Holiday makers and booze cruise drivers will need to dip their hand in their pockets. People renting vehicles with 9 seats or more will, next spring (2007), have to get a £38 driver card to log the drivers time on the road. The card, which looks similar to the UK photographic driving licence needs to be purchased in advance from the DVLA (visit site here). Using this new card will involve slotting it into a new style of tachograph and will restrict journeys to 4 and a half hours continuous driving followed by a 45 min break.

My comment is that the obvious way to get round this is to get two people to buy cards and then swap over their cards every 4.5 hours? No?

Mercedes Benz are shortly about to launch a 400 bhp version of their already successful SLK 55 AMG. The normal car has 360bhp and the new one, that features a carbon roof and various body panel additions is speculated to have 400 bhp. I have looked on the www.mercedesbenz.com website but cannot find clarification of this however there are a few websites that are posting images.

The acceleration of this beast has been dropped from 4.9s to 62.5mph to 4.5s and the car is reputed to have 620Nm of torque. This may spell disaster for the 3.2S Boxster as the handling of the SLK has been impoved also. C’mon Porsche, improve the performance of the Boxster. At only 285bhp the Boxster is definitely lacking with many other ‘competitor’ cars being well over the 300bhp+ range.