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

Deloitte interviews 677 'millenials,' concludes they're broke

Until artisanal, sustainable, locally sourced craft-beer bars can upend themselves from their Brooklyn brownstones and directly to your Park Slope loft entrance, it turns out that today's youthful generation will still need to buy cars to get places. In fact, they might even be picky about what they spend time in, which means that young people, even "millennials," are doing research on cars and forming their own opinions as smart consumers. Hey, doesn't that sound familiar?

Smart Fortwo Lightshine launches

Yet another Smart Limited Edition - the Smart Fortwo Lightshine You have to hand it to Mercedes – they don’t give up on Smart (or Maybach – another expensive departure). They keep churning out new cars (well, endless new limited editions, anyway) despite sales that seem to keep falling. Last year (2010) saw Smart sales in the UK fall by 8.5% and their sales last month (December 2010) were a woeful 57% down on December 2009.

2013 Ford Kuga goes in to production

The new (2013) Ford Kuga crossover – which debuted at Geneva in the Spring – has now gone in to production in Spain ahead of first customer car deliveries. Ford has announced it’s finally started to churn out the new Kuga at its plant in Valencia, and that the Kuga will be heading to Ford’s UK showrooms to get customer cars out in the new year. Despite starting production of the new Kuga, Ford still hasn’t come up with prices for its compact crossover, but says they will be available before the end of the year. On offer in the new Kuga is a range of new technology including the kick-to-open tailgate, Active Park Assist, Blind Spot Monitoring Torque Vectoring Control, SYNC and the first use of Ford’s EcoBoost engines in the Kuga (although no sign yet that the 1.0 litre EcoBoost will be added to the Kuga).