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News watch December 2012: today's auto industry news

Welcome to CAR Magazine's news aggregator as we round up the daily stories in the auto industry. Top tip: news summaries are added from the top hour-by-hour Monday 31 December 2012• Despite reports earlier this month that shareholders valued Mercedes-Benz at half that of its luxury rival BMW, Mercedes CEO Dieter Zetsche has remained bullish about his ambitious targets for the carmaker's growth. 'I am confident that we will be ahead of our rivals by 2020 at the latest,' he told German newspaper Boersen-Zeitung in an interview.

McLaren MP4-12C arrives in USA (video)

The MP4-12C hits the US The McLaren MP4-12C has finally hit the USA, and to celebrate McLaren has put together a video showing its arrival in America. Being a supercar lover in the USA can have its drawbacks, particularly if you have a penchant for supercars from smaller car makers, because the US can be rather tetchy about letting a handful of supercars on American roads, just in case they destroy the fabric of American society. McLaren had that problem with their last car – the iconic McLaren F1 – and it took years for the legislative mess to be sorted to let ultra rich Americans indulge in a bit of McLaren love (mind you, it also lined McLaren’s pockets as they charged and arm and a leg for software to make US F1s legal).

Motorway pile-up 'like pinball'

DRIVERS involved in a fatal pile-up on a motorway entered a "wall of blackness" before suffering numerous impacts as if they were "a pinball machine", a jury heard. Seven people died and 51 were injured after 34 cars collided when a section of the M5 in Somerset was suddenly "engulfed in thick smog". Anthony and Pamela Adams, Maggie and Michael Barton, Malcolm Beacham, Terry Brice and Kye Thomas died in the incident, on November 4 2011.