(FORTUNE Magazine) – There's a hot show in Hamburg, but it isn't the World's Fair. While Expo 2000 is drawing one-tenth of the visitors expected, organizers of Autostadt--in nearby Wolfsburg--expect two million people in its first year, double the estimates.

Autostadt ("Auto City") is Volkswagen's new automotive theme park. Conceived as a place for customers to pick up new cars, it soon got Chairman Ferdinand Piech carried away: Some $400 million later, Autostadt has seven pavilions (one for each brand, including Audi, Bentley, and Lamborghini), six restaurants, three shops, and a Ritz-Carlton hotel.

If you're wondering why anyone would go, look around. VW has stocked its high-style architecture--by Gunter Henn--with quirky exhibits that sometimes have only a tangential relationship to the company. There's a museum of classic cars, from a reproduction of the Karl Benz 1886 tricycle to John Lennon's Beetle from the cover of Abbey Road. There are films by German director Dani Levy and the San Francisco computer graphics team Xaos, shown in 360-degree theaters and the world's first spherical cinema; one of the films is about a figure skater's and a violinist's quests for perfection. There are rides that replicate the force of a car crash, artworks by Ingo Gunther and Matt Mullican, and a 12-meter-high model engine for kids to explore.

But the heart of the park is the pavilions. In the Lamborghini one, for instance, is a Lamborghini, behind bars, mounted on a wall. After several warnings about noise, the show begins: The room darkens, a light show dances over the car, the engine revs, smoke appears, and then...the section of the wall that the car is mounted on flips around and the car disappears, to be found outside. And if that doesn't get your heart racing, the price will--about $11 a day, far cheaper than Expo 2000.

--LAUREN GOLDSTEIN

AUTOSTADT 49-5361-401970 (It helps if you speak German.)