Porsche is planning to launch its four-door, four seat super sedan, Panamera, in 2009. The model is currently under design and developmental stage and will be the first four-seat sedan to go into production from Porsche.
According to Rod Wallace, Managing Director of Porsche India, the new four-seat sedan from Porsche will find potential buyers in India as it will come with a sedan that delivers performance of a sports car. Although there is an ongoing credit crisis in the country and the auto sales have slumped over the past few months, nevertheless, the luxury car sales have been unhampered. Porsche expects good market in India.
Honda India has cut the price of Civic Hybrid by a whopping 8 lakh rupees!! The company looks forward to boost the sales of its environmentally friendly car in the growing unfriendly automobile environment. The price cut comes with immediate effect and becomes historic as the sharpest price cut in the Indian automobile history.
The launch price of the car was Rs. 21.5 lakh but the new price after the price cut is Rs. 13.36 lakh (ex-showroom, Delhi). The hybrid model from Honda had made a lot of customers interested in the car. However, the car was imported as a completely built unit and attracted heavy import duty.
Honda, which only sold 60 units of the Civic Hybrid in India over the last five months, sold 98 units of the car in one single day, immediately after the price cut was announced. Of course, one can only imagine the plight of those poor souls who bought the very same car at its earlier price of Rs 21.5 lakhs!!
It has been confirmed by MarutiSuzuki officials that they will launch A-Star on 19th November. Also A-star’s official website is up and Maruti is going to make debut of A-star in true bollywood style…!!
The new models has been designed by Rajesh Kumar Gogu and Saurabh Singh of Maruti Suzuki India, A-Star, which is a five-door hatchback; has been engineered keeping in mind the trends and standards of the European market.
Tata and a US based company is developing a green engine that would require only air to run. According the EnvironmentalNews Network (ENN), Zero Pollution Motors is developing a vehicle that can motor around all day on nothing but air and a splash of salad oil, alcohol or possibly a pint of gasoline. The car is expecetd to be christened Air Car/ CATS.
The science behind building the Compressed Air Vehicle, or CAV, is not new as off-the-shelf technology already uses compressed air to drive old-fashioned car engine pistons instead of combusting gas or diesel fuel to create a burst of air.
Hyundai Motor India has rolled out from its Irrungattukottai plant the first batch of all new i20 cars, premiered at the Paris Motor Show last month. The maiden consignment, comprising 2,820 cars, has just been flagged off from the Chennai port for Europe.
i20 is considered a highly significant addition to the new generation of Hyundai vehicles identified by the `i` prefix. It is designed at Hyundai`s European design centre at Russelsheim in Germany. It is designed and engineered to meet the European tastes and needs. The i20 cars exclusively manufactured at the India facility of HMIL.
HMIL makes i20 in three variants - 1.2 litre, 1.4 litre and 1.6 litre - in both petrol and diesel versions. The first export consignment comprises a good mixture of these.
Addressing a press conference here on Wednesday, H.S. Leem, Managing Director, said HMIL could launch i20 in the domestic market sometime in January next. Fielding a range of questions, he said HMIL initially was targeting to export 6,000 units of i20s by November.
The global financial melt-down in its wake had seen some distributors cancel their orders and still others postpone their buys. This had forced HMIL to make lower initial shipment, he pointed out. Export shipments would pick-up in the coming days in the wake of Christmas-eve orders, he pointed out. Mr. Leem said HMIL had fixed an export target of 120,000 nos for i20s next year.
HMIL was hoping to sell 15,000 i20s in the domestic market next year. He admitted that the global melt-down would hit 25 per cent of export sales of HMIL. Nevertheless, he asserted that Hyundai’s thrust on small cars should keep his organization in good stead in a crisis situation like the one the world was through now, where the accent was more on cost and fuel efficiency.
BMW has launched its first electric vehicle - MINI E. Based on the current generation R56 MINI Cooper, the MINI E is powered by a 204 Bhp, 220Nm electric motor that draws power from a rechargeable lithium ion battery. Power is transmitted to the front wheels via a single-stage helical transmission.
0 to 100km/h takes 8.5 seconds and the vehicle has a top speed of 152km/h, which is not very high but is probably due to the maximum spin speed of the motor and the single-stage transmission, which is derived from the Cooper S helical gearbox. It’s essentially a single-speed automatic so there’s limitations on the top speed.
The MINI E has been reduced from a 2+2 into a strict 2 seater as the rear bench has been removed and replaced by the battery bank. The 5,088 lithium ion battery cells (grouped into 48 modules) have a maximum capacity of 35 kWh, and powers the motor at 380 volts. They provide for a maximum of 240km range on a full charge.
Some of the energy can be recovered via brake energy regeneration to provide a 20% boost in range. A full recharge via a plug-in charger draws 28 kWH from the power grid. Quick charging in 2.5 hours is enabled via a quick charger that will be installed in the customer’s garage for higher amperage.
According to CEO Stephan Winkelmann, Lamborghini will not decide on whether to proceed with the production version of the Estoque until next year. After that it should take about four years to develop the four-door car.
Winkelmann said that he expects the car to be greenlighted for production, but confirms that Lamborghini does not yet have a platform. As far as teaming up with sister companies, Porsche (using the Panamera platform, Audi (using the A7 architecture) or Bentley, Winkelmann says: “that a platform will be sought ‘within the group’.
After the YZF R15, then the FZ16 - Yamaha is going to launch a new 125cc bike - The R125. The R125 is a scaled down version of the R15 which itself is a scaled down version of the all conquering R1. It actually looks much better than the R15 and whether Yamaha will bring the R125 as such is still skeptical.
