Mercedes U.S. boss ‘excused' from his duties

Mercedes-Benz U.S. chief has been “excused” from his duties effective immediately, according to a Daimler spokesman. Ernst Lieb, 56, had held the position since 2006.

Land Rover testing electric Defender 110 pickup

Land Rover has begun testing an electric version of the Land Rover Defender first shown at the 2012 Geneva motor show. The electric Defender prototype is in service at the Eden Project in Cornwall, U.K., a complex of several large transparent domes that house multiple artificially maintained environments containing thousands of rare plants, and is a popular visitor attraction. At the moment the electric Defender isn't exactly tearing through the Amazon rainforest, but the work it's doing is nevertheless a good approximation of how quite a lot of Defenders are used in real life -- at least in terms of speed and duration of use.

New BMW X5 gets a range of M Performance goodies

The new BMW X5 gets a range of M Performance goodies It wouldn’t be a BMW unless you could make it look like it can go faster, even when it can’t. So it’s good news for buyers of the new BMW X5 that they can opt for the cheapest, and least powerful, X5 sDrive25d and adorn it with enough goodies from the new X5 M Performance option list to make it look like it’d eat an X5 M50d for breakfast. But its not just the lowliest model in the new X5 range that can have any of the new M Performance parts bolted on; BMW will be happy for you to bolt on the extras to anything from the sDrive25d to the xDrive50i.