Ferrari Yearbook 1992 on 2040-parts.com

McLaren plan to make windscreen wipers obsolete

McLaren plan to make windscreen wipers obsolete Much of the ‘clunkiness’ in cars – stuff like wind-up windows and a cranking handle – have been made obsolete in cars as technology arrived to make things work better, but one thing that remains on modern cars from the dawn of the motoring age is the windscreen wiper. Invented by Mary Anderson in 1903 after she realised drivers of the first motor cars were having to lean out of the window in rainy conditions to see where they were going, it became a standard fitting on all cars within a few years. Windscreen wipers have certainly improved over the years as technology has developed, but they’re still basically a strip of rubber moving across the windscreen to clear rain.

Local Motors XC2V Competition

Local Motors, producer of the Rally Fighter, has teamed up with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to host a design contest. The partnership, which was made possible within the Adaptive Vehicle Makes initiative, aims to create an Experimental Crowd-derived Combat-support Vehicle (XC2V), exploring the potential of a crowd-sourced design for military use. The initiative to develop a crowd-derived vehicle body design for the US military was created in an effort to decrease the time and developmental costs associated with creating niche military vehicles.

Volvo C30, Ford Focus fare well in insurance-group crash tests

Four two-door cars received the highest safety rating in frontal crashes and two received that rating for side collisions in recent testing by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. The institute gave its "good" rating in side crashes to the Volvo C30 and two-door Ford Focus. Those vehicles, along with the two-door Honda Civic and Chevrolet Cobalt, also received "good" ratings for frontal collisions, the non-profit group funded by auto insurers said.