Technology Reviews

Jaguar Land Rover has launched the Jaguar XE and XF in India with the lightweight and efficient all-aluminium Ingenium petrol powertrain. The new 2.0-litre Ingenium petrol motor is offered in both 197 bhp and 247 bhp options.

Trek Bikes has forayed into the India market with 34 bicycle models across its road, mountain and hybrid categories in the premium and super premium segment.

Lyft will lead the co-development of the self-driving system at its Palo Alto-based self-driving engineering centre and Magna will lead manufacturing and join Lyft's development team onsite, contributing their vehicle systems knowledge, safety and ADAS expertise, and manufacturing capabilities.

The third generation Maruti Suzuki Swift was launched last month at the 2018 Auto Expo and has already been a runaway success with a long waiting period. The new Swift is a great package with a new and updated exterior design, a new interior packed full with gadgets and an option of both petrol and diesel engines along with a 5-speed manual or a 5-speed AMT on both engines. And now, it ha been reported that the Swift and other Maruti Suzuki models will soon get a 6-speed manual gearbox replacing the 5-speed one that has been used for quite a while.

Almost every electric car today is powered by a conventional Lithium-Ion battery pack. However, conventional Li-On batteries do have their limitation. These include charge times, weight, size and of course, the amount of charge that they can actually hold (depending on the size of the battery). The next step in the evolution of batteries will be the solid-state Lithium-Ion battery pack which in turn charges quicker, is much lighter and most importantly, is much safer than the current crop of battery packs. Manufacturers like Toyota have been wokring on solid-state battery packs for years now on prototype stage and now, the Renault-Nissan Alliance, of which automaker Mitsubishi is also a part of, has announced that it will move towards solid-state batteries by 2025. Toyota has also announced production versions of the solid state battery in their cars - both hybrid and fully electric by the year 2022.

While in India we see automakers and advertisers never take names of its competition in their campaigns, this practice is quite the norm internationally. We all remember the famous billboard wars between Mercedes-Benz, Audi and BMW a few years ago and now Hyundai seems to have taken a page out of the same playbook with a new billboard that popped up in Geneva during the 2018 Geneva Auto Show. The billboard that reads 'Your turn, Elon.' with the tagline 'the first electric compact SUV is here', which in turn takes a dig at the upcoming Tesla Model Y that will be unveiled sometime later this year with production slated to begin next year.

Audi Sport has released a new teaser announcing the unveiling date for its e-Tron Vision GT Concept, for the Gran Turismo racing game series. The concept car is slated to be revealed on April 6, 2018.

We have complied a list of hypercar concepts to electric concepts that took centre-stage at the 88th Geneva International Motor Show and have created a buzz for the future.