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Old is new again: Will a floor-hinged throttle pedal be in your future?

If you think that every little nut, bolt, switch, gear or widget in your new car wasn't scrutinized by a team of highly educated, overworked car geeks (read: engineers), think again. A couple of recent conversations with automotive engineers confirmed that virtually nothing that goes into a car today is taken for granted. During the recent Pebble Beach weekend, I had the pleasure of spending time with an engineer for Jaguar, and the subject turned to materials used for various switches in the cabin.

Audi A1 sketches

By Tim Pollard First Official Pictures 27 July 2007 06:08 Audi A1: the world exclusive We always knew that CAR's Georg Kacher is one of the best connected motoring journalists in the world. But even we were surprised when he rang the office with news that he'd 'obtained' official design sketches of Audi's new Mini, the A1. Forget the artist's impressions you'll find elsewhere, CAR Online has three sketches smuggled out of Ingolstadt's design HQ that show exactly how Audi's baby will look.

Toyota to sell tens of thousands of fuel cell cars a year by 2020

Toyota FCV-R Hydrogen Fuel Cell Toyota is pushing ahead with hydrogen fuel cell vehicles and plans to be selling tens of thousands a year by 2012, starting with the Toyota FCV-R Toyota may have brought yet another hybrid concept to Geneva, and may we have moaned again about their obsession with flogging hybrid cars. But we can’t argue  they haven’t made a success of turning car buyers on to hybrid cars, however futile a long-term route we may think it is. But it seems Toyota do agree with us on electric cars with no plans to throw their weight behind the EV in a big way, but they are gearing up to try and do with hydrogen fuel cell cars what they’ve done with hybrid cars, and are expecting to be selling tens of thousands of fuel cell powered cars a year by 2020.