2012 Ford Flex Original Sales Brochure on 2040-parts.com

Porsche uses phone-formatted bar codes to connect with customers

Porsche is harnessing the power of smartphones, using Microsoft Tag bar codes to provide dealership customers with unique information about the cars they're looking at. Buyers can scan the square stickers with a properly equipped phone, and the application will take them to dedicated microsites where they can see stats, videos and pictures of the car, along with audio clips of a flat-six engine revving up. Through the microsite, buyers can provide contact info for a follow-up call from Porsche salespeople.

Bluebird Electric aiming for UK Land Speed Record

Bluebird Electric You’d hope that anyone of any age would associate ‘Bluebird’ with ‘Campbell’, but as many of our schools don’t seem too keen on anything that may be even remotely considered part of Britain’s history, perhaps not. So we’ll just throw in that Sir Malcolm Campbell drove a variety of Bluebird (or Blue Bird) cars to new land speed records on Pendine Sands in the 1920s and his son, Donald Campbell, matched his father’s achievements with world speed records on both land and water – the only man to have held land and water speed records at the same time. And he too used the Bluebird moniker for his record-breaking transport of choice. Fast forward the best part of fifty years and it’s the grandson of Sir Malcolm – Don Wales – who’s plotting to take the Bluebird Electric to a new UK Land Speed Record, and planning to make a start on that quest at Pendine Sands (a location Top Gear fans will probably recognise – and was it Pendine Sands on the new Torchwood series last week?).

New 2015 Mazda2 arrives

This is the new 2015 Mazda2 (Demio) The new Mazda2 was all but revealed at the Geneva Motor Show in March in the guise of the Mazda Hazumi Concept, but now the real new Mazda2 has arrived, or at least it has in Japan. But Mazda are captioning the photos – which are clearly of the Demio – as the Mazda2, so we can be pretty sure not much is going to change when the Demio gets the Mazda2 badge in the UK and Europe. That means the same Kodo design language Mazda has introduced across its range recently with a shield grill flowing in to the headlights, big wheel arches and horizontal lights at the back – all very much like the Hazumi.