Happy Thanksgiving from Everyone at Carscoop!

Here’s wishing to all of our readers and their families a happy and hearty Thanksgiving. Even in the case that you don't celebrate the day, perhaps you can still take a moment to acknowledge all the super-duper things that make your life and a little better and more pleasant – and hopefully we're one of them.

In lieu of a traditional Thanksgiving dinner, we plan to take half the day off (okay, maybe a bit more) but we will resume our regular coverage of the daily automotive news and then some more on Friday, November 25.

We’ll send you off with the sounds of happiness: a compilation of new and old V12-powered Lamborghinis, which you can check out in the video after the break.

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Google's Cookie Monster Ate our Poll

Some of you may have noticed that our poll on the three compact SUVs that Ford, Mazda and Honda introduced at the 2011 Los Angeles Auto Show last week is a little on the cuckoo side today in regards of the number of people that voted.

If our memory serves us right, there were about 2,800 votes last night with the Mazda CX-5 leading the pack, but dropped to around 1,690 in the morning and have being going up and down ever since.

Obviously, there's a bug somewhere, but being that the gadget used for the poll is an official Google widget, there's really nothing we can do about it from our side, so we've decided to remove it.

We hope you accept our apologies for the glitch and promise to head over to one of Google’s official forums to write a heated message to someone who may or may not escalate the problem to a Google employee and cross our fingers that he or she will read it in six business days and find the time to respond in a timely manner - if you've ever dealt with Google, you probably know what we mean…

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GM’s Opel follows in the Footsteps of Ford, Asks Bloggers to Write About the Astra GTC to Attend the Presentation

Those of you readers that have been with us for a while might remember our revealing post about Ford Motor Company’s shady marketing tactics (via its media agency) to attract attention and web traffic to the brand by asking bloggers to participate in a Ford website-linking contest and win a place in the company’s 2010 Model Year Drive event.

That said, we are no strangers to the mommy-blogger-type approach from marketing companies representing major automotive brands, but we never cease to be amazed. This time we were approached by a social media agency called Knallgrau on behalf of GM’s European Opel unit. When we received the first email, we believed it was a media / press invitation but upon our request for additional information, we discovered that wasn’t the case.

In a similar fashion to the Ford incident, the agency asked if we wanted to write about the new Astra GTC and participate in a type of contest, the winners of which will be invited to the official unveiling of the three-door hatchback at Opel’s headquarters in Rüsselsheim, Germany.

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Carscoop: And we’re back online again

They say bad things happen in threes (don't go all Tosh.0 on us now - the opening picture was a random choice that has nothing to do with our dislike of BMW's all-wheel drive turn to crossovers), and that seems to be the case for Carscoop these past couple of weeks. After Google’s cloud outage that left us offline for more than 24 hours earlier this month, this week we were faced with a new technical problem followed by a computer blackout that wiped out one of our hard disks… Well, what matters is that we’re back online now and ready to provide you with the latest auto news.
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Carscoop Version 5.0 has Arrived: Tell us What You Think about our Latest Redesign

If you wondering why we have been dragging our feet on the news front these past few weeks, it’s because we were busy with the HTML5’s and CSS’s of our brand new template. True, the feel and the design have remained more or less the same with some subtle changes in the aesthetics and the size of our site, which is slightly more compact, but almost everything underneath is new.

Think of Carscoop Version 5.0 as something like a new Porsche; while the looks remain the same (to the previous Version 4.3), everything else is new or revamped. In our case, this should translate to a better experience on most modern browsers and more importantly, faster speeds regardless the connection.

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