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Frankfurt 2007 - and beyond

Harry Metcalfe reports from Europe’s biggest motor show

Frankfurt 2007 will go down in history as the show where CO2 panic finally took hold. Nearly everywhere you look there is some sort of eco-mobile trying to out-green the Prius. There are diesel hybrids from Peugeot, petrol hybrids from BMW (an X6) and Porsche (a Cayenne), and plug-in hybrids from Nissan, but it’s Mercedes that is stealing the show with a huge collection of eco-friendly cars, topped by an S-class-sized concept powered by a 1.8-litre engine featuring the company’s new ‘DiesOtto’ technology – basically a petrol engine that incorporates an efficient auto-ignition process, much like a diesel, enabling it to achieve 44.3mpg with a top speed of over 125mph.

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It’s comforting to see that, even with this oxygen-enriched backdrop, nearly every stand I visit has a new sporting variant on show. First stop of the day is Audi, where the head of development at Quattro GmbH, Stephan Reil, is on hand to take me round the mighty new RS6. Reil is such a car nut you never know what nugget he’s going to come out with next – and he doesn’t disappoint.

‘These squared-off wheelarches on this RS6 look great, don’t they?’ he asks, before adding: ‘They were originally destined for the RS4 but we couldn’t get them to look right. I’m so glad we got them to work on the RS6.’

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Reil goes on to explain the thinking behind the new model’s turbocharged engine and auto gearbox: ‘I want the RS6 to be more relaxing than the RS4, so it needs to have a lot of torque. Turbos give you that. The only trouble is keeping everything cool, so the RS6 ended up with a total of eight radiators!’

When I ask if Audi will ever make an RS version of the A8, the idea is instantly dismissed as being wrong for the car, but when I ask the same question of the TT, Reil hints that he is working on it already and that we should expect to see something (with an all-new transmission, apparently) soon. This would seem to indicate that an RS3 is in the pipeline too.

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But isn’t he worried that he will soon have environmentalists on his case, trying to put a stop to all this performance nonsense? Apparently not. According to Reil the number of RS cars built by Audi is so small in the great scheme of things that they simply don’t play a role in the global CO2 debate.

Next stop is Bentley, where I meet up with its head of engineering, Dr Ulrich Eichhorn. With the new 600bhp Conti GT Speed the main attraction on the company’s stand, I ask what Bentley’s plans are in terms of reducing its cars’ CO2 emissions. Dr Eichhorn points out that Bentley has already significantly improved its average CO2 figure (down by 60g/km over the last few years) and that – using a similar defence as Audi with its RS range – Bentley is only a niche player in all of this so has no real part to play in this war on global emissions.

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‘The driver can vary the CO2 output of their car by up to 50 per cent purely by changing their driving style anyway,’ says Eichhorn. ‘Then man-made CO2 only amounts to 3.5 per cent of total CO2 in the atmosphere, and of this total, transport only accounts for 2.2 per cent, with cars being responsible for just a third of this. So if you do the maths, Bentley cars account for less than a millionth of the total, meaning our contribution to the world’s CO2 problem is almost immeasurable. This is a global problem – you can’t tackle it with local solutions.’

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Next it’s over to see what Lamborghini president Stephan Winkelmann thinks of all this talk of cars causing global warming. Expecting to sell 2400 cars in 2007 (up from 2087 in 2006), his answer is that he is much more interested in increasing the desirability of his cars than making them eco-friendly.

‘My customers want more power but not necessarily more top speed,’ he says. ‘I will work to reduce the weight of future Lamborghinis as well as maximising the power so we can increase the feeling of speed.’

Winkelmann sees great design as being far more crucial to future sales prospects than green issues. According to customer research conducted by Lamborghini, it is the number one factor in the purchasing decision for the company’s cars – so we can expect more extreme designs like the Reventón, perhaps as often as one special model every year.

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‘It would have been wrong of us to produce the Miura concept we showed at Detroit in 2006,’ says Winkelmann. ‘That would have meant we were looking backwards. We must look forward at Lamborghini.’

Another important consideration for Winkelmann is the way the global market for Lamborghinis is changing. For example, he expects Lamborghini sales in China to increase to the point where it becomes one of the company’s top five most important markets within the next three to five years. India looks set to become increasingly important too, while Russians are buying Lamborghinis for use at their foreign houses because the winters are so bad at home.

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Overall you get the feeling things are pretty buoyant for Lamborghini, especially with customers speccing over 20,000 euros of options on average, driving Lamborghini profits up accordingly. Winkelmann is even considering introducing a third production shift in order to keep up with demand and push production beyond 2500 cars a year. Any talk of a third model line is soon dismissed, though; limited-run specials based on the existing line-up is how he wants to see Lamborghini developing.

I escape to the Alfa stand for a breather from the VW machine. Here the Alfa 8C is still the star of the stand some two years after the car was first shown. I quiz newly installed design director Frank Stephenson on what will happen next at Alfa.

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‘Spring 2008 we’ll launch the new Alfa Junior,’ he says, ‘but that car is nothing to do with me as it was all finished before I joined Alfa. Looking further ahead we want Alfa to develop into new sectors in the market, so this is a very exciting time for me to join.’

Exactly where Alfa might be heading he’s not saying, but when I suggest that at least he’s got a fantastic grille design to hang it all onto, I’m surprised to hear he thinks the current grille is more of a hindrance than a help to him.

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‘The first thing I have to do is change the grille, otherwise all the cars we do will look the same. It’s going to be hard, but it needs doing now.’

Looking at the current range, Stephenson likes the 8C a lot: ‘It’s a great design that won’t date. I want to see what else we can do with it.’ A baby Alfa coupe then? Frank’s not saying, but we expect to see a Spyder version of the 8C make production, along with a mini SUV at some point in the future.

Having just spent a week with the new Fiat 500 (penned by Stephenson when he was responsible for Fiat design) I can’t help asking him about why it ended up so big. It was the fault of the latest safety regs apparently. ‘We wanted it to score five stars in the front impact test,’ he says, ‘so we had to make it that size, with plenty of distance between the driver and the bodywork. That’s why it’s so tall.

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‘These crash regs are a real problem,’ he continues, ‘especially the pedestrian ones, which will be getting even harder from 2009. In this sector of the market we can’t afford to do pop-up bonnets like Jaguar did on the XK, for example. We will have to go back to basics and look at engine architecture to meet them. It’s going to be a really tough time for designers!’

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There’s one car I’m itching to see today and that’s the production-ready version of the Artega GT. It was first shown at Geneva in March, but this is the first appearance of the finished article. Ex-Maserati boss Karl-Heinz Kalbfell, now a retained consultant for Artega, is keen to show me round.

The first surprise is how compact the car is inside – think 911 and you won’t be far off. The GT’s engine is the all-new VW/Porsche direct-injection 3.6-litre V6 (as will feature in next year’s R36 Passat), producing around 300bhp and transmitting its power via a six-speed DSG gearbox. The result will be a sub-5sec time to 62mph and a top speed of over 270kph (168mph).

Perhaps the most impressive thing of all, though, is the GT’s promise of a clever traction control system that is apparently very similar to that offered by Ferrari on the 430 Scuderia.

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Kalbfell tells me the first cars will be arriving with customers in late spring 2008 and will cost 83,915 euros (around £58,000) including taxes. The planned 2008 run of 170 cars is almost sold out already, and during 2009/10 Artega hopes to build up to its peak production target of 500 cars per year.

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Looking further ahead, the German company’s intention is to sell the GT worldwide, which includes seeing what needs to be done to build a right-hand-drive version – the bosses know that the British market has great potential for this type of car.

Knowing how Kalbfell likes to reflect on the bigger picture, I ask him for his opinion of cars like the RS6. After a slight pause he replies: ‘I think these sort of high-powered cars are only prolonging history. They do not point to the future.’ Food for thought.

Next I’ve got lunch booked with Audi’s head of technical development, Michael Dick, but on the way there I take a quick detour to look at one of the main talking points of this year’s show: the Chinese rip-offs of the BMW X5 and Toyota RAV-4. Looking like badly executed kit cars, I’m not surprised to hear that, a few hours later, BMW issued a writ against the company responsible, ordering them to be removed from the show.

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Back in the real world, and Michael Dick is soon spilling the beans on some models we can expect from Audi. First off are details of a Mini rival, the A1, which will be shown in prototype form at the Tokyo motor show in October/November. The A1’s body will be all steel (unlike the unsuccessful all-aluminium Audi A2) and making it as much fun to drive as the Mini is paramount to Audi. The car will be built in Brussels and should weigh under 1100kg when it goes on sale in 2010.

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Before that there will be a Q5 (think smaller, five-seater Q7), with the range including a petrol hybrid version using technology co-developed with BMW. Apparently Audi looked at the possibility of a diesel hybrid, but decided it was too expensive (diesel engines are more costly to produce than petrol ones), especially as the company believes that the hybrid route is only a temporary eco-solution and not worthy of full investment.

Expect to see new longitudinal DSG gearboxes for sporty variants of the new A4 and A5 soon too (particularly the new RS4, due early 2009), plus a cabriolet version of the A3. Dick also hinted at an all-new aluminium-bodied Bentley Continental for 2010 that will share components with the new A8 due around the same time.

The motor industry has always moved with the times, but the pace of change seems extraordinary right now. VW’s terrific rear-engined, rear-drive, Mini-sized ‘up!’ concept is perhaps one of the most exciting cars at the show, with engineers promising the eventual production version should be a brilliant drivers’ car – particularly in range-topping turbocharged three-cylinder form – thanks to its 1100kg target kerb weight and, of course, its rear-wheel drive. The man responsible for the fantastic RS4 engine is now working on the performance engine for the up!.

I’d expected all the current talk of CO2 limits to result in glum faces at Frankfurt, but instead there’s a real buzz of excitement as new technology brings solutions we could only have dreamt about a few years ago. It seems these are great times for the car industry; the only problem on the horizon might be trying to educate the greater public that the car is not actually the root cause of the global warming scenario that it is often perceived to be.

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