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News watch July 2012: today's auto industry news

Welcome to CAR Magazine's news aggregator as we round up the daily stories in the auto industry. Top tip: news summaries are added from the top hour-by-hour Tuesday 31 July 2012•Porsche SE recorded a first half profit of €1.15bn, in comparison with €149m for the same period in 2011. The enormous jump has come not from directly selling cars, but from the group's investments in Porsche Zwischenholding GmbH and Volkswagen AG (Porsche SE)•Reuters suggests Germany's car market is in recession, but few outside the industry would know it, thanks to a controversial sales practice that inflates official statistics and paints a flattering picture of demand.

Essex boost for car loving home buyers

An Essex council is to make garages and drives bigger on new homes For most of the last decade the UK Government has waged a war on the motorist. Endless speed cameras, which are in reality just tax-raising  machines and have little to do with road safety; never-ending fuel tax rises; congestion charging; spiralling parking charges; road-charging schemes and the only coppers you see have a speed gun so non-speeding untaxed and uninsured drivers never get caught -  pushing up costs for the rest of us. But one of the most stupid, head-in-the-sand policies was the idea that new houses should encourage people to forsake their cars by making garages too small and off-street parking almost non-existent.

Citroen Cactus stars at the 2013 Frankfurt Motor Show

Citroen's big news at the 2013 Frankfurt Motor Show was the launch of the Cactus concept car. This spikily named show car is more than just a wacky concept - the Citroen Cactus marks the relaunch of the French brand's bread-and-butter cars. Struck by the success of the DS models, it's now hoping to achieve similar success with a rejuvenated range of C-line models.