Volkswagen!!!!

This was such a fun day, I just had to share.

So, about 30 minutes away from Hannover is the city of Wolfsburg, home of the VW factory. One of the few cities not bombed in WWII, they've since created this mini-city within a city called "Autostadt." It's a collection of probably a dozen or so buildings, each devoted to some aspect of Volkswagen, Inc.. Think: Showroom plus science museum plus car dealer plus art exhibit plus Ikea plus World's Fair. There were buildings like the history all the cars VW has made, the Lamborghini (sp?) building, the Audi building, the Bentley building, the test drive track (unfortunately requiring a 3 week advanced reservation), and coolest of all, the CarTowers:

These things are 20-story towers (x2) housing probably hundreds of cars in untold color/feature combinations. Folks come to the VW factory to buy a car direct, and judging by the crowd in the showroom, this includes most Germans living within a few hundred miles and/or a train ride of the factory. Once they pick out the color/options they want and sign on the dotted line, a giant robotic arm rises up in this tower (not open to the public, unfort.), physically lifts your car out of its skyscraper parking space, and lowers it into the basement where a VW salesperson drives it through a tunnel into the middle of the showroom, where he hands you the keys and you drive out the front door. HOW FREAKING COOL IS THAT!?!?!?

I'm telling you, this place was insane. This was part of the collection of old VW beetles through the years.

This is the life sized Lamborghini that was strapped to a big rotating wall, and swung from inside the Lamborghini museum to the outside wall amid a giant laser-light show, complete with thumping bass, fog machines, and 200 decibles of reving engine.

This was a wall of side view mirrors. Kinda trippy. You can sort of see me in some of them.

This is the main factory part of Autostadt (though the photo only shows about 1/4 of it). See the big VW logo? It's exactly the same size as the turning radius of the original VW bug. Cool!