KEY POINTS:
Holden Special Vehicles is on track for a record sales year. March was the third best month in the 20-year history of the go-fast arm of GM-Holden. This year, HSV has sold 1210 vehicles, including 152 in New Zealand. British sales of the E-series Commodore-based HSVs have been
boosted by Vauxhall's decision to take several hundred Clubsport R8s each year for the next three.
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The Good Oil took a few backroads from Sydney to Brisbane over Easter in an automatic 1.6-litre turbodiesel C4 Citroen liftback. It covered 1235km at an average, so the car's computer said, of 4.3-litres/100km. That's 65mpg. The same computer said there was still 95km left in the 60-litre tank when we pulled into Brisbane airport. Citroen here sells the five-speed manual only, priced from $34,990.
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Police in NSW and Queensland were running a holiday blitz on speeding over Easter. Penalties included double demerit points. Roadside signs saying "Drive, Revive, Survive" make more safety sense than New Zealand's "Tired drivers are dangerous." Motorists were better behaved, too. Didn't see a heavy truck and trailer doing 115km/h in the outside lane in the rain or an empty tourist bus hogging the outside lane unlike the Southern Motorway this week.
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BMW will launch its new crossover X6 next year. The carmaker is calling it a "sports activity coupe". It has all-wheel drive, a lifestyle-type interior, and a coupe-like roofline. The X6 will be built in the US, at the BMW plant in South Carolina. The same plant builds the Z4 sports car and the X5 all-wheel-drive wagon. Standout feature of the new X5, which has just gone on sale here, is its dynamic ride/handling mix.
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Suzuki is the high-flyer among mainstream carmakers in New Zealand. Sales of new Suzuki cars in the first three months of 2007 were up 34 per cent over the same period last year, the highest growth of 16 brands. Record sales in March pushed Suzuki into overall sixth position, with a market penetration of 6.34 per cent.
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Lotus has teamed with British green energy company Ecotricity to study the use of wind power for the carmaker's factory in Norfolk. Lotus says wind-driven turbines within the test track could provide up to 100 per cent of the carmaker's electricity needs.
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Muslim nation Saudi Arabia allows women to own cars but won't allow them to drive or ride in them unless they are accompanied by a male relative. Likewise, car saleswomen have to get a male colleague to take customers for a test drive. A company owned by a member of the Saudi royal family has a women pilot for one of its jets. But, the Associated Press reports, she has to have a male relative drive her to and from the airport.
