Table of contents for No. 191 in AUTO & DESIGN

“Today’s new can be defined as a return to simplicity, legible forms and an honest product. Something that people understand at first glance and sticks in your memory, and makes you smile.” This is how Walter de Silva sums up the philosophy of Volkswagen’s latest arrival: the up!, presented in definitive guise at Frankfurt. According to Wolfsburg, this model is destined to be the head of a whole new family of small cars which will lead the German marque into the city car segment. De Silva, design director for the entire VW Group, developed this little car in close collaboration with brand design director Klaus Bischoff. “This is a design”, he explains, “inspired not so much by the automotive world as by product design: it is very simple, very comprehensible…

The idea of a sport utility vehicle in the Maserati range has been around for a few years – since the Detroit Motor Show in 2003, where the Trident marque presented an SUV concept penned by Giorgetto Giugiaro and named Kubang. Nothing came out of that design, but the idea stuck and laid the foundations for a model the brand says will go into production in 2013. The name Kubang however, which has been kept to emphasise a sense of continuity in terms of intentions, is the only element that the concept recently unveiled at Frankfurt shares with the prototype from eight years ago. Both the architecture and style of the vehicle are completely new, explain Design Vice President of the entire Fiat-Chrysler Group Lorenzo Ramaciotti and Maserati design director Marco…

“We are a solid company offering the best possible quality through the three core principles of dimension, proportion and harmony”. This is how Matteo Broglia, Franco Carone and Andrea Sartori – the three founding members of Quartostile – define the activities of the company they established in Turin in 2004 to combine their shared passion for design. After its initial projects in industrial design, very soon the studio broadened its scope to include the automotive and marine sectors. The company’s first important jobs were in fact for the nautical sector, a sector in which it has since developed the skills necessary to develop projects from a blank sheet of paper to the finished project – whether this be a production model, the architecture for a custom vessel or the design…

Ford goes to the museum to explain, in a didactic way that is never tedious, the “democratising technology” concept that underlies its strategies. The Leonardo da Vinci National Museum of Science and Technology is hosting an interactive exhibition dedicated to car technologies, designed and developed in cooperation with Ford, until 20 November. The presentation starts with a video where an actor pronounces the words of company founder Henry Ford and his democratic dream, and ends with a door through which the visitor leaves after printing an adhesive chip that opens it in simulation of Ford’s key free system that turns the engine on by simply pressing on a key. The story is subdivided into thematic rooms that explain the various technologies used in car projects. And as the occasion arises…

The heavy truck is a complex product where the requisites of a work vehicle in terms of productivity, comfort and safety must coexist with the ability to be a home from home during long-haul journeys. If you then consider the fact that the commercial lifespan of these vehicles is around fifteen years, it is easy to understand the punctilious care with which new models and new generations are developed. A typical example of this is the new Mercedes-Benz Actros, the Premium class heavy truck presented at Frankfurt. The product of a seven year development project, this is an all-new vehicle offered with a choice of Euro 5 and 6 power-plants from 421 to 510 bhp. The focal point of the project was the design of the cab, which is available…

The Yaris is a design case study for Toyota and for segment B cars in general. In the following pages we will be looking at the story of the model’s three generations, from the first Yaris which reached the European market in 1999 and was immediately rewarded with the most prestigious of prizes - Car of the Year 2000 - to the second generation, which held on to all the concepts of the original, right up to this last iteration which has evolved even further to respond to changing segment demands. A journey lasting more than a decade in which the “little genius” has become an adult. Meantime, in October this year the Valenciennes plants in France celebrated the production target of 2 million units of the Yaris, a real…

The Milan Triennale opened its doors to what has been dubbed act three of the Yaris – a model whose sales success and critical acclaim have never wavered since its original European launch in 1999. The new Yaris took centre stage in a daylong special event, summed up in the slogan ‘planned for what’s next’, which retraced all the most significant milestones from 1999 – when Toyota was still mainly known in Italy for its off-road models and had a somewhat marginal image (as recalled by Toyota Italia President Massimo Gargano) – to 2006, the brand’s most successful sales year to date. For the official presentation of the new Yaris, Toyota created an instant exhibition – as the industry likes to call it – spread out both inside and outside…

The up! is perhaps the car whose development has produced more concepts than any other car in automotive history. After those already presented by Volkswagen from 2007 onwards, the production version unveiled at Frankfurt was accompanied by a fresh new spate of concepts. The eco-up! prefigures the imminent LPG version, with ultra-low CO2 emissions of just 79 g/km. Underneath the bulky crossover cladding, the cross-up! offers a glimpse of what a four door version (which is already slated for launch next year) would look like. The e-up!, on the other hand, previews an electric version of the new little car from Wolfsburg due in a couple of years. Looking even further ahead – and although no official decision has been made yet, it would be unbelievable if this too did…

2010 has seen a practically continuous succession of debuts from BMW. The 6 Series presented officially in January was followed by the fascinating Vision ConnectedDrive revealed at Geneva, the new 1 Series and the ‘i’ range – with the i3 and i8 concepts unveiled at Frankfurt. “And it isn’t over yet – the new 3 Series is also coming soon” said BMW Group design director Adrian van Hooydonk when we met him at the IAA stand in September. Completely new from the platform up, the 1 Series plays a key role in the Bavarian brand’s range. “It’s the car that brings us new customers – almost 70 percent of its buyers come from other brands” explains Van Hoydoonk. “Our goal was to make it even more luxurious, roomier and more…

Asymmetric. Laurens van den Acker can’t stop repeating the word as he describes the Renault Frendzy. Two years since his arrival at the Régie and appointment as the brand’s head of design, he has now almost completed the cycle of six concepts (of which the Frendzy is the fourth) expressing the new design language for the French carmaker conceived to bring it out of the styling rut it had been stuck in after the fruitful and imaginative years of Patrick le Quément’s tenure. The fourth concept – dedicated to the idea of ‘work’ – follows the DeZir, which interpreted ‘pleasure’ and whose styling will inspire the new Clio, the Captur, which embodied the idea of ‘discovering the world’ and will spawn a new crossover, and the R-Space, which represented ‘family’…

Style has played a significant role in the recent growth of the Korean Kia brand. Peter Schreyer has created a precise family feeling and combined it with a dynamic and richly expressive formal language. An exemplary case of this is the fourth generation Rio. While the basic 5-door hatchback layout (the 3-door will come later) is a tried and tested B-segment formula, it has been interpreted here with intriguing new perspective. Compared with the outgoing series, length, wheelbase and width have grown by 55, 70 and 25 mm respectively (to 4,045, 2,570 and 1,720 mm), while height has been reduced from 1,460 to 1,445 mm. The designers’ intentions to create a sleeker car that appears more firmly planted on the road are evident in styling choices such as the bold-looking…

Few could have imagined that an event conceived as a competition for aspiring young designers would, in just a few short years, grow to become one of the most important dates in the Italian automotive style calendar. The event in question is the Autostyle International Design Competition, an initiative devised and developed with passion by Roberto Artioli and Fulvio Cinti, impeccably organised by the dedicated staff of Berman and supported by the town council of San Benedetto Po (Mantua), Iveco Suzzara, the Mantua Campus of Milan Polytechnic and the University of Florence, with the patronage of the Mantua Chamber of Commerce and the Province of Mantua. This October 6 and 7, the evocative Polironiano Civic Museum hosted Autostyle in the architecturally magnificent, thousand year old monastery of San Benedetto Po,…

Paris, late September 1998. The Yaris, Toyota’s new Segment B compact makes its debut at the Mondial de l’Automobile. Less than seven months earlier, already named and just about ready for production, this attractive compact had appeared at the Geneva show, in the guise of a prototype, the development of the concept model that had appeared a year earlier at Frankfurt motor show as the Funtime. If getting results is all that matters, Toyota has certainly made some rather intelligent preparations for its first onslaught on the European “personality car” market. Because the first Yaris, while naturally not excluded from other markets, sees its commercial future right here on the Old Continent. By the time of its debut, the plant where it will be manufactured is already close to completion…

It weighs a third as much as a city car, consumes ten times less and is slim and sleek, but it isn’t a motorcycle. No, this isn’t a riddle – it’s a description of the RAK e concept presented by Opel at the recent Frankfurt motor show. With a name reminiscent of the rocket powered car created by the pioneering Fritz von Opel in the early 20th century, the RAK e ups the ante in the fiercely competitive lightness and energy efficiency game with a formula promising a range of 100 Km for just a Euro in running costs. “We want to develop electric vehicles that everyone can afford” says Opel CEO Karl-Friedrich Stracke. “The RAK e experimental vehicle aims to deliver pricing that even younger customers can afford. The…

It may seem a little far-fetched to talk about style in a commercial vehicle, but when form interacts beneficially with function, comfort and profitability, it is more than justified. An excellent example of this is the New Iveco Daily, the eighth generation of a vehicle originally launched in 1978 and of which over 2.5 million have been sold, and now configurable in an incredible 7,000 different permutations of engine, chassis and body style to cater for any specialised application. For good reason, Iveco cites the world of Superman in the tagline “This is a job for the New Daily” chosen for its publicity campaign. The exterior design of the New Daily is defined by attractive forms, well-proportioned volumes and a dynamic character. The grille and headlights – which incorporate daytime…

“There are few brands capable of bringing out strengths that you didn’t know you had, and Ferrari is one of them.” César Mendoza, director of IED Turin, expresses his satisfaction with the work done by his students for the Ferrari World Design Contest 2011. For 26 of the institute’s students, the contest coincided with the end of a three-year course in transportation design, and the three finalists from the school invited to Maranello on 19 July were picked from their eleven end-of-course theses (some of which described in this issue). Namely, these projects were Xezri by Samir Sadikhov, which won a well-deserved second place, 540 Pegaso by Giuseppe Ceccio, Giacomo Pierin and Matteo Politano, and Ethesian by Alessandro Nardolillo. The brief for the contest called for the students to design…

The Yaris is “innovative, well matched with the rest of the range and created to stand apart from other cars in its segment” says Tokuo Fukuichi, Managing Officer of Toyota Motor Corporation and the man in charge of all design activities of Japan’s number one constructor. Having been with Toyota for over 37 years – many of which spent in the brand’s different design centres around the globe, from California to France and back to Japan, where he now lives once again – Fukuichi has a total understanding of the creativity of the brand. The Yaris has special meaning for Fukuichi, not just for its outstanding sales performance in Europe (where last year it recorded almost 4% of all B segment sales), but also because, “compared with previous generations, the…

The Yaris launched in 2005 is the second generation of Toyota’s small B-segment car to be completely designed in Europe. Inevitably, the result could not be other than evolutionary: this second Yaris is bigger, more intelligently packaged, and even carries the signature of its original creator, among those of other designers from Toyota’s ED2 studio in southern France. Six years before, the Yaris became Toyota’s European-made entry level model, but right from 2005 the Aygo offers an entry to the Toyota world. “That explains why the second Yaris has grown, to create some distance between it and the Aygo. It needed to be bigger,” said Tokuo Fukuichi, at that time president of ED2, and as such successor to Wahei Hirai when he became head of Toyota’s global design in Japan.…

In keeping with Toyota’s philosophy, the new Yaris continues to uphold the principle of juxtaposed contrasts giving shape to new aesthetic solutions. In this case, it is the same principle – embodied by the endearing nickname ‘little genius’ adopted since the first generation Yaris – of the contrast between extremely compact external dimensions and a spacious interior. But as well as this spatial contrast, the third generation also introduces other equally interesting contrasts: such as between the soft curves of the flanks and the sharpness of the two crease lines, which visually contain the flanks themselves and create harmony. It is in these terms that Akihiro Dezi Nagaya and Yahiko Kumai define the latest addition to the Toyota family. In this contrast transformed into harmony, Toyota design general manager Nagaya…