Motoring Newsbriefs

Oct 15 2008 Steve Hughes

NORWEGIAN WOULD! TATA Motors' UK subsidiary, Tata Motors European Technical Centre, has acquired a 50.3% holding in Miljø Grenland/Innovasjon, Norway, which specialises in the development of innovative solutions for electric vehicles.

Miljø will produce electric vehicles based on Tata Motors' products and the development of related technologies.

Tata Motors says it believes that this investment in Miljo will help the company realise its strategy to develop convenient, affordable and sustainable mobility solutions through electric and hybrid vehicles.

The first such vehicle to be developed by the company will be the Indica electric vehicle, which is scheduled for launch in Europe next year. It will be capable of carrying four people with a predicted range of up to 200km and acceleration to 60mph in under ten seconds.

Tata Motors is India's largest automobile company and has operations in the UK, South Korea, Thailand and Spain. Among them is Jaguar Land Rover.

MAN AT THE TOP THE Road Haulage Association says Geoff Dunning will be its new chief executive. Dunning has been the RHA's Northern Regional Director since 1987.

Before that he spent many years in the retail motor trade. He will start the new job next spring, when Roger King, the present chief executive retires.

SHOCKING RECHARGING a battery-powered car through a conventional electricity supply is like trying to refuel a car with a hypodermic because the energy transfer rate is so low.

This is the conclusion of Lotus engineering director Simon Thing, speaking to delegates at the SMMT's first seminar on the electrification of transport.

"Providing a widespread system that would recharge a vehicle as fast as a person can refuel a car would probably melt the national grid.

"The biggest opportunity on the road to electric transport is to develop a practical re-charging infrastructure," he says.

DOLLAR-A-SEAT STAGECOACH says its US business megaus.com will spend 60 million dollars on 96 double-deckers as North American motorists ditch cars for coach travel.

All the new coaches will run on megabus.com routes in the Midwest and Northeast United States. The firm says about 150,000 people a month now use its service, driven by high fuel prices.

The company started offering one-dollar fares in the US in April 2006 and now covers 13 States and one Canadian province.

The new 81-seat wheelchair-accessible vehicles have reclining seats, safety belts, reading lamps, power outlets, free wi-fi, and toilets. Van Hool in Belgium builds them and starts deliveries this month, completing them in August 2009.

VANTASTIC BRITISH Car Auctions says its latest figures show that overall values for vans fell again in September but only by 0.75%.

The average value for all vans fell by just £24 to £3,190 in September. This suggests the rate of fall may be slowing as previous months had seen falls of £200 or more, says BCA.

The present average values of vans are about £750 lower than those from earlier in the year. "Although it would be misleading to say the market came back with a vengeance in September, there was an upturn in activity in the auction halls and a fragile confidence returned to the marketplace," says BCA manager Duncan Ward.

A SAFER ZAMBIA HRH the Princess Royal launched Transaid's Zambian Professional Driver Training programme at a dinner in London to mark the charity's 10th anniversary.

The Princess Royal said the new project would help make commercial drivers safer and more skilled, teaching them better understanding of risks and their effect on other road users, including pedestrians.

Transaid's programme aims to build the capacity of the Industrial Training Centre in Lusaka. There is a shortage of professional truck drivers in Zambia, where road crashes are the third highest cause of death after HIV/Aids and Malaria.

BATTERY BANK FRANCE will spend 400m in state support for the development of electric and hybrid cars. President Nicolas Sarkozy says the cash will be for the research and development of non-polluting vehicles over four years and will come from funds already earmarked for environmental projects.

He called upon other European countries to encourage car makers to take loans from the European Investment Bank to develop more efficient, lower emission vehicles.

A SCRAP IDEA THE European motor industry wants a 40bn loan from the EU to help fund a scrappage scheme and drive the sales of low emission vehicles. They want subsidies over a three-year period to encourage people to scrap vehicles over eight years old to accelerate fleet renewal.

"The proposed loans-package will give an important and welcome signal to consumers and financial markets," says Christian Streiff, president of the European Automobile Manufacturers' Association and boss of PSA Peugeot Citroën.