Sailor Thrane & Thrane Type 4900 Handset on 2040-parts.com

GM's Ed Whitacre meets the press in Web chat

General Motors' new front man, Ed Whitacre, remains a bit of an elusive figure in the car world. But at the very least, the former telecom honcho who's now the leader of the nation's largest automaker does like cars. “Oh yes,” he answered in response to that question during a Web chat on Tuesday, one of his first interactions with the media so far in his tenure at the helm of GM.

Goodwood Moving Motor Show: (almost) an unqualified success

The Goodwood Moving Motor Show Yesterday we toddled along to Goodwood to see the set up for this year’s Festival of Speed and to have a look at the Moving Motor Show in action for the first time. We also – courtesy of Jaguar, who had invited us for the day – got an early drive up the hillclimb-based circuit that forms part of the Moving Motor Show’s appeal for the lucky ones who got the opportunity to take the wheel of one of the impressive bunch of cars on display. And it was an impressive bunch, with everything from the Toyota Auris Hybrid to the Rolls Royce Phantom DHC via the Audi R8 and the new Jaguar XJ on offer to drive.

McLaren plan to make windscreen wipers obsolete

McLaren plan to make windscreen wipers obsolete Much of the ‘clunkiness’ in cars – stuff like wind-up windows and a cranking handle – have been made obsolete in cars as technology arrived to make things work better, but one thing that remains on modern cars from the dawn of the motoring age is the windscreen wiper. Invented by Mary Anderson in 1903 after she realised drivers of the first motor cars were having to lean out of the window in rainy conditions to see where they were going, it became a standard fitting on all cars within a few years. Windscreen wipers have certainly improved over the years as technology has developed, but they’re still basically a strip of rubber moving across the windscreen to clear rain.