Mercruiser 5.7 on 2040-parts.com

Citroen DS3 DStyle Red & DSport Red special editions

Citroen has launched a pair of special edition DS3s – the DS3 DStyle Red & DSport Red – to give New Year sales a bit of a fillip. Price from £15,655. The Citroen DS3 Red Edition comes in two flavours - DS3 DStyle Red and DS3 DSport Red – based on the existing DS3 DSport and DS3 DStyle with the requisite added goodies and stand-out paint job – either Polar white or Nera Black (with Perla Nera Black pearlescent a £480 option)  – with an exclusive ‘Red Touch’ interior and exterior pack which includes red roof and door mirrors, red grill, red dashboard and red door handles.

Scuola Politecnica di Design announces Chris Bangle workshop

Italy’s Scuola Politecnica di Design has announced a seven-day workshop with former BMW Group design boss Chris Bangle at its campus in Milan. Themed ‘Future Personal Emotional Mobility’ and scheduled to run from 18 to 24 September 2009, the workshop invites design degree graduates and experienced car designers to take part in a project to create a new breed of sustainable shared transportation for the year 2050. Based on the concept that the mass migration of people from the countryside to cities will in the future create even more social, economic and ecological differences between population zones, this event will see attendees work closely with Bangle towards designing systems that engage on an emotional as well as an economic level, satisfying the personal transportation needs – and desires – of a disparate global population while minimising impact on the environment.

Crunch watch Dec 08: the auto industry in crisis

By Tim Pollard and Simon Stiel Motor Industry 31 December 2008 14:05 Wednesday 31 December 2008• GMAC, GM's finance arm, said it would immediately revise its criteria for providing loans, after the US government bail-out of the General's credit arm. It will now supply credit for anyone with a score of 621 or more on the Fico scale, the scale used to assess Amercian customers' creditworthiness (Financial Times)• The news means that 80% of US consumers would now qualify for a loan from GMAC – which should improve sales in the depressed US market (Detroit News)• Chrysler is being lambasted for taking out full-page adverts in the American national press thanking the nation for supporting its auto industry. But critics point out this is a fresh waste of bail-out resources, as pages in the Wall Street Journal – one of the titles in which the ad ran – reportedly cost up to $264,000.