2001 Kawasaki Dual Purpose Motorcycle Showroom Sales Brochure...6-page Foldout on 2040-parts.com

Mercedes signs joint venture to build carbonfibre parts

Not to be outdone by BMW’s joint venture with the SGL Group to manufacturer commercially viable carbonfibre-reinforced plastic (CFRP) for the electric Megacity Vehicle, Mercedes has announced a joint venture with Japanese company Toray Industries to manufacturer and market its on CFRP automotive parts. The deal was signed in Germany today, with Toray taking a 50.1% stake, Daimler holding 44.9% and the remaining 5% being taken by other shareholders. The two companies started working together in March 2010, and while Toray has been working on the materials and moulding processes, Merc has designed the automotive parts and the technologies to join the parts together.

The Super Bowl's most refreshingly honest car ad

In 2000's High Fidelity, hapless record-store owner Rob Gordon -- played memorably by John Cusack -- opines, “What really matters is what you like, not what you are like." In the year 2000, I was 24 years old and was working on a punk rock magazine, an environment not dissimilar from Gordon's Championship Vinyl. The line made a lot of sense to me; it was a quiet, back-of-the-head maxim that informed much of what my friends and I did and how we saw people. It's a shallow way of looking at things, but for those of us who came of age amid the us-vs.-them liberal identity politics of the '90s, awash as we were in Public Enemy's political consciousness, the post-AIDS gay-rights push and the loud-fast feminism of the riot grrrl movement, there was a good chance that if somebody liked the things you liked, they thought like you and they were good.

New Lotus V8 will mean new 4-Cylinder engine too

2014 Lotus Elise - will get new 4-pot Lotus engine It seems that Lotus are deadly serious in their plans to build an all new V8 engine to drop in to the new Lotus Esprit, and it also seems as though the Lotus engine revival isn’t going to end there. The headline act is an all new modular Lotus V8 of 4.8 litres and boasting 562bhp. This is planned for the new Esprit, which is the only one of the crop of Lotus concepts actually under development, and will be ready to fire up in just a couple of months.