Innehållsförteckning för No. 173 från AUTO & DESIGN

Master with Fiat Group As from this year, Milan offers aspiring car designers another option. The Faculty of Design at Milan Polytechnic has just introduced the new “Transportation and Automobile Design” Master’s course, made possible by a collaborative effort between the polytechnic’s Department of Industrial Design, Art, Communication and Fashion (INDACO) and Fiat Group Automobiles. The goal of the Master’s course is to prepare designers for the professional world by supplementing their existing academic knowledge in the areas of information technology and industrial processes such as, in particular, virtual modelling, the development of interiors and research into colour and trim. Fiat, an established patron of the technical and educational activities of the polytechnic, will contribute to the course by providing the services of its own personnel and offering internships within…

At this October’s Mondial de l’Automobile in Paris, the French carmakers pulled out all the stops to put their creativity on show with remarkable courage. In a motor show dominated by innovative powertrains, everyone highlighted hybrid technology in the most spectacular concept cars. A return to the future. Unfortunately, the Show opened its doors just a few days after the start of the global economic crisis, which dealt yet another blow to a French motor industry already strained by fiscal measures slowing down sales of larger engined cars introduced in early 2008. The European Union directive unfairly penalises cars deemed to be too polluting, on the basis of an arbitrary figure of 160 g/km of CO2, creating a scenario in which it is extremely difficult to sell dreams and flaunt…

Renault already enjoys a reputation as the inventor of the MPV. Almost a quarter of a century since the debut of the first Espace, the marque’s definitive MPV – a luxurious, comfortable conveyance with impeccable road manners – could now inherit its looks from the Ondelios concept presented at the Mondial. Whatever the case, there is a message to be read between the very sleek lines of this long distance tourer. The management at Renault design want to see the range topping MPV evolve into a flowing and sleek monolithic shape that is comfortable and still spacious enough for six. Measuring 4.80 in length, the Ondelios concept boasts a Cd of 0.29. Renault design chief Patrick Le Quément wanted his MPV to be “treated like an object sculpted from a…

Transforming an imposing Rolls-Royce into a sophisticated Concours d’Elegance show car is no mean feat, especially considering the powerful character and sheer size of the original car. Pininfarina pulled it off however, presenting its latest one-off, (and, rumour has it, costing over 4 million Euros) commissioned by the British collector Roland Hall: the Hyperion, a gargantuan two-seater convertible with barchetta cues maintaining, in addition to some of the interior, the platform, mechanicals and electronics of what was originally a Phantom Drophead Coupé under its skin. This is the third time that Pininfarina, which has recently made a comeback to the one-off market, with models such as the Ferrari P4/5 for the collector Jim Glickenhaus and the Ferrari Scaglietti K for Peter Kalikov, has worked on a Rolls-Royce, with the previous…

There’s always more than one way to look at a car. What some observers at the Paris motor show saw in the Kiyora – the latest stunning concept from a group of designers now in the third year of a period of prolific creativity – was a glimpse of a future Mazda1. Others – namely the official voices of the Japanese marque – emphasised the significance of the name, which translates as “clean” or “pure”, and drew attention to the flank design, which is reminiscent of a water droplet, as is appropriate for a car that develops the nature-inspired Nagare concept. Mazda design chief Laurens van den Acker, however, is much more prosaic: “It’s an onion”. He smiles, and then explains himself: “With Nagare, we started a new language of…

While having absolute freedom of choice in the creation of a project may appear to be both a challenge and a risk for a young and inexperienced car designer, the proposals for future automobiles presented at the DREAM exhibition proved the exact opposite to be true. The Torino Esposizioni expo centre, the historical home of the Turin Motor Show, was chosen as the stage for the 2008 ‘Stile Italiano Giovani’ awards, the sixth edition of the national competition founded in 1998 by the ANFIA coachbuilders’ association, which has rapidly established itself as an event of key interest for students all over the world. Aspiring young designers aged between 16 and 28 were given the chance to exhibit their original exterior and interior design proposals for every possible type of automobile.…

A hundred years ago, on September 27, 1908, the first Model T Ford rolled out of the Piquette factory near Detroit, paving the way to mass production with the newborn technology of the production chain. The world of transport changed overnight and the era of mass distribution of the automobile began. The Model T phenomenon swept through the whole of America – demand was so great that the cars were only made in black, as offering other colours would waste too much precious production time. This was a car that did not break with tradition, but integrated with it, making the traditions themselves change. It had many things in common with horse-drawn carriages, such as its track, designed to fit the ruts in the cart tracks that had still not…

“Twenty years after” reads the plaque certifying the authenticity of the 499 numbered examples of the new Campagnola, reincarnated as a limited series two full decades after the last of Fiat’s historical off-roaders rolled off the production line. Unlike its forebear built from 1951 to 1987, the 21st Century Campagnola carries the Iveco badge, as it is based on the Massif, a model manufactured by the heavy vehicles division of the Fiat group. The design of the Massif was penned by Italdesign Giugiaro. The project is a derivative of the Santana PS10, of which Giugiaro retained the extremely functional pure off-roader layout, with two boxy volumes, but giving the Massif a decidedly up to date look, with twin circular headlights that no longer sit side by side and are now…

Volvo stunned everyone by presenting the XC60 concept at Detroit in 2007. Up until then, the Scandinavian design of the Goteborg based brand depended strongly on a functional, timeless elegance. With this new model, Volvo chief designer Steve Mattin turned this tradition on its head, introducing innovative cues and less classical lines with a more expressive content. These concepts, albeit with slightly more restraint, have been carried over onto the production car. The design of this SUV is sleek and dynamic, with tall flanks defined by taut lines and mouldings accentuating the muscular look. At the front, an elongated grille and almond headlights give the car a determined face with plenty of personality. The rear also exudes character, with the design of the tailgate in perfect harmony with the elongated…

Dream, an exhibition dedicated to the automobile, was the ideal conclusion to the year of ‘Turin World Design Capital 2008’, during which the Piedmontese capital was the centre of attention of the international design world, with a packed calendar of shows, conventions and activities. It was a natural choice to bring the year to an end with an initiative dedicated to the car’s role in Turin, a city that has always been a cornerstone of the car industry. Dream (organised by Giuliano Molineri and Paolo Tuminelli, and accompanied by a catalogue published by Allemandi) took an unusual perspective in telling its story, tying together the threads of a series of experiments conducted over the past half century as part of a dreamlike vision of the new frontier of the car.…

“Designing simplicity is one of the hardest jobs a designer can be given” says Walter de’ Silva, an advocate – since his appointment as design supremo for the Volkswagen group – of a return to formal purity, to an aesthetic that stands out and can be understood without resorting to pointless ornamentation. The new Golf is a child of this philosophy, it is a “stable form coherent with its history, and that is clear and legible in its expression”, after 34 years and over 26 million units sold worldwide. The car has a dual role: to continue the lineage of one of the definitive Volkswagen models and to rediscover the DNA of the brand, to indicate the direction that future products from Wolfsburg will take. “We told ourselves: you can’t…

Of the three French marques, Citroën has been the most fortunate in recent times, enjoying a positive period helped along by the success of the C4 Picasso MPV and encouraged by the warm reception of the C5 saloon and Tourer, in which the brand now reaps the rewards in terms of design of a dynamic policy. It was undoubtedly this auspicious transformation that earned Jean-Pierre Ploué, head of Citroën design since 1999, his promotion to design director for the entire Peugeot-Citroën group. It would appear that these satisfactory results have been interpreted as a license for immoderate excess, as demonstrated by the Hypnos, an imposing creation definable as a crossover, as it is a fusion of a large roadgoing saloon and an off-road station wagon. As a genre, it represents…

The California is a smorgasbord of firsts for Ferrari: it is the marque’s first model with a front mid mounted 8 cylinder engine, the first with a folding hard top and the first ‘2+almost2’ convertible. “A raft of firsts”, commented Andrea Pininfarina just a few days before his untimely death, “making this a unique model, not a replacement for another, and an addition to the Ferrari range.” During the car’s presentation at Paris, Luca di Montezemolo expressed a similar concept: “A Ferrari for a different kind of Ferrari owner”: so different and, most significantly, so numerous in fact that even before its presentation, they had already snapped up all of the production quotas for 2009 and 2010. A product of the time-honoured relationship with Pininfarina, which penned the exterior, the…

Viewed with a critical eye, experts might see some evolutionary details in the design of Opel and Vauxhall’s new upper-medium Insignia. But the model should actually be seen as a cumulative result of some earlier attempts to change General Motors Europe design language. Insignia’s presence builds on some of Opel’s other model details and the sum of it all is a milestone design. That is how Mark Adams, vice president of GM Europe design, and his Insignia team – Malcom Ward (chief exterior design), John Puskar (executive director interior design) Peter Jaksch (chief designer colour & trim) – want to see Insignia. “With the Insignia, we have redefined our design vocabulary. It expresses an emotional experience not only for this model but for the whole brand. Five years from now…

Bonetto Design has looked to the past, the present and the future to celebrate half a century in industrial design and the fiftieth anniversary of the studio founded in 1958 by Rodolfo Bonetto, a legendary name in post war Italian design. Rodolfo was succeeded by his son Marco, a man with experience of his own, who is and has always been deeply passionate about his role as ‘design manager’. A retrospective event-exhibition was organised to mark the anniversary, evocatively titled 1958/2008-Cinquant’anni di Design: celebriamo il passato, progettiamo il futuro, (Fifty years of design: celebrating the past, designing the future), hosted one evening at the Officine del Volo in Milan. The exhibition intertwined the three aspects of time, with different colours used to represent each: yellow for the past, red for…

In mid October, Palazzo Te, the stately summer residence of the Gonzaga dukes built in 1500 by the architect and painter Giulio Romano for Federico II, hosted the prize giving ceremony for the fifth edition of the Autostyle design competition. This is the second time that the Palazzo has been chosen as the venue for the culmination of the competition organised by Berman, a prominent manufacturer of bodywork components and premium accessories for sports and luxury cars based in San Benedetto Po. Berman is renowned for working with the craftsmanship of a renaissance artisan workshop yet with the professionalism of an established industrial concern. Since its inception, the competition, open to students of automotive design schools all over the world, has grown remarkably, attracting a number of satellite initiatives, workshops,…

Thirty years since its foundation, the Institute of Applied Art and Design in Turin celebrated this special anniversary together with the city of Turin and Giugiaro Design, bringing creativity and design to the streets of the Piedmontese capital with the exhibition “2008 Fatti di Design” organised in Piazza Palazzo di Città as part of the Turin World Design Capital calendar. Also on display were twenty end-of-course projects – four of which as 1:4 scale models – developed by the students in the context of two curricular programmes: “Alfa Romeo Next Generation” and “Ducati Superlight 2020”. Both programmes were conducted in collaboration with these two iconic Italian marques. For the event, the square was decked out in red – a colour symbolic of the two brands but also of the passion…

Jazz, the second generation. Seven years since its debut, Honda has renewed the baby in its range in an operation going far beyond a mere facelift. “It has been a complex evolution”, explains Toshiyuki Harada, who headed the project, “founded on the success of the first series, which was extremely popular for its design, space and efficiency.” The Japanese marque has focused on one of these attributes in particular, improving efficiency with two new engines: a 1.2 and a 1.4 litre petrol, offering the lowest fuel consumption (5.3 and 5.4 litres/100 km respectively) and emissions (125 and 128 g CO2) in the B segment, and with the larger unit even available with a sequential gearbox with steering wheel mounted shift selectors. The new car boasts better visibility thanks to A…

This year, Alfredo Häberli proposes a kitchen perceived as something to taste, something to smell. An invitation to the senses, if you will, of taste and smell, but also a stimulus for our ‘involuntary’ memory, evoking recollections, fragments of life and moods. On the one hand of today’s growing kitchen sector we have a proliferation of increasingly minimalist, professional-looking designs, where function is often sacrificed in the name of aesthetics, while on the other, new sophisticated appliances in vivid colours are gaining popularity, in defiance of those who believe that they should only ever be white. Then there are those who stop to consider the power of memory, who look to the past to find the heritage and warmth of the ‘kitchen of the memory’ – specifically, a kitchen in…

Finally, the homage he deserved In spite of being one of the most brilliant creative minds in the automotive world, Franco Scaglione has never been paid the homage he deserved, either when or was alive or after his silent, solitary death, which was just as tormented and painful as the last decade of his personal and professional life, when all he was remembered for were the few fleeting appearances of his best known aerodynamic coupé studies, such as the BAT models, and his seminal masterpiece, the Alfa 33 Stradale. And yet during his career as a designer, he had created around sixty models. The city of Florence, where Scaglione was born, the University of Florence, where he studied, and the ASI Automotoclub Storico Italiano (Italian historic car and motorcycle club),…

As soon as the formal language of the new Volkswagen was clear, the concepts laid out by the design criteria were applied to Project A6 (the 6th generation Golf) to completely redesign the car in every single one of its painstakingly defined details, while retaining the architecture, which had already been signed off. The result is a car that is true to itself and is immediately recognisable as a Golf. Much of the inspiration came from the first generation, the original styled by Giorgetto Giugiaro in 1974, and the fourth iteration presented in 1997 which, according to Walter de’ Silva and Flavio Manzoni, was the “first of the contemporary Golfs: with great formal purity, it was the first to show the path of quality without turning it into a slogan”.…

Peugeot came to the show in a period of internal turmoil for the company. Jerôme Gallix, who succeeded Gérard Welter in 2007 as head of the brand’s design centre, left the company just a few days before the Mondial. Apparently, his departure was a consequence of a reorganisation of the management of ADN, the PSA Peugeot-Citroën Group research and design centre. Who knows if the RC HYbrid4 model was conceived under the direction of Jerôme Gallix and if it heralded the style that he intended to apply to the next generation of the brand’s products. Or, perhaps, if this style marks a new beginning for Peugeot’s formal language. The lines are more flowing and the general look less aggressive than in the past, and the superb satin paintwork emphasises the…

At the Paris Motor Show, Pininfarina behaved just like many of its carmaker clients. In the build-up to the unveiling of the electric car it will be manufacturing under its own brand name next year as part of a joint venture with the French firm Bolloré, it presented a teaser concept that was very close to the final product. One of the most interesting debuts at the Mondial, the B0 was exhibited alongside its precious LMP batteries – produced by Bolloré using lithium metal polymer technology, which can store five times more energy than conventional batteries and can be recharged in just a few hours in plug-in mode. The batteries made a break away from traditional architectures possible, eliminating first and foremost the volume taken up by the engine…

On board the Insignia, there is an immediate impression of substantial quality in everything from the style to the materials and the equipment. As Holger Weyer – who headed the project for the interior – explains, the designers opted for a path of total innovation and a sporty and elegant yet restrained character to ensure that existing Opel clients would feel at home in the car. An original touch is the upper ‘blade’ surface of the dash, which joins with the door panels, where the handles echo the boomerang shape of the creases in the flanks and the lights. On the subject of lighting, the cabin interior is illuminated at night with an emotive warm red, which, in certain variants, is also available for the instruments as an alternative to…

In agriculture, as in all sectors of the working world, design, meaning the interaction between form and function, is the key element in ensuring the functionality of a machine. It was true in the age of oxdrawn ploughs and in the age of the hot bulb engine, and it is still true today, with ever more sophisticated machines and computers linked to navigation systems to manage and control operations such as ploughing, and parameters such as sowing density and the width and overlap of grass or wheat cutting rows. In a context where cutting costs and optimising productivity and yield are the primary objectives, the machine you use really can make the difference. One example of this is a leviathan from New Holland, the CR9090 combine harvester for large areas…

Can you imagine the modern manufacturing process without automated systems? Probably not. Where machines – or robots, to give them their more exotic and cybernetic name – have been used to replace human labour, production systems are faster and more efficient. But what role could robots play in our private lives, and would it be possible to introduce them into our own personal reality? Suyin, an Asian electronics company with branches in Europe, has tried to answer these questions with “My private robot”. This was a project given to the students of the Industrial Design faculty of Fh-Joanneum in Graz, in collaboration with the German branch of the robotics company, to develop robots for introduction into everyday life in the near future. The brief did not call for humanoids to…

“This was not a gamble, we strongly believed that a dual fuel petrol/LPG solution was the right choice. Offered initially on the Matiz, this eventually proved to be a winning strategy.” These are the words of the managing director of Chevrolet Italia, the first carmaker to offer this fuel solution long before the spectre of soaring crude prices reared its head. Today, more confident than ever about its choice, the company is now extending the option throughout its entire model range. A by-product of the crude oil refining process, LPG (liquefied petroleum gas) boasts a number of interesting chemical and physical properties – it offers high energy yields, contains very little sulphur compounds and burns extremely cleanly, with minimal environmental impact. At the pumps, it costs practically half as much…

Focusing on the languages commonly used in design, a group of international experts has analysed the most significant trends in interior design, producing a forecast for the entire furniture sector, which will be presented in January at the next edition of the Cologne furniture show. The results of this research – brought to you first by “Auto&Design” – will allow the industry to consider new approaches to how design is presented to the public at furniture shows and possible adaptations to the instruments currently in use for dialogue between all those involved, on all different levels and in all capacities. The results will also be of use for the organisation of certain product presentations, especially for lifestyle related products, and for the definition of advertising campaigns in magazines and in…