Table of contents for No. 241 in AUTO & DESIGN

Beautiful or functional? When we look at a car, the first thing that captures our attention is the shape and style, which are increasingly influenced by, or dependent on, aerodynamics. After a first phase triggered by the oil crises, when the CX became a key element in reducing consumption - people were talking about “wind tunnel design”, with models like the 1982 Ford Sierra - today we have reached a new phase. Aerodynamics are becoming increasingly essential to any new project; this time, in fact, for containing emissions and, thus, contributing to the auto industry’s efforts to combat the greenhouse effect. To explore this issue, we interviewed one of the world’s leading experts in the sector: the engineer Dialma Zinelli, head of the Aerodynamics division at Dallara Automobili. In designing…

Ford has had a “human-centric” approach to design for some time. In short, for the “Blue Oval” carmaker, style is defined according to functionality and has a precise task to fulfil for people, as well as assuming a purely aesthetic value. The new Ford Puma adheres to this philosophy and further raises the bar. Conceived at the Cologne style centre, it was designed using innovative methods. For the interiors, for example, the team of designers made use of an advanced piece of software that allowed them to faithfully recreate the passenger compartment through simple, two-dimensional drawings. Thus, the time and cost of defining the general lines, before arriving at the actual 3D models, were reduced. With the Ford Puma, the use of VR visors has also evolved. The latter now…

There are those who want to launch cars at more than 200 km/hr in underground tunnels - as Elon Musk is planning to do with The Boring Company in Los Angeles - and there are those who are designing aircraft that use the sky as a third dimension in urban mobility. Ideas for limiting traffic congestion in the big metropolitan centres of the future, thus reducing travelling time, are many and varied. Bartini, the Russian air taxi startup founded in 2017, has chosen Italdesign to design the glazing and passenger compartment of its first VTOL (Vertical Take-Off and Landing) aircraft. “With the Pop.Up”, the flying car presented at the Geneva Motor Show in 2017, “we tasked ourselves with creating a city car that could be integrated with a drone”, explains…

Can a lamp take us through the day, from waking up to going to bed, at the same time adapting the light to how old we are and the type of room we are in? The answer is an emphatic yes in the case of a "scientifically" designed solution, namely the Dyson Lightcycle Morph project. The Dyson company was founded in 1993 and initially specialised in the vacuum cleaners for which it is now famous. Research at the company underpins all solutions and on this occasion the neuroscientific contribution of Dr Karen Dawe, Senior Research Engineer of the Dyson lighting team, was decisive. Her observations and research – into understanding how psychology, exposure to environmental factors and sun-light can impact health, wellbeing and cognitive performance - were translated into guidelines…

Technologies and hi-tech fashions might change, but the problem remains unresolved: how to create a car-specific digital user interface, namely an interface that is not the mere transposition to the dashboard of a tablet or smartphone, and works well with connected and assisted-drive cars. From the CES in Las Vegas, the January mega tech show that this year once again was in fact a motor show, some ideas emerged about the direction being taken by car tech and interior design increasingly dependent on digital choices. The star of the Consumer Electronic Show 2020, however, was not a vehicle from a car manufacturer, but a Sony prototype. Yes, the same great electronics company that with alternating fortune has shaped the digital world as we know it today. It’s called Vision-S, and…

Crouching animal-like in full flow with an abundance of luminous scales incessantly stimulating the eyes of the observer, the most magnetic show car of the last CES in Las Vegas might appear at first glance to have been conceived as a delight to the eyes, a sensorial show for decryption through the lens of electronics show exhibitionism. At the heart of the AVTR project, however, lie many other values. “It’s true, we wanted to go way beyond "normality"… even beyond supercars”, says Steffen Koehl, head of Global Advanced Design at Mercedes-Benz, with a smile. “But right from the very first meetings with the team that made “Avatar”, the film that inspired the car, we realised that the original film and the upcoming sequel offer a very profound vision of man…

It’s difficult to find a key to understanding Mazda’s new MX-30, the Japanese manufacturer’s first electric vehicle, even if its designers define the car as “minimalist”, inventing the expression “Human Modern” for its stylistic concept. The latter is intended to express an appropriate course for the values of the future and evolutions in lifestyle. “With the Mazda3 we had launched a new phase of Kodo design, the well known Soul of Motion”, explains Youichi Matsuda, the “father” of this electric vehicle. “With the ‘car as art’ ethos, we have sought to broaden the expressivity of the Kodo style and to exalt the artistic dimension of the car for this vehicle, exploring new horizons”. Minimalism, Matsuda adds, entails “beauty by subtraction, which is one of the expressive elements of Kodo”. Here,…

“A flashback through GT-R successes to celebrate the brute power, technology and passion for racing that has always been its hallmark”. This is how Alfonso Albaisa, Senior Vice President of Global Design at Nissan Motor, defines the Nissan GT-R50 by Italdesign, produced in a limited series of exclusive one-offs to celebrate two fiftieth anniversaries, that of the model itself in 2019 and the Turin design house in 2018, the year the prototype that anticipated the car debuted at the Goodwood Festival of Speed. In developing the project, the distribution of roles between the two players was fundamental, the creative part being entirely the responsibility of Nissan design, while all engineering and construction aspects were placed firmly in the hands of Italdesign technicians. The grittily refined look of the sports coupé,…

Autonomous driving, artificial intelligence, connected environments, home automation - these are some of the concepts that will characterise daily life for those living in the future, a state that is closer than we can imagine. And if it is too complicated to adapt our cities to new technologies, better start from scratch. Woven City is the metropolis of tomorrow, according to Toyota: a genuine, open-air laboratory that will be built in Japan in early 2021 at the foot of Mt Fuji. It will cover an area of 708 000 m2. Inside this city, all future technologies will be tested: from self-driving cars to micromobility, from connected residences to digital personal assistants, all fed entirely by hydrogen. The Woven City construction project was born from an idea of Akio Toyoda, president…

The Kawasaki Z H2 is the most powerful naked bike ever produced by Kawasaki. Equipped with the same 1.0 supercharged four-cylinder engine as the Ninja H2 and H2R, it boasts an hp of 200. This vocation for uncompromisingly high performance is also clearly reflected in the styling. It is Mitsuru Kobayashi himself, designer of Kawasaki’s motorcycle division, who tells the story of how it was designed. “The bike fully respects our Sugomi approach to design”, explains Kobayashi. “It blends style and technology in a balanced, harmonious way and enhances both aspects without either having an edge over the other. On a motorcycle like the Z H2, then, the emphasis has been placed on the concept of power and performance inspired by the vision of a crouching predator ready to pounce”.…

A car without compromises, able to travel at high speeds both on the motorway and on desert dunes with electric motors and in total safety. If the vehicle is inspired by a country, then the conformation of the land becomes an integral part of the design brief, as in the case of Vision 2030, one of GFG Style’s most recent creations, the Giorgetto and Fabrizio Giugiaro design house. “Saudi Arabia asked us to design a model that would perfectly adapt to their region, which is made of big roads - all new and really wide - but also of deserts with dunes and rough terrain”, Fabrizio Giugiaro explains, going over the genesis of the project. For a vehicle with these features, we needed, therefore, to begin with the point of…

Everything for a reason. And if “reason” means making a car that can do 400 km/hr, McLaren has respected its watch-word with the Speedtail. In a conglomeration of art, science, and elegance, the Woking designers have given life to their most aerodynamic car. It is a teardrop with a very long tail in a purity of shapes where every line and every curve has a reason for being in the effort to create perfect airflows and to eliminate any drag. “This is not intended as a car to be raced on a circuit”, Steve Crijns, senior design manager of the manufacturer that has Formula 1 in its veins, says, “because, in that case, it would need big air vents and spoilers that would lead, inevitably, to a somewhat brutal formal…

Developed at the same time as the 208, the new Peugeot 2008 introduces a particularly strong design – as is appropriate for an SUV, even a compact one (it is 4.30 metres long). Gilles Vidal, head of design for the “lion” automaker, explains: “We played around with solutions that represented protection, solidity, strength, without renouncing a sleek and dynamic silhouette, in order to give the vehicle modern, even futuristic, values”. The two “sister” models cannot be compared, even if the modular CMP platform is the same. “Our engineers”, Vidal adds, “did an excellent job: the new platform is truly miraculous”. To give the 2008 a different look, his team insisted on highly sculpted sides, on marked wheel arches - in short, on some principal design elements to “give a new…

Cities stretching up to the sky and dotted with flying objects, glazed pavilions, hanging gardens blooming hundreds of metres above ground. Daring architecture, capable of blending a use of space typical of the mid-century Californian villa with projections into the future of materials, technologies and structures. Declaredly science fiction scenarios, yet animated by objects with an incredibly real feel to them, imagined it would appear for production in series a few decades down the line. And then, of course, there are the cars. Flat and ultra-profiled, or cubic and wrapped in steel and crystal, at times even without wheels or suspended hovering over the asphalt, but always incisive and pregnant with inspiration. Depicting for over fifty years the contours of such a variegated and deeply imaginative universe has been just…

Synergies that lead to great results. Kvadrat Shade is a system, in three variants, of polyester fabric blinds that allows you to screen a room and control its temperature. Well-known French designers Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec have developed it over the last three years, carefully designing every detail. Three hundred designs were needed only to define the box elements. Design partners are the Dutch companies Coulisse and Verosol, the latter leaders in high-performance metallic fabrics, with a patent for the application of aluminium to the fibre to provide an anti-reflective action. This team work has brought interesting results, above all in offering the residential and contract sector a sustainable solution in terms of environmental control: the blinds serve to control the temperature, so saving on air conditioning, and they also…