Hamburg, Germany  - Ever wonder how hundreds of ants are able to go up and down a narrow twig without bumping into each other?

A team of German scientists want to find out how ants avoid collisions so that they can apply the same principles to cars on the motorways.

The scientists built an ingenious super "ant farm" complete with roads and bridges and a veritable city of ants. Then they observed the traffic patterns of the ants and fed their findings in to a computer.

The Dresden Institute of Technology collective intelligence expert Dirk Helbing and his team set up an ant highway with two routes of different widths from the nest to some sugar syrup, according to their findings, published in New Scientist.

Budapest  - Audi said Monday it would suspend production at its Hungarian plant for a month from mid-December, citing a seasonal drop in demand for convertible cars.

The German company said it has no immediate plans to lay off staff.

Meanwhile, another German car maker, Daimler AG, sought to reassure Hungary that it has no intention of cancelling its planned 800 million-euro Mercedes-Benz production facility in Hungary.

Daimler spokeswoman Nicole Rubba told the Hungarian state news agency MTI on Monday that despite a management call for "absolute budgetary discipline" the investment will go ahead.

C plus segment sedan Linea was launched by Fiat India Automobiles (FIAL) from the Ranjangaon plant. The car will enter market in the middle of next month.

It is estimated that company would have 2000 units in all its dealers for immediate sale by then. This is a new Fiat model to be launched in India in seven years.

Rajeev Kapoor, managing director and CEO, FIAL, said the car will be distributed by Tata-Fiat dealers but declined to reveal its pricing details.

Despite the global slowdown in the automobile sector, Anand Automotive Systems still plans to go ahead with the investment worth Rs 600 crore to set up 13 plants across the country by 2010. 

The company accepts that the slowdown in the domestic automobile sector has put the group's bottom lines under pressure but said the company was confident that old export as well as domestic orders would help it tide over the current crisis. 

New Delhi  - Indian auto major Tata Motors plans to shut down its unit in Jamshedpur in eastern India for five days from November 25 due to a slump in sales, news reports said Sunday.

It would be the second time the Jamshedpur plant, the company's main manufacturing facility, is being shut down this month after it was closed for three days starting November 6.

The Tata Motors plant in Pune, in western Maharashtra state, and another plant in Lucknow, capital of northern Uttar Pradesh, have also been shut down for five days each in November, Indian Express newspaper reported.

In October, Tata Motors announced it was reducing its production target by 15 per cent due to slowing demand.

New York, Nov. 22: Nearly half of Americans say they are ready to let the Big Three automakers go out of business rather than rescue the sputtering car companies with taxpayer dollars, a new poll shows.

According to the New York Post, voters believe that the Detroit auto industry - which includes GM, Ford and Chrysler - have priced themselves out of the car market with labor contracts that are more expensive than what Japanese and other foreign companies pay workers at American assembly plants.