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Active safety features: What your next car needs to have

Car safety used to mean double buckling your seatbelt when you squeezed three people into the front row. Now, with electronic stability control (ESC), cross-traffic alerts and adaptive headlights, it's a bit more difficult to sort through all of the available options. Of course you want to choose the safest car you can for yourself and your family.

Holt Ware becomes Design Director at GM-PATAC

Holt Ware has been appointed to design director at GM's Pan Asia Technical Automotive Center (PATAC) joint venture in Shanghai, China. He replaces Friedhelm Engler who has since relocated to Germany to lead the Advanced Design Studio, a position vacated by Anthony Lo earlier this year. Ware's new role at GM-PATAC puts him in charge of designers and modelers working in China's leading automotive engineering and design facility.

Refreshed Fiat 500 Hits The Streets

FIAT has released the refreshed version of its popular 500 supermini. The car boasts style, comfort and technological enhancements for 2014 A key new feature is the market-first seven-inch digital instrument display, which is said to combine cutting-edge technology without disrupting the trademark aesthetics of the cabin. Standard on 500S and Cult models, the layout of the speedometer, rev counter and trip computer will be familiar to existing 500 fans, but the centre of the display - which contains a digital image of the car - can be configured to show various trip computer readouts, such as distance travelled, instant fuel consumption and range.