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Porsche finally becomes a VW company

Volkswagen has announced it is to finalise its takeover of Porsche by buying the remaining 50.1 per cent of Porsche stock for €4.46 billion. The takeover of Porsche by VW has been a long and rocky road, but then family fallouts are always messy. It all started with Porsche attempting to consume VW, but some clever manoeuvring by Ferdinand Piech thwarted the efforts of his cousin, Wolfgang Porsche, to swallow up his business and the financial crisis saw Porsche rack up €10 billion in debt in the process.

Essay: Variable Degrees of Translucency

Car door panels and fenders are generally made of steel, sometimes of aluminum or plastic composites, and you can't see through them. Car windows, on the other hand, are made of a transparent sandwich of glass and plastic - and you can see through them. But in the future there will be variable degrees of transparency: translucent elements where once there were none, traditional window areas that will have opaque elements and graduated progressions from opaque to see-through.

McLaren MP4-12C (2011): the full spec announced

CAR is at McLaren HQ in Woking, Berkshire, today to hear the full specification of the new company's new MP4-12C supercar.Scroll to our video player below for live footage broadcast straight from the event at McLaren Automotive. The video will begin at 10.30am GMT on Thursday 18 March 2010 and we'll upload the full video for playback as soon as it's ready. McLaren F1 drivers Lewis Hamilton and Jenson Button were on hand to talk about their experiences with the 12C – they drove it hard at Goodwood earlier this month – and you can read their thoughts at the foot of the page.