Viking Boat Anchor, 29" Tall, Working, Made Of Aluminum on 2040-parts.com

Autos to overtake manuals

By Jack Carfrae Motor Industry 28 February 2007 07:39 Automatic transmissions will finally overtake manuals as the top-selling gearbox choice in 2007. Autos have been long established as the more popular option Stateside and in Japan, but it seems that Europe has now finally caught the two-pedal bug. With the ever-increasing popularity of semi-automatic gearboxes (Tiptronic, DSG, CVT and a whole flood of other acronyms), it isn’t hard to see why.

MINI John Cooper Works Range gets a new engine

MINI JCW range gets new engines MINI has had a play and a tweak with the 1.6 litre turbo engine in the MINI John Cooper Works Range to make it more appealing. The Geneva Motor Show this year saw the debut of the latest MINI JCW – the MINI Countryman John Cooper Works – and with it output figures we though might be arriving across the MINI JCW range. Those figures saw the output of the 1.6 litre lump in the JCW rise to 215bhp and, surprisingly, managed to come in with economy figures for the JCW Countryman that were much the same as the rest of the JCW range.

British team aim for electric world record

A BRITISH team headed by Lord Drayson is seeking to set a new World Land Speed Record with its electric racing car. The Drayson B12 electric Le Mans racing car is heading to the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah, USA in a bid to raise the current record for electric cars weighing less than 1000kg. Recently, the team set a new British record of 204.185mph with the same car.