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Mini Cooper Countryman gets New York freshening

The Mini Countryman has undergone a subtle midlife facelift for the New York auto show, four years after it was launched in North America. The lightly reworked range-topping Mini Countryman model is expected to go on sale in July at prices company officials suggest will remain largely unchanged here in the U.S. As this first batch of official photographs reveals, there is very little to distinguish the refreshed Countryman from the existing model.

The future of headlamp techonology – see it on video

By Richard Yarrow Motor Industry 27 May 2009 10:12 Cars of the future will drive at night with main-beam headlamps on all the time, but never dazzle another vehicle. That’s the vision of American component firm Gentex, which already makes the auto-dipping lights on the current BMW 7-series. Its engineers are working on a new technology called Dynamic Forward Lighting (DFL) which features a single main beam that floods the road with light.

CAFE standards set to rise to 54.5 mpg for 2025

President Barack Obama on Friday revealed ambitious plans to raise the corporate average fuel economy standard for cars and light trucks to 54.5 mpg by the 2025 model year, a landmark move that will dramatically remake carmakers' product portfolios and consumers' buying habits. Unlike the first CAFE standards passed by Congress in 1975, the Detroit automakers now publicly support the high requirements and have begun retooling their fleets to adapt the changes. “[This] represents the single most important step we've ever taken as a nation to reduce our dependence on foreign oil,” Obama said in a morning press conference.