Honda Helix Cn250 Fuse Panel Harness on 2040-parts.com

Video: Fiat creates café racer 500 for SEMA

Fiat is preparing a café racer-style 500 for this week's SEMA show by stripping down an Abarth version to take it "down to the essence of what you need to drive a car." The café racer philosophy of ‘more speed, less comfort' was born around the 1960s British 'biker scene and while initially focussed on increasing performance, quickly developed into a culture as concered with 'the show' as 'the go'. "It takes something like this to really get noticed at SEMA," says Craig Buoncompago, Project Manager at Fiat Product Design. "The Café Racer is really going to be one special car that you guys should really come and see." The 500's roof has been chopped, while also shorn of its door handles and being fitted with hot rod billet rims.

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.

Ferrari F70: First Photo

We have what appears to be the first photo of the Enzo replacement - the Ferrari F70 – taken at a private viewing for Ferrari clients in China. Despite expectations that the new Ferrari F70 would be revealed before the end of 2012 – which is what Ferrari boss Luca di Montezemolo told us – we still haven’t had the reveal of the F70 in any form, and certainly not at the Los Angeles Auto show, where we expected Ferrari to debut their new hypercar as it’s the last motor show of note for 2012. It now looks like – short of a non-motor show reveal – that the new F70 will bow in at Detroit in January, but ahead of that it seems Ferrari are already showing the F70 to select clients.