With the festive season nearing, many Malaysians will be travelling back to their hometowns to celebrate. This results in an increase in traffic on the roads which means there might be high chances of accidents occurring.
The fire department has identified and will station fire engines and personnel at 14 accident hotspots along all motorways across the country to speed up the response time during peak hours.
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Lancia, which is part of the FCA Group within Stellantis, seemed to have no future not so long ago. Its declining sales numbers and a stagnant range with just one model put its continued existence at risk, and it was only Italians who seemed to have any affinity for the brand.
Stellantis sees Lancia as a brand with some hope and is willing to help it revive and embark on a new era. For a start, the 116-year old company has worked on a new brand vision which takes it into the electric age.
The brand vision has a design vision which was described last November and previewed in the Pu+Ra Zero, a 3-dimensional ‘manifesto’ that will guide the designers of the 3 new Lancia models to be launched between 2024 and 2028. Created from the words ‘Pure’ and ‘Radical’, Lancia Pu+Ra Design is described as a sustainable design language that is intended to ‘last for the next 100 years’.
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Unveiled in November 1971 at the Turin Motor Show, the Alfasud was a significant new model by Alfa Romeo. Although the Volkswagen Golf, which arrived a few years later, would continue to exist to this day, the Alfasud was essentially a single generation that never had a successor of the same name.
It was nevertheless a commercial success in its time, with over a million units sold worldwide between 1971 and 1989. Besides Italy, the Alfasud was also assembled in South Africa, Malta and also Malaysia.
Local assembly in Malaysia (at the Swedish Motor Assembly plant in Shah Alam) was due to the enthusiasm of City Motors, then the importer and distributor of the brand, particularly Datuk Dr. Foo Wan Kien.
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The act of cutting queues is a common occurrence in our daily lives. However, it is not acceptable and can lead to serious consequences. On March 23 2023, a 36-year-old Malaysian man was caught cutting a queue of cars by overtaking them using the bus lane near the Woodlands Checkpoint.
Mohd Shahrir Johari was spotted trying to filter into the car lane from the bus lane by auxiliary police officer Muhammad Noralif Amir Hamzah, whose job is to control traffic towards the checkpoint. Vehicles that try to cut the queue in the car lane from the bus lane are instructed to make a U-turn and head back towards Malaysia.
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South Korea’s POSCO, the sixth-largest steelmaking company in the world and Japan’s Honda Motor signed a comprehensive memorandum of understanding (MOU) on Tuesday. This partnership is to expand cooperation in the electric vehicle (EV) industry.
Prior to this, Posco was understood to have agreed in principle to a contract last year with a duration of at least five years with Ford. This contract is only for the supply of cathode materials and other key EV battery minerals, including lithium and nickel.
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Just as the Japanese and then the Korean carmakers have swept across the world, displacing the older European and American brands, carmakers from China are now starting their offensive on international markets. They are targeting Europe in particular as this region is moving strongly ahead with electrification, with regulations that aim to minimise or even stop sales of vehicles with combustion engines.
Electrified vehicles are an area where Chinese manufacturers have built up a lot of experience and knowledge, thanks to their government’s introduction of the national New Energy Vehicle (NEV) policy in 2009. This had the goal of 500,000 electrified vehicles – battery (BEV), plug-in hybrid (PHEV), and hybrid electric vehicles (HEV) – by 2012, which would account for 5% of new passenger vehicle sales.
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