India turns the screw on luxury car makers

Land Rover will still be sending CKD to India despite the rise in import duty India’s economy is growing almost exponentially, as a result of which it has a big, rising middle-class with much the same aspirations as the middle-class in the West. Those aspirations include the accumulation of status symbols considered worthy of representing their success and new wealth, none more so than a good set of wheels. So it’s no surprise that the mainstream luxury car makers – Jaguar, Land Rover, Mercedes, Audi and BMW – are ready, willing and able to provide exactly what India’s middles classes are looking for.

Ford, Hyundai, Toyota lead industry to 15 percent gain

Ford, Toyota, Subaru and Hyundai Group spurred a year-end U.S. sales rally that took some sting out of a painful year. Overall, December sales of 1,030,096 light vehicles rose 15 percent from December 2008, when the credit crisis and a deepening recession dragged industry demand to 27-year lows.

MINI Beachcomber Concept revealed

The Countryman-based MINI Beachcomber Concept Another month in 2009 and yet another MINI. When we reported last month on the MINI Rolls Royce Edition we reckoned that BMW had managed to produce a dozen new models of the MINI in 2009, although the number of new models and limited editions is so large we thought we might have missed one or two. But if we were right with the dozen models at that point you can now make that a baker’s dozen with the reveal of MINI’s latest creation – The MINI Beachcomber.