2000 Chevy Impala Cruise Control Module Unit 3800 on 2040-parts.com

Interior Motives China Conference to explore new design directions

Chinese consumers are driving new design directions, and CDN's Interior Motives China Conference in Beijing next week is set to explore how. Titled ‘New brands and the search for a design identity', the conference features an impressive speaker line-up that blends the international (Chris Bangle and VW's Wolfgang Muller Pietralla) with the regional (GM PATAC's Friedhelm Engler, Ford China's Chelsia Lau and PSA-Peugeot/Citroën China's Robert Walker), with the domestic (Shan Wei of the Beijing Automotive Technical Center (BATC), and Ken Ma of SAIC). The annual conference is the third in China to be hosted by CDN's magazine Interior Motives, and will be held on Wednesday 21 April, and Thursday 22 April, just in advance of the opening of Auto China 2010 in Beijing on Friday (23 April).

Concept Car of the Week: Pininfarina CNR-PF (1978)

In the 1970s alarm bells were ringing in the energy sector as a series of energy crises and rising fuel prices spiralled. The car industry was forced to produce a new generation of more efficient cars and designers were putting new models through wind tunnels to optimize their aerodynamic performance to reduce aerodynamic drag. Some pushed the limits further than others and none more so than Pininfarina, which designed a car that slipped through the air twice as efficiently than any other.

Ford Fiesta eWheelDrive gets wheel hub electric motors

The Ford Fiesta eWheelDrive – a driveable research vehicle built by Ford and German specialists Schaeffler – may be a regular supermini in size, but it points towards a potential future EV which is much more compact and very manoeuvrable. Ford has taken a regular Fiesta and dumped its powertrain, replacing it with a battery bank where the engine would be and fitted a pair of in-hub electric motors on the rear wheels. But the plan is to build new cars with the batteries under the floor which frees up the space under the bonnet which can then be all but removed to create a very compact urban car that still has space for four.