This is what Happens when a Limousine, Convertible and Yacht Meet

In today's highly competitive auto market, one would think there are no new niches left to explore. Well, it's pretty true, except for imaginative individuals like the crew from Sweden’s Gray Design, which also penned the Saab supercar.

Enter the world of the Strand Craft Limousine Beach Cruiser, a vehicle that looks like a crossover between a limousine, a convertible and a yacht – yes, you read correctly, a yacht. Essentially a beach shuttle, the Stand Craft has been conceived for luxury hotel chains willing to offer their clients premium service. More specifically, to carry six passengers from the hotel to the nearest beach as fast and as comfortable as possible.

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A Photo Tour of the VW Group’s 2011 Wörthersee Festival with 150 Images

For the past thirty year, tens of thousands of enthusiasts of Volkswagen Group cars assemble on the shores of Lake Worthersee in Austria to participate in the largest festival of its kind in the world. Over the years, Volkswagen and the other brands of the German group including Audi, Seat and Skoda, have used the show to unveil special concepts, new models and studies that hint at future production versions or accessories.

At this year’s event (June 1 to 4, 2011), the VW Group prepared several vehicles for the festival including the production VW Golf GTI 35 Edition with 235HP, the VW Golf Cabriolet GTI and R concepts, the wild 503HP Audi A1 Clubsport Quattro study, and the Skoda Fabia RS 2000 Convertible prototype. As you may have noticed, the company didn’t show much love for its Seat brand which was left to display its current lineup.

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Yuhan Zhang’s Aqua is the Personal VW Hovercraft Concept of Tomorrow

Before budget airlines and the Channel Tunnel, the faster way to get from Britain to France was by hovercraft. The largest of these was the SNR4, a 300-ton behemoth capable of carrying 380 passengers and 40 cars at a speed of 70 mph (113 km/h). In the 1950s and ‘60s, magazines like Popular Science and Popular Mechanics were predicting a future where we’d all be cruising around in affordable, personal hovercrafts. Sadly, it was not to be.

Now, some 11 years after the last SNR4 was retired, 21-year-old industrial design graduate Yuhan Zhang has resurrected the personal hovercraft in the form of her Volkswagen Aqua study.

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VW Golf GTI Cabriolet Concept Live from Wörthersee. Should it be Built?

Yesterday, we brought you the first images of Volkswagen’s Golf GTI Cabriolet study but today we have live photos from the car’s world premiere at the Wörthersee meeting in Austria along with official information on the concept.

The hotted-up convertible is based on the standard Golf GTI with power coming from the same 2.0-liter turbocharged four-cylinder engine delivering 210-horsepower and 280 Nm (207-lbs/ft) of peak torque at 1.800 rpm.

Volkswagen says the open-air model’s performance matches that of the closed-top GTI with a 0-100km/h (62mph) sprint time of 7 seconds and a top speed of around 240km/h (149 mph).

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