Mercedes 380sel Headlight Light, Original Part No. Le1757a on 2040-parts.com

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.

Concept Car of the Week: Mercury El Gato (1970)

Of all the brands that marked American automobile history, Mercury had never been the most popular or the most loved, which ultimately led to its demise in 2011 when Ford chose to terminate the brand. To be fair only a handful of Mercury models are worth remembering: the 1950 Mercury Eight iconic base for custom cars, the 1955 Montclair, the Mustang-based Cougar, the Marauder X-100, the evil Cyclone Spoiler. However one of their coolest creations is fairly unknown mostly due its short concept car life: El Gato, in Spanish translating as "The Cat".

F1: Bahrain Grand Prix back on – India Grand Prix now in December

2011 Bahrain Grand Prix - back on in October The start of the F1 Circus this year was put back after the Arab Spring made the Gulf Kindom of Bahrain a less than suitable venue for something as frivolous as Formula One, leading to the postponement of the 2011 Bahrain Grand Prix. But now it seems the Bahranians are convinced they’ve put a lid on the populist move to topple their regime (how they’ve done that is debatable), so the FIA’s World Motor Sport Council met on Friday and reinstated the Bahrain Grand Prix for 30th October. That date was originally supposed to be the date of the inaugural Indian Grand Prix, but that too has been pushed back and will now take place at the end of the season, at the same time as the FIA Annual General Assembly and Prize-Giving Gala on December 11th.