Oem Piaggio Sfera Front Wheel Pn 267544 on 2040-parts.com

(Gas) Tax Day: How much are you paying?

Today is April 18, also known as Tax Day in the United States. Since we're car enthusiasts and not accountants, we decided to ignore the half-finished 1040 on the kitchen table and take a look at a tax that means a lot more to us--the gas tax. The gas tax is the portion of every gallon that pays for road maintenance and other transportation projects.

Video: Jaguar's Julian Thomson on the importance of design values

Jaguar's Head of Advanced Design, Julian Thomson, appeared at this month's PSFK Conference in London giving a talk on design values. Thomson's talk, ‘Concepting Dreams, Making Reality Happen', dealt with questions of creating a design story as well as how Jaguar uses the value of its heritage while keeping things original and new. Thomson – the man behind the 2010 C-X75 and the recently revealed F-Type – said, "You can't get a good design story if you don't look at your heritage, where you came from, where your values came from." He went on to discuss the ‘sad years of Jaguar', from around 1968 to 2004 where Jaguar was too timid to develop and "essentially made the same-looking car." He put this down to a reluctance on Jaguar's part to move too far away from its successful models and, quite interestingly, because "not only did we start doing market research, we started asking Americans what they wanted." Watch the full video on the left.

2014 Volvo XC90 to get a raft of new safety technology

The 2014 Volvo XC90 (pictured) will get a whole raft of new safety technology We know that the Volvo XC90 will be replaced (finally) next year with a new XC90 using Volvo’s new SPA platform and powered by their new range of 4-cylinder, high efficiency engines. We’ve also got a clue or two about how the new XC90 will look thanks to a design exercise by Volvo’s designers in 2011 to create their vision of the next generation XC90. Now we get details of some of the technology we can expect in the new XC90 as Volvo works towards their target of making sure no one gets killed in a Volvo involved in an accident by 2020.