Wellhouse Leisure’s first campervan conversion of the all-new Ford Transit Custom – the Misano 5 – is now available to order with prices starting from £71,500 for a 6-speed manual and a 130PS, 2.0 TDCi Ford EcoBlue diesel engine, or from £73,000 for a 6-speed automatic transmission.
The engines can be upgraded to 150PS and 170PS, plus there will be a plug-in hybrid (PHEV) model with a 232PS, 2.5-litre petrol engine and automatic transmission and has an official 33 mile range on purely electric power and fuel economy of up to 79.1 mpg to give a total range of over 250 miles.
The updated, fourth-generation A3 Sportback and Saloon have been on sale in the UK since mid-April and the expansion of the powertrain line-up brings the starting price of the model range down to £28,920, while orders for the S3 Sportback and Saloon also start at £46,925.
While the number of cars on the road reached a record high last year of nearly 33.6m, the rate of growth over recent years hasn’t nearly matched that of new light goods vehicles (LGVs), including vans, that have fuelled the boom in home deliveries, said the RAC.
Since the end of 2014, the number of LGVs rose by a third (32%) from 3.6m to 4.7m, yet cars rose by just 10% over the same period. And in the last five years, the number of LGVs has shot up by 14%, compared to cars going up by 3% while, conversely, the number of buses and coaches on the UK’s roads tumbled 16% from nearly 169,000 at the end of 2014 to just 141,300 at the end of last year, which is disappointing at a time when so much public money is being spent on trying to make bus travel more attractive – for instance, by building more bus lanes.
Volklec, a new UK manufacturing business making batteries for electric vehicles, will be based in Coventry in the West Midlands, with the vision of Powering Electrified Mobility, it is set to manufacture sustainable batteries for on-road, off-highway and track vehicles.
In an innovative UK technology collaboration, Volklec is working with UKBIC, the UK Battery Industrialisation Centre and national manufacturing development scale-up facility, which also provides skills for the growing EV battery sector.