I see so much of this stuff, time after time at the motor shows that I couldn’t help but giggle.
Still, the cartoon highlights the disconnect between a manufacturer’s reality (our cars are still made from oil and stuff dug out of the ground and run on same) and their marketing (our cars are BFFs with pandas, run on sun and happiness and blow green leaves out of their exhausts).
You can see more of the Coretoons here.
P.S Whatever your take on the exterior of the Toyota FT-EV II, the interior is an absolute cracker, cracker enough to make Citroen designers weep. Sadly Toyota only published one press shot of it so you’ll have to take my word on just how great it is… @EricGallina from Car Design News kindly provided some far better images for your enjoyment. Hat tip to Eric!
Never have two great automotive names been so resolutely underserved by their colaboration.
When I was a kid I was given a book packed to the rafters with images and descriptions of the output of the Italian styling houses up to the mid-80s. Apart from a couple of Pininfarina jobbies like the Ferrari Modulo and Pinin (don’t ask, I love barges hmmmkay?) it was always the sheer audacity and other-worldlieness of the Bertone cars that made me keep turning those pages until the book fell apart.
From BAT to Marzal (stylishly accessorised above) to Carabo to Camargue to Sibilo… the list goes on and on… Bertone was largely responsible for me wanting to become a car designer.
It’s only natural, therefore, that I expect a great deal of Bertone, and while they’ve wavered in the last couple of years, the news that they would be teaming up with Alfa Romeo for Geneva had my heart a-flutter.
Consider that heart shot out of the sky and in the mouth of a rabid dog. I’m hurt and I’m mad. Read the rest of this entry »
Oh how I love the run-up to motor shows! With Geneva but a matter of weeks away, Nissan has revealed the Juke, a productionised version of the cute Qazana @JoeSimpson and I raved about at Geneva last year. Sadly, the car above is not the Juke. It’s my fantasy Juke, with the suicide doors of the Qazana rightfully reinstated.
Although I moved the shut-line back all of 100mm, the difference (for me at least) is night-and-day, making the wonderful Juke just that little bit more insane by keeping a whole lot more coupé in the mix. It’s a subtle change in appearance – if not in engineering – that I sorely wish we could have seen in the real thing.
At the end of the day, it matters little. I love this little box just fine and, after the slightly awkward second-album-syndrome Cube, the Juke puts Nissan back on top of the small car game.
About 7 years ago, if my recollection is correct, we saw the beginnings of a design trend that would take the automotive industry by storm. The progenitor was the Mercedes Vision CLS Concept and the feature was a dramatic, plunging shoulder line that caused some to comment, unfairly in my opinion, that the car looked like a pressed steel banana.
Despite the common name that would be ascribed to the feature, it was actually an ascending shoulder that whipped from the from wheel arch and arced gracefully rearwards. Did it have it’s genesis in the Triumph TR-7? Thankfully, we’ll probably never know and in any case only the most ardent – and odd – automotive design watchers would ever try to make the link…
Read the rest of this entry »
Third time’s clearly the charm with Kia’s baby SUV, the Sportage.
The first generation of the Sportage impressed with it’s cheapness, off-road prowess and… well that’s about it*. The second one, if we’re honest, had even less to recommend it: in a nod to changing market expectations of small SUVs, it dropped any semblance of off-roadability and was simply cheap.
1st and 2nd Generation Kia Sportage (click to enlarge)
Yet given the strides Kia’s been making in the design department of late (the conservative but nicely resolved Koup, Soul and Sorento all come to mind), the new Sportage was always going to represent a significant stylistic departure from its dowdy predecessors. In fact, having looked over the press shots, I’d go do far as to say that the new Sportage is the best resolved Kia to date and another indicator of just how serious the brand is about conquering the middle of the market. Read the rest of this entry »
“The [Peugeot] 505 is a saloon with quite a pleasant appearance, quite efficient engines, quite comfortable seating, quite nice steering and a quite reasonable price. And it is quite well constructed. So, you might say it was merely average. But can it really be that simple? Have Peugeot in fact, played a very clever game where, instead of dazzling us with technology or breathtaking styling, they have decided to woo us with understatement of the profoundest kind?”
Archie Vicar, Automotive Journalist, writing in The Monthly Car Review in October, 1979
The iPad is a tablet computer with quite a pleasant appearance, a quite efficient processor, quite comfortable physical dimensions, a quite nice user experience and a quite reasonable price. And it is quite well constructed. So, you might say it was merely average. But can it really be that simple? Have Apple in fact, played a very clever game where, instead of dazzling us with technology or breathtaking styling, they have decided to woo us with understatement of the profoundest kind?
Given how often I talk about the intersection of automotive design strategy and a generation of kids more interested in their iPhones and iPads than cars, how could I not repurpose the wonderful Mr. Vicar?
And on a similar but different tack: having comprehensively lost their way stylistically, Peugeot would do well to revisit Archie’s observation because it neatly sums up what made the brand so loveable.
Apple, on the other hand, clearly needs no such advice…
Is it just me or are we starting to see more and more of Nemo’s mates find their way onto dry land?
First, there was Nissan’s Grouper/Leaf:
Then there was Lexus’ Fangtooth/LF-A:
Now Mazda’s in on the game with the Devil Ray/Mazda5:
Who have we got to thank for this? Probably Mercedes-Benz and their Box Fish/Bionic Concept from 2005, which broadcast the idea that aquadynamic shapes were better for aerodynamics than… ah… aerodynamic ones.
If our current delight in eking out aerodynamic efficiencies continues, I wouldn’t be surprised if more fish faces start appearing on our roads. Sadly, however, on the aesthetic front the idiom like a fish out of water has never rung truer.
Ford’s new Focus has been unleashed a full year ahead of it’s European on-sale date and it’s already generating substantial comment in the sphere of the blogs. Ed Stubbs and Dustin Shedlarski have both written interesting critiques of a design that I, personally, find a little schizophrenic. But let’s face it: when you’re trying to design one C-Segment product for two markets – one that’s been downsized for decades and another that’s only just coming to terms with the concept – things are bound to get a little hectic. Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve just seen the beginnings of a great design research guide put together by Swedish strategic design bureau Transformator.
Covering different research processes and methods, it breaks design research down into language (sometimes quaintly Swedified) that mere mortal designers can understand and make use of. If you haven’t thought about doing some hard-core research work since your god-forsaken design research classes at uni. then the guide will help you ask ‘why’?, ‘where?’, ‘when?’, ‘how?’ and, most importantly ‘what if…?’ in a structured, useful way.
In a state of continuous development, it’s well worth a browse and a bookmark.
[Source: Tranformator DESIGN RESEARCH GUIDE ]
“A designer is only as good as what he or she knows. If all you know is what you’ve garnered from fifteen years of living in Detroit, it’s going to limit what you can lay down. If you’ve had experiences around the world, you’ll be able to design a much richer story for people to enjoy.”
J Mays, Global Vice President of Design, Ford Motor Company
Just read this in an Esquire interview with J Mays and what he has to say adds to some of the points I was making in my recent interview with Raph Goldsworthy over at Design Droplets.
There’s a whole lot more in the interview that chimes with me too, especially J’s thoughts on simplicity, building stories and the cars of the 50s.
Short but wonderfully sweet, it’s well worth a couple of minutes of your time.
P. S. What better image to represent J’s globetrotting ways than his (and Martin Smith’s) seminal Avus, somewhat out of context with some serious looking travellers in marle catsuits. Hawt.
[Source: Esquire Image: Audi Press]
