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First Sight: Smart Fortwo and Forfour

"Dress-down Wednesday," remarked a colleague as Daimler CEO Dieter Zetsche walked on stage wearing jeans and no tie. While it was a hot day in Berlin, Zetsche's excuse for his informal attire was the occasion – the new Smart is here. Its prospective owners, he explained – young, urban consumers with an active lifestyle, not the typical members of corporate Germany – adhere to a different, if similarly rigid etiquette.

Volkswagen Golf R Cabriolet arrives on video

The first view of a production VW Golf R Cabriolet has arrived in a video of the new Golf R Cabriolet from Volkswagen. The idea that VW would produce a convertible version of the Golf R has been around as long as the Golf R has. But only now, when the current Golf R is almost the ‘old’ Golf R after the arrival of the new VW Golf MK 7, do we get the production version.

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.