After preparing its customers with anannouncement in January, Nissan today went ahead and introduced a re-badged version of the Mazda5 MPV (called Premacy in its home market) in the form of the new Lafesta Highway Star. The compact minivan is supplied to Nissan by Mazda on an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) basis, and will be sold exclusively in Japan.
The transformation of the Mazda5 into the Lafesta Highway Star was a rather straightforward process accomplished by adding Nissan’s logos inside and out, restyling the front end that gains a new hood, lights and bumpers, smoothing out the Mazda’s swoopy profile lines and adding a chrome strip between the tail lamps.
The 7-seater model is offered with a 2.0-liter four-cylinder gasoline engine coupled to an automatic transmission with five-speeds in the front-wheel drive model and four-speeds in the all-wheel drive versions.
In Japan, prices for the new Lafesta Highway Star range from 1,991,850 Yen to 2,483,250 Yen (US$24,650 to $30,700) with Nissan aiming to sell around 1,200 units per month.-carscoop.blogspot.com
These are the first official images of the upcoming 2012 Toyota Yaris European edition.
The model is due in dealer showrooms later this year while an official introduction is expected sometime before that, perhaps at the Frankfurt motor show in September.
The images published here show a rather different Yaris compared with its Japanese domestic market (JDM) sibling the Vitz. There are some changes to the front fascia. This euro-spec Yaris is sporting a design very much in keeping with the current overall paradigm for compact European hatches.-worldcarfans.com
When Honda officially debuted the new 2012 Civic lineup at this year’s New York Auto Show, the Japanese automaker may have held back a little. Sure there was the Civic Coupe and Sedan, the Si, Hybrid and even a high fuel efficiency HF model, but now it appears as though the big H is preparing a 5-door hatchback version of its best-selling car.
Recent spy photos show a Honda Civic five-door is out testing, sporting a decent amount of camouflage. The bigger question now isn’t whether Honda will build the car, but if it will be offered for sale in North America.
Could the success of the 5-door Ford Focus hatch help bring a similar model here from Honda. Would it sell?-autoguide,com
Back in March, Renault-Nissan’s Korean division Samsung brought the firstsketchesof its big sedan offering, and a few weeks later the we got to see it as aconcept. Now we get to see the full production-ready form of the upcoming car that was officially shown at the 2011 Seoul Motor Show this past April in concept form.
With the exception of some changes that are to be expected from a car that they can actually sell at a relatively affordable price, like the use of slightly smaller alloy wheels, changes to the front and rear bumper, the SM7 looks exactly like its concept form.
At the front, we spot the large and imposing single-structured grille flanked by the original look of the car’s adaptive and directional bi-Xenon headlights. At the back, the the SM7 still has exhaust on either side,
but the configuration has been
changed to one with four tips in total.
The production version of this design study is set to enter the South Korean market in the second half of the year as a replacement for the current model, which is based on the aging Nissan J31 platform (also used by the Asian Nissan Teana and the North American Nissan Maxima). The new car will make use of an elongated version of the SM5 platform. Renault Samsung says Korean customers can expect to see the SM7 on the market by the end of the year.
Renault Samsung has not yet provided details on the available engine range, but given the size of the SM7 the lineup will most likely include a two V6 gasoline units.-autoevolution.com
While Google is still by far the most dominant search engine on the Web, it can't afford to rest on its laurels with Microsoft constantly adding new features to its Bing search engine. At Google's 'Inside Search' event, the company has announced several new features designed to ensure it stays on top of the lucrative search engine game. Users will now be able to search using images, enter search terms by voice and have the top search results pre-rendered so they appear instantly.
Google Goggles has been letting users conduct searches based on pictures taken on mobile devices since 2009 and now Search by Image brings the same functionality to the desktop. Users can drag and drop an image from the Web or stored locally on their computer over the Google search box and Google will try and identify it and bring up relevant results. Users can also Search by Image by copying and pasting an image URL or uploading an image by clicking on the camera icon in the search box. Google is also releasing extensions for Chrome and Firefox browsers that will let users search an image on the web by right-clicking on it.
The company says it is rolling out the feature globally in 40 languages now, but it doesn't look to have been activated in my neck of the woods yet so I wasn't able to put it the test by attempting to identify the location of my holiday snaps. If you point your browser to images.google.com and see a camera icon in the search box, however, you should be good to go.
Another feature making its way from mobile devices to the desktop is Voice Search. The feature is limited to Chrome 11 or higher users who will see a microphone icon in the search box. Users can click on the icon and speak their search - provided their computer has a built-in or attached microphone.
Also revealed at 'Inside Search' is Instant Pages, which is basically an evolutionary step of its Instant Search feature introduced last year that provides search results as you type. To speed up things even further, Instant Pages will pre-render the top search result in the background so it will appear instantly when clicked. Instant Pages will be included in the next beta release of Chrome but can be tried now with the developer version.-gizmag.com
Check out the videos below for examples of the new Google features.
