Table of contents for No. 217 in AUTO & DESIGN

The Buick Avista concept was the star of the Detroit auto show, taking home the EyesOn Design best concept car award - the second for the brand in as many years. The low-slung 2+2 seat concept was well deserving of the win. Developed to explore the bandwidth of the Buick brand, it pays tribute to the company’s sport luxury coupe lineage while also showcasing an evolution of the marque’s signature design elements. The exterior design is beautifully proportioned, with a low, sweeping roofline and a Cokebottle silhouette in plan view. The surfaces flow seamlessly into one another, accentuated by elegant lines with just the right amount of tension; and the rear haunches communicate the powerful rear wheel drive sport GT nature of the car, which sources power from a twin-turbocharged…

True designers can’t stop. They will create things until death. That’s a big problem for some top auto design leaders. When they retire they typically cannot design cars for anyone else, but at only 60 or 65, they’re still too full of creative energy to just go fishing or play golf. So we see ex-Mercedes leader Bruno Sacco creating exquisite household faucets, Paul Bracq keeping on his fine arts painting activity, and ex-Renault chief Patrick Le Quément becoming a prize-winning yacht designer — no cars. Ex-Ford Chief Creative Officer J Mays has found a creative way around those restrictions. He has been actively creating new cars. Certainly not for any rivals of Ford, nor even for any prospective Ford clients. Mays has been creating cars for the Walt Disney studios,…

What happens when furniture and furnishings become interactive and react to our presence as if they were “humans”? Aisin, Toyota group, answers this question with a number of concepts revolving around the Imagine New Days theme. In this way, through Information Technology – the Japanese company are IT specialists – technologies used in the automotive area are transferred to human settings, particularly furniture. Setsu and Shinobu Ito have designed a set of “sensitive” furniture translated into organic forms, from sofas to beds to electric armchairs which conceal weight sensors (as used in the seats of airbag systems) and Leds, and are able to react to our movements or even, through software, interact with the world around. For those who imagine artificial intelligence to be as emotionally involving as a humanoid…

The future of the car and the future of technology go arm in arm. The digital age is this too: cars that drive themselves, or that are learning to do so, machines – in every sense of the term – that evolve in step with wearable devices, smartphones, augmented reality and appliances that are intelligent and, obviously, interconnected. Once again, this year’s CES – Consumer Electronics Show – offered a review of the changing digital world. This edition is not brimming with exciting novelties, or what we could call sparkling innovations, but there were plenty of interesting ideas. The spotlight at Las Vegas was focused on stands crowded with devices, and plenty of smartwatches that are finally reaching maturity and becoming more useful. But the dominant theme of the proposals…

“Design is a cultural model. It develops analogue and digital, aesthetic and poetic systems. It defines corporate strategy, it is at the centre of decisions, it makes products less ambiguous, and gives added value that is repeated in time, for the mutual benefit of the consumer and the company.” This is how Walter de Silva, who has spent more than forty years in the creative world, almost entirely in the automotive field, defines design. “In the early Sixties, Tomás Maldonado talked about design activities, in 2010 the IDSA [Industrial Designer Society of America, ed. note] described it as a professional service. For me, design is a cultural model that defines a company’s political and economic models. It is the only way to generate growth.” He has always been a free…

The blue oval puts its money on cars that drive themselves. Ford was hesitant at first about autonomous driving, but is now speeding up the development of computer-driven cars as part of a programme known as the Smart Mobility Plan, which studies the various forms of mobility in the future. It takes several directions and envisages an extended fleet of autonomous prototypes, made up of 30 Fusion Hybrids (the Mondeo in Europe). The cars will be equipped with an innovative Lidar sensor developed by Velodyne of California. More compact (it is the size of the camera that recognises road signs), faster and more accurate, it can interpret complex and therefore more realistic scenarios. The company from Dearborn is trying out self-driving cars on the roads of California, Arizona and Michigan.…

Chrysler created a new vehicle typology when it launched the minivan in 1983. The successful vehicle piqued the interest of buyers looking for functionality, but as tastes shifted the typology began to wane in the eyes of customers. “We listened to what customers were saying and what they weren’t saying but were frustrated about,” says FCA’s global head of design, Ralph Gilles. “Of any product I’ve worked on this is the most complicated project ever because there’s so many products within a product.” Now called Pacifica, the main objective for the design team was to create a vehicle that was more aesthetically appealing whilst enhancing the hallmark characteristics of the previous Town & Country model. Built on an all-new platform, the front wheels have been moved further forward and the…

This vehicle made quite a stir at the last Tokyo Motor Show for the very fact that it was a car: the Sports Ride Concept is in fact signed Yamaha and, like the two-wheelers produced by this celebrated Japanese maker, deliberately focuses on driving entertainment and on a very direct, physical relationship with the vehicle. “We were looking to develop a car with the same brand image as our products”, explains Yamaha design chief Akihiro “Dezi” Nagaya talking about this big personality two-seater sports coupé, whose dimensions are similar to those of a Lotus Elise (3.9 m long, 1.72 m wide, 1,17 m tall and weighing 750 kg). The two-wheeler theme can be seen in the car’s layout, starting with the plan view which looks like a motorbike seen from…

Ideas for luxury saloons, motorbikes and innovative Suv’s that look ahead to and anticipate the future. These were the thesis projects that emerged at the end of the Master course in Transportation and Car Design 2014-2015 held by the Milan Scuola Politecnica di Design in cooperation with the Volkswagen Group. The brands involved in this edition were Ducati, Audi and, as is traditional, Lamborghini whose style centre employs as many as five former SPD students there out of a total of nine. An indication of the success of the brand and school mission to train students and turn them into professionals ready to take their place in the working world. The Ducati project, developed in cooperation with the Borgo Panigale design centre, required a futuristic reinterpretation of the legendary Monster,…

This could be an epochal change in direction for DS, which has been a brand in its own right, separate from Citroën, for over a year. According to DS brand design director Thierry Metroz, the e-Tense concept presented at Geneva is “not a gratuitous styling exercise but a hypothetical vision of the future” – by which he means production future. “Our concepts, and I’m also including the Divine presented in 2014, create and nurture a dream, contribute to building the story of the brand and sustain its values.” Metroz calls the e-Tense a “strategic car” for three precise reasons: “Firstly, the direct link between the concept and future production models. Second, its connection with technological evolution: it is an electric supercar, so it’s a test bench for DS Performance, which…

The concept Karim Habib insists on repeatedly is the proportions, that make the new X1 “a triumphant partnership between designers and engineers”. The result, according to BMW marketing, is that this vehicle transfers features typical of the SAV (Sports Activity Vehicle) to premium compact vehicles – and with greater intensity – an act of vanity if you like on the part of the Munich manufacturer aimed at distinguishing it from the world of SUVs. Habib, the brand’s design chief, says candidly that this result was achieved by way of an adroit use of the new modular UKL platform which was created for front-wheel drives – the Active Tourer architecture is an example – even though in actual fact the X1 will mainly be fitted to four-wheel drives. “We managed to…

The tangled history of the Chrysler minivan, renewed in a sixth generation at the 2016 Detroit auto show, is absolutely fascinating. The original 1984 model made an inauspicious entry to the world on Detroit TV when the initial car off the Windsor, Canada production line, had a lock malfunction so the executives within — including recently appointed Chrysler chairman Lee Iaccoca — couldn’t exit. And it wasn’t badged Chrysler for several years, only as Dodge Caravans or Plymouth Voyagers. Eventually versions of the car were sold as Chryslers, Rams, Lancias and Volkswagens as well. But the immediately-successful concept of a small single-volume front-drive multi-passenger vehicle that would fit in a standard American home garage was not even conceived by Chrysler. It was initiated at the Ford Motor Company, where Henry…

Combining sensual design with performance, the XDiavel is Ducati’s first cruiser offering. Despite bearing the same name as an existing bike preceded by a letter “X”, this is no mere variant but a model in its own right: a true fusion between the relaxed riding style of machines with forward mounted footpegs and the adrenalin-fuelled world of Ducati. We spoke with Andrea Ferraresi, design director of the Borgo Panigale based brand. “The initial ideas date back to late 2012, and development started the next spring. This model brings the extreme proportions typical of a show bike to production reality, a result that was also made possible by close dialogue between the designers and engineers.” The whole project was conducted in-house, involving collaboration with Volkswagen’s California design centre only at the…