UPDATE: Honda has confirmed that it will shut the Swindon plant in 2021. Honda may be about to announce the planned closure their Swindon plant in 2022, at the end of the lifecycle of the current Civic. It has been building cars since 1992 starting with the Accord, and has produced the Civic, Jazz (Fit…
McLaren Automotive recently extended their deal with Ricardo Ltd for their V8 engines to continue to be built as they have since the MP4-12C. So, in case you didn’t already know, that much-lauded engine has been made and engineered by someone else. That’s the reality of the automotive industry. McLaren draft in assistance for many…
A staple purchase for any vehicle is a foldable boot (or trunk) organiser. They are all over Amazon and eBay. But what if you could get them designed to fit in all those storage compartments? I know it seems like utopia, but Fiat will make it your reality. This week, Fiat was granted a patent…
Engineers have pored over every detail, literally spending YEARS developing it, squeezed every penny out to make it more profitable for the company and more affordable to the customer, quality improvements and performance improvements have been made everywhere and… You buy the brand you have always bought, your parents bought, or which anecdotally “you can’t…
Ford has been granted a patent for “fuel drip retention”, which in simplistic terms is a system that generates a vacuum within the fuel filler pipe on the car to draw out the last drips from the fuel nozzle at the petrol station, saving the pain of watching diesel or petrol drip down the side…
Back in April 2015, then-CEO of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCA) stated that the future of the automotive industry depended upon the consolidation of OEMs. At the time, the likes of GM dismissed this as an attempt to find a merger partner for FCA. Nearly 4 years later, after his tragic passing in 2018, what I…
It’s the little things that matter, like being able to see through cameras that replaced your mirrors. GM mirror cameras might be issue-free thanks to this patent. GM have had a patent published for a “spherical rotary cleaning device” that will be the saviour for anyone that has repeatedly forgot to clean the reversing camera…
Why does one person buy a VW, another buy a Ford, and a third buy a Honda? Is it because of how it drives? How it sounds? How it feels? Or does it just come down to being the right price and looking good? The effort of engineers A few years ago, I was taking…
The Toyota Supra is finally here and saw its grand unveiling at NAIAS 2019. It has made a good impression, ticking the boxes of any new and popular car: selling the first VIN for $2.1m at Barrett-Jackson , selling out the right-on-trend special edition launch model , and filling endless pages of car-themed pages with…
