Innehållsförteckning för No. 209 från AUTO & DESIGN

The most astute observation at the Paris show last fall came from Chrysler-Fiat’s design leader, Lorenzo Ramaciotti: “Journalists keep telling me this is a dull show, but if you look carefully, there is something new on almost every stand.” He was absolutely correct, but what the journalists were really saying was that there wasn’t much that was truly exciting. A new Jaguar aimed at a larger audience should have stirred enthusiasm, but in fact the XE comes across as a nice car that already feels about two years old. A good car, no doubt. A strong seller in a new niche for the firm, almost certainly. But for all the impressive aluminum structure technology, it’s a bit as expected. Consider the new Lamborghini Asterion hybrid, impressive in having 910 horsepower…

“One of the most important aspects of car design is the emotional link with the public. We must trigger an emotional motivation to purchase in them.” Moray Callum, the Vice President for Global Design at Ford is rightly convinced that this is so. We met him in Cologne, together with Joel Piaskowski, Design Manager for Ford of Europe. It was a chance to examine the way design is organised at the blue oval, as well as some of the latest issues in car design. A journey, seen as an experience of driving and movement, and the brand values expressed by the face of the car and by even the smallest detail, are the main chapters of every project, whether it regards series production or the development of a concept car…

The Q80 Inspiration concept is an ultra luxury performance car, a preview of a higher echelon premium limousine from Nissan’s luxury brand. With a sloping roofline and Kammtail rear end, the four-door saloon appears to be taking on the more established German players in the fastback segment – namely the Audi A7 and Porsche Panamera. But Infiniti’s global head of design Alfonso Albaisa quickly shuts that down. “We'll have the romance,” he says of Infiniti’s individual design language, illustrating his steadfast ambition to differentiate the brand from other carmakers in the premium segment. “It’s not emotion because everyone says emotion. It’s not emotion as much as the dream of designing a car. I'm not trying to make sex on wheels. Just a dream.” Albaisa’s vision is embodied in the Q80…

“Yes we can”. Apart from being one of the most famous catch phrases in cinema history (from Mel Brooks’s ‘Frankenstein Jr’), this is the title of the annual meeting organised by Skorpion Engineering now at its seventh edition. An opportunity to discuss everything Automotive, namely the core business of this Milan company that specialises in the design and production of prototypes and small and medium sized series of finished products. This year the event took place in Turin at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, with an afternoon of workshops where specialist engineers came together to mix experiences. The opening speech by Italo Moriggi, MD of the Skorpion Company, on the subject “Italian Design and Rapid Developing Cars” opened the way to a succession of contributions directed at an audience of…

Imagine a two-wheeled vehicle that looks to the future and explores new technologies while respecting the environment and answering the needs of young users. This was the premise of the 2013/14 thesis project for the Transportation Design diploma course held by IED in collaboration with Aprilia. The brief put forward by the Italian brand was to explore new concepts for two-wheeled vehicles for urban and extra-urban mobility that also took the history, pioneering nature and sports heritage of Aprilia into account. The work group of 12 students started their projects with an initial study of both the history of the brand and the company as it is today, visiting the Aprilia plant in Noale and with the invaluable contribution of Head of Design Centre Marco Lambri and Design Centre Specialist…

As Pär Heyden observes, safety does not express luxury, but care for passengers does. A feeling of wellbeing, a stress-free relationship with the car, interfaces for communicating with friends, quality of materials and precision parts mean the chance to compete with the best. “They put us in the right league”, says Heyden, head of design strategy at Volvo, who works closely with Thomas Ingenlath in crafting the Swedish company’s new status. “The debate has always centred on Scandinavian design but they always show us the same pictures: birches, the rocks on the west coast, Swedish furniture of the ‘50s, Arne Jacobsen’s Swan Chair a beautiful object but it dates back to 1958. We are tired of all this, there must surely be something new in Scandinavian design, something real and…

The Mercedes-AMG GT was designed in collaboration with the highly qualified engineers at Mercedes’ in house tuning arm AMG, with the goal to compete head on with the well-established 911 and newcomer McLaren 650S. Based on a shortened SLS platform, the GT’s design is a clear departure from the SLS as it embodies Mercedes’ Sensual Purity design philosophy, says Vice-President of Design Daimler AG Gorden Wagener. He defines the design ethos as having three core attributes: modernity, authenticity, and simplicity. “We don’t want to make a direct comparison to the SLS,” Wagener notes, “This is a different price point.” Instead the Mercedes-AMG GT expresses the philosophy through “simplified surfacing and minimal lines” says Wagener, coupled with “technology and craftsmanship”. Though only fractionally smaller than the SLS – the area ahead…

Infiniti demonstrated its ambition to become a key player in the premium marketplace with the opening of a new design studio inaugurated near parent company Nissan’s European design base (NDE) in London, UK. The new London studio is the first of three new design centres dedicated to the Infiniti brand, with other facilities scheduled to open near Nissan’s existing design studios in Beijing, China (NDC) and San Diego, California (NDA) by 2015. The new 900m2 space, located in the Battleship building adjacent to NDE’s Paddington headquarters, houses all exterior, interior and colour and trim designers. Working in conjunction with clay modellers and utilising the same fabrication facilities as the Nissan studio, the Infiniti design studio team is dedicated solely to furthering the global design objectives of Infiniti. “We’re putting forward…

“Passion is what moves us all”. This is how Cesar Piéri began his account of the Jaguar Project 7, presented at the Goodwood Festival of Speed in August and shown at the last Paris Motor Show. The car was born by chance after the Italo-Argentinian designer had left a drawing on his desk and design chief Ian Callum spotted it while he was reviewing another project. It is a story laden with personal involvement, ideal for raising the curtain on the eleventh edition of Autostyle given its symbolic value, that of marking the completion of a cycle of which Autostyle can bear proud witness. It was just 2011 when Cesar Piéri, today a designer with Jaguar and author of Project 7, was still a student at Milan Polytechnic and was…

Outcome of five years of research and recently brought to market, the HP synchronous motor designed for Lafert by the Miquadra team of Riccardo Varini and Andrea Cero with Alessandro Pedron has been hauling in the prizes (European New Product Innovation Leadership Award 2013 and an honorary mention at the Compasso d'Oro ADI 2014). “The focal point of the project is the volumetric fusion of engine and drive unit”, the team confirms, “tucked into a minimalist, single shell casing, a veritable formal breakthrough in a historically rigorous (and static) market that has always been suspicious of formal innovations”. There is fresh demand for motors whose appearance needs to be refined because they are exposed to view. Applications are aesthetically more and more demanding and selective and include contexts such as…

Utility ATVs & Snowmobiles is the title of the thesis project assigned to the students of the sixth semester of the Industrial Design graduate course at Fh-Joanneum in Graz. The objective of the project, which was supervised by Head of Degree Programme Michael Lanz and developed in collaboration with Benelli Watercraft, was to create a concept for a modern vehicle for one to three persons destined for use on snow, in the city or off-road. Known as a producer of jet skis, Benelli Watercraft has recently started developing snowmobiles and ATVs for use on snow and dry land. Six projects were presented by the students, who used their talents to create agile, environmentally sustainable vehicles such as quads for urban and off-road environments and versatile snowmobiles for winter sports use.…

At long last, Ferrari is recognized Was it about the money? At last, powers-that-be at the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elégance have faced the reality that automotive elegance exists in our times, that it has flowered since 1939, and that their insistence that only cars built more than three-quarters of a century ago are best exemplars of automotive elegance is simply ridiculous. At the beginning in 1950 only new cars were considered. First Best of Show was the Edwards R-26 Special Sports Roadster, an alloy-bodied car built to the desires of Sterling Edwards, a wealthy enthusiast who avidly supported the idea of road racing, including the races at Pebble Beach, where the concours was a free added attraction on Sunday after racing finished. The next few years saw wins by production…

Even sportier, more aerodynamic and more technological. That’s how the next generation of Audi’s is shaping up, promises Marc Lichte, the four-ring brand’s design chief since February this year. We met him in Paris where he let us in on what to expect from the first assignment carried out on his watch, a concept car that is ready to be unveiled at Los Angeles. A veritable manifesto for Audi’s future design language as seen through a car of great dimensions, explains Lichte: “It is a teaser for the upcoming A8, A7 and A6. No individual model is specified but all the important elements will go into production. It marks a profound change even though looking at it there is no question it is an Audi”. Every brand passes a number…

After thirty years, the time has come for a fresh new start for the Espace. The new generation breaks away from the classic MPV mould to become a crossover: in the new series presented at Paris, the airy ambience and modular flexibility of a family car genre pioneered by Renault are matched by style and presence. Simply put, the new Espace embodies the essence of the Regie’s new design direction. “This is the sixth petal – representing wisdom – of the daisy constituting our formal language strategy” explains Renault design chief Laurens van den Acker. “It is the petal allowing us to be more explorative, more visionary, more futurist. Espace has become the icon of our innovation.” Says François Leboine, who was responsible for the exterior design: “we wanted to…

Just hearing this iconic name instantly conjures up an image of the Ducati Scrambler from the 1970s. This was a bike based on the original version from 1962 – a model conceived specifically for American tastes – which quickly captured the hearts of the public with its perfect mix of style, rideability and a nonconformist attitude reflecting the spirit of the times. A true icon, which enthusiasts have been begging Ducati to bring back ever since it went out of production in 1975. And their wish has finally come true with the new Scrambler, which inherits all the personality of its forebear and already starts life as a very special model. So special in fact that a whole new division was created within Ducati for its inception – the Scrambler…

Slipping through the traffic with the agility of a motorcycle, but protected by an enclosed body with an innovative and attractive design that limits its environmental impact. This is the scenario that Helix Motors suggested to the Transportation Design students at IED Barcelona (and extended to their colleagues in Turin), inviting them to interpret the vehicle that Helix – a Hong Kong start-up with operational headquarters in Newport Beach, California – intends to put into production soon. It is a three-wheeled vehicle approximately 3.5 metres long and 1 metre wide, with two seats in tandem, driven by an electric motor with a range extender, tilting with respect to the rear axle in order to “lean” on bends like a motorcycle. An appealing subject for future designers, which became the subject…

The Concept Estate is a natural child of the Concept Coupé: in the sense, above all, that it physically devoured the coupé (at least its front half) on the road to the Geneva Show last spring; and then because it adds a child’s creativity to the authority of the father. “This concept”, Thomas Ingenlath says, “regards the interaction with all modern elements of connectivity, and the controls are organised in an absolutely intuitive, easy-to-use way.” You have to interpret it “in terms of simplicity”, says Robin Page, head of interiors. “With such simple controls it is as though the driver has been freed from a pair of handcuffs, but the choice we made also allowed us to develop splendidly harmonious architecture for the interiors which takes shape around the big…