India never did embrace the hybrid. Even the best-selling Toyota Prius hasn’t been able to make headway in that market, with only 167 units sold since it was launched there in 2010 until March this year (you’ll realise why later).
For those of us who live in Malaysia, we are being treated to a veritable slug fest between the two national carmakers at present. On one side, we have the new king of locally produced cars, Perodua, who has a long association with Daihatsu, the bargain end of the Toyota empire; on the other, the ex-heavyweight champ of Malaysia, Proton, who for a number of years now has been designing and building its own cars and engines.
Remember back in May we ran a story about some crazy futuristic Chinese engineers who planned to build a bus that would glide above the traffic. Well, they have gone and done it and ran the very first tests.
In the otherwise stuffy world of motor-engineering development, it is nice to know there is what passes as humour. Competing automakers routinely benchmark their vehicles against others with which they would like to be compared.
The build-up to the new Jeremy Clarkson TV offering called the Grand Tour is beginning, although an actual launch date is still to be confirmed. As the lack of Jeremy and gang seems to be creating withdrawal symptoms for some of our readers, we put our collective thinking caps on in the office and came up with some of our favourite Jeremy quotes, and some from the other two as well.
Police chiefs in the Northern English county of Yorkshire were almost left red-faced after their new batch of Vauxhall Astra patrol cars turned up with the word “POLCE” painted big and bold on each side.