The thinking man’s M3: Alpina D3 Bi-Turbo is world’s fastest diesel production car

German tuning firm Alpina has been tweaking BMWs since it started back in 1965 – in fact, it helped BMW develop the legendary 3.0 CSL, so it seems it knows its onions. However, its latest effort is something a little different. Not quite a conventional performance car, the 2013 Alpina D3 Bi-Turbo is actually the world’s fastest diesel production car, according to the firm.

Gordon Murray Design's eight new models revealed

By Ben Oliver Motor Industry 17 August 2010 09:29 Legendary car engineer Gordon Murray has revealed exclusively to CAR Magazine that he is working on eight new cars. Seven are lightweight, low-emissions cars based on his radical new iStream manufacturing technique, and the last is a new supercar that he says will have 'an enormous amount in common' with his iconic McLaren F1.You read CAR's first full appraisal of the T25 in the new September 2010 issue of CAR Magzine, out on 18 August. We've a full six-page feature on the T25 and you can see the full photoshoot by John Wycherley (tasters above).Murray unveiled the first of his eight planned products, the T25, at the Ashmolean Musuem in Oxford at the end of June.

How safe are new minicars?

The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) recently tested a total of 11 minicars in its relatively new small-overlap crash test, and the Chevrolet Spark was the only one to earn an Acceptable rating. The small-overlap crash test was instituted in 2012 with the goal of better replicating real-life car crashes, most of which don't follow the pattern of traditional government crash tests. Instead of a car hitting a stationary object with 100 percent of its front making contact, the small-overlap test examines how a car behaves in a frontal impact at 40 mph where only a quarter of the car's front hits an object.