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Rolls-Royce hits new sales record

ROLLS-ROYCE has strolled luxuriously to a record half-year new car sales total - although actual volumes have not been released yet. Sales worldwide have risen by 33% compared with the January to June 2013 period, with sales in Europe up by more than 60%. There was also strong growth in Asia Pacific (up nearly 40%) and in the Middle East (up by more than 30%).

'American Nitro' is back!

"Seventies drag-race mayhem is back!" bills "American Nitro," a schlocky drive-in exploitation film whose only quote of praise, from a dog-eared period issue of "Car Craft," reads, simply, "SPECTACULAR CRASHES!" Director Bill Kimberlin says that he made "American Nitro" in 1979 as a response to Tom Wolfe's influential 1965 essay, "The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby." "I was just getting out of high school in a small town in Northern California when Wolfe's book came out," he said. "Nitro came about as my response to the car culture I was exposed to in the small valley town of Boonville, Calif. Instead of 'American Graffiti,' I made 'American Nitro.'" A fitting comparison, in fact, considering Kimberlin later worked for George Lucas at ILM, starting with" Return of the Jedi." Now the movie is being released on DVD for the first time -- beware of bootlegs, warns the website -- and digitally remastered, while retaining the explosive charm and goofy narration of the 1979 original.

Concept Car of the Week: Ford Ghia Focus (1992)

As far back as the 1960s, Luigi Colani was preaching about organic design, and the 'biodynamic' forms that eventually became his signature. However, organic design didn't gain widespread popularity among car designers until the late 1980s and early '90s, and no car paid a greater tribute to nature and its forms than the Ghia Focus. Designed entirely by Taru Lahti only two years after graduating, the concept was a real breakthrough for the usually conservative American brand.