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Koenigsegg planning an entry-level car – but it’ll still cost £500k

Koenigsegg are planning an entry-level car at half the price of the Agera R (pictured) Think of the cars that Christian von Koenigsegg has made since he started with the CC8S in 2002 and you think of them as extremes of the supercar genre; the Swedish engineering take on the bloated and massively complex Bugatti Veyron. Christian’s men in a shed in Sweden have gone on to make a series of progressively quicker and more impressive supercars, through the CCR, CCX and the Agera and on to the current most extreme iteration – the Koenigsegg One:1. But it looks like Christian has decided that his ambition to create the world’s greatest hypercar leaves room for a ‘Lesser’ Koenigsegg, a car that still has innovative engineering and extreme performance but comes at a lower price.

BMW M Performance Automobiles Geneva 2012 launch

BMW X6 M50d - likely to one of the first BMW M Performance Division cars BMW has announced that they are to create a new division of cars -  BMW M Performance Automobiles – to sit below BMW M. This week is the Detroit Auto Show, but car makers are already releasing details of their offerings for the next car show at Geneva in March. Today, BMW has joined that list by announcing they will launch the  BMW M Performance Automobiles division at the Spring show.

BMW Alpina D3 BiTurbo – a great diesel

The BMW Alpina D3 BiTurbo - a brilliant, quick and economical everyday drive Alpina has turned out some stunning versions of the BMW range over the years (and some not so stunning – their 8 Series springs to mind) and they fill a gap that is either not profitable in small volume for BMW or, in some cases, a hole that BMW hasn’t plugged. And this one is a good hole to fill with the BMW Alpina D3 Bi-Turbo, a 3 Series diesel with the heart of a hot hatch. Alpina has taken the engine out of the 1 Series 123d and given it a boost to 240bhp, in the process dropping the 0-60 time to a very creditable 6.9 seconds But it’s not the sprint that count,  but the way this peppy diesel unit delivers it.