News

Opel will unveil the STX Concept at the Paris Motor Show on 12 October, a design study its chief executive calls a vision for the future of the wagon silhouette and the first glimpse of the ninth-generation Astra. The name stands for Sports Tourer eXperimental. Opel has exactly one estate left in its range, and it is the Astra Sports Tourer.

Nissan has revealed the electric Pixo, a 3,796 mm city car with a 27.5 kWh LFP battery, 259 km of WLTP range and 50 kW DC charging on every grade. It weighs 1,285 kg, seats four adults and reserves 50 of its 356 boot litres for charging cables. Renault builds it in Slovenia and pricing follows in December.

Tuner Brabus has turned the Mercedes-AMG G 63 into the 900 Rocket Edition Cabrio, a four-door convertible limited to ten cars worldwide. The soft top uses more than 500 newly developed components and every car spends over ten hours in a climate chamber before delivery. Mercedes has been teasing its own open four-door G since December 2025 and has yet to show one.

MCA built five Centenaire coupes in Monaco between 1990 and 1992, each around a full carbon-fibre monocoque and a 455 hp Lamborghini Countach V12. Broad Arrow will offer the first of them at its Zoute Concours Auction in Knokke-Heist on 9 October, with an estimate of €900,000 to €1,200,000. The car spent a decade inside Lamborghini's Sant'Agata factory.

Porsche has patented a dual-clutch gearbox that switches between full automatic, paddle-shift sequential and a real H-pattern with a working clutch pedal, none of it mechanically connected. Published at the European Patent Office on 20 September, the filing covers combustion and hybrid cars, which is the 911 architecture Porsche said in August could not take a manual.

EU fuel set a record in the week of 14 September: €2.063 a litre for petrol and €2.159 for diesel, the highest in a European Commission series that begins in 2005. ECB experts expect diesel refining margins to peak in October. France's 16 percent of stations short of a fuel is 91 percent one company's price cap, not a supply failure.

Renault has built a 1,500-unit limited edition of the Rafale called hypnotic, priced at €63,550 in France against €60,250 for the Atelier Alpine it is based on. The four options it makes standard cost €3,600 on that car, so the exclusive paint, wheels and numbered plate effectively cost nothing. Orders open on 1 October in 14 countries.

Mercedes will close one German assembly plant and one German powertrain plant if it cannot agree cost cuts with its workforce, production board member Michael Schiebe told staff in Sindelfingen. The demand is a 40-hour week at 35 hours' pay. Kecskemét in Hungary has just doubled to 400,000 cars, where an hour of labour costs €15.60 against €49.50 in Germany.

The 2026 Azerbaijan Grand Prix will be run on Saturday 26 September rather than the usual Sunday. Formula 1 agreed to move the Baku weekend forward 24 hours at the request of local organisers, so the race does not clash with Azerbaijan's Remembrance Day on 27 September, which honours the roughly 2,900 soldiers killed in the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War.