Club Pro E-z-go 2 Person Txt/medallist Over The Top Enclosure, Aspen on 2040-parts.com

One Lap of the Web: A Tumbler for Gumball, smashing supercars in China and a pedigreed race car for sale

We spend a lot of time on the Internet -- pretty much whenever we're not driving, writing about or working on cars. Since there's more out there than we'd ever be able to cover, here's our daily digest of car stuff on the Web you may not otherwise have heard about. The Gumball 3000 starts May 18 in Copenhagen, Denmark, heading northeast toward Stockholm, Sweden.

Exclusive: Laurens van den Acker to replace Patrick le Quément at Renault

The wheels of change are continuing to turn within the automotive design industry, with yet another new appointment being made at the director level. According to industry insiders, Laurens van den Acker is set become the new Design Director at Renault when Patrick le Quément retires later this year. One of the most pre-eminent car designers in the world, Patrick le Quément began his design career at Simca, worked at Ford for 17 years and did a brief stint at Volkswagen before taking the top design job at Renault.

Nissan Leaf with advanced-driver assist to begin public road tests in Japan

Nissan is about to begin testing advanced driver-assist systems in the real world, and a new Nissan Leaf is serving as the test bed for these technologies. This is all a part of Nissan's development of Autonomous Drive, a goal to achieve virtually zero fatalities in accidents involving its vehicles by the year 2020. Autonomous Drive can be said to be a further development of Nissan's Safety Shield, a system that has a 360-degree view around the vehicle that scans for risks and provides warnings to the driver, intervening automatically if necessary.