The Geneva Salon may not be the prime place for tuners, but it is one of the two most important motor shows in Europe together with the Frankfurt and Paris events that alternate each year, and as such, big players in the industry like ABT Sportsline always have something new to show.

At this year's event, ABT will debut several new tuned models including the Volkswagen Up! and Beetle, and the Audi AS6 Avant and QS3 crossover.

Volkswagen has made the new Up! city car a little more practical with the presentation of a five-door model that will go on sale across Europe early this summer.

The new addition to VW's New Small Family, which is the internal name for the model series, keeps the same 2.42 m (95.3-in.) long wheelbase and 251-liter boot as the three-door model.

"The future belongs to the small," says Volkswagen and to prove its point, the German automaker came out with a new commercial for the recently launched Up! city car.

The advert takes us on a quick journey through history showing us numerous "big things" that eventually went extinct, from dinosaurs to 1940s swimsuits and from 1970s sideburns to 1990s lexicons.

The spot is smart, to the point and reaches the Up!'s youthful target audience. Hop over the jump to check it out.

There are many kinds of automotive-related records but one of the most common is trying to fit as many people as possible in a passenger car.

If a VW Camper sounds spacious to you, try to imagine what it must have felt like for the 86 students of the Institute of Technology in Carlow, Ireland, than were cramped inside on April 23, 2009, or the 27 Penn State students that set a new Guinness World Record by squeezing themselves in a New Beetle.

These records inspired the crew over at VW Communications to find out how many people could fit in the 3.5 m-long Up! city car.

More often than not, when a new Volkswagen model is presented to the public, the German automaker commissions a matching scale replica, and this week, we have not one, but four new miniature vehicles that go on sale through the company's official store.

These include the production versions of the new up! city car and the Beetle along with the two-seater XL1 diesel-electric hybrid study and the Race Touareg 3 competition vehicle.

Even though the new Up! city car won’t be arriving at dealerships before spring 2012, VW today released pricing details for the UK model and opened the ordering books. Pricing for the 3.5m-long three-door model with seating for four starts at £7,995 for the base version and rises to £11,180 for the top-of-the-line White and Black editions. Read more »

The world premiere of the VW Up! at last month's 2011 Frankfurt Motor Show last month was only the beginning for the German group as after the recent presentation of the Skoda Citigo, Seat is next in line to gain its version of the small city car with the Mii.

The new Mii is the Spanish firm's first offering in the segment after the termination of the Arosa mini in 2004, which was also based on a VW model, the Lupo.

As is the case with the Skoda Citigo, the only visible differences between the Seat Mii and the VW Up! are their front end styling, alloy wheel designs, tail lamp graphics and the interior trim colors and options.

Only two days after this year's edition of the Frankfurt Motor Show closed its gates to the public, Skoda came out with official details on its own interpretation of the Volkswagen Up! city car that will wear the Citigo nameplate.

The Czech automaker's smallest vehicle will go on sale in its home market before the end of this year, with the UK and other European countries following at the beginning of summer 2012.

Unlike its Wolfsburg sibling that will launch in a three-door body style, the Citigo will be offered in both three-door and five-door versions.

To demonstrate how important size is when it comes to parking in modern day cities, Volkswagen launched a new guerilla campaign for its new Up! city car right outside the Frankfurt Motor Show hall.

In the early hours of the morning, the German company's marketing team covered a line of cars in textiles featuring a life-size print of the new Up!.

You can watch the video right after the break.

Making their world premiere alongside the series production Up! in Frankfurt, are six new concept versions of Volkswagen's new city car. We've already shown the you the Buggy Up! that harks back to the 1960's model, so we'll concentrate on the five other Up! studies.

First up! (pun intended), is the sportiest prototype of the bunch, aptly named GT Up!. Volkswagen says a possible production version of the GT could be fitted with a small displacement engine delivering 100-horsepower or 25HP more than the most powerful Up! available at launch.

The world premiere of Volkswagen's new Up! mini in Frankfurt did not involve only the production version as the German company also unwrapped a variety of concept models based on the small city car.

The most impressive study is the Buggy Up! that pays homage to the original, Beetle-based model of the same name that was born in California in the 1960s.

The concept model features a lightweight construction with extensive body reinforcements and a roll bar behind the two seats to compensate for the loss of the roof and the doors.

Volkswagen's star attractions at this year's edition of the Frankfurt Motor Show may be the pint-sized Nils Concept and the Up! city car, but there's nothing small about the German firm's exhibition stand which measures a whopping 97,000 square feet or close to 9,000 square meters.

The cloud-like shaped booth will host more than 50 vehicles focusing on the Up! city car, which is making its public debut along with the Nils single-seat electric commuting vehicle concept and the recently unveiled new generation Beetle, facelifted Tiguan and Golf Cabriolet.

The production version of Volkswagen's up! small car has been officially revealed ahead of its world premiere at the Frankfurt Motor Show. The up!, which has been previewed by numerous concepts over the past few years, is a small city car measuring just 3.54 m long and 1.64 m wide.

Unlike the concepts, however, the production version VW has abandoned the rear-engined, rear-drive layout in favor of a more conventional and predictably less costly to manufacture, front-engine, front-wheel drive setup.

It won’t be long before we get our first glimpse of the production version of Volkswagen's all-new Up! city car that scheduled to have its official world premiere at next month's Frankfurt Motor Show.

But here's a little something we learned. While the three-door hatchback model's looks are very similar to the original Up! Concept car displayed at the 2007 Frankfurt auto show, under the sheetmetal it's a different story as Volkswagen has ditched the study's unique rear-engine, rear-wheel drive layout.