The Vauxhall Insignia Country Tourer is a more rugged crossover version of the regular Insignia Tourer estate that we saw in facelift form last month.

We’ll find out how much extra you’ll pay for the Country Tourer when it’s shown off at the Frankfurt motor show in September 2013. We're expected a price tag of £31-32k, compared to £28.5k for a standard Tourer with the same engine.

In the realm of premium sports cars, Porsche takes a back seat to no one. But when it comes to back seats, Porsche isn’t the first marque that springs to mind. Every person geeked on cars knows that premium sedans with generously proportioned aft quarters hail from the likes of Rolls-Royce, Mercedes, Audi, Jaguar, and BMW. Porsche builds light, agile two-passenger sports cars, right?

The last word in luxury limos hasn't been spoken until Mercedes-Benz has had the floor. Herr Dr. Benz’s firm was making the preferred shipping containers for the mostly un-elected elite when Audi was just a business plan, when BMW was in the bubblecar business, and when the word “lexus” was just badly butchered Latin. No company in this market has more experience catering to finicky buyers.

Upon announcing the cancellation of the C-X75 supercar last December, Jaguar brand director Adrian Hallmark tried to put a positive spin on the story, saying that the car’s development would be completed, and that regular Jaguars of the future would benefit from the work done on its hybrid technology, aerodynamics, and carbon-fiber composites. He also promised that Car and Driver, who had followed the project closely, would have a chance to experience Jaguar’s vision for a 21st century supercar. That opportunity came just a few days ago and showed that Jaguar, together with Williams F1, is capable of producing a high-tech road car that could compete with the likes of the La Ferrari, McLaren P1, and the Porsche 918.

In the realm of premium sports cars, Porsche takes a back seat to no one. But when it comes to back seats, Porsche isn’t the first marque that springs to mind. Every person geeked on cars knows that premium sedans with generously proportioned aft quarters hail from the likes of Rolls-Royce, Mercedes, Audi, Jaguar, and BMW. Porsche builds light, agile two-passenger sports cars, right?

There was quite a lot of hype surrounding Sébastien Loeb when it was announced that he would partake in the 2013 edition of the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb. After all, it’s been suggested that the nine-time World Rally Championship winner is the greatest driver in the world right now. (Loeb aims to augment those claims with a campaign in the World Touring Car Championship next season.) That hype was justified when the Frenchman smashed the existing overall record on Sunday by a more than a minute and a half, reaching the summit in just under eight minutes, fourteen seconds.

After a 2001 earthquake damaged a double-deck section of State Route 99 running through Seattle, city planners decided to just bury it. Rather than rebuild the so-called Alaska ­Viaduct, they are replacing a two-mile stretch with a tunnel. So how do you dig a nearly-60-foot-diameter tunnel under downtown ­Seattle? With the world’s largest tunnel-boring machine (TBM). “Bertha,” as Seattle has named the machine, is currently being assembled in a pit at the head of its path and starts chewing through buried flannel shirts and Starbucks cups this summer.