Honda 61100-gel-a00 Fender, Fr. on 2040-parts.com

Interior Motives China Conference to explore new design directions

Chinese consumers are driving new design directions, and CDN's Interior Motives China Conference in Beijing next week is set to explore how. Titled ‘New brands and the search for a design identity', the conference features an impressive speaker line-up that blends the international (Chris Bangle and VW's Wolfgang Muller Pietralla) with the regional (GM PATAC's Friedhelm Engler, Ford China's Chelsia Lau and PSA-Peugeot/Citroën China's Robert Walker), with the domestic (Shan Wei of the Beijing Automotive Technical Center (BATC), and Ken Ma of SAIC). The annual conference is the third in China to be hosted by CDN's magazine Interior Motives, and will be held on Wednesday 21 April, and Thursday 22 April, just in advance of the opening of Auto China 2010 in Beijing on Friday (23 April).

Retracing Steve McQueen's Los Angeles in his Jaguar XKSS

In 1958, Steve McQueen bought this Jaguar XKSS from a local TV personality who kept it parked in a studio lot on Sunset Boulevard. McQueen cajoled his wife Nellie into writing a check for $5,000 -- today around $40,000 -- and became the third owner of XKSS chassis No. 713, a car that had originally been imported a year earlier by Jaguar North America.

Jag Land Rover factory closure ‘already decided'

Jaguar Land Rover management has already decided which UK factory to close – and the decision will be announced this autumn in 2010. The car making group, which manufactures around 250,000 cars a year, operates out of three UK sites: Castle Bromwich and Solihull near Birmingham, and Halewood near Liverpool. Those sorts of volumes are more normally associated with a single factory or, at a push, two.