Innehållsförteckning för 263 - November / December 2023 från AUTO & DESIGN

“We began to dedicate ourselves to this project first of all by letting go of the pressure exerted by the great success of the 3008, so as to push creativity and boldness much further into the future”. It is with this mindset, Matthias Hossann tells us, that the Peugeot design team he heads shaped the new E-3008. “The 3008 has always been able to keep up with the times. The first generation was the hybridisation of an MPV with a crossover, the second – the one currently on the road – signed its consolidation in the universe of SUVs. The third aims to respond to customer expectations by guaranteeing the highest expression of the brand's values, as well as its inventiveness and audacity. Its three pillars are allure, emotion, excellence”.…

Marchio di lusso dell'impero Ford, Lincoln gioca con la nuova generazione del Suv Nautilus la carta del “terzo spazio” o, come ama definirlo Kemal Curič, del “santuario”: la casa lontano da casa, l'auto come estensione della propria abitazione, capsula al tempo stesso protettrice e accogliente. Curič, responsabile del design Lincoln, è convinto di avere centrato l'o biettivo. È la lezione della pandemia. In America, e credo in tutto il mondo, si cerca quel terzo spazio. Negli anni del Covid, infatti, abbiamo imparato che nella nostra auto possiamo essere produttivi usandola come santuario: sovente guidando avviamo i nostri primi contatti di lavoro e concludiamo gli ultimi. Prendetemi come esempio: quando torno a casa, dove ci sono tre bambini molto rumorosi, sovente finisco il mio lavoro nell'auto parcheggiata davanti a casa. Per noi…

Beast Mode. Thus the sixth generation of the Mitsubishi pickup presents itself, with a strong and blunt design concept which only the utilitarian typology of the vehicle prevents - unlike the recently introduced Xforce SUV - from completely expressing the Japanese company's new design philosophy, the Timeless Modernity made of simplicity but with a strong design, destined to dictate all the Mitsubishis of the future and already anticipated last year by the XFC concept. The Triton, which in many markets as in the past will be called L200, is therefore - as Alessandro Dambrosio explains – “a meeting point between past and future.” Right-hand man of Mitsubishi design manager Seiji Watanabe, Dambrosio is the Executive Design Director under whom there are a group of Product Design Directors who deal with…

Interview Shao Jingfeng/SAIC L'avanzata dei marchi cinesi in Europa coinvolge anche i centri stile che lavorano attivamente per creare forme Inedite e conquistare nuovi mercati. Alcuni, come il gruppo Saic con il caso MG, hanno anche ridato vita a brand storici del Vecchio Continente, recuperando parte degli stilemi del passato e ripensandoli al futuro con un certo successo commerciale. Ne abbiamo parlato con Shao Jinfeng, Design President of SAIC Research and Development Innovation Headquarters. Quali sono i principi fondamentali della vostra filosofia progettuale? «Il nostro design è incentrato sull'utente: nell'era dei veicoli elettrici e intelligenti è ancora più fondamentale concentrarsi sulle persone. Vogliamo realizzare auto belle, in grado di affascinare i clienti per un maggior successo commerciale. Un altro punto fondamentale riguarda i valori dei nostri prodotti e la loro qualità.…

Hyundai Santa Fe Cover story “What makes a car special is its ability to adapt to society's needs even if radical changes have to be made to do so”. Hyundai and Genesis Global Design Centre's Executive Vice President and Head SangYup Lee, stresses the crucial role played by design in the new Santa Fe. “Before launching a model, we do a thorough analysis of trends and try to predict what the future has in store”, Lee tells us speaking from Hyundai's style centre in Namyang, South Korea. “The project got under way five years ago when the pandemic was still to come, but the trend of lengthy out-of-town car trips was emerging”, continues Simon Loasby, Hyundai design chief, connected from London. “A trend that exploded after Covid”, Lee says. “Here in…

Cupra DarkRebel Concept car The enthusiasm of Jorge Diez, Cupra's design director, quickly grows when he tells the genesis of the DarkRebel, the creative drive that captured the scene at the last Monaco Motor Show: “Several ideas were developed from the interaction with our fans, exploring a novel approach”, he explains, referring to the real-virtual exchange that took place thanks to a customisation space in the metaverse. “Since within Metahype, the 'showcase' we set up for the occasion, people could express their preferences through the Hyper Configurator, more than 270,000 proposals were collected from our 'tribe'”, he continues, citing a term very dear to the Car Maker, traceable even in the intentions of the logo introduced in 2018. The project unfolds along the freedom of interpretation granted by such a young…

Opel Experimental Concept car Built around a tapered architecture laden with surface carvings, the latest Rüsselsheim prototype appears, at first glance, to be rather distant from the much more monolithic and dry current production (as in the case of the Astra L). Moreover, the company emphasises that the “experimentation”, also in the namesake, will have no direct impact on any corresponding model. Yet underneath the profiled shapes lies a researched development of today's values, certainly harbinger of a stylistic promise for the years to come: “We are reworking our language, albeit without distorting its principles. This proposal is a necessary step forward”, explains Florian Theis, Chief Designer Advanced Concepts OpelVauxhall. The first formal manifesto dates as far back as 2018, when the GTX Experimental, in many ways a forerunner of the…

In a world that is changing ever so rapidly, from a social, environmental and climate point of view, mobility scenarios are becoming increasingly more complex and user needs are evolving towards less and less standardised routines. Starting from this consideration, the eighteen students of the Master's course in Transportation & Automobile Design at the Politecnico di Milano, organised in four working groups, tried to prove that it is precisely the needs of users that will be the main driving force in defining the characteristics of the vehicles of the future, which will have to be capable of adapting to different scenarios at the same time, from the city to off-road, from motorways to rural routes. MISTRALETTE by Pierluigi Di Ponte (Italy), Javier García Felipe (Spain), Diego Hernan Montenegro Orjuela (Colombia)…

Who would ever have imagined a comeback for the legendary Alfa Romeo 33 Stradale? “We bridged a 57-year gap with a project born out of the dreams of the entire Alfa Romeo Style centre”, Alejandro Mesonero-Romanos, head of Alfa Romeo design who we met up with in Turin at the Alfa Style Centre, told us. “Anyone who does what we do would leap at the chance to engage at least once with such a special car, and we ourselves didn't hesitate before this unique opportunity”. Before us is the Fuoriserie designed by Alfa Romeo's designers for thirty-three élite customers and which until fourteen months ago had just been a beautiful sketch. “We all wanted to have a hand in such an exclusive model, but of course its sustainability was crucial.…

A year ago at the unveiling of the Scénic Vision, the Renault Group's Head of Design Laurens van den Acker told us that, except for a few minor details, the production car's exterior would be virtually identical to the concept's. That has indeed turned out to be the case. We interviewed him again at the Munich show, where the new Renault Scénic E-Tech Electric was officially unveiled. What has changed compared to the Scénic Vision? “Almost nothing on the outside which remains consistent with the principle that CEO Luca De Meo has stated on more than one occasion: we deliver what we promise. That's a principle you have already seen and you will see it again in the Renault 5 and the Renault 4. We remain very faithful to the…

The spread of Chinese brands in Europe has gone hand in hand with the efforts of style centres to create innovative shapes and conquer new markets. Companies like the Saic Group and its MG have given new life to Europe's historical brands, retrieving styling cues from the past and revisiting them for the future with some commercial success. We talked about this with Shao Jinfeng, Design President of SAIC Research and Development Innovation Headquarters. What are the fundamental principles of your design philosophy? “Our design is user-centred: in this age of smart electric vehicles, it is even more crucial to prioritise people. We want to make beautiful cars that attract customers and drive commercial success. Another key point concerns the values of our products and their quality. We encourage our…

Users, their talents, their passions. Once again, design is grounded in the end customer, a growing trend in European schools which, hand in hand with the carmakers partnering end-of-course projects, are increasingly steering students towards predicting where future markets are headed. “A strategic evolution which in effect asks new generations to analyse markets and targets - a fundamental element for the automotive sector that is more and more involved in briefing thesis projects - and which, given the diverse backgrounds of the students, allows a rich tapestry of perspectives to be explored at the same time”, comments Michele Albera, lecturer and co-ordinator of the three-year Transportation Design course at the IED of Turin. As part of this year's thesis project in which the partner was Mitsubishi Motors, the students were…