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CES: GM to open the dashboard to developers

At last year's Autoweek Design Forum, father of the iPod and Nest Labs co-founder Tony Fadell suggested that automakers concentrate on designing and building cars, leaving handset makers to handle infotainment. The latest announcements from Ford and GM -- in conjunction with the International CES -- suggest that automakers would rather treat the dashboard space as a handset. Yesterday, Dearborn, Mich., announced the Ford Developer Program, which opens up Sync to outside application development; now General Motors has announced a similar initiative.

Bahrain Grand Prix: Rosberg takes pole for Mercedes

So much for the 2013 Mercedes being uncompetitive. Nico Rosberg put in a strong performance in Bahrain in qualifying for tomorrow’s F1 race, beating Sebastian Vettel in to second place and Fernando Alonso in to third. But whether this was a qualifying ‘special’ from Mercedes we won’t really know until tomorrow.

Battery breakthrough set to accelerate electric-car development

A team of scientists working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are claiming a significant breakthrough in recharging times for lithium-ion batteries. According to findings published in the scientific journal Nature, MIT researchers Byoungwoo Kang and Gerbrand Ceder have unlocked the potential of lithium-ion batteries by patenting a unique process which is claimed to allow a typical laptop power pack to be fully recharged in less than a minute--an improvement in recharging performance of roughly 90 percent over existing lithium-ion batteries. Lithium-ion batteries generate electric current via the flow of lithium ions across an electrolyte, from an electrode to a cathode.