Volkswagen Polo 2008 Rear Bumper Assembly [2015100] on 2040-parts.com

Car industry needs to agree on an app standard

Application developers who want their programs to run in cars are flush with options -- too many options. They can choose to target Toyota Entune standard, Ford Smart Device Link, BMW Connect, and many more. All, by the way, completely incompatible with each other, meaning that any programmer who wants their app in multiple cars has a long road ahead of them.

Aston Martin finally reveals official V12 Zagato pictures

AM finally releases official photos of the production V12 Zagato The Aston Martin V12 Zagato finally gets its production car debut in Kuwait next week, and Aston manage to release a few official photos. It does seem odd that when AM has published the brochure for the Aston Martin V12 Zagato online (admittedly you had to hunt it out), complete with a fair number of photos, that they hadn’t got round to releasing any new official photos of the V12 Zagato to an eager fan base. But they’ve now managed to fix that, by releasing just three new photos.

German new car sales drop 11 per cent – pre-reg accounts for 33.5 per cent

New car sales in Germany dropped by 11 per cent in September with pre-reg cars accounting for over a third of all sales. That drop of 11 per cent in Germany is despite deep discount offers – an average of 12.2 per cent in September – with even the previously invincible Mercedes and VW having to offer discounts of up to €3k, despite which VW’s sales fell by 20 per cent in Germany and Mercedes by 12 per cent. What’s perhaps most interesting about the decline in car sales in Germany is the number of pre-reg cars sold (pre reg cars are cars registered by dealers to hit sales targets and then sold at a discount of up to 25 per cent).