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“It had to be unmistakably Bentley, but with a modern, contemporary touch, not trendy,” head of exterior design Sang Yup Lee says of the Bentayga, the ultra-luxury brand’s first SUV. Previewed in concept form as the EXP 9F, the Bentayga was entirely reworked. It rides on the VW Group’s MLB platform, which it shares with the Audi Q7. As such, the Bentayga has the same wheelbase as the Q7 but is 150mm longer, with most of the added length in the rear overhang. Lee defines the Bentayga as more of an ultra-luxury crossover than a two-box SUV. “We want to highlight all of the elements of [Bentley] sedans,” Lee says of the car’s proportions. “We wanted to make it long, stretched. Usability had to be emphasised in the boot space.”…

“Our flagship”, says Adrian van Hooydonk, “is a special challenge because we always have to surprise our customers in some way, offer them more than they expected. In the present case, the idea was to create modern luxury based on the most advanced technologies and painstaking attention to detail”. According to the BMW Group design chief, the new generation 7 Series is therefore “the most luxurious, most comfortable and overall the most perfect car we have ever built in this class”. But how do we distinguish the concept of “modern luxury” from that of “traditional luxury”? For the Bavarian manufacturer’s designers it was a question of combining the classical (wood, leather, finish) with new elements which, in the words of Van Hooydonk, “make the car smarter”, namely advanced technology, increasingly…

Aduplex with parking space, an arrangement that is typical in Japanese cities. Not a place where you’d imagine a design studio to be: “True, it’s small and looks like a domestic residence but that’s exactly the way we want it. A kind of “secret place” where creatives find an attractive environment and can focus totally on their work”, explains Yoshihiro Sawa, Executive General Manager of Toyota design who came over from the Aichi headquarters to meet us at Toyota Design Intersection, in the vibrant neighbourhood of Shibuya in Tokyo. Hiroji Sugiura, Project Manager and Misako Shiba of the Design Strategy department as well as visiting designers work here and as the studio’s name suggests it receives inputs from a variety of creative contexts. Art, fashion, tendencies and innovations from various…

The divorce from Ford in 2008 has not thrown Mazda into reverse, quite the contrary. Using the corporate Kodo design strategy, as set out by Ikuo Maeda in 2009, the independent Japanese car maker has reinvented itself with a succession of individualistic models, all outstanding for their elegant proportions. And six years later, there is still enough creative room to evolve Kodo even further. So the name ‘Koeru’ (Japanese for Go Ahead) wasn’t chosen without reason. “Kodo stands for vitality and dignity,” Iwao Koizumi, chief designer at Mazda, explained in Frankfurt on the occasion of the debut of this concept. “Life style, expression and emotion are key elements of the Kodo design language. For the Koeru, we tried to evolve it, retaining the vitality but making it stronger and more…

There was a time when all kids dreamed of owning a bike, that symbol of freedom and real passion. But for some time now, the changed overall situation paints a different scenario that is less “impetuous” and where increasingly often the emotions give way to awareness. Is this course irreversible? We discuss the subject with Marco Lambri, director of the Piaggio Group’s Style Centre which looks after the Piaggio, Vespa, Aprilia, Moto Guzzi, Gilera, Derbi and Scarabeo brands. “The concept of freedom”, Lambri explains, “is always the same. But the means and the constraints that enable you to experience it have changed. Personally I don’t believe in the story of the smartphone replacing a means of transport. The great return of the bicycle and the advent of electric models show…

“The problem was how to interpret AD in the right way”. Thomas Ingenlath heads Volvo design and that’s how he explains the birth of Concept 26, the Swedish manufacturer’s contribution to the intriguing world of AD: Autonomous Driving. “We avoided going for an alluring showcar”, he says, “but preferred an intellectual approach, given that the technology already exists. As the car’s exterior is not involved, our Concept 26 regards solely the interior”. The schedule is very tight: “It’s like a race for pole position”, says Robin Page, head of Volvo’s interior design department, who was assisted in this project by Daniel Forsgren: “All the big manufacturers are working on this and it was important to present our own take on it”. As early as this year, Volvo will be fitting…

“It very often happens that show cars attract attention for innovative features which disappear on the production model. By contrast, in the e-tron quattro concept we have held back some novelties that will make the production car truly surprising”. Having said that, Audi design chief Marc Lichte announces changes in form and substance that will be seen in an original crossover scheduled for 2018 that many already call the Q6, although Audi is not confirming the name for the moment. Based on the same platform as the upcoming Q5, it will differ from this above all in its proportions, with the tail having a less voluminous, shooting brake type of design. “It’s not a classical Suv”, Lichte explains. “I wanted the e-tron quattro to be different, making it clear that…

As soon as it was unveiled at Frankfurt, the GripZ was hailed by many observers as the successor of the Juke. “It is a pure concept, a design study for a new type of crossover”, Nissan design chief Shiro Nakamura stepped in immediately to clear things up. "It’s true that when we unveiled the Juke for the first time in a concept car version it was so unusual that everybody thought it was only a styling exercise, but this time it’s different, even though some aspects of the GripZ will influence the next generation of that car”. But the GripZ isn’t a styling exercise either. With its complex, sculpted forms that appear to be generated by intersecting volumes, it experiments with a new kind of compact crossover. "We wanted something…

When Tsunehiro Kunimoto (64, with almost 40 years spent in Nissan design) took over the reins of Mitsubishi design in April 2014, the first thing he did was to study the company to rediscover its true heritage. So he decided to not only visit the headquarters of Mitsubishi Motor Company, but also its Heavy Industries wing. “I looked at processes and met people. I wanted to re-establish the connection between the brand and design” he said at the unveiling of the eX Concept at Tokyo. “Design is important in expressing who we are. We needed to create a new ‘Mitsubishi-ness’ that is evolved and future-oriented but still very Japanese.” This concept has implications rooted even more deeply in culture than in form. “The Western approach is very different from the…

ED Design made the headlines at the last Geneva Show with the Torq, an autonomous racing car concept that is part of a broader research project (MAAL, Mobile Autonomous Automobile Laboratory, see Auto&Design n° 215). A far-sighted look into the future, “but we are also working on a great many cars for today that will be unveiled in the next few months”, says Mike Robinson, Design Director of ED Design. So much so that 2015 could be called “the year of the Suv”. As many as seven sport utility car projects, for the moment only presented to specific customers, have been created with the Chinese market in mind, where this type of vehicle is much appreciated and enjoys a lot of market appeal. Mike Robinson’s background of expertise in this…

“We took the Astra to the gym, to make it lighter, more efficient and more dynamic and give it athletic power” begins a smiling Mark Adams – design vice president of General Motors Europe – as he admires the latest arrival in the Opel family. Designed entirely at Rüsselsheim from a blank sheet of paper, with an efficient body underpinned by an all-new platform, the new Astra interprets the evolution of the brand’s style philosophy towards a theme of: “Sculpture meets German precision”. The soft volumes and sensual lines creating an emotive bond with the user are a legacy from the Monza Concept - the manifesto of Opel’s new design language. “Monza was a true show car, a portrait of the formal coherence of our design direction, and a concept…

Bugatti’s Vision Gran Turismo was created for the successful GT6 racing game by Sony Polyphony and debuted as a full-size, working prototype at the 2015 Frankfurt motor show. Stripped of excessive luxury and designed to race, the Vision Gran Turismo was the result of engineering expertise and extensive aerodynamic research, which yielded an impressive function driven design containing Bugatti’s four key DNA elements. The project started in Spring 2015, with Bugatti thinking about how to launch the new Chiron, the Veyron replacement that will be revealed at the 2016 Geneva motor show. “We thought about how to introduce this car, the first signal,” says Bugatti head of design Achim Anscheidt. “We always wanted to go racing with our product or do special customer projects in that direction and we never…

A common denominator links two very different research projects – the Toyota FCV Plus, a vehicle with futuristic forms and content, and the Lexus LF-FC, a large saloon that will shortly go into production. Presented at the last Tokyo Motor Show, these two concepts were both born in the Tokyo Design Laboratory, the Toyota Group’s styling studio. We were taken round it by Hidenori Takatoo, General Manager of the studio, together with Katsuhiro Inatomi and Kan Takei, Group Manager and Assistant Manager of Design Communication Toyota respectively. To all intents and purposes, the Tokyo Design Laboratory has its headquarters in the capital, but away from the skyscrapers and motorways. It is sunk in greenery on top of a hill surrounded by cherry trees – the spectacle of flowers blooming in…

To outfit the interior of the Teatro for Dayz Concept, Nissan’s colour and trim designers did not have to do much research. The entire dash and seat surface is in fact one giant screen for showing information and multicolour graphics. The result is that a cabin where otherwise a totally white background dominates can be personalised at will. In actual fact the technology necessary is not yet available to hypothesise use in high volume production, but this concept developed on the basis of the Nissan Dayz kei car suggests a series of reflections on new consumer habits, as Satoru Tai, Executive Design Director Nissan, explains. “It is a pure concept dedicated specifically to the generation of digital natives. They are ready to lay out significant sums on communication devices to…

KTM Move Extreme is the title of a thesis project prepared by students of the fifth term winter 2015 of the degree course in Industrial Design at the FH Joanneum in Graz, in collaboration with KTM and Kiska. Kronreif und Trunkenpolz Mattighofen (KTM) is an Austrian motorcycle manufacturing company that was founded back in 1934 by an engineer, Hans Trunkenpolz. Originally established as a workshop for cars and motorcycles, it gradually began to manufacture bicycles too, and in 1951 it developed a project for the company’s first motorcycle, the R100, a light 98 cc bike. From that moment the company’s motor production expanded in all directions. Looking to the future, the students in Graz directed their design activities to the creation of a whole range of concepts from different perspectives:…