Zex 82006 Nitrous Bottle Heater on 2040-parts.com

VW Design Vision GTI gets 500bhp: Worthersee

The Design Vision GTI is built to show what a Golf built for racing would look like – and perhaps point to future evolutions of VW’s most successful car – and is built on the same MQB platform as the regular GTI. It’s a bit shorter (15mm) than a regular Golf, a chunk wider (71mm) and a lot lower (57mm) which conspires to make the Design Vision GTI much more aggressive looking than its mainstream sibling. Power comes from a 3.0 litre V6 with two turbos – good for 500bhp and 413lb/ft of torque – which is driven to all four wheels through a DSG ‘box and can scoot to 62mph in a supercar-like 3.9 seconds on its way to 186mph.

Bench Racing: New crop of supercars

It's been a while since we've hypothetically raced a handful of cars around the office; long enough that an entirely new crop of supercars has arrived for us to chart, graph and dissect. Today we're zeroing in on the $1-$3 million price tag range, which fits the Ferrari LaFerrari, McLaren P1, Pagani Huayra and the Bugatti Veyron Super Sport. The first three fit neatly, pricewise, at about $1.3 million.

2013 Nissan LEAF updated

Nissan has updated the LEAF EV in Japan for 2013 with better range, less weight and a new LEAF S entry-level model. Revealed in Japan – but likely to come to the UK from 2013 when the LEAF starts rolling out of Nissan’s Sunderland factory – there are significant upgrades to the powertrain which result in both less weight and better range. Nissan has had a play with the electric powertrain and made it both smaller and lighter with a new motor that uses 40 per cent less dysprosium (a rare earth metal) than before, and comes in 30 per cent smaller and 10 per cent lighter, and a new streamline battery case and a few other tweaks drops the LEAF’s weight by 80kg.