05 Impala Hood Hinge on 2040-parts.com

Parents 'taxi drivers' for their children

PARENTS spend around six months of their lives playing taxi driver for their children, a poll has found. A new survey claims that the average mum and dad clocks up around 30 miles a week ferrying their youngster to school, to clubs and to see friends, spending around three-and-a-half hours in the car. It means that the average parent racks up around 26,741 miles driving their child around between the ages of three and 20, and spends around 3,147 hours behind the wheel, according to Goodyear, which commissioned the poll.

Mercedes SLA Roadster looks likely

As car manufacturers start to look with fresh eyes at smaller, cheaper cars, reports from Germany confirm that Mercedes is close to committing to the SLA, a small Roadster to be based on the next generation A-Class platform. The original SLA concept was shown at Detroit in 2000, and aimed to slot in beneath the SLK. But at that time Mercedes didn’t have a suitable platform on which to base the car, and the project was shelved.

One Lap of the Web: the Bill Thomas Cheetah, Martini Racing and the 1976 Ferrari 208 GT4

We spend a lot of time on the Internet -- pretty much whenever we're not driving, writing about or working on cars. Since there's more out there than we'd ever be able to cover, here's our daily digest of car stuff on the Web you may not otherwise have heard about. --You've probably seen the Martini Racing livery on everything from Formula One cars to rally cars.