Amongst the cars gaining an honourable mention in the Telegraph’s Car’s of the year are a number of real world examples set clear from amongst the pornography of supercars, the usual dreams of Ferraris and McLarens. The new Ford Focus is conspicuous by its inclusion, an affordable and fun to drive vehicle in a list which invariably tends towards the latter, exclusively.
More interesting perhaps are the cars which make it into the Glass’ Guides ‘car which hold their value best. In amongst the forecourt staples of Golf and Scirroco are …

News of Victoria Beckham’s association with the new Range Rover Evoque project has been headline news this week, which was the point of course. The tabloids still have a thing for Posh Spice, years after she made much of a pretence to be anything other than a celebrity mother, fashion designer, brand ambassador, WAG – in short the consumate modern celebrity; and one whose vaccuity you suspect but can never really confirm, and whose loyalty and fierce motherhood temper any questions you might begin to ask about the underlying horror …

Put bluntly, you can run a car for in excess of a million miles on the same engine and gearbox. Somehow this fact doesn’t sit so easily in a culture which still subscribes to the grand idea of the new-car-as-myth. But it is a fact.
There will be no prized for guessing that this startling number of miles was achieved in a Honda either, Honda having won the title of the UK’s most reliable car for the last six years running.

It seems that if you are a bit handy …

I seem to be writing about oil as much as about new cars at the moment. But then there is a lot of pressure on the motoring economy generally, by which I mean the total picture of motoring, the fuel bills, the tax and the cost of new car repairs. Gone are the days when motoring was a carefree practise and all you had to think about were the open road.
Nowadays you have to watch your bills and shop around for savings of a few pence per litre. …

Whether the UK is in recession or not is a matter for statisticians to debate. Certainly when a retailer such as Tesco describes trading conditions in the UK as being the most challenging in a generation, you know that times are hard. Strange then that the company continues to post profits for the 26 weeks to 27 August of £1.9bn, up 12.1% on a year earlier. Group sales also rose 8.8% to £35.5bn, but like-for-like UK sales excluding VAT and petrol fell 0.5%.
Like other supermarket retailers, Tesco are actually making …

It’s a signal perhaps of quite how central driving is to the British public, that we’re making such a fuss over increasing the speed limit by 10mph. Some people would suggest that this is eminently sensible, as most motorway drivers regularly do/exceed this speed anyway. Some have also claimed that by giving people this greater license, and thereby making the law less of an ass, we will change gung-ho attitudes in rural and built up areas where people think they can get away with the extra ten or twenty percent …

Here at buyacar we have written before about the point at which new electric vehicles become a serious proposition to the new car buyer. And we have written about the fact that this will not necessarily be contingent on some sort of environmental consciousness suddenly grabbing hold. Rather this will be contingent on the economic facts becoming clearer, and the economic arguments for owning an electric car becoming ever more compelling.
A useful analogy was drawn this week by Businessweek, who compare the fortunes of the electric vehicle to that of …

Frankfurt is always going to throw up a few new car and innovation surprises, as well as cause for reflection and the revisiting/reinvention of all those classic models we know and love.

On the latter, it seems the new Honda Civic 2011 (above) move sideways from it’s previous incarnation, in terms of the styling at least. We hear that the previous car, whose styling has been described as saucer-like, did little to diminish sales, dropped the average age of Civic customers from 61 to 53! This paragon of endurance and …

In the spirit of bolt-ons, here’s a new feature from those people at Business Week. This regenerative braking system charges up your battery, improving engine efficiency. And the stop-start engine technology kills the engine in traffic, saving you bits and bobs of fuel.
All of those fuel drops count these days as trips to the pumps get ever more painful.
And that’s what the dudes at Peugeot Citroen realise as they unveil their radical new 3008 Hybrid4. It not so much raidcal for it’s dual-fuel technology, but rather for being …

The financial bottom line means more to motorists than, perhaps, at any point in the recent past. And don’t manufacturers and dealerships know it – they too are fighting for that squeezed middle ground.
This of course is where buyacar earns its keep, in offering the consumer the best deals on new cars.
New cars in the ‘real world’ middle-ground of motoring have to appeal to customers as much on the grounds of economy as much as luxury and performance.
Traditionally motorists who run real world vehicles are concerned about …

Those professional pedants at the AA choose this week to remind us just how lax we have all been with our maintenance and servicing this summer. It might make vaguely miserable reading to reflect on ‘what we might have done better’ – there are echoes of the school report here – but there is a serious point to be made about our apparently self-willed failures.
The AA’s point is that, if we’d only carried out a few basic checks, a lot of breakdowns could have been avoided. It’s hard to …

Whether you read it as death throes or a final flourish, the Bugatti Veyron makes an appearance in the press this week in the only way it knows how – in superlatives.
And this is a car of the superlative, whether it be superlative performance figures, journalistic adjectives or – as is the case with the current crop of articles – a truly superlative price tag.

The limited edition Bugatti ‘Sang Noir’ has a price tag of £2.1 million, a figure that is somehow very worrying. Why is this? Of …

From the Google blog:
‘Our goal is to help prevent traffic accidents, free up people’s time and reduce carbon emissions by fundamentally changing car use.’
Despite the other laudable aims here, I can’t help but think, ‘free up people’s time for what?’.
‘So we have developed technology for cars that can drive themselves. Our automated cars, manned by trained operators, just drove from our Mountain View campus to our Santa Monica office and on to Hollywood Boulevard.’
How can an automated car also be manned? An automated car doesn’t need a man surely. …

As the editor of a motoring journal it pays to be ahead of the curve a little bit, or at least to be sat on it. And keeping up to date with what’s happening in motoring circles sometimes takes you out and into the abstract, into the realms of the theoretical and away from the everyday world or petrol costs and traffic jams.

The publication and its partner BMW envisage a future dominated by cities and city transport. As such they are looking at how they design both cars and …

I used to think of Prince Charles as an endearing addition to our great national debate. Here was a man who, like the hereditary peers in the Lords, could offer suggestions from left-field, could test issues with an incongruous opinion, no matter how eccentric or inbred.
And now we have the revelation that Charles had his Aston Martin Volante converted to run on refuse from the UK wine industry. That is a radical stand to take. And somewhere, no matter how wacky this gesture seems to be, it is a …

‘Welcome to the future of urban modernity, a future that is still being written, its canvas somehow extracted from the crowded city streets of the world’s great metropolises. Cities were once shaped by transport, public and private. But now the inverse is true, and we are more wary of the impact that transportation has on the urban fabric, the quality of the air, and the experience of the streets.’
Considering this is promotion material that presumably both BMW and Wallpaper* have licensed, there’s an unfeasible amount of bollocks number of non-sequiturs …

There’s been a lot of press for ‘webuyany…’-type businesses of late, really glorified pawn shops cashing in on the economic crisis and people’s need for hard cash, now.
This is a cynical reading maybe. But reading the reviews of sites like webuyanycar.com, it’s a pretty standard experience, that people feel they are getting fleeced. They turn up to one of the drop-off centres having been quoted one figure for their used car and soon find that price has dropped appreciably for lots of little reasons. It seems like a pretty …

All hail the latest innovation and buzz subject for the motoring innovator!
We wrote a little while ago about BMW embracing carbon-fibre technology.
As part of their efforts at the vanguard of Green motoring, it is perhaps unsurprising that a major manufacturer should utilise a ‘magical’ material already well-used by cycle and aeroplane manufacturers.
The idea of using natures lightest strong material make sense to a motoring world now at least partly focused on the value of less-as-more. Lighter cars will require less fuel to move them. And with everybody in …

The definition of ‘Green Motoring’ is a complex one. And it simply doesn’t stop with you buying a greener car.
People may be seduced by the marketing men and their slick delivery of the new electric car phenomenon, which is really just beginning. But how can you really rest your conscience when you know that your electric vehicle is powered by energy from fossil fuel-burning plants?
The renewable dream is surely that we have enough sustainably generated energy to deliver our everyday energy needs. At the moment this is some way off. …

A very interesting story from the BBC’s ‘The Report’ team last night, analysing nothing less than the continuing validity of petroleum fuels.
And it’s interesting that a profusion of motoring-related stories (really oil-related stories) are in the news at the moment. And from within those stories it’s easy enough to see a pattern emerging.
These stories point not only to the reality of our current financial situation. This, anecdotally at least, seems to be looking more and more like a recession. And this is being borne out by local …