Monroe Ma717 Rear Max Air on 2040-parts.com

The Extreme Mini Adventure Money Can’t Buy

IT’S NOT every day as an apprentice you get to build a new concept car for your employer. However that’s exactly what a lucky few trainees did when BMW tasked them to make their design study a reality. Choosing the firm’s Mini Paceman as the donor car, the talented apprentices transformed the vehicle into a rugged two-door pick-up – a long way from the original motor’s sleek coupe origins.

Non-starting Nissan LEAFs to be reprogrammed

NIssan LEAF - date with a laptop They’re not exactly thick on the ground but, as we reported just a week ago, Nissan has already got problems with the Nissan LEAF, which has been refusing to restart once it’s stopped. Not restarting is not exactly a safety issue, so as long as you can actually get your nice new Nissan LEAF to start in the first place there’s no chance it will pack up on you mid-journey (unless you run out of electrickery). But having stumped up at least £10k more than an equivalent ICE car would cost for your LEAF, the least you should be able to expect is it to do what it says on the tin without packing up.

Concept Car of the Week: Dodge Deora (1967)

Half concept car, half custom but all awesome, the Dodge Deora was designed by former GM designer Harry Bentley Bradley for the famous car customizers the Alexander brothers who wanted to build a radical custom truck using one of the Big Three's new cabover mini-pickups. They relied on Bradley's futuristic drawings to seduce Chrysler who eventually agreed to provide a stripped down A100 truck for them to customize although the final design shares almost nothing with the original donor car. The cabin was radically chopped and integrated into the rest of the body and – after its suspension was also lowered – the overall height of the Deora was reduced by a whopping 380mm.