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Kia Track'ster (2012) first official pictures

After all the pre-launch teasing, Kia today slid the covers off the new Track'ster at the 2012 Chicago auto show. It's a slammed, hot hatch vision of what the Kia Soul could become, were the Koreans brave enough to battle it out among the VW Golf GTIs and forthcoming Polo R pocket rockets. Conceived at Kia's Californian design studio, the Track'ster is designed as a road and track car.

C'est si bon: Mullin Automotive Museum celebrates the best of the Art Deco era

The French supposedly have a word for everything, but we couldn't muster any in English let alone the remnants of high school language lab upon first entering the new Mullin Automotive Museum in Oxnard, Calif., just west of Los Angeles. All we could do was grin giddily at the sparkling array of Bugattis, Voisins, Delages, Delahayes and other unique examples of French automotive masterpieces from the 1920s and 1930s in an exhibition hall evocative of the salon that housed the 1936 Paris motor show and similar exposition halls of the Art Deco era. The collection is an immersion into the excitement and optimism of Art Deco design, especially in terms of automotive design.

Ssangyong relaunches brand with Giugiaro-designed Korando

Korean brand Ssangyong is back from the dead. After looking odds-on favorite to become another automotive casualty of the global recession after Chinese owner SAIC put it into receivership in early 2009, the 4x4 specialist has found a new owner in 2010 – signing a memorandum of understanding with Indian company Mahindra & Mahindra in August – and has just re-launched its brand with a new car designed by Giugiaro. The fourth-generation Korando mid-sized crossover – prefaced by the C200 concept shown at the April 2009 Seoul motorshow – is due on sale in January 2011 pending the expected completion of the Mahindra deal in November this year.