The Frankfurt Motor Show was a battleground this week between the power and the glory: the power of high-performance, CO2-emitting cars and the glory of achieving environmental greenness or, depending on your point of view, the other way round. This dichotomy was not necessarily between different carmakers but often within individual company ranges. Their philosophical answer to the situation is that there is plenty of room for both ? that being socially responsible and green is vital but that on the whole it makes for pretty boring vehicles and there is still a huge market for cars that can travel at 150mph or more.
A winning formula would be to have a car that does both convincingly and hybrids are starting to make that happen. So are low-CO2 diesel engines. Audi has triumphed at Le Mans with a diesel and Wolfgang Hatz, the head of engine development for the VW Group, said he could envisage the exotic, ultra-quick Audi R8 having a diesel engine. “Why not? It is my dream,” he said, while Volker Mornhinweg, the Mercedes-Benz AMG chief executive officer, said that a very high-performance hybrid, used mainly for high-speed, long distance trips, might also be powered by a small electric motor just in the environs of the owner’s local community.
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