Tt500 Tt 500 Xt500 Xt 500 Headpipe And Midpipe on 2040-parts.com

June sales get a pick-me-up from pickups

If there's a bright spot in June's tepid light-vehicle sales, it came from an unlikely segment. After slumping for several years as the economy tanked and gas prices spiked, pickup demand is rising faster than the overall sales gains of most automakers--serving as a pillar once again during the industry's fledgling recovery. And most of the buyers returning to showrooms are pickup enthusiasts, automakers say.

Driven: Volkswagen Passat CC GT

Elegant and refined. Forty years ago these two words would not have been used to describe the Beetles bought in droves by the counterculture in the US; a symbol of the hippy movement and the definitive people's car, designed at a time when Germany sought to put people in motion. With the Passat CC, however, Volkswagen is indeed making a sharp move away from the ‘volks wagen', and these two words rolled off the tongues of those who saw the car in all three countries we drove through on our winter holiday.

UK electric car sales hit record high

While electric cars may not have taken off as quickly as the likes of Renault and Nissan had hoped, the latest figures from the government’s £5,000 electric car grant scheme show that sales have leapt 25% in the last quarter. A total of 1,149 electric cars were registered in Q3, not only a 25% improvement over Q2, but the most successful quarter since the government scheme began back in January 2011, indicating that consumers are starting to understand the technology and its limitations rather better. On Bing: see pictures of electric cars in the UK Find out how much an electric car costs on Auto Trader This news comes as the Renault-Nissan alliance has been forced to admit it is not going to reach its self-imposed target of 1.5 million electric car sales by 2016.