208522 A/c Accumulator on 2040-parts.com

GM's top battery executive for the Volt to join California startup

General Motors's top executive in charge of developing batteries for the Chevrolet Volt plug-in hybrid is leaving to take a position with an unnamed startup battery company in California. Denise Gray, 46, global director of rechargeable energy storage systems, will step down March 5 after more than three years in the post. This was “an opportunity that I could just not resist,” Gray said in a phone interview.

Ram introduces CNG-powered pickup

Aside from the Honda Civic Natural Gas, compressed-natural-gas-powered vehicles have usually been converted after the fact, generally for fleet use. Chrysler is hoping to carve out a niche in the corporate-pickup segment by selling a factory-built CNG Ram 2500 that can seamlessly switch over to gasoline operation when the natural-gas tanks run dry. The twin 4.6-cubic-foot CNG tanks (which store the equivalent of 18.2 gallons of gas) take up a section of the bed, while an eight-gallon gasoline tank provides fuel during start-up and then reserve capacity when the compressed tanks are tapped out, allowing the bruiser a measure of operational flexibility.

Still saving for a McLaren F1? You’ll need to try harder as they’ve hit £6.2 million

This McLaren F1 sold for $10 million The price of the McLaren F1 keeps on rising, and just last year F1 chassis #66 was sold by Gooding and Co in the US for a then record-breaking £5.42 million. But that record seems to have been broken. Ferrari specialists DK Engineering in Hertfordshire have just spent six months tracking down an F1 for a British buyer, culminating in chassis #28 being sold for a reported £6.2 million ($10 million).