15-6126 K & L Fork Seal & Wiper Kit on 2040-parts.com

Do You Know the Way to Monterey? Martin Swig and friends know several ways, and made a rally out of them

One of the best things about the Monterey week is driving to it. Thanks to plate tectonics, California has some of the best roads in the world. No one knows those roads better than Martin Swig, professor emeritus of the School of Piston Knocks.

BMW X1 – first car in the wild!

The new BMW X1 on the road for the first time The X1 is designed to be a proper, compact SUV, aimed at a younger market, with less to spend, than most of BMW’s current offerings. Based on the 1 series platform, this shot seems to look exactly like the concept car (BMW X1 Concept gallery at the end). Not sure about the brown paint job, though.

Ellesmere Port's bid to build Ampera hits snags

By Rob Golding Motor Industry 09 October 2009 15:02 Prime minister Gordon Brown’s personal crusade to get Vauxhall's version of the Chevrolet Volt petrol-electric plug-in hybrid – the Ampera – built in Britain's Ellesmere Port factory in 2012 is a dream delayed, CAR can disclose today.News that the UK Astra plant is the best in Europe, that the Astra's Delta platform will underpin the Ampera, and that Volt will be on US sale from 2010 had been taken to mean that Vauxhall would be churning out the cars in the north west within three years.But the prospect of an electric car industry growing up around the run-down Merseyside manufacturing site is not imminent, CAR has learned.'No Ampera to be built in Europe before 2015'Vauxhall insiders have made it clear that the car to be known as the Vauxhall/Opel Ampera in Europe will be an import from the US for at least five years. One senior planner told us: 'The US will be the sole source of Amperas until at least 2015.'Bob Lutz, GM's former product supremo who recently came out of retirement as a PR, said that the low value of the dollar made the US an ideal site for the manufacturing of export cars. And with forecast sticker prices of the range-extender electric car standing at a scary £35,000+, every price saving is vital to its marketability.The European market also needs time to get its electricity recharge infrastructure in place before it is worth making cars onshore in volume, GM high-ups point out.