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Watch this Volvo truck drive up a quarry road using hamster-powered steering

Volvo Trucks has been producing some of the most interesting and thrilling commercials around as of late, and this new one involves a live hamster. While you may wonder how could a hamster and a dump truck could be exciting, just know this ain't a Kia Soul commercial: the Swedish truck company enlists the help of a hamster named Charlie to steer an FMX construction truck up a winding road in Ourence, Spain. From the bottom of a quarry. We are not kidding you.
All we ask is that you watch the commercial below to see how it all goes down. If you like what you see, you can then check out a bonus 'behind the scenes' video and press release for details about how Volvo Trucks prepared for the stunt.

Volvo's plan for China: sell them on the clean air inside the car

Large Chinese cities aren't known for having clean air. Just this week, the Chinese city of Harbin filled with record levels of smog after starting the city's coal-fired heating system, according to CNN. But Li Shufu, the chairman of Geely, Volvo's parent company, says the automaker's astute attention to cabin comfort in areas such as air filtration is a selling point for the Swedish automaker in China, Forbes reports.
Shufu says when he is inside a Volvo, he feels like he's in Northern Europe, but when the door is opened, he feels like he's in Beijing. The chairman made the remarks at the fourth annual Global Auto Forum (GAF) in China (which also happened to be attended by Alan Mulally, CEO of Ford, which was Volvo's owner until 2010), where he emphasized Geely's hands-off approach to managing Volvo, saying, "Geely and Volvo are brothers, not father and son."
While good filtration contributes to cabin comfort, the way we see it, Shufu also is allowing Volvo to play to its most well-known strength: safety. Smog protection via air filtration might not seem like the most important safety feature for a car in the US (unless you live in Los Angeles), but when you consider that Harbin's level of fine particles was up to 30 times higher than the World Health Organization's recommended standard on Tuesday, we'd think twice about that. Fine particles, which are 2.5 micrometers in diameter or less, are considered to be the most harmful to health.

Volvo bringing Chinese-built cars to America beginning next year

Just because the penetration of the American automotive market by Chinese brands hasn't quite happened yet doesn't mean that Chinese-built cars are far off. According to a new report, we could very soon see long-wheelbase Volvo S60s that were assembled in the People's Republic arriving on US shores.
The report comes from Automotive News China, which cites an anonymous Volvo exec. An official Volvo spokesperson later corroborated ANC's report, although where the original source claimed that we could see the Chinese-built S60L in US dealers at some point in 2015, the company line was that a timeline hadn't been established to begin exports from the world's most populous nation.
According to Volvo, the benefit to exporting from China to the United States rather than from Sweden is the relationship between the US dollar and the Chinese yuan. Overall, it's a less tumultuous issue than the dollar-to-euro situation. By moving vehicles from China to the US, the Chinese-owned company is limiting the degree of risk it's taking with sudden currency swings.