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The first Volkswagen Beetle in America looked like this

On Jan. 17, 1949, the Holland America Line Westerdam pulled into New York Harbor from Rotterdam carrying the seed of an automotive empire. It had been only four years since Volkswagen resurrected operations in Wolfsburg, the factory heavily ruined by Allied forces and now under the command of Major Ivan Hirst.

CCS students design tomorrow's headlights

The College of Creative Studies (CCS) in Detroit teamed up with Visteon and Osram to give 18 CCS seniors an opportunity to create new automotive lighting designs using the latest technology. CCS has been partnering with Visteon since 2002 and with Osram since 2010. The trio gave students a chance at hands-on design experience under the guidance of designers and engineers from Visteon and Osram as a class during the 2011 fall semester.

Mini Vision concept: what does it say about the brand's future?

The sight of Mini design head Anders Warming presenting a holographic, 3D projection of the Mini Vision concept as if appearing in his own cartoon was certainly a new one on us, but it captured the quirky, slightly left-field image the subsidiary of BMW Group has cultivated since its relaunch 13 years ago. As the 'Vision' tag suggests, this is billed as a marker of intent for the brand's future design direction rather than a pre-production teaser of the new Mini hatchback (Cooper in most markets) we'll see later this year. However if the third-generation 'new' Mini doesn't look remarkably similar we'd be amazed, such is the level of productionized detailing on this purely digital model.