Beckson 410 Opening Port Light on 2040-parts.com

MINI JCW Cabrio at Monte Carlo Rally +video

MINI JCW Cabrio with Paddy Hopkirk and Rauno Altonen in Monte Carlo So MINI thought it would be a great idea to get these two Rally greats together and take them back to the scene of their former triumphs. Only this time they sent them to Monte Carlo in a brand new MINI John Cooper Works Cabriolet to drive round part of the Rally stage. This is properly good video from MINI, with some great cutting between the classic Mini in action and the legendary pair driving and reminiscing.

2014 Ford Mondeo testing autonomous driving technologies (video)

The Ford Fusion with its LIDAR ears allowing autonomous driving Car makers are starting to take self-driving, autonomous cars very seriously, and we’ve recently seen Mercedes testing their autonomous driving S-Class in Berlin, Volvo planning a big trial of 100 self-driving cars in Gothenberg and Tesla planning systems that will do 90 per cent of your driving within 3 years. Now it’s Ford’s turn. Ford has equipped a Fusion Hybrid (that’s the North American version of the new Ford Mondeo we still haven’t got in the UK) with its autonomous vehicle technology to conduct research in partnership with the University of Michigan and State Farm (a big group of insurance companies in the US). The test Fusion gets a system called LIDAR (light detection and range – the funny looking ears on the top of the Fusion in the picture above) which can scan the road ahead up to 2.5 million times a second and create a 3D map of the surroundings.

One Lap of the Web: Gourmet cheese, ‘Gorilla Glass’ and the cost of car repair by state

We spend a lot of time on the Internet -- pretty much whenever we’re not driving, writing about or working on cars. Since there’s more out there than we’d ever be able to cover, here’s our daily digest of car stuff on the Web you may not otherwise have heard about. -- Ford Motor Co.