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Porsche Panamera hits the heights in Shanghai

A Porsche Panamera on its way to the 94th floor of the World Financial Centre in Shanghai [ad#ad-1] The stories of car makers doing daft things with cars to garner a bit of publicity have been rarer of late. Which, considering the sombre mood of car makers and the car buying public in recent months, is no real surprise. Even Motor Shows have been relatively sombre affairs (the Detroit Motor Show was particularly muted in 2009), but China is still booming, and the Shanghai Motor Show has been pretty much an old fashioned, glitzy affair.

Car dealers are buying again

Used car sales in the UK (and just about everywhere else, for that matter) have been in the doldrums, to say the least, for many months. The inexorable decline in car values has left many dealers nursing painful losses on stock cars, and has led to the strange situation where, however desperate a dealer was to sell you a new car, he wouldn’t (or couldn’t) offer you a part-ex price. Car dealers are buying stock again But according to the used car value Gurus at Glasses Guide, things are starting to look up – a little.

Relive Volvo's 'Emotion of Design' Google Hangout

If you missed out on Volvo's ‘Emotion of Design' Google Hangout, which was broadcast on Volvo's YouTube channel on 28 November, you can relive it here. The Hangout, which featured Volvo's exterior design chief Maximilian Missoni, neuropsychologist Dr David Lewis and Wallpaper magazine's automotive correspondent Jonathan Bell, discussed the results of the Swedish carmaker's experiment to measure the emotional response to the Volvo Concept Coupé – among other things – using an electroencephalographic (EEG) machine. Participants were asked to rate a series of images while wearing an EEG headset measuring brainwave activity, with results showing that car design and emotions were inexorably linked.