1954 Chevy Pick Up Grill on 2040-parts.com

Chevrolet offers Corvette buyers the opportunity to build the engine for their cars

WITH VIDEO -- Chevrolet Corvette buyers can already take delivery of their car at the National Corvette Museum, get professional driver training and watch their cars being built. Now, General Motors will let them build the engine. GM is offering buyers of the 2011 Corvette ZR1 and Z06 models the chance to build the engines for their cars.

Ford Verve Sedan

Just as Mazda is exhibiting a sedan version of the 2 at Auto Guangzhou, the automaker's parent company, Ford, is revealing a sedan version of the Verve concept. The second in a series of concepts that will culminate with yet another variant set to be unveiled in Detroit, this 'notchback' provides further insight to the future small car design direction for Ford. Ford's European design team, which created the Verve concepts, applied Ford's kinetic design philosophy and built on the look of its hatchback sibling.

Video: Chris Bangle delivers “Empowerment: Design without Designers” talk at Creative Mornings/London

Chris Bangle – the undisputed front man of car design – needs little introduction, so the prospect of the former BMW Design Director and now founder of Chris Bangle Associates giving a talk in our home town of London was too good to pass up. His presentation (which you can watch in full in the video to the left) touched on his time at BMW, but was more focused on the idea of empowering others to create: "design without you in the middle", as Bangle says. From the story of the co-creation of the staircase in his Italian studio to the idea of encouraging people to think about their culture when designing, his philosophies transcend disciplines.