Audi A3 1.6TDI announced

The Audi A3 1.6TDI - one of a range of A3s featuring the new 1.6 litre diesel from Audi Audi has announced that they are introducing a new 1.6 litre common rail diesel engine across the A3 range, which will oust the old A3 1.9TDIe and the A3 and Cabriolet 1.9 TDI. The new engine offers the same 104bhp as the old 1.9 litre unit, but manages to improve economy by over 8% to 68.9mpg and cuts CO2 to 109g/km. The new A3 gets stop-start and energy regeneration to achieve the same performance and power from the smaller engine.

Exclusive: Franz von Holzhausen joins Tesla Motors

Car Design News has obtained exclusive information about Franz von Holzhausen's next career move. On Thursday of last week, von Holzhausen resigned from Mazda, where he was Director of Design at the R&D Design Center in Irvine CA, to become the Design Director at Tesla Motors. "It's going to be an exciting adventure," von Holzhausen told CDN in an exclusive interview.

Aston Martin DB9 1M: Aston’s Facebook celebration

To mark reaching one million followers on Facebook, Aston Martin invited its fans to help design a car – the Aston Martin DB9 1M. Just like every other car maker, Aston Martin is beginning to embrace the web as perhaps the best way to get their message across and showcase their products. Yesterday we had Aston Martin trumpeting its website traffic on the back of the launch of the new Vanquish, and now we get an Aston designed with the help of Aston’s Facebook Fans.