is up for auction at Pebble Beach in August Not only are Classic Cars a decent long-term investment they do also offer the pleasure of playing with them – something no other work of art can manage. And with the rising wealth in emerging economies, something with as finite a supply as Classic Cars can hardly fail to appreciate in the long term. Which explains why real classics are still fetching record prices.