Junior Dragster Front Beam Break on 2040-parts.com

Audi Urban Future: Project New York

Audi will take advantage of New York's 'Festival of Ideas' to display their vision of Manhattan in 2030, an objective that fulfills part of the German automaker's Urban Future Initiative. Now in its second year (the first was held in Venice last year) the initiative was created with the intention of looking at the future of megacities as well as individual transport methods and mobility. For Project New York, Audi will be bringing together architects, designers, artists and researchers to visualize ideas for the city's future, and the carmaker has collaborated with the Architizer architecture community to create a 1:1200 scale model of Manhattan.

Saab shutdown would doom new 9-5, 9-3 models

The new Saab 9-5 sedan and a proposed replacement for the 9-3 will be killed off if General Motors Co. winds down its Swedish subsidiary, AutoWeek has learned. The new 9-5, a longer-wheelbase version of the Opel Insignia and the Buick Regal, is poised to go down in the annals of automotive history as a major rarity--a design that was fully tooled for production yet never got built.

First Sight: Mercedes-Benz SL

The new high-tech, low weight Mercedes SL roadster receives its official global unveil next week in Detroit but Car Design News got an early peek of the final production car and had a chat with its designers at Mercedes' US advanced design studio in Carlsbad, California back in November. "We want to get back to clean, long-lasting design," director of Mercedes global advanced design and SL project leader, Steffen Kohl told CDN at the exclusive preview of the sixth-generation model. "So the new SL is long, sleek and still full of tension in the feature lines but less wedgy." In a short presentation Kohl felt all SLs became successfully iconic in their times because they followed two key rules – ‘sensuality' and ‘cleanness' – but alluded that the first rule may have been lost in more recent eras.