2020 Vauxhall Corsa F Front Driver Side Air Vent 545326626 on 2040-parts.com

McLaren gives MP4-12C power and gadget upgrade

McLaren has announced a surprise package of upgrades which will be offered to existing owners of its MP4-12C supercar, free of charge. Owners will benefit from more power, a tunable engine noise and fewer foibles - yes, the tricky swipe-to-enter door handles are banished for good. So what exactly has changed on the McLaren MP4-12C for 2013?

Video: Jaguar's Julian Thomson on the importance of design values

Jaguar's Head of Advanced Design, Julian Thomson, appeared at this month's PSFK Conference in London giving a talk on design values. Thomson's talk, ‘Concepting Dreams, Making Reality Happen', dealt with questions of creating a design story as well as how Jaguar uses the value of its heritage while keeping things original and new. Thomson – the man behind the 2010 C-X75 and the recently revealed F-Type – said, "You can't get a good design story if you don't look at your heritage, where you came from, where your values came from." He went on to discuss the ‘sad years of Jaguar', from around 1968 to 2004 where Jaguar was too timid to develop and "essentially made the same-looking car." He put this down to a reluctance on Jaguar's part to move too far away from its successful models and, quite interestingly, because "not only did we start doing market research, we started asking Americans what they wanted." Watch the full video on the left.

The Name Game: Why the next Buick will be called the Verano

Verano means “summer” in Spanish, though it could easily be a type of coffee or even a brand of crystal. But the idea behind the latest Buick was to snare an upscale, forward-sounding name to lure to new customers. Buick could have gone with an alpha-numeric designation, or even dipped into its heritage for a storied moniker from the past.