Mini Minor Mini Cooper Mk User's Manual Copy on 2040-parts.com

Lifetime of commuting 'costs £50,000'

A CAREER-LONG commute is likely to set a worker back an average of £50,000, according to a survey. For a Londoner starting work at 18 and finishing at 65, the cost of commuting could reach as high as £66,000, the poll by investing service Nutmeg.com found. Overall, commuters will spend an average of 10,634 hours travelling to and from work in their lifetime - the equivalent of 443 days.

Ellesmere Port's bid to build Ampera hits snags

By Rob Golding Motor Industry 09 October 2009 15:02 Prime minister Gordon Brown’s personal crusade to get Vauxhall's version of the Chevrolet Volt petrol-electric plug-in hybrid – the Ampera – built in Britain's Ellesmere Port factory in 2012 is a dream delayed, CAR can disclose today.News that the UK Astra plant is the best in Europe, that the Astra's Delta platform will underpin the Ampera, and that Volt will be on US sale from 2010 had been taken to mean that Vauxhall would be churning out the cars in the north west within three years.But the prospect of an electric car industry growing up around the run-down Merseyside manufacturing site is not imminent, CAR has learned.'No Ampera to be built in Europe before 2015'Vauxhall insiders have made it clear that the car to be known as the Vauxhall/Opel Ampera in Europe will be an import from the US for at least five years. One senior planner told us: 'The US will be the sole source of Amperas until at least 2015.'Bob Lutz, GM's former product supremo who recently came out of retirement as a PR, said that the low value of the dollar made the US an ideal site for the manufacturing of export cars. And with forecast sticker prices of the range-extender electric car standing at a scary £35,000+, every price saving is vital to its marketability.The European market also needs time to get its electricity recharge infrastructure in place before it is worth making cars onshore in volume, GM high-ups point out.

SAIC Roewe-MG Cup design competition winners announced

The results of SAIC's Roewe-MG Cup design competition are in, with East China Normal University student Sun Jiajun taking top honors with his 850 Celebration concept. Themed ‘Roewe 2020: Elegant Confidence', the contest asked Chinese university students to design a future sedan, SUV or MPV for Roewe in 2020. Coming in second behind Jiajun were Qian Junlin and Zhang Mingxi, both of Jiang Nan University.