"Who-Are-Ya?"

The motoring media for past week or so and the front cover of the new Top Gear Mag have been dominated by this car......The Pagani Huayra.

The motoring media seem to have a few issues on how you pronounce it. Top Gear say it is "h-wire-a". Auto-Express have gone with "why-eera". Autocar say it is "Wirer" with a heavy Spanish accent - their words not mine. So I was very interested to see how Car and Driver cope. This is an American site and Americans do have very different pronunciations of car names - I know this as a "Jagwah" owner. Car and Driver have chickened out a bit on this, they just state that "here we thought 'Touareg' was hard to pronounce."

I find Car&Driver quite interesting - you get the Buicks and stuff that we don't see here - then you get their take on things like the Ford C-Max which is new to them and old-hat to us and you also get quirks likes the Volkswagen XL1 Concept which they claim will achieve 261mpg (not 261 mph which is how I originally read it) However, the British press claim it can do over 300mpg.

Does this mean that the British are more efficient drivers?

No, of course not - it means that a US gallon is smaller than an Imperial gallon. In fact, one US gallon equals 0.83267384 Imperial gallons if you really want to know (I didn't) but that doesn't explain why fuel is still considerably cheaper over there than it is over here.

Anyway, back to the Whoareya, it has gullwing doors and a 6-litre V12 AMG engine and fancy computer-controlled flaps that replace the tail-spoiler - it will also have a price-tag of about £1Million - on a par with it's predecessor - just a shame it looks so much like it...Actually, I think the Zonda is better looking.

And much easier to say.

Parking Offensive

Spotted this story on the BBC News Site last week. It came with this picture...For those who think all supercars look the same (and I do have some sympathy with that view, especially looking at this picture) what you have here is a Lamborghini Murcielago parked behind an extremely rare £1.2Million Koenigsegg CCXR.

£120 penalty charge notices were issued for the illegal parking, but the cars were released for £70 each as the fines were paid within 14 days. No mention was made of the crime of painting these cars in that awful shade of turquoise.

A Harrods spokesman said: "Any matters relating to parking tickets and enforcement are strictly the domain of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea." In other words - "It's nothing to do with us - even though we have recently been bought by the Qatari Royal Family." Who, though, could be the owners of these vehicles? - after all, it's not like the Qatari Royal Family have a habit of painting supercars turquoise like this Pagani Zonda they own: