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Saab: Muller seeking €600 million Chinese Bank loan to placate GM

Saab €600 seeking million China Loan Victor Muller is seeking a €600 million loan from a Bank in China to allow Saab to survive and circumvent GM’s objection to Chinese ownership. We’re not sure if this is ‘Plan B’ or whether we’re way beyond that now. But the latest ‘Save Saab’ pitch from Victor Muller is to acquire a €600 million loan from a bank in China to save Saab.

2013 VW Beetle Convertible arrives

The new 2013 Volkswagen Beetle Convertible has been revealed ahead of a launch at the Los Angeles Auto Show in November. The new Beetle Convertible is due to bow in at the LA Auto Show in November  but VW obviously decided it was pragmatic to get an early reveal out of the way before the new Bug soft top trickled on to the Interwebs of its own accord. What we get is what we expected (although we did hold out a little hope the new Beetle Cabriolet would look more like the E-Bugster Cabriolet Concept); a convertible version of the 2012 Beetle with a pram style soft top that sits on the boot.

Land Rover testing electric Defender 110 pickup

Land Rover has begun testing an electric version of the Land Rover Defender first shown at the 2012 Geneva motor show. The electric Defender prototype is in service at the Eden Project in Cornwall, U.K., a complex of several large transparent domes that house multiple artificially maintained environments containing thousands of rare plants, and is a popular visitor attraction. At the moment the electric Defender isn't exactly tearing through the Amazon rainforest, but the work it's doing is nevertheless a good approximation of how quite a lot of Defenders are used in real life -- at least in terms of speed and duration of use.