Posts Tagged "concept car"

By Owen Ready

We covered certain aspects of the Rocketman concept in our previous post, trend observation and photo gallery. Now it’s time to bring you the full video of new Design Director Anders Warming talking us around the car, highlighting not only the sense of occasion that comes with the simple act of opening the door, but also the rear drawer and tailgate. At 3400mm long, the Rocketman is a foot shorter than the Cooper, but has high levels of functionality and technical detailing to keep weight down.

Eric Gallina

Created in Alfa Romeo’s design studios in Turin, Italy, the 4C concept is a technical and emotional showpiece for a new compact sports car from the Italian brand. Developed in a scant three months, the show car was built around a carbon fiber tub. CDN speaks to Marco Tencone, Alfa Romeo and Lancia Design Director, about the new design.

Eric Gallina

Exterior

Interior

Murat Guenak and David Wilkie, former Volkswagen and Bertone Design Directors respectively, unveiled a new all-electric mobility concept in Geneva.

Available for fleet sales from June this year, the vehicle features sliding doors and a three or four passenger arrangement, where the driver sits in the center with the passengers behind and on either side. The four passenger model is 300mm longer behind the rear seat, allowing the delivery variant of the same car 1500 liters of luggage space.

More product design-like rather than automotive referencing, the MIA is made from plastic body panels for lightweight. These are represented as simple honest trim pieces, which can be textured according to customer taste.

Eric Gallina

To commemorate its 99 years as a coachbuilder and design house, Bertone unveiled a Jaguar sedan concept called the B99. The boldly proportioned car eschews Jaguar’s current trend towards a more modern design language in favor of a very traditional three-box design, with broad shoulders and unbroken lines that give the car a solid, carved-out-of-a-solid-block appearance.

The detailing is a bit less decisive however, with a very intriguing front grille design that resembles tiny jewels set behind a large piano-black plastic panel, but small slit headlamps that fight the bold curves of the wings and waste the opportunity to create a graphically strong DRG. At the rear, the powerful haunches fade somewhat awkwardly into another set of inset tail lamps which, as at the front, are rendered in a thin strip. To top it off, a Jaguar badge is set in another large black plastic panel.

Mike Robinson says he wanted to create something that was “bold in its conservatism” with this car. In a way he’s succeeded in making an impact and impressing a lot of people with his view of Bertone and Jaguar design, but the B99 is lacking the decisive detailing that we are accustomed to seeing from the nearly 100 year old design house, and ultimately lets down the powerful, classical proportions of this concept.

Andrew Meehan