Arias Pistons 12.5:1 Compression 82mm Bore Honda B-series on 2040-parts.com

Man-made Modern Luxury Materials in Cars

Luxury, within the context of a car interior, has been closely related to the use of wood and leather for over a century. These natural materials have a familiar organic, tactile quality that are intrinsically desirable attributes for most people and, in today's mass manufactured plastic world, they also assume a luxury or premium quality. Throughout the last century, metal, leather and wood have also been progressively supplanted by bakelite, vinyl and then polymer-based plastic materials in car interiors as well.

One Lap of the Web: Toyota in the Motor City, GPS-enabled headlamps and a mobile Fiat shop

We spend a lot of time on the Internet -- pretty much whenever we're not driving, writing about or working on cars. Since there's more out there than we'd ever be able to cover, here's our daily digest of car stuff on the Web you may not otherwise have heard about. -- From Bring a Trailer, it's a 1966 Fiat Furgone panel van equipped as a mobile workshop.

Sacramento, Salt Lake City, Los Angeles top road frustration study

Weather, crashes, traffic and attitude--these are the things that make our commutes unbearable. Now, the RoadIntel.com Web site has ranked cities based on its "road frustration index." The index is based on how weather affects the roads, the amount of traffic, the number of crashes and driver sentiment, which is calculated by searching for keywords such as "traffic jam" and "stuck" on Twitter. On the site, you can look at cities ranked day by day and even hour by hour.