Innehållsförteckning för 264 - January / February 2024 från AUTO & DESIGN

“A spaceship for the daily round”. Mitja Borkert, Lamborghini’s design chief, doesn’t mince his words when talking about the Lanzador, a concept car and the latest creation to come out of the Sant’Agata Bolognese Style Centre. “There is something very special about this Lambo. It encapsulates the very essence of our brand, it is inspired by the past while looking to the future and it can claim to have invented a completely new segment”, Borkert continues, not forgetting that we are also talking about a car that is completely original, since the Lanzador is also the first electric Lamborghini in history. “The brief was clear from the start. We had to grab the attention of our customers with a body that combined three different worlds, that of the Urus, the…

“The design language that defines the New Holland CR11 represents a new brand signature - said Vietti - which has been applied to the new tractors. There is a whole new generation of bonnets that follow the style born with the combine harvester”. Various sources of inspiration have dictated the design of this vehicle. “Although very large - added Vietti with its shape, this CR11 wanted to emphasise the concepts of efficiency and the ability to fit into the environment. That’s why it has this yellow side, a colour that has always set apart New Holland combines, which is very sinuous and sculptural, while everything else is black. Even that sort of air intake that you can see in the middle of the body panel serves to streamline the shapes”.…

“The Emeya is a car that tells a love story. Ben Payne, head of Lotus design, has been working with his team on the Brand’s new skin as it embarks on its complete transformation to 100% electric: “When you hold the destiny of a brand like Lotus in your hands, you tend to humanise it until you fall in love with it. You do everything you can to accompany it into a future full of technology and automation, but at the same time you teach it not to shed the values of the past that have made it great so far”. While Lotus’ transformation began with the Eletre SUV, the Emeya saloon definitely represents a second step into the future. “We started from the proportions”, says Payne, whom we meet…

Zeekr 007 Design story It is not James Bond’s car, even if the name - 007 - may have misled some. It is much more: it is the first large sedan from Zeekr, the dynamic Gothenburgbased offshoot of the Chinese group Geely, and it is also the first car of the brand to bear the signature of Stefan Sielaff, vice president for global design. Unlike the Zeekr 001 sportwagon and the Zeekr X urban SUV, both intended primarily for the European market, the Zeekr 007 is intended for the moment only for the Chinese market, like the large SUV Zeekr 009. However it represents the beginning of a new cycle and of a new design philosophy - it’s called Hidden Energy - which at a rapid pace will introduce on…

Design story Citroën ë-C3 The design of the Citroen New ë-C3 started with a challenge: Could the Stellantis brand make a full-electric car in Europe for less than 25,000 euros? “To bring an EV in that segment for that price hasn’t been clone before," design director Pierre Leclercq said. But price doesn’t mean the buyers don’t deserve good design, he added. “You have to make sure that thè customer loves the car,” he said. “Even though it’s cheaper, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t have to be incredible in terms of design. We approached it the same way as any design project." Leclercq and his team were not working with a blank page. Citroën had already developed the Smart Car platform, a multi-energy architecture for small cars in emerging and developing…

Driven by an ongoing quest for environmentally friendly technologies, New Holland Agriculture, a global brand of CNH, has recently created a prototype tractor powered by liquefied natural gas. It is called the T7 Methane Power - LNG and was awarded the prestigious 2023 Green Good Design Award for its ability to combine style, functionality and sustainability. The tractor has a completely redesigned bonnet, which follows the lines of the brand’s new styling direction, featuring fluid lines that give dynamism and lightness to the front. The T7, which emphasises its ecofriendly nature with its new “Clean Blue” exterior colour, is also immediately recognisable by its new lighting system, which guarantees excellent visibility in all conditions of use, by its sky-dome roof with an enlarged glazed area, and by a series of…

When we think of hyper-cars, the mind fills with images of those ultra-high performers that develop enough power to make a Formula 1 car tremble. But some manufacturers take a contrary approach to this market niche. One such is Ares Modena, whose new S1 is not just a sports performance model (after all, it does conceal a C8 Corvette under the bodywork), but a veritable life experience that involves the buyer in all stages of the car’s development, starting with what it should look like. We talked about this with Gianluca Cordua, Head of Design at Ares. “The S1 is the first model on our journey to developing a design identity”, the designer explains. “The intention behind the project was to create a car whose identity did not depend on…

Good design has the power to change the world. This was the theme of the 2023 International Automotive Design Forum, organised by Geely Design in Shanghai on 6 December to celebrate its 10th anniversary. The event brought together Chinese and international industry experts, university and media representatives, and was also attended by Auto&Design. A gathering that portrayed a Chinese design scenario that has evolved at the lightning speed of the digital revolution, keeping pace with a generation of consumers in Constant search of innovation and hi-tech, while holding on to ties with its own culture. A seismic shift from ‘Made in China’ to ‘Designed in China’, from world factory to global innovators. I l buon design ha il potere di cambiare il mondo. È su questo tema che si è…

Styling updates are frequent in the automotive world: the look is freshened up, certain finishes are changed, details are polished to keep up with the times. In agriculture, everything is different. Vehicles are only redesigned when there is a major technical innovation that justifies the change in look. This is what is happening with the New Molland CR11 combine harvester, which in addition to being the largest ever made, also sets new standards in terms of productivity and grain loss reduction. The engineers at the Zedelgem plant in Belgiurn who designed it interacted with parent company CNH’s design centre in Turin led by David Wilkie to give shape to this revolutionary machine. “I am very satisfied with this project said Wilkie - because, if on cars ‘design is king’, on…

The Japanese word Kenshiki means Vision or awareness. In English it can also be translated as insight. So it is no coincidence that Kenshiki Forum is the name of the event that Toyota organises in Brussels every year to lay out its future strategies. It is here that we met up with Simon Humphries, the group’s design chief, surrounded by concept cars showing the next generation of Toyota and Lexus cars at the cutting edge of technological content, but also decidedly eye-catching design-wise. In the past, Toyota design has always seemed to take a back seat to egineering. How did you manage to change things round? “It wasn’t all down to me. The top management gave us a lot of support too. Akio-san (the Chairman Akio Toyoda, ed.) fought hard…

Against a backdrop of timeless beauty in Bologna, at one of the most important Italian vintage car shows, an iconic name in Milanese coachbuilding, Touring Superleggera, has written the latest chapter in its storied history, Sensually contemporary and embodying a nuanced pursuit of excellence, the RH95 has been revealed in its newly revisited guise, refining the concepts celebrating the 95th anniversary of the company to which it owes its name. “We explored the past in depth”, explains Matteo Gentile, who has headed up Touring design since last July. The original design, dated 2021, “has its roots in our Disco Volante. You might say it represents a midengined version of it, displaying as it does the same ‘tornado line’ that cuts through the front wheel arch and marks the sides”. It…

To call it a beach buggy is too simplistic, but finding another name for it is not easy. Skye, the latest born from the fervent imagination of lan Callum who with his years of work first at Aston Martin and then at Jaguar had accustomed us to design excellence, intends to occupy - he explains - “an empty niche between buggies and extreme off-road vehicles”, but it is also another step in Callum’s development as an independent brand as this is the first model completely designed, developed and soon to be produced in the Warwick facility. With one characteristic: “From the waist down it is very off-road, but from the waist up it is very sporty, elegant and fascinating because that is my DNA and I wanted that upper half…