Lotus won’t be sold – Bahar suspended over expenses

Lotus owners Proton have said that Lotus is not up for sale and reports say Lotus CEO Dany Bahar has been suspended over his expenses. There’s been a lot of show and not much real go since Dany Bahar took over at Lotus. Grandiose plans launch a whole range of supercars from a small niche manufacturer in the flatlands of Norfolk was always a strange call, and the sort of bills loss-making Lotus seems to be meeting make, on the face of it, little commercial sense.

General Motors salutes Bob Lutz

General Motors gave a fitting send-off to now-retired vice chairman Bob Lutz on Tuesday in Detroit. Lutz officially hung it up on April 30 after more than five decades in the auto business. He was most recently an adviser and served an extended stint as GM's product boss.

MIT develops self-transforming materials that behave 'like robots without robots'

A cross-disciplinary research lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has developed a suite of programmable materials, including carbon fiber, printed wood grain, textile composites, rubbers and plastics, that self-transform when exposed to an external stimulus. Director of the Self-Assembly Lab, Skylar Tibbits, presented a TED talk on 4D printing in 2013, where he demonstrated how a flat sheet of material could effectively build itself when exposed to water, like a robot without a robot. Following positive feedback from industries including aviation, automotive and manufacturing, his lab has been working on developing materials that change according to different activation sources, including heat, light, and air pressure, in addition to water – all of which have automotive relevance.