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Ellesmere Port's bid to build Ampera hits snags

By Rob Golding Motor Industry 09 October 2009 15:02 Prime minister Gordon Brown’s personal crusade to get Vauxhall's version of the Chevrolet Volt petrol-electric plug-in hybrid – the Ampera – built in Britain's Ellesmere Port factory in 2012 is a dream delayed, CAR can disclose today.News that the UK Astra plant is the best in Europe, that the Astra's Delta platform will underpin the Ampera, and that Volt will be on US sale from 2010 had been taken to mean that Vauxhall would be churning out the cars in the north west within three years.But the prospect of an electric car industry growing up around the run-down Merseyside manufacturing site is not imminent, CAR has learned.'No Ampera to be built in Europe before 2015'Vauxhall insiders have made it clear that the car to be known as the Vauxhall/Opel Ampera in Europe will be an import from the US for at least five years. One senior planner told us: 'The US will be the sole source of Amperas until at least 2015.'Bob Lutz, GM's former product supremo who recently came out of retirement as a PR, said that the low value of the dollar made the US an ideal site for the manufacturing of export cars. And with forecast sticker prices of the range-extender electric car standing at a scary £35,000+, every price saving is vital to its marketability.The European market also needs time to get its electricity recharge infrastructure in place before it is worth making cars onshore in volume, GM high-ups point out.

Ford B-Max arrives in production guise

The first photo of the production-ready Ford B-Max Ford has released the first picture of the new B-Max, which will debut at Geneva in March, a year from the debut of the B-Max Concept. The Ford B-Max is a long overdue replacement for the Ford Fusion, the one car in Ford’s range that is way past its sell-by date, and was shown as a concept at the Geneva Motor Show in 2011. Now, one year on, the Ford B-Max is to debut in production guise at the 2012 Geneva Motor Show.

New BMW M3 and M4 revealed for 2014

This is it, folks – this is your early petrolheaded Christmas present: BMW has released full details of the new BMW M3 Saloon and M4 Coupe. And we do mean full details. Output of 431 turbocharged horsepower is the headline, but really it’s the extent of the engineering overhaul carried out by BMW’s M division that really stuns the senses here.