Ford Model 48 Front Brake Adjusting Shaft on 2040-parts.com

Seat completes industry's largest solar panel installation

SEAT HAS completed construction of the largest solar panel installation in the automotive industry. The huge 'Seat al Sol' array at the firm’s Martorell plant outside Barcelona is the size of 40 football pitches and generates 15 million kilowatt hours of power per year courtesy of the reliable Spanish sunshine. The electricity produced is enough to account for a quarter of the amount needed to build a year’s allocation of Leons, reducing the factory’s energy bills significantly and saving 7,000 tonnes of CO2 per year.

UK Government to add electric cars to its fleet – but don’t think the PM will be driving a Tesla Model S

The Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV – the sort of car the Government will acquire The roll-out of electric cars has not been an exactly overwhelming success, with even the Government’s £5,000 bribe to get you to go electric failing to kick start electric car sales in a meaningful way. So the Lib Dem bit of the coalition has decided that the Government should lead by example and have declared that the Government Car Service – which supplies cars for ministers and ‘government’ use – will start to acquire electric cars from this Autumn and, as part of the £5 million scheme, the wider public sector will be involved with council, police and NHS fleets looking seriously at EVs. But this scheme is aimed at the sorts of government cars that do the daily grind; ferrying junior ministers, getting staff to meetings and making deliveries in commercial vehicles.

VW Design Vision Golf GTI (2013) 493bhp Golf revealed

As CAR reported in our scoop last week, VW will unveil a higher-performance Golf GTI hot hatch at the 2013 Wörthersee show, and here we have the first sketches of the super-Golf. Called the VW Design Vision Golf GTI, the concept packs close to 500bhp and can outrun a Porsche 911. It's by far the most extreme Golf hot hatch since the Bentley-engined GTI W12 concept of 2007.