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

CES: It's a digital experience

The night before the Consumer Electronics Show opens its portals to the world’s technogeeks, there is a sort of preshow called the Digital Experience! (They added that exclamation mark to the name, not us.) Still, the relatively small, ancillary consumer-technology show does set the stage for the massive CES juggernaut the next day. This year, as always, we wandered the aisles of Digital Experience looking for car-related tech.

Volvo develops new energy storage technology

Volvo is looking to make heavy batteries in electric vehicles a thing of the past, unveiling a new technology still under development that could use the body panels of the vehicle to store energy. Everyone knows that right now one of the biggest technological limiting factors of electric vehicles are the batteries. They can be damaged through depletion, they add weight, they use expensive and polluting technologies to manufacture, and they just don't hold as much energy as we'd like.

Volkswagen Up (2012): first photos of VW's mini

Almost four years to the day after we first saw the VW Up concept car, Volkswagen is unveiling the real thing: this is the new VW Up city car, on sale in UK dealers in spring 2012. Forget the official, trendily informal name 'up!'. I'm afraid CAR's going to overrule the grammatical violations and call it the good old Volkswagen Up.