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

Seat announces new special trim grade

SEAT HAS announced a great-value new special edition trim level across most of its UK range. I-Tech will add special alloy wheels and equipment extras to the Mii, Ibiza, Toledo, Altea, Altea XL and the Alhambra, even including special edition floor mats, badges and key covers on some models. Customer savings versus adding the extra equipment separately reach as high as £480.

NLV Quant – née Koenigsegg Quant – at Geneva

The Quant - back at Geneva as the NLV Quant Last week we ran a story on Koenigsegg taking somethig new to Geneva after we’d had a chat with them. But part of that story was on last year’s Koenigsegg Quant, a four-seat electric supercar we saw at Geneva 2009. At the time it was billed as a Koenigsegg Quant (although, as Koenigsegg pointed out to us, it was always a commission project) but now it’s set to return to Geneva 2010 as the NLV Quant.

Early cars, fashion on display at the Petersen

Automotivated, a new exhibit at the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles, traces the evolution of clothes worn in cars--from the bulky circus-tent stuff people had to wear to keep from freezing to death in the jangly, open-topped conveyances of 100 years ago, up to the height of the European Concours in the 1920s and '30s, when what you and your date wore was just as important to winning best of show as the styling of your Delahaye/Delage/Talbot Lago. “In the earliest days of the automobile, you were sitting on the car, you weren't sitting in it,” said Leslie Kendall, curator at the Petersen. So the first section of the exhibit shows people (mannequins dressed as people) in heavy, practical overcoats, scarves and goggles.