Vintage Whistler Fx1001 Mayday Car Alarm Radio Part As-is on 2040-parts.com

This day in Autoweek history: Driving across France in a Ford Sierra RS Cosworth

Today we relive a drive across France in the Ford Sierra Sapphire RS Cosworth with Cynthia Claes. This potent four-door sedan offered rear-wheel drive, a Borg-Warner five-speed manual transmission and a claimed top speed of 150 mph from its turbocharged 2.0-liter, twin-cam four-cylinder engine. Introduced in 1986, the original Sierra saw 5,542 units constructed; 5,000 were needed for homologation in Class A rally competition, its original purpose.

VW will build small run of XL1 plug-in hybrid

Volkswagen will begin production of its XL1 plug-in hybrid in two years. "We want to go into series production with this car starting in 2013," VW chairman Ferdinand Piech told Automotive News Europe on Tuesday at an event in Doha, Qatar, ahead of the 2011 Qatar auto show where VW unveiled an XL1 prototype. (a href="http://www.autoweek.com/article/20130221/GENEVA/130229972">Read the latest update here announcing the XL1 hybrid's Geneva Auto Show debut).

BMW takes the Active Tourer Outdoor outdoors this weekend

This weekend BMW will be taking its BMW Concept Active Tourer Outdoor to the annual OutDoor fair in Friedrichshafen, Germany. We first saw the concept last September, noting that it was a departure for BMW in more ways than one -- with the German automaker stretching itself into segments in which it previously had no foothold. The BMW Active Tourer is meant to preview a whole new generation of small cars from BMW, but one of the biggest changes underneath is a transverse layout of the engine -- a setup that BMW has traditionally shunned in favor of a longitudinal layout.