
‘Jay, you look at the dials,’ I said to my passenger, ‘I’ve got other things to concentrate on.’ We were doing about 270km/h and rising fast.

‘Jay, you look at the dials,’ I said to my passenger, ‘I’ve got other things to concentrate on.’ We were doing about 270km/h and rising fast.

Not so long ago I blogged about how Honda needed a halo model to re-boot the brand after mothballing Swindon for so many months. It’s reassuring to know that the powers that be in Japan are devotees of Top Gear.

Until this morning I couldn’t reliably spell Koenigsegg. It was a little company of fewer than 50 employees making fewer than 20 cars a year. Now it has effectively taken over Saab.

This economic chokehold on the motoring industry is squeezing air out of everyone, but it’s doing us a great service at the same time. It’s culling the weak. Separating the wheat from the chaff.
OK, it’s a bit less adrenaline-filled than that fiery Ken Block video, but here’s Jaguar design guru Ian Callum giving a quick preview of the new XJ, due to arrive in July:

Well, Foreman called it wrong. I thought Fiat would get control of Vauxhall and Opel, but the giant Canadian car-components-maker Magna won. I was looking at it from an automotive point of view, and the result was skewed by politics.

I’ve just returned from having a privileged early poke at BMW’s 5 Series Gran Turismo, a bizarre cross-breed of 5, X5 and 7 Series, with a bit of X6 thrown in for the cod coupe styling.

Good grief. The endless wait for the world’s teasingest supercar is finally… nearly… over. The 500bhp Lexus LF-A will arrive at this October’s Tokyo show. That’s almost four years since they showed the concept.
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