Singapore is a country known worldwide for both a very high cost of living and limited real estate space — that combination makes it hard to imagine a better location for a gigantic vending machine that spits out luxury cars.
That’s right, folks. Autobahn Motors[1], a company that started out selling used vehicles in conventional showrooms, recently opened a 15-story building in Singapore that looks like a real-life kid’s toy box hidden inside the Southeast Asian city-state.
The structure can hold up to 60 high-end vehicles — it includes cars from Ferrari, Bentley and Porsche — which can be purchased by customers who visit the location.
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Rather than a regular sales process, visitors to the Autobahn Motors’ site complete their purchase via a tablet device and customized app. Their car will be delivered to them within two minutes of their payment thanks to a unique ‘fishbone’ delivery system that Covered.Asia experienced[2] in a pre-launch demo last year.
“We needed to meet our requirement of storing a lot of cars. At the same time, we wanted to be creative and innovative,” Gary Hong, general manager at Autobahn Motors, explained to Reuters in a recent interview[3].
This approach has been adopted for inner city parking in many parts of the world, and there is one similar concept for car sales in the U.S.[4] via Carvana — which recently went public[5].
It’s a pretty crazy system that looks like a concept, but it is absolutely real. You can find the Singapore-based building for yourself on Google Maps Street View here[6]....
Read more from our friends at TechCrunch
We should learn more about the implications of a global “ransomware” attack on vulnerable computers this week. Computers networks everywhere – ranging from hospitals in the United Kingdom to the Bank of China’s ATM machines – were disabled.
Hackers used recently leaked malware built by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA). The malware took advantage of a vulnerability in Microsoft Windows the NSA had identified and purposely kept hidden.
We can expect the NSA and its supporters in Washington to dodge all accountability. All blame will instead be laid at the feet of Wikileaks and the insiders who revealed the virus and put the NSA’s activities on display.
Should the attack lead to prolonged outages, we can expect markets to respond – perhaps with some flight to safety, which would help precious metals.
