Full Throttle - 007-1026 - Goldfinger Left Hand Throttle Kit on 2040-parts.com

GM and PSA sign a global strategic alliance (2012)

GM and PSA Peugeot Citroen this evening announced a 'long-term and broad-scale global strategic alliance' which will see the three brands co-develop cars in Europe and, in some cases, globally. Opel/Vauxhall and Peugeot Citroen will start sharing vehicle platforms and components, with the first jointly developed models expected by 2016. The focus will be on small and medium sized cars, MPVs and crossovers, but could in future stretch to include vans and commercial vehicles.

One Lap of the Web: Mini challenges Porsche; kit cars; and brand loyalty

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. Mini wished the Porsche 911 a happy 50th anniversary.

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.