Chrome

Toyota entered its fuel cell Mirai in the Gurston Down Speed Hill Climb, marking the car's UK motorsport debut. Goodwood is next.

To celebrate winning the Golden Steering Wheel award from Auto Bild, Audi is displaying this gold-chrome R8 V10 Plus at the Forum adjacent to the factory where it's built.

We've seen some rather unfortunately garish chrome-jobs in our day, and yes, some have even ladled on the shiny stuff in gold. Many of those have also been Mercedes-Benz vehicles. But while we've come to expect that kind of bling from owners with cash coming out of their Ferragamo shoes, we didn't expect the same treatment to be carried out by Mercedes-Benz itself on its own vehicles.

By and large we're not big fans of the full-on chrome-finish treatment here at Autoblog. Most of us lean more toward matte than mirrored. But some cars wear the garish look well. Like a Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren, for example. A Buick Regal? Less so.

What separates an old car from a classic? In many cases, not a lot. Beautiful sheet metal, a legendary powertrain or world-class performance could make a world of difference, and so can attention to detail.

Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG GT3 chromed by Laureus – Click above for high-res image gallery

Redefining the term "enough is enough", the owner of this car is said to have had his SLR gold-chromed. The strangest part is that, according to reports, this is actually the same Mercedes SLR McLaren that was previously spied in Dubai with a silver-chrome treatment. We're not sure about the accuracy of this model considering it has a different rear spoiler, different wheels (which have also been gold

At last year's Santa Monica Alt Car Expo, we discovered the chrome emblems from Third Planet Energy and one of our readers, GreyFlcn, had a little fun with the "greenness" of the words.

Third Planet Energy's booth at the Santa Monica Alt Car Expo caught my eye. Which is exactly what the folks there intended. In fact, Third Planet Energy's whole goal is to allow you to catch other people's eyes, through the use of chrome emblems that will upgrade your car's back end to identify just what kind of powertrain you're running in that thing. All electric? VegOil? Hybrid? CNG? Biodiesel? All these emblems and m

The paint shop is one of the least environmentally friendly divisions of any auto production plant. Work is being done however to reduce the impact of the painting process in producing new vehicles such as the announcement by Ford that they will partner with Henkel Corporation to produce the automotive industry's first producti