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News watch October 2010: 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 Friday 29 October 2010• Spyker has announced third-quarter losses have increased since its takeover of Saab. Spyker lost £35 million in 2010, compared to £3.6 million last year (BBC News)• GM will repay $2.1 billion of the Obama government's preferred stocks.

MINI at the Detroit Motor Show – Video trailer

The MINI Beachcoimber will be one of the stars of the NAIAS Next week sees the start of the 2010 Detroit Motor Show – the first big Motor Show of the season. And there will be lots of new stuff – and some not so new – and maybe even a surprise or two we don’t yet know about. So the teases are now starting in earnest for the NAIAS and MINI has put together a video trailer for the goodies it’s planning on bringing to the party.

Driven: BMW i8

When BMW unveiled the Vision EfficientDynamics concept at the 2009 Frankfurt motor show, we wrote: "for our money, it's the first time a major carmaker has really attempted to communicate ‘green' technology in an aesthetic sense." Fast-forward five years and we've swapped the show halls of the IAA for a beauty spot on the north-west coast of Scotland. And, while the car's name has changed to i8, our sentiment towards this genre- and era-defining car remains. Admittedly the production car's design execution hasn't received the universal praise of its concept forebears, but, on a remote outpost of the British Isles, a Protonic Blue i8 couldn't look more exotic.