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

Mercedes CLC tease

By First Official Pictures 09 January 2008 11:19 Looking squat, mean and aggressive (the car, not the model), this is the new Mercedes CLC. And although the CLC is based on the current C-class-derived Sports Coupe, Merc hopes that the 1100 new or revised components will make the car a serious challenger to the BMW 1-series coupe. It certainly looks slicker than the current car, and with C-class inspired styling it looks smarter than today's stumpy model.

General Motors Europe opens new Design Center

Being a car designer is often percieved as a glamourous occupation, but few people realise that this typically means working in some of the least inspiring places. Wolfsburg, Detroit and Birmingham are just a few of the locations that are home to some of the largest populations of car designers around the world. GM Europe's location in Russelsheim, Germany is also one of the less glamourous locations but the new design center building opened this week aims to redress the otherwise rather industrial feel of the place where tomorrow's Opels and Saabs are created.

The Super Bowl's most refreshingly honest car ad

In 2000's High Fidelity, hapless record-store owner Rob Gordon -- played memorably by John Cusack -- opines, “What really matters is what you like, not what you are like." In the year 2000, I was 24 years old and was working on a punk rock magazine, an environment not dissimilar from Gordon's Championship Vinyl. The line made a lot of sense to me; it was a quiet, back-of-the-head maxim that informed much of what my friends and I did and how we saw people. It's a shallow way of looking at things, but for those of us who came of age amid the us-vs.-them liberal identity politics of the '90s, awash as we were in Public Enemy's political consciousness, the post-AIDS gay-rights push and the loud-fast feminism of the riot grrrl movement, there was a good chance that if somebody liked the things you liked, they thought like you and they were good.