Table of contents for 266 - May / June 2024 in AUTO & DESIGN

Geely Galaxy E8 Cover story Our meeting with Chen Zheng, Vice President of Geely Auto Group, took place on the 16th floor of the Torre Diamante, one of the symbols of Porta Nuova, Milan, a district revitalised by the pencils of great architects and today one of the trendiest places in the city. This is where the Chinese manufacturer has opened its Geely Innovation Design Center Italy: “The strong design culture here gives us the chance to deliver a more inclusive design. I believe that design is the most eloquent interpreter of a brand's values whatever the field, whether it’s cars or fashion”, Zheng says. Leading Geely design’s global management, he redefined the Geely brand’s design language in the era of intelligent electric vehicles, empowering the brand to accelerate its transformation…

Since the ‘50s and ‘60s, Chrysler has been synonymous on the American market with great design and attention to detail. Now, at the dawn of a great effort aimed not only at expanding the range - at the moment the brand has only two cars in the catalogue, the Pacifica and the 300 - but also at addressing the epochal changes towards electric and autonomous driving, it reclaims that role by offering its vision of the near future with a concept that cannot leave anyone indifferent. It's called Halcyon and it is, as Irina Zavatski states, “a vision of style and proportions between today and 2030.” “Our North Star,” echoes Ryan Nagoda: “With a driving effect on all the other brands of the group.” That is, across the entire Stellantis…

It is only rarely that the Olympus of hypercars allows a glimpse into its own elusive essence, offering only fleeting peeks into the inner sanctums of its style centres. There is, however, one bastion of excellence that, over the years, has revealed even less of itself than others. It is based at Woking, in impeccable premises where the atmosphere of aseptic perfection is combined with structures inspired by automotive engineering. Here we were offered for the very first time the opportunity to listen to the views of Tobias Sühlmann, head of design since April 2023. How come McLaren has decided, in a groundbreaking move, to let us in to its creative processes? It is practically unprecedented in fact. Up till now, not even all our employees had ever visited the…

MG3: just two letters and a number and you have MG's trump card in Europe. The British-born brand now owned by the Chinese SAIC group has opted for the Geneva Motor Show to unveil a compact hybrid specifically targeting the needs of the European market. “The MG3’s volumes are perfect for the Old Continent, which has always gone for manoeuvrable, fun-to-drive cars”, explains Carl Gotham, Advanced Design Director of the SAIC style centre in London. And true to form, the MG3 has typical European hatchback proportions: a trim physique, short overhangs and a rear-oriented centre of gravity. Small yes, but assertive. A character defined by the design of the front end, exuding aggression and dynamism, a departure from MG’s traditional style typified by its nine-layer threedimensional grille. On the MG3…

VOLVO For the third year in a row, the ADI Design Museum in Milan has hosted the Car Design Award, the automotive styling Oscar instituted in 1984 by our magazine and now a key feature of the Milan Design Week. A unique occasion for the design community that flocked to Milan to celebrate the winners of this year's award: the BMW design team for the Vision Neue Klasse concept car (Concept Cars category), Volvo for its EX30 (Production Cars category) and Kia for its Brand Design Language, awarded to the design team that best ensured the consistency and transversality of the brand's formal language across the entire product range. Once again this year, the winners were chosen by a jury of experts made up of journalists from leading international automotive…

Simplify design and make the design process more streamlined. Offer more opportunities to stimulate creativity, save resources and improve collaboration between professionals. These are the main objectives of DigiPHY, an intelligent design and communication tool created by Turin-based design house Granstudio that combines virtual reality with physical media to create an immersive experience as close to reality as possible. “We immediately understood its potential, but when we used it, a whole new world opened up to us,” says Stefano Oliva, Chief Designer Prospective Design at Lynk & Co Design, an atoll of the Geely archipelago that is responsible for imagining and building concept cars and future mobility scenarios for the Chinese group. Lynk & Co Design first became aware of DigiPHY about two years ago and decided to buy it:…

Harmony of volumes, right proportions, excellent visual impact. “These are the most important ingredients that make it possible to remain stunned like a child in front of a car”, explains Maximillian Missoni, head of Polestar design, pointing out that this is exactly what happens when you look at the Synergy, a concept car born from the pencils of three students who won the Polestar Design Contest 2023. “We are talking about three cars in one, or rather a car that goes three ways”, Missoni jokes. “The Synergy takes the best of three ideas: the exterior originates from the fusion of the designs of students Devashish Deshmukh and Swapnil Desai, while the interior is by Yingxiang Li. A mix of creativity carefully selected from over 600 entries”. To the winners of…

Alfa Romeo Junior Design story Nimble, dynamic and sporty. The Junior is the Alfa Romeo that wasn’t, a sharply featured, muscular compact that had long been missing from the Biscione range. “In July 2021 when I arrived at Alfa Romeo, the project was already underway but we needed to give it more character”, says Alejandro Mesonero Romanos, head of Alfa Romeo design, whom we met up with at the style centre in Turin. While the initial architecture of the Junior was conceived with SUV undertones, it now has more the look of a raised hatchback: “There is no firm or soft surface, you just have to look more closely to realise how many lines define the volumes. A myriad of them, but with a feline grace, persuasive and captivating, despite…

The history of the car tells of body shops and style centres that over the years have combined design with the complete engineering of a vehicle, but it is so much rarer to hear the opposite. Yet this is exactly what has happened to the ERRE Company, a company based in Moncalieri, on the outskirts of Turin, in one of the most active automotive districts surrounding the Piedmont capital. A turnaround that has the name and friendly face of Argentinian Hernan Charalambopoulos, called upon in 2023 by founder Rosario Radice to lead the new ERRE Design Studio division alongside the one, started some 10 years earlier, as a supplier of engineering services. Actually, ‛division’ is not the right term, because the team of roughly 20 creatives works in close contact…

That Marcello Gandini is one of the greatest automobile designers of his generation, if not the greatest, can hardly be disputed. Over the past six decades, he has created many of the most epochal automobiles in history. Not only did he define and design some of the greatest supercars ever – the Lamborghini Miura, Espada, Countach and Diablo, the Maserati Khamsin, the Ferrari 308 GT4, and the Cizeta V16T, amongst others – he also designed some of the most important workaday hatchbacks and saloons such as the Innocenti Mini, the Audi 50/VW Polo, the Renault Super 5 or the Citroën BX, the first-generation BMW 5-Series, the Mazda Cosmo/Luce/929 and the second and fourth generation Maserati Quattroporte. And it wasn’t just cars, Marcello Gandini also came up with inventive light commercial…

Renault R5 E-Tech Electric Design story Some designs are intentional from the beginning, while others come from intuition and inspiration. The new “retrofuturistic” Renault 5 small electric car is one of the latter. In late 2019, Renault designers working on special projects came up with an idea for a future small electric car. They produced a design study that drew inspiration from the original Renault 5 — but with the automaker still dealing with the fallout from the Carlos Ghosn scandal, their idea stayed in obscurity. Then in early July 2020, former Seat CEO Luca de Meo became head of Renault Group, and one of his first acts was to visit the design center in Guyancourt, outside of Paris. There, he saw the bright orange Renault 5 design study. As de…

Peugeot’s designers faced a twin challenge in reimagining the brand’s best-selling SUVs, the 3008 and 5008. There was the difficulty of following up two very successful cars, of course, but they had the added goal of further differentiating the models to meet changing customer expectations. The 3008, with a fastback silhouette, responded to buyers who want to be a bit different, but still needed the roominess of an SUV, said Matthias Hossann, Peugeot’s design director. For more-traditional-minded customers who want more space for family, sports or leisure, there is the new seven-seat 5008. “We believed it was an opportunity to create a stronger differentiation, and when you discover the 5008 you can better understand the choice we made with the 3008 to go with a much more disruptive fastback silhouette,”…

More mature and elegant, but also inclined to be off-road with an unprecedented energy. Five years after the début of the third generation, the Ford Kuga, one of the most successful SUVs by the blue oval is heading towards an interesting formal evolution, successfully aided by the minimal intervention on the bodywork sheets. The main theme of intervention, especially on the front part, which is its focal point, is horizontality: “It was the means of infusing more strength and visual security into a global model, conceived to respond to varied needs, whose full potential it was time to explore”, explains Nedzad Mujcinovic, senior exterior designer at Ford Europe. One of the project’s “most critical issues” lies in its split commercial destination across multiple markets, including the United States (where the…

Futuristic proposals, characterised by formal cleanliness and profound attention to interior design, that imagine solutions for the needs of society in a hypothetical tomorrow where the increase in digitalisation and the ever-increasing spread of technology at a global level is contrasted by man’s need to reconnect with nature and unshackle from the daily digital overload. The thesis projects of the students of the Department of Transportation Design at the University of Pforzheim, a selection of which is presented on these pages, explore the potential of a global revision of the mobility system for a new conception of the vehicle, not only as a means of transport but also as an environment at the service of the user, that is both adaptable and reconfigurable to meet a new range of needs.…