Mercedes' mystery building revealed!

Last year, Mercedes-Benz USA was working out a lease on a huge 1.1-million square-foot former aircraft factory across the street from the Long Beach Airport that used to build DC-10s, MD-80s and Boeing 717s. Mercedes wouldn't say what it planned to do with the massive space. Was Benz building airplanes?

‘Charge rage’ on the up for electric car owners

Forget ‘range anxiety’, the latest term to sweep the world of electric cars is ‘charge rage’. The new phenomenon hitting owners of zero-emission vehicles relates to the growing number of electric cars on the roads – because public charging infrastructure is failing to expand at the same rate. On Bing: see pictures of electric car charging points Find out how much a used electric car costs on Auto Trader This means owners are actually fighting over these plug-in points, with some rather unsavoury behaviour reported causing charge rage for many electric car drivers.

Back to basics for VW, says Walter de Silva

By Adam Towler Motor Industry 25 June 2008 13:01 It was an odd place for an inside line into what future Volkswagens will look like, but when head of VW Group design Walter de Silva invited CAR to the old Fiat Lingotto factory in Turin - now a conference and shopping centre – we could hardly say no. De Silva described VW as being immersed in a 'process of defining their design language' which could be read as ‘we’re still sucking our designer thumbs to see what happens’. Audi, De Silva said, had already been through that process and its design DNA was ‘understood by everyone in the company, right down to the smallest details'.