Table of contents for No. 218 in AUTO & DESIGN

Italdesign came to Geneva with a redesigned logo, a production feasible concept car and a reinvigorated business plan – one that aims to reinstate the company as a leading full service atelier for clients in the transportation and industrial design sectors. We sat down with new Italdesign CEO Joerg Astalosch and design director Filippo Perini to find out what they’ve got in store. Astalosch has spent his entire career working in various highlevel management positions within the VW Group, most recently as Chief Financial Officer of MAN Truck & Bus AG, and Filippo Perini’s 11-year career at Lamborghini is nothing to scoff at either. Together they are striving to recapture Italdesign’s glory days with a vision that is closely aligned with the Italian company’s roots. With roughly 1000 employees –…

Taut and pointed like a sheet of paper folded with the skill that only the Japanese have mastered, in the shape of a concave, front profile ready to cut through the air and swallow it up. No, we are not talking about a car, even though the prototype of this sports car responds closely to the description, but of the sculpture that inspired it. A free form steel structure in space, done at the Mazda style centre, which in many respects represented the first creative trigger for the project. “When we started to dedicate our attention to the RX Vision”, explains Ikuo Maeda, general manager of the design division, “the guys on the team were free to put forward artistic proposals without constraints that might take the material form of…

For Mercedes, 2016 is the year of the dream cars, coupés and cabrios we all long for: C-Class, S-Class, SL and SLC roadsters, not to mention the AMG versions. “Many companies are cutting down in these segments: no cabrios, fewer coupés, they are concentrating on SUVs”, comments Gorden Wagener: “But if you are a top luxury car company like Mercedes, you have to do dream cars and that’s what people expect from us”. The C-Class had never had a Cabriolet before but it has one now. It derives directly from the Coupé which in its turn has been revolutionised compared to the previous C Coupé. Daimler Group design chief Wagener explains: “It has changed drastically in terms of proportions. We have converted a 2-door saloon which was its predecessor into…

Lively, cheerful, uninhibited. The adjectives brought into play to tell the story of how the Citroën E-Mehari, a four-seater cabriolet developed in cooperation with Bolloré, was born and how quickly it was done, are all sunnily positive. “It was March 2015 when they gave us just a few months to create a car fully integrated into our range but totally based on the Blue Summer produced for Autolib’ by Bolloré”, recalls head of Citroën design, Alexandre Malval. “We therefore took that car and changed its livery to regenerate the Méhari concept in a right up to the minute product”. The result, especially as regards the front, is surprising. Design tricks, explains Malval: “to turn it into a Citroën we first decided to graft some “Cactus spirit” on to it, using…

“The Shiwa is a vehicle concept that strikes us for the questions it raises rather than for the solutions it proposes”. That is how Riccardo Balbo, Director of IED Torino, expressed his satisfaction with the twelfth full scale concept developed by students of the Master in Transportation Design in cooperation, for the second time, with the monthly magazine Quattroruote and presented at the Geneva Motor Show. The Shiwa (fold in Japanese) takes its inspiration from origami, the starting point for the Korean student Youngjin Shim in her development of the concept: a fold can give form and function to an object that, without it, would not have any. The result is a self-drive vehicle designed to be fitted with four electric motors in the wheels, a vehicle that looks to…

The GTZero came to be without milling a single style model, and was fabricated directly after conception and evaluation performed entirely virtually. While IDG has been using this technology for over twenty years, in the past two years – and the last twelve months in particular – ground-breaking new innovations have been introduced in augmented reality. “The enormous potential of this technology lies in the fact that it allows us to look at an object in its true three-dimensional form within the real world”, explains VR Designer Fabio Pirri, “letting us evaluate the form even down to the millimetre scale”. Designers gain entry into this whole new dimension with new viewing devices such as the Oculus VR headset or the VIVE by HTC which, unlike a conventional computer monitor, let…

Klaus Busse has been the new EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa) design chief for the Fiat, Abarth, Alfa Romeo, Lancia, Fiat Professional and Maserati brands since October. A job that brought him back to this side of the Atlantic after ten years in the United States. “In a manner of speaking, in the course of my career I have changed companies without ever leaving my company”, he quips, speaking in his new office in Turin, in that “Officina 83” that houses the FCA Italian Style Centre. A German aged 45, Busse graduated in transportation design from Coventry University and in 1995 joined the Mercedes-Benz design department. Ten years later he moved to the United States as part of the plans of the then DaimlerChrysler. He remained tied to the Chrysler…

“Returning to a small size and pure simplicity was the idea when we started working on this GT concept in the summer of 2014,” Mark Adams, vice president of Opel/Vauxhall design in Ruesselsheim, Germany, said. “But we did not do anything retro. That wasn’t the way to go. What we did was draw from the past to make it fit today.” Still, the showstopping GT displayed at March’s Geneva Motor Show expressed the same character as the original GT from 50 years earlier. “Most important, it is small again and with proportions to make it feel admirable, not a super car which its technical layout says it isn’t.” The new GT is only 385 cm long, 168 cm wide and 118 cm tall. Adams: “That gives the model a smaller…

“More modern, more aggressive, more refined”. Gilles Vidal, head of Peugeot design, does not hold back on his praise for the new 2008 presented at Geneva. In actual fact it’s Oscar material. Because with a handful of tweaks, in what is essentially a restyling operation, he and his team have managed to give a completely new face to the French lion’s baby-SUV which has sold 515 thousand in three years and gave its name (nothing else, however) to the “monster” that won the last Dakar. To renew the 2008 he has resorted to an increasingly SUV-like design – “assertive, powerful and attractive” in the brand’s declared intentions – with changes that work, even though they have been cut to the bone. Vidal explains: “To give the 2008 a stronger, more…

“If it wasn’t a brake, it would be a sculpture worthy of any modern art museum.” This was the reason cited by the ADI Industrial Design Association for awarding the Golden Compass to Brembo for one of its products in 2004. “The history of our relationship with design actually dates as far back as the origins of the company” says Roberto Vavassori, Business Development and Marketing Director of Brembo – the world leader in the design, development and production of braking systems. “Our founder was an architect with an extraordinary sense of aesthetics, and who appreciated the role of beauty in the form of a mechanical object.” He is talking about Emilio Bombassei, father of the current president Alberto, who founded the company in 1961 together with Italo Breda. Since…

Mercedes-Benz Style designers and the technical expertise of Artemide, one of the world’s leading light design companies, have joined up to make the Ameluna pendant lamp, the name being an acronym of Artemide, Mercedes and ‘luna’ (moon). Just as the sun illuminates the surface of the moon, this lamp in one of its two versions features a spotlight located above the asymmetric cap of the diffuser. This permits light to spread through the highly transparent acrylic material in ever changing shades that the user can vary using an app. But that’s not all because an array of LEDs fixed to a special extruded aluminium strip that acts as a heat dissipator, runs along the circumference which is strengthened by a sort of injection-moulded ring. This is an invention patent which,…

The GTZero is Italdesign’s interpretation of the classic Gran Turismo format with a contemporary twist. Inspired by concepts and production cars from the company’s past, the show car is a powerful, sufficiently practical sports car with an emotional design, but also one that generates zero emissions from its plug-in electric powerplant. As the first concept car created under the direction of new design boss Filippo Perini, formerly head of design at Lamborghini, the GTZero’s exterior design is strikingly similar to recent supercars wearing the Raging Bull badge, but it is also a clear showcase for Italdesign’s technological capabilities. “The GT Zero was an opportunity to design a car that had the emotional qualities of a sporting GT but on a new electric platform with zero emissions,” says Perini. “We used…

Perfectly balanced softness and tension in a car shaped by a simple and effective design. The Pininfarina H2 Speed, a hydrogen fuel cell powered single seat track racer, pays subtle homage to Pininfarina’s traditions in advanced study prototypes and, in particular, to the Sigma Gran Prix of 1969, with which it shares the same intent to bring innovation to motor sports. The references may be subtle, but they are clear: the white of the bodywork contrasting against vivid colours identifying functional zones – red for aerodynamic elements and green for safety and technology - the graphics of the H2 logo, the Swiss flag next to the Italian flag on the car’s flank (a nod to Revue Automobile Suisse, which sponsored the Sigma, and an allusion to the collaboration with the…

A year since the formal separation of the DS brand from Citroën, the new DS3 completes the process to renew its entire range. With 390,000 sales since its launch in 2010, the French brand’s smallest model now gains a more accentuated character evocative of elegance and Parisian savoir-faire. Both the hatchback and the cabriolet (with a roof that can now open at up to 120 km/h and new materials for improved soundproofing) flaunt the new family face – dubbed ‘DS Wings’ – with a sculpted look like a work of art, an upright hexagonal grille with extensions leading from the corners of the frame (the wings) towards the headlamps and fog lights, and with a new light signature created by the LED DRLs. “The silhouette of the DS3 models –…

There’s a lot of Italy in Honda’s bikes. At the R&D Europe centre in Rome four proposals have recently seen the light that are particularly significant as regards present and future tendencies of the wing logo company. First and foremost the CRF 1000 L Africa Twin, heir to the XRV750 of the same name of 1988, multiple winner of the Dakar. Then three concepts earmarked for production: the CB4 café racer, its Six50 fun bike incarnation and the City Adventure all-purpose scooter. Let’s start with emotions. The emotions transmitted by the CB4 concept that projects us into a world where the motorbike is essential and with just a few tweaks is able to unleash passion. “Sensual, exotic, solid and metallic, a mix of refinement and toughness: that is how”, explains…