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CAR tech: Britain's £1bn auto-industry revolution

By Damion Smy Motor Industry 21 October 2013 09:30 BMW, Jaguar-Land Rover and Nissan are just a handul of the car companies to have seen the potential in British design and engineering. Read on to find out just how they're actually helping Britian fight Germany as the car world's most pivotal auto-industry R&D hub. More than £1billion will be invested in the UK over the next decade to build a hub of design, engineering and manufacturing nous in the automotive equivalent of California’s Silicon Valley.

New Mercedes S-Class Plug-in Hybrid to debut at Frankfurt Motor Show

The new Mercedes S-Class (pictured) will arrive with a plug-in hybrid version in September We’ve known Mercedes were planning a plug-in hybrid version of the new S-Class as far back as 2009, and it now appears it will debut – as a 2014 model – at the 2013 Frankfurt Motor Show in September. When Mercedes revealed the Vision S500 Plug-in Hybrid Concept at Frankfurt in 2009, they had fitted it with a V6 petrol engine mated to a 44kw motor and a bank of lithium-ion batteries, and promised the hybrid S-Class would do 90mpg, have emissions of under 75g/km and manage 18 miles in EV mode. That means the hybrid S-Class would have performance comparable to the V8 petrol-engined S500 but attract no BIK or VED in the UK.

BMW makes a printing press out of an M6

While you're invariably reading this piece on some manner of digital device, Autoweek's roots lie in a physical magazine printed on an offset press. Hell, Competition Press was our original name. But as with any other old-media organization even cursorily concerned with relevance, we've made the leap into the digital world.