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Volkswagen trots out Mini Vader for Chattanooga plant inauguration

Volkswagen is hoping that a little advertising goes a long way. The company brought its Super Bowl star Mini Vader back for an encore during the opening ceremonies for VW’s new Chattanooga factory. The pint-sized Dark Lord gave a final blessing to the plant before pushing a red button to make things official.

Fioravanti expands into China in partnership with Eastone

Renowned Italian design house Fioravanti has formed a partnership with Shanghai-based design and engineering consultancy Eastone. The aim of this powerful duo is to deliver a wide range of design and build services directly to Chinese OEMs, with the first fruit of their labors being a concept car for Chinese manufacturer BAIC, to be unveiled at the Beijing auto show. For the first time in their own country, Chinese OEMs can now benefit from the time-served capabilities, knowledge and car culture typical of a leading Italian design house, while simultaneously gaining from the local knowledge, strong relationships and powerful commercial strength of a domestic design company.

Art installation moves 100,000 toy cars an hour

IT'S NO PICASSO, but this installation by conceptual artist Chris Burden certainly has the potential to be moving. Called Metropolis II, this amazing construction took Chris and his chief engineer four years to design and create and expands significantly on Metropolis I - the latest version has 18 roadways including one six-lane carriageway. It also has a rail network with HO-scale model trains, and running at capacity it pumps 100,000 cars around its network at a scale speed of 230mph.