Would you ride in a car with this man?

Fahrfegnugen
So, last week at the Frankfurt Motor Show, Lamborghini unveiled the Lamborghini Reventon, with a sticker price of one million Euros. It's unclear why you'd actually buy one, though. You can get a Bugatti Veyron with 340 more HP (about a 50% increase) for the same price. Or you can get a Lamborghini Murcielago that looks about the same and has about the same horsepower for a quarter of the price. Or you can get a Mazda RX-8 with about 35% of the HP for 2% of the price. Plus, the Reventon doesn't even have a Wankel!

But, I want to talk about a different Volkswagen unveiling that happend at Frankfurt (oh yeah, Volkswagen owns Lamborghini, didn't you know that?): The Volkswagen Up! concept (exclamation theirs). The Up! is pretty much production-ready, and widely expected to become the new Volkswagen Lupo. (Lupo, get it?)

Most commenters have labeled the car as a competetor to smart, but there are other competetors in this class, like the Fiat Panda and Ford Ka, although the smart is the only one coming to the US any time soon. The thing about the Up! is that it's an affordable, very small rear-engined 4-seater from a German company, which you may recall is the same combination of the original Beetle, the Type 1. This would be a real follow-up to the original Type 1, unlike the closest thing to a Type 1 you can buy new today, the Porsche 911. Even the New Beetle is a Golf in a different suit. Plus, maybe they'll contract out to Karmann to make a sports car version, and Karmann will in turn sub-contract out to Ghia to design one. Hey, it worked before.

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