Wishing you all a Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

To all our readers, we would like to take the time to wish you a very Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays from everyone here at Carscoop!

Being a joyous time of celebration, some folks may overindulge during the holidays, in which case we hope that you'll forget about driving altogether and have someone else deliver you back home.

We'll be taking some time off to spend the day with our families and friends, but not without programming some select news for today and tomorrow before we return to our normal daily schedule on Tuesday, December 27, as we get ready for the next round of car shows starting with the Detroit Auto Show in the second week of January.

Vroomy wishes to all, and hope you enjoy the Santa Claus videos after the jump!

.

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.

.

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…

.

Carscoop Redesign Update: New Commenting System Goes Live

Ever since our latest redesigns (5.0 & 5.1), we’ve been toying around with the idea of replacing our comments system, and now, after some late night research and beta testing, we decided to give Disqus a try on Carscoop.

For those of you unfamiliar with Disqus, it is a popular commenting platform for websites that provides readers with a variety of options for commenting and participating in conversations in a more active way. Other sites currently using Disqus include Time Magazine, CNN, Engadget and the UK’s Daily Telegraph.
Among other features, readers can spiff up their posts with videos and photos, reply to other comments directly, rate and flag users, have their own avatar (no, we’re not giving away blue-hued bomb shells from the planet Pandora) and some more.
We’ve opted to allow you to comment either as a guest by providing an email and a name or nickname, or if you prefer, by using your account on Disqus, Google, Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo or OpenID.

Redesign Update: Carscoop 5.1

As you probably already noticed, on Saturday, July 9, we passed on to the second phase of our redesign, which started out with a clean sheet back in May (read more about that here).
This time, we focused clearly on the design aspect tweaking and updating the styling after taking into consideration your constructive criticism and ideas. Changes include but are not limited to the larger and more prominent Carscoop logo, the font choices throughout the site and the more compact sidebar sections.