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CDN–GM/PATAC Interactive Design Competition China winners announced

The winners of the CDN-GM/PATAC Interactive Design Competition China have been announced during Car Design Night at The Waterhouse in Shanghai on April 20, 2013. The inaugural Chinese installment of the popular student design competition has been a huge success, with 1,241 submissions during the five-month process. February saw an amazing number of last-minute entries that ensured a tough decision when the judges, including Brian Nesbitt, vice president of Design at GM International Operations, Michael Simcoe, executive director – Global Design GMIO at Holden, Min Cao, chief designer/Advanced Design director at PATAC, Burt Wong, executive deputy director of PATAC Design Department at PATAC, and Holt Ware, executive Design director at PATAC, met to choose a winner last month.

Grab a ‘VAT Free’ Skoda Octavia

In yet another ‘Sign of the times’ Skoda has announced that they are now offering ‘VAT Free Octavias’ until the end of the year. No, this is not a tie-up between Alistair Darling and VW, it’s just Skoda’s way of offering a headline price decrease of a bit over 13% (less expensive to Skoda than last week for the same headline, to be fair, and there is a new model due in January!). Grab a VAT free Skoda Octavia I’m pretty sure that there will be a raft of these ‘VAT Free’ offers floating around on everything from cars to washing machines, capitalising on the fact the VAT is in the headlines.

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.