2015 2016 Chevy Corvette Driver Wheel Airbag on 2040-parts.com

Smart car inventor Nicolas Hayek dies

Nicolas Hayek, the engineer and industrialist who founded the Swiss watch company Swatch and brought the world the Smart car, died on June 28 of heart failure at his office in Switzerland. He was 82. Hayek saved the Swiss watch industry from lower-priced Asian competition in the early 1980s by offering colorful, inexpensive Swatch timepieces that he backed with equally colorful marketing.

Ellesmere Port Celebrates Five Decades Of Production

VAUXHALL recently celebrated 50 years of production at its Ellesmere Port facility by recreating the original 1964 press image of the first vehicle coming off the line, in the same production location with today’s Astra alongside. The first new car to be produced at Ellesmere Port was a Vauxhall Viva HA, a model name that would run in a number of variants until 1978, when it was replaced by the Chevette. The Viva cost £527 7s 11d at launch.

GM reportedly set to sign deal on Thursday to sell Opel

General Motors Co. likely will sign a deal on Thursday to sell a majority stake in Opel to a group led by Magna International Inc., German news agencies reported, citing sources close to the negotiations. GM agreed on September 10 to sell 55 percent of Opel to Canadian supplier Magna and its Russian partner Sberbank, but the deal stumbled amid labor union demands for a veto on factory closures and concern in the UK and Spain that 4.5 billion euros ($6.7 billion) in aid pledged by the German government for restructuring Opel favored the carmaker's German factories.