Indice dei contenuti per No. 240 in AUTO & DESIGN

It’s up to the market to decide whether the new Defender is, as Land Rover claims, “an icon reinvented and instantly recognisable” - that is, the new, natural heir of an all-purpose vehicle that has basically remained unchanged for 70 years. In any case, the long wait is over: the secrecy that, for a long time, has enveloped the creation has given way to images of a modern car with an attractive design. It is a design with character, even if it is less spartan than its predecessor. “We’ve found the right formula for volumes and shapes”, Massimo Frascella claims, “designing our battle horse in a modern - not retro - key, with an eye to simplicity and practicality”. Frascella is Gerry McGovern’s righthand man. He arrived in Gaydon in…

Speaking of the Dolce Vita, according to Ferrari’s claim for the Roma, amounts to evoking the 1960s. This was an epoque that saw the birth of legendary sports coupés around Maranello - above all, perhaps, the 250 GT that inspired Flavio Manzoni to create the first Gran Turismo Ferrari of the third millennium. But don’t try and talk to Manzoni about nostalgia. “We simply chose to recuperate the classic proportions of the Gran Turismo: the long bonnet, the compact cab, almost leaning on the back end, and the low tail, which also serves to highlight the difference with the Portofino”. The Roma shares the technical layout of the latter, with the V8 turbo in the front central position, and the wheelbase measuring 267 cm. The rest, however, is entirely…

Sensual is not an adjective that leaps to mind when speaking of motorbikes, where practicality and functionality are the trending concepts. For the Honpe CTjet project, however, Mike Robinson, who was responsible for the design, started from more emotional factors: “For this electric bike I wanted a fluidly sensual formal language and I looked for stylistic references in the female rather than the male world, which is overreliant on tough, graceless content. Above all I wanted this bike to be sexy”, says Robinson. Presented at Eicma 2019, the project is the brainchild of Honpe Technology Srl, a company that works in prototyping for the automotive, medical and telecommunications sectors, with the collaboration of Marco Minardi and Giacomo Caliendo, students of Turin Polytechnic. “The CTjet was designed and built in just…

For many people, Land Wind is the Chinese brand that produced the X7, the SUV that caused a stir for being an almost exact copy of the Range Rover Evoque. “After this episode, the Chinese manufacturer turned to us to create a new image for the brand with its own strong identity, and to close this chapter of the past”, recounts Fabrizio Giugiaro, founder of the Turin design house GFG Style with his father Giorgetto. The first product of this collaboration is the Yao (“glory” in Chinese), an SUV that has debuted the brand’s new stylistic features, which we will see on other products in the future. “We worked by seeking out essentials that would express a strong identity for the brand. For the Yao, we began with the front…

Interpret the concept of luxury through an electrically-propelled hypercar capable of conveying the values of purity and innovation using cutting-edge technologies. That was the brief developed this year by the students of the IED Transportation Design course in Turin in collaboration with Automobili Pininfarina. A theme with no specific constraints allowing students to express themselves in total freedom, reconsidering packages and layouts, and modulating the user experience to create innovative solutions. “We started working on the theses before the presentation of the Battista”, says course coordinator Michele Albera, who led the students together with lecturer Fulvio Fantolino. “The work was therefore very complex, a question of referring back to principles rather than styling cues and the students had to engage with something that did not yet have a defined identity,…

Whoever would have thought that cars in the new millennium would have lines with little in the way of science fiction but a decidedly nostalgic feel instead? Far from the design of today’s electric vehicles or concepts such as driverless cars, a significant number of projects developed in the 2000s draw inspiration directly from the past. Talking about the lines of the new Ford Thunderbird, in an article published in Auto&Design No. 114, J Mays, who was then Design Vice President at Ford, explained how “these years are sort of like 11:45 on New Year’s Eve, with everyone looking back and remembering positive things. Whether or not you like to admit it, as the millennium draws to a close we’re a little bit scared of what the future might bring…

There are cases where the best option is to backtrack and rethink a project from scratch. This is what happened to the Ford designers of the Mach-E, an electric SUV of dynamically attractive proportions which styling-wise ran the risk of being – in the words of the designers - a practical dustbuster. In the summer of 2017, the Dearborn team had presented a model that responded to the initial brief requesting the first electrically-powered car in the history of the Blue Oval. “The top management were not convinced, they didn't think it was representative enough for Ford and they asked us to pull out our strength as a company and completely rethink the project”, says Joel Piaskowski, Global Head of Design Cars & Crossovers, North America. So new horizons were…

Sportiness has always been a key element in Mini production. Supreme expression of this is the John Cooper Works GP, the version with the most striking racing personality of all the Mini’s. Today it reaches its third generation and will be produced in just 3,000 units. Work on defining the model’s design began in 2017. “Being a limited series production, we had more freedom of movement than with other projects, even though, given the performance features in the mix, we had to work in close contact with the engineers”, explains Oliver Heilmer, head of Mini design. “However, the engineers only had to intervene on very few occasions. One such case involved the rear spoiler. During a test session at the Nürburgring, we were asked to change its profile so as…

Science applied to life. Everyone knows the 3M slogan, coined over 117 years of activity and growth that today translates to a multinational company with 91,000 employees and a catalogue of around 60,000 products. Recently, however, a new chapter has been added to that activity: material science and design. Yes, because in the last seven to eight years, the concept of design - as Kevin Gilboe, head of design international, explains - has continuously gained new significance in the corporate context. Another four design studios have been added to those in Milan and in Korea - one every year - first in the 3M general quarter in St. Paul (Minnesota), then in Japan, India, and China. “We are lucky”, Gilboe explains, “to work in a company where, if a material…

Four doors, four seats, and superior performance. The Drako GTE is a celebration of classic, Italian-style Gran Turismo architecture, with lines that express a passion for driving and sportsmanship, with a zero emissions powertrain. Drako is a Silicon Valley start-up that was launched to construct electric supercars and, for the design of its first model, it turned to the Turin style centre, GranStudio: “The request was to create shapes that do not communicate the propulsion technology, but that had all the features of a sports car. The most important thing was to convey, through the shapes, the sensations felt at the steering wheel”, explains Lowie Vermeersch, the founder and creative director of GranStudio. Performance, muscle, and sculptural surfaces, the GTE has a genuine style that tells of its power. “The…

It is “a special, emotional moment”, when we meet Gerry McGovern in Frankfurt, immediately after the official reveal of the new Defender. It’s McGovern who defines it thus: “I feel honoured to represent the work of so many people involved in this launch. It is a project that has embodied great expectations on everyone’s part”. The long waiting period has been well repaid by the final result, a vehicle that is, at the same time, recognisable as a Defender and yet so evolved and contemporary in its shapes and features. Land Rover’s design boss doesn’t hide his satisfaction. “It will be polarising”, McGovern predicts, “like many good designs, it is focused on longevity and this always presupposes a certain period for fully grasping the novelty. You’ll discover it one piece…

Toyota’s luxury spin-off brand, the Lexus, was founded in 1989. Today, with thirty years of history behind it, it is attempting to look ahead one decade by proposing a concept that interprets how a hypothetical model of the brand will look in 2030. It’s called the LF-30 and it sprang from a sort of in-house competition among the manufacturer’s various design centres that saw the project proposed by the ED2 (European Design Development), the Toyota style centre near Nice, headed by the American Ian Cartabiano, win the day. The Lexus LF-30 takes on a very special meaning not only because it represents a synthesis of the direction the Japanese brand will be taking from now on, but because it is the first brand concept that does not precede an upcoming…

In the now already distant 2013, Renault’s first little crossover appeared in a segment in the embryonic stage using an approach that was purposefully based on fresh, soft forms: “We wanted to introduce ourselves to the universe of high ground vehicles, which were considered aggressive at the time, according to an innovative and more friendly mode”, recounts Laurens Van Den Acker, today, as then, design boss at the French manufacturer. It is clear that the cumbersome features were transformed, at the time, to aim at an unprecedented lightness of character. “Now, however, the competitors in the same dimensions have multiplied by some 20 times and the project has assumed global amplitude, since it will be commercialised in China and Korea as well, with very few modifications. Thus, though preserving…

Launch Design is an independent design company whose name evokes the sound of Chinese words: dragon (a symbol of strength and courage) and challenge, a significant combination firmly linked to Chinese culture. Specialising initially in engineering, the company was founded in Shanghai, China, in 2000 by its current chairman Mr. Wang Xun, a professional from the aeronautics sector. Its spread into the field of design - particularly in the automotive sector that is experiencing a period of robust growth in China - has been fast and profitable and has led, in a short time, to the opening of several plants in the country. After almost twenty years of consolidated activity, and as part of a global development plan, Launch Design opened its Italian headquarters in San Mauro Torinese in the…

While user friendliness and flexibility have always provided the crucial design framework of light commercial vehicles for urban use, in recent years the more strictly utilitarian motivations have given way to considerations of aesthetic research. This process has affected to a perhaps even greater extent those models long present in the segment: the Daily, for example, born in 1978 and radically updated first in 2001 and then in 2014. “This time it was a matter of dealing first with a technical innovation”, comments Marco Armigliato, head of Iveco’s styling department, “because the introduction of a 310 hp engine meant an increased number of radiator openings. But right from the start the idea was also to redefine the formal appeal of one of our best loved products”. Although this was a…