Bmw (hardcover Book) on 2040-parts.com

Gorden Wagener on how Mercedes is "moving from a traditional luxury brand to a modern luxury brand"

Mercedes' 'home' design studio in Sindelfingen, Germany is housed in an expansive 30,000-square meter building designed by Renzo Piano. The lobby is unassuming, but we're soon through into what Mercedes' grandly calls 'the Vision Room.' It's here that strategic meetings are held with the firm's board, and where we meet Gorden Wagener, Mercedes' head of design since 2008. It's in the Vision Room that Wagener convinced the Mercedes board of the merits of his overarching design philosophy: 'sensual purity'.

One Lap of the Web: Lambrecht cars, drifting red Italian cars, and lost east German cars

-- The Lambrecht Chevrolet sale is this weekend, and VanDerBrink auction house has posted some more walkaround videos of the lots. Check out this video which highlights some of the trucks and sedans, most of them with delivery mileage. -- Here's an interesting car that sold on eBay last week and attracted quite a bit of attention on Bringatrailer.com: a 1975 Peugeot 604 that was brought into the U.S.

2012 Ford Focus

Ford revealed the all-new third generation Focus at the Detroit auto show last week. The C-segment vehicle is the latest evolution of the Ford kinetic design form language that has been developed by the team at the company's Merkenich design center near Cologne in Germany, under the leadership of executive design director Martin Smith. With a more dynamic form language bringing the vehicle in line with its smaller (Fiesta) and larger (Mondeo) siblings, the new Focus has been engineered to meet all customer and legislative requirements of the major worldwide markets.