1966-1967 Impala Ss Rear Seat Filler Panels & Armrests on 2040-parts.com

London 'most costly' for car cover

MOTORISTS living in London faces paying almost four times the amount that a driver in the Isle of Man would spend on their car insurance, a study has revealed. AA Insurance, which compiles an index of the typical cost of car insurance for someone who shops around, named London as the most expensive place in Britain to insure a car, followed by the postcode area of IG, which includes Ilford, Chigwell, Woodford Green, Buckhurst Hill, Loughton and Barking, with Greater Manchester in third place. The IM (Isle of Man) postcode was found to be the cheapest place to insure a car, with the average quote for someone there who shops around standing at £231.

Magna Electronics develops 'Touchskin' concept [w/video]

Electronics firm Magna is working on a new technology it calls 'Touchskin concept' that has the potential to eliminate traditional switches and instruments inside vehicles. As part of its ‘Intelligent Surface Technology', the Touchskin concept is set to be an integral part of a system that allows the user to control the car via intuitive gestures – such as pinching, tapping and swiping – as we've become so familiar with when using smartphones. The potential design implications are easy to see with the large amount of space made available by removing the traditional instrument cluster and its wiring and the removal of wired-in switches and buttons.

Electric cars must get noisier, ICE cars must get quieter

Electric cars will have to make a noise to protect pedestrians It’s four years since the Lotus solution for making electric cars noisy raised its head, since when the US has had a go at the Pedestrian Safety Enhancement Act in 2010 to do the same thing, the Japanese are playing too, and Toyota revealed the Prius Vehicle Notification System, and now the EU has decided its time to act to make EVs emit ‘noise’. Despite the most appealing part of an EV being that it makes our cities quieter, legislators worry about the blind, partially sighted and distracted pedestrian (think earphones and a Smartphone) being mowed down by a stalking electric car and feel the need to act. So the European Parliament has decided that by 2019 new models of electric vehicle will have to make a noise in cities, and that by 2021 all new hybrids and electrics must be noisy too.