New Gasket Mercury Mercruiser Quicksilver on 2040-parts.com

The no-show cars: a reader rant on mad concepts

Instigated by Harley Earl at General Motors in the late 30s with the quaintly named Buick Y-Job, show cars, or concept cars, were presented to an excited public eager for new things. As the world recovered from a depression and then a war, these vehicles pointed to a better future that many people believed in, including the people who produced them. And, although many of the concept cars of the 50s, with their Jetsons plexiglass roofs and notional nuclear powered engines seem ludicrous now, in their time they weren’t that cynical.

2013 Land Rover Range Rover sheds weight with all-aluminum unibody

Land Rover publicly unveiled its redesigned 2013 Range Rover five-seat SUV in London on Thursday, with less weight and better fuel economy than its predecessors thanks in large part to a new all-aluminum unibody structure--the first of its kind in an SUV, according to Land Rover. The company also announced that European Range Rover buyers will get a diesel hybrid option. The Range Rover hybrid will pair a 3.0-liter diesel engine with a 35kw electric motor.

Aston Martin Rapide coming home

Aston Martin Rapide - homeward bound It took Aston Martin what seemed like forever to get their four-door supercar – the Aston Martin Rapide – in to production, and even then they didn’t build it themselves. When they were busy planning production of the Rapide the world’s economy was buoyant, credit was a piece of cake and Aston Martins were flying out of the showroom. But the new economic reality bit in 2008 and sales fell at Aston Martin, but by then the plan to get the Rapide built at Magna Steyr in Austria was unstoppable so, despite Aston Martin workers twiddling their thumbs as Magna Steyr built Rapides, there as nothing to be done.