Standard Motor Products J04024 Heater Blend Door Actuator on 2040-parts.com

First Sight: Smart Fortwo and Forfour

"Dress-down Wednesday," remarked a colleague as Daimler CEO Dieter Zetsche walked on stage wearing jeans and no tie. While it was a hot day in Berlin, Zetsche's excuse for his informal attire was the occasion – the new Smart is here. Its prospective owners, he explained – young, urban consumers with an active lifestyle, not the typical members of corporate Germany – adhere to a different, if similarly rigid etiquette.

Porsche makes £14k on every car it sells, Bentley makes £12.7k

Porsche made £14k on every car sold in 2013 If you need an illustration of how much more profitable high-end sports and luxury cars are than mainstream cars, VW Groups sales figures demonstrate it perfectly. At the extreme ends of the profit per car spectrum, Porsche made an enviable £13,931 for every car it sold in 2013 and VW made just £615 (although SEAT actually lost £330 on every car it sold) . In fact, although you might expect the higher-priced Bentley range to make more per car than a Porsche, Bentley only managed a creditable second place on VW Group’s profit per car table, turning in £12,700 profit for every car it turned out (11,000 of them in 2013).

First BMW i8 for US to be auctioned at Pebble Beach

The Frozen Grey BMW i8 for Pebble Beach The other end of the scale from BMW’s i3 City Car is the BMW i8 Supercar and, despite its modest 1.5 litre range-extender engine for its electric propulsion it seems to offer proper borderline supercar performance. With just an estimated 500 BMW i8s heading for the US this year, BMW has decided it would be a bit of a wheeze to produce a one-off i8 for the US market to plonk in Gooding and Co’s auction at Pebble Beach in August to give one lucky American buyer the chance to jump the queue for the i8 and inject some funds in to Pebble. So they’ve created a special i8 for Pebble which comes with a Frozen Grey Metallic paint job and a titivated interior with Dalbergia Brown Leather upholstery that’s been dyed using plant extracts – all very ‘Green’ – with BMW i Blue for the stitching and highlights.