Vision-oe 13945 Alternator/generator-reman Alternator on 2040-parts.com

World's smallest car enters the record books

Texas is the US state that's big on… well, being big. So it's slightly surprising that a Texan has just entered the Guinness World Records book for creating the world's smallest roadworthy car. Is this his answer to our increasingly congested city streets?

2012 Ford Focus ST gets 297bhp

Those clever chaps at SuperChips have given the 2012 Ford Focus ST a bit of an ECU tweak to deliver 297bhp and an extra 85lb/ft of torque. When we reported last week that WTC outfit Arena had in roped Ford’s tuner of choice, Mountune, to give the new Ford Focus a makeover, we were a tad disappointed to discover that they were tweaking the rather journeyman Focus Zetec S. That meant the Zetec S got 200bhp – a handy jump – but we bemoaned the fact that they hadn’t fiddled with the Focus ST to give us a car to fill the void left by the absence of a Focus RS in the current iteration of the Focus.

Audi Snook at the 2008 Michelin Challenge Design

German design student Tilmann Schlootz has been named one of the winners in the 2008 Michelin Challenge Design competition for his Audi Snook project. Selected for special exhibition at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit by a jury of professional designers and educators, the Snook scale model concept answered a design brief entitled: 'Sharing the Road - Big Safety/Small Vehicles', which called for enhanced real and perceived safety for smaller vehicles through design innovation. The visionary concept vehicle, which rides on a mono-sphere wheel, is heralded as a new vehicle category, implementing the principles of agility through instability learned from aerospace technology.