Rolls Royce redesigns sought in new competition

Hip Shing Hong Group, Stefano Tordiglione Design and online design platform It's Liquid have launched a competition to redesign a Rolls Royce for a factory-turned-office project in Hong Kong. The contest, focused around the themes ‘Innovation', ‘Energy' and ‘Creativity', is giving the winners the chance to see their design displayed in the lobby of the new building. They will also receive a cash prize of HKD 20,000/EUR 2,000, while the second- and third-placed designers will earn themselves HKD 10,000/EUR 1,000 and HKD 5,000/EUR 500 respectively.

Datsun Go boldly goes downmarket

The Datsun Go (pictured) has been revealed in India We’ve know since March that Nissan was adding an extra brand name to its portfolio – to add to Nissan and Infiniti – by reaching back in its history to bring the Datsun brand back to life, and we got the first image of what we now know is the Datsun Go at the start of July. Having spent a fortune eradicating Datsun from the minds of buyers and replacing it with Nissan, Nissan are now working to make car buyers in emerging markets fall for the new Datsun Go in the way the UK  did for the first Datsun Sunny in the 1970s. So we get the Datsun Go which is, to all intents and purposes, a Nissan Micra with all the fripperies removed and pitched – initially at least – at the budget end of the car market in India where it will go up against cars like the Hyundai i10 and cost under £5,000 which, entirely coincidentally, is the starting price for the i10.

Rockin' Supercar: The Rebirth, Short Life, and Death of a Shark-Fin-Equipped '85 Toyota Tercel Wagon

Sometimes a very ordinary car becomes something special, maybe even loved, but that's not always enough to keep it out of the jaws of the crusher. This is the story of a second-gen Toyota Tercel wagon (known in Japan as the Sprinter Carib) and its journey from auction to lumber-hauler to kid transportation to a Chinese steel factory. Around the turn of the century, while I was working at a doomed dot-com in San Francisco's South of Market neighborhood, I discovered that the city auctioned off all the unclaimed tow-away cars every week at nearby Pier 70.