KEY POINTS:
A Volvo P1800, described as one of the best original examples in the world, was sold for just over $30,000 at auction in Australia. The cream coupe was bought new in Sydney in 1963 and owned by the same family for 44 years. The new owner inherits the
original of everything: number plates, 40-odd years of receipts in the service booklet, AWA radio manual, air-conditioning manual, instruction book, and workshop manual. The P1800 was made famous in the 1960s television series The Saint, starring Roger Moore, and based on the novels by Leslie Charteris.
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There was a sign a bit bigger than a newspaper poster on Auckland's Quay St the other morning telling traffic to move to one lane. But, like most such signs in and around the city, it gave drivers only a few metres' warning, just enough time to curse their fate. In this case a truck unloading stuff at a building site had shut down one lane, smack in the middle of rush hour. Traffic banked up back to Mechanics Bay to the east and frustrated drivers were doing u-turns across the Quay St median strip to find another way into the city. The answer could end up on a Tui billboard: The people who run Auckland roads are going to make drivers' lives a little easier on main arteries by warning them earlier of problems ahead. Yeah, right.
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Hyundai's Santa Fe television commercial is returning to Australian screens after being removed by the advertising standards people across the ditch. But it has been chopped and changed. The boy toddler and the girl toddler still end up at the beach, she sitting in the Santa Fe watching him surf. But the ad doesn't show how they got there. The driving sequences with him at the wheel have been removed - along with the perceived risk of Australian boy toddlers taking Australian girl toddlers to the beach in the old man's Hyundai.
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London's transport chiefs will use special cameras to catch vehicles with dirty exhausts driving through the city's Low Emission Zone. Sixty automatic number plate recognition cameras will scan the plates of diesel-powered trucks that pass through the zone. The trucks will then be tested for exhaust-emissions levels. Those that aren't up to scratch will be banned from the zone until they clean up their act. The truck tests start in February. Transport authorities in the British capital say poor air quality, much of it from vehicle emissions, causes around 1000 early deaths each year.
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A Mitsubishi salesman in the United States is being sued after a customer was shot in a road-rage incident while on a test drive. The lawsuit claims that salesman Gabriel Lobos, 19, provoked the shooting by gesturing at the driver of a car that cut off the car for sale. The customer was in a coma for six weeks.