General Motors to keep green car technology in house

For the first time in its 100-year history, General Motors plans to design, develop and manufacture electric motors for its growing array of gasoline-electric hybrids and electric vehicles. The electric motors used in GM's current lineup of hybrids are made to GM specifications by outside vendors. GM wants to bring the design and manufacturing in-house to save money and to apply its own technology to boost performance, lower weight and reduce power consumption, said Larry Nitz, GM's chief hybrid powertrain engineer.

Alpine Celebration At French Historic Endurance Event

RENAULT will be out in force at this weekend’s Le Mans Classic. The historic alternative to the highly charged modern Le Mans 24-hour endurance race has proven popular with fans, and the French car maker will be celebrating its Alpine sub-brand by running three cars. This seventh running of the classic race will see an Alpine M65, Alpine-Renault A110 and Alpine-Renault A443 take to the famous circuit.

Webinars: Autodesk – Concept Modeling with Maya

Autodesk presented its third Webinar in the series entitled ‘Concept Modeling with Maya' that illustrates how the software helps to create concept models. Martin Emila of Autodesk showed how Maya could accelerate the development of a design concept with the help of polygonal modeling workflow, and how it can be integrated into common workflow - starting with first ideation sketch, move to polygon model and continue to surfacing and visualization. Emila's four-year career at Autodesk has largely focused on conceptual design and visualization.