1994 Ford Mustang Shifter Assembly Automatic 195295 on 2040-parts.com

The no-show cars: a reader rant on mad concepts

Instigated by Harley Earl at General Motors in the late 30s with the quaintly named Buick Y-Job, show cars, or concept cars, were presented to an excited public eager for new things. As the world recovered from a depression and then a war, these vehicles pointed to a better future that many people believed in, including the people who produced them. And, although many of the concept cars of the 50s, with their Jetsons plexiglass roofs and notional nuclear powered engines seem ludicrous now, in their time they weren’t that cynical.

Upgraded Ford MyKey blocks explicit satellite radio channels

Teenage radio listeners might have to look somewhere else besides the family Ford for the Playboy channel or Howard Stern. The new generation of Ford's programmable MyKey system will let parents block "explicit" radio channels on the Sirius/XM satellite service in their cars. That would cover Playboy's and Stern's channels, as well as more than a dozen music channels, such as rapper Eminem's Shade 45 and the hard-rock Boneyard.

Old distractions as bad as new tech

DRIVERS are as much distracted by "old technology" as by new gadgets, according to a survey. Adult passengers, twiddling with the radio and children in the car were the main distractions causing either a near-miss or an accident, the poll of more than 18,000 motorists found. These three distractions came ahead of operating the sat-nav and talking on a mobile phone as the biggest reasons for lack of driver attention.