Legendary Lotus Seven is one of the most recognisable cars ever produced. The Seven still lives on mainly through Caterham in very different performance specs. There are also countless of small niche players who have something similar in production based on the original Seven.
At CES, Toyota announced that it will invite royalty-free use of approximately 5,680 fuel cell related patents held globally, including critical technologies developed for the new Toyota Mirai. The list includes approximately 1,970 patents related to fuel cell stacks, 290 associated with high-pressure hydrogen tanks, 3,350 related to fuel cell system software control and 70 patents related to hydrogen production and supply.
by Chris Smith
Google isn’t the only company out there interested in putting self-driving cars on the road, and the search giant may have some serious competition in the future, with companies such as Mercedes-Benz also looking to offer passengers smart cars that drive themselves around.
New-car sales in Germany rose 7 percent in December, returning Europe’s largest auto market back to positive annual growth after two years of shrinking sales. Spanish sales jumped by 21 percent, helped by a subsidy scheme, and sales also rose in Italy, according to auto industry associations.
BMW agreed to pay 5.1 billion yuan ($820 million) to its distributors in China to help cover their losses after the retailers stopped ordering cars from the manufacturer, a dealers’ group said.
The subsidies are the largest by an automaker to its retailers in China and will be paid by the end of February, said Song Tao, a deputy secretary general of the China Automobile Dealers Association, which represented the BMW distributors in the negotiations. The dealers are still in talks with the Munich-based carmaker over this year’s sales targets, he said.
