1959-1965 Cushman Horn & Dimmer Switch on 2040-parts.com

Design Contest: Local Motors and Shell announce 'DRIVEN' [w/video]

Local Motors, the open-source car design community, has announced its latest competition. Working in collaboration with Shell Oils, the DRIVEN contest is an acronym for Design of Relevant and Innovative Vehicles for Energy Needs. Entrants are asked to create a car for one of five cities: Amsterdam, Bangalore, Basra, Houston or Sao Paulo.

McLaren plan to make windscreen wipers obsolete

McLaren plan to make windscreen wipers obsolete Much of the ‘clunkiness’ in cars – stuff like wind-up windows and a cranking handle – have been made obsolete in cars as technology arrived to make things work better, but one thing that remains on modern cars from the dawn of the motoring age is the windscreen wiper. Invented by Mary Anderson in 1903 after she realised drivers of the first motor cars were having to lean out of the window in rainy conditions to see where they were going, it became a standard fitting on all cars within a few years. Windscreen wipers have certainly improved over the years as technology has developed, but they’re still basically a strip of rubber moving across the windscreen to clear rain.

Toyota wins unintended-acceleration case

Toyota secured a legal victory on Friday against the landslide of unintended-acceleration claims that have dogged the company for more than a year. A jury in New York found in favor of Toyota, rejecting claims of a driver who said a floor mat was the cause of his 2005 crash in a Scion tC. The jury took 45 minutes to reach the verdict after a weeklong trial in federal court.