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2010 Interior Motives Design Awards

The eighth annual Interior Motives Design Awards has opened for registration. Themed ‘Driving the Interior Revolution', this year's contest – hosted by our quarterly interior design publication Interior Motives – challenges design students around the world to come up with innovative designs that offer new solutions to the problems and opportunities facing vehicle designers in the 21st century. Students are tasked with creating a design that fulfills one of the following four briefs, which this year have been set by Volkswagen and Peugeot: Pay as you go (set by Volkswagen) Design a pay-as-you-go vehicle.

Wild thing: Audi A1 clubsport quattro unveiled

Audi has created a 496-hp version of the A1 small car to celebrate the 30th anniversary of an Austrian festival for Audi, Seat, Skoda and Volkswagen fans. Called the A1 clubsport quattro, the one-off show car gains a heavy dose of rally-inspired styling that is said to preview the appearance of a hot new all-wheel-drive S1 quattro model being developed by Audi as a rival to the likes of the Renault Clio Sport. At the heart of the hatchback is a heavily modified version of Audi's turbocharged 2.5-liter, five-cylinder powerplant shoehorned transversely into the A1's compact engine bay.

Cash for clunkers: Is it ready for prime time in America?

One proposed solution to prop up new-car sales in the United States involves paying bonuses to owners of older vehicles who send their cars to the scrapyard and buy new ones. Proponents say that not only does the auto industry benefit, but so does the environment, as emissions decrease and fuel economy typically improves in newer models. Critics, however, say that scrapping older vehicles hurts collectors by reducing the number of older models available and also hurts those least able to afford to buy newer vehicles by driving up the price of used cars.