“The Autostadt, a visitor attraction in the area around the Volkswagen factory in Wolfsburg, Germany, with a prime focus on automobiles. It features a museum, feature pavilions for each manufacturer in the Volkswagen Group, a customer centre where German customers can pick up new cars, and take a tour through the enormous factory, a guide to the evolution of roads, and cinema in a large sphere. It is also home to the largest glass doors in the world and the longest printed line. The line starts from outside Wolfsburg and travels through Autostadt to a point on a farm. It is about 4 miles (6.4 km) long.”

This is like a car dealership and a theme park rolled into one. And the purpose of these two towers? As Wikipedia succinctly describes:

There are two 60 meter/200 ft tall glass silos used as storage for new Volkswagens. The two towers are connected to the Volkswagen factory by a 700 metre underground tunnel. When cars arrive at the towers they are carried up at a speed of 1.5 metres per second. The render for the Autostadt shows 6 towers. When purchasing a car from Volkswagen (the main brand only, not the sub-brands) in select European countries, it is optional if the customer wants it delivered to the dealership where it was bought or if the customer wants to travel to Autostadt to pick it up. If the latter is chosen, the Autostadt supplies the customer with free entrance, meal tickets and a variety of events building up to the point where the customer can follow on screen as the automatic elevator picks up the selected car in one of the silos. The car is then transported out to the customer without having driven a single meter, and the tripometer is thus on “0″.

The Autostadt website describes the Car Tower Discovery (TurmFahrt) attraction which originally was not accessible to the public:

Visitors to the Autostadt are now able to experience the Car Towers from the inside! A special glass, panorama lift takes six guests through the same procedure as one of the 800 cars stored in the Car Towers.

Until recently the glass-encased steel construction of the Car Towers was closed to the public, now the inside of the Autostadt’s most well-known landmark can be explored from top to bottom.

Visitors are taken up 48 metres to the 20th storey by the car shuttle as if they were a regular car – for extra effect the car shuttle swings slowly to the right and then back to the left before safely depositing the glass lift in a specially designed slot on the observation deck.

A breathtaking view of the Autostadt’s lagoon-landscape, the Volkswagen factory and the adjacent countryside greets the guests when they disembark. During the ride through the inside of the tower the ever changing views of the landscape merge with the impressions of a highly complex technology at work.

As is to be expected of German technology, this is a fascinating structure. In an article on Elevator World, The Twin Glass Towers and Conveyor System is described as a highly sophisticated and efficient system and it is not difficult to see why. I would consider visiting the place myself when I next return to Europe.

Post from: Madam Zebra's Blog

Car Towers

Although my camera is still working relatively well (the flash is beginning to stick a little), I have considered buying myself a new camera. There are so many considerations to make and the most important aspect of buying a digital camera (from recent articles I have read), should not be based on the number of megapixels.

It is the size of the lens which is the more important factor. A larger lens (which lets in more light) with a smaller number of megapixels is far better for picture quality than a smaller lens with more megapixels. Gizmodo explains in more detail why more megapixels isn’t necessarily better.

Post from: Madam Zebra's Blog

Why More Megapixels Isn’t Always More Better