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Smart fortwo ED (that’s the electric one) 3rd Gen in 2012

2012 Smart fortwo ED You’ve got to admire Mercedes for persevering with the Smart, despite not exactly setting the car sales charts on fire. Even braver is their faith in producing an electric Smart when electric cars are just not selling. Still, their pockets are deep enough to play, so we’re to be treated to the third generation Smart EV with the arrival at Frankfurt next month of the 2012 Smart fortwo ED.

Mercedes launch new 9G-Tronic gearbox on E350 BlueTec

New Mercedes E350 BlueTec (pictured) gets 9-speed 9G-TRONIC auto It’s not exactly a million years ago that automatic gearboxes offered poorer performance and economy than manual gearboxes, and came as standard with just three gears. But now, automatic gearboxes are so good they can  change quicker than any driver and, with the proliferation of eight-speed auto ‘boxes, offer improved economy and performance too. The next logical step is even more ratios in an auto ‘box, and Land Rover has already revealed they’ll be fitting the Evoque with a 9-speed ZF ‘box from 2014, and the new Jeep Grand Cherokee gets a nine-speed auto ‘box too.

Mercedes S-Class Grand Edition launches

Mercedes S-Class Grand Edition - AMG cosmetics to garner the last sales It’s usually a fair assumption that when Mercedes launches a car with a ‘Grand Edition’ badge attached to its boot that the end for that model is nigh. And so it is with the Mercedes S-Class Grand Edition. So before the 2012 S-Class arrives with its Magic Sky and Magic Body and Magic everything else, Mercedes has bolted a lot of its high-end cosmetics to the more lowly S-Class models to try and wring the last few sales out of a car that is long in the tooth and no longer as good as the BMW 7 Series, Audi A8 or Jaguar XJ.