We limited ourselves to current production vehicles and to pedals that come stock on those cars. Thankfully, there's still quite a bit of variety. You'll note that the more exotic cars come with floor hinged pedals. That's a more classic look that takes a little bit of engineering and ergonomic gumption to get right. Top hinged pedals are more common as it's easier to get them to adjust and break away in a front end impact. Mounting them from the bottom is now a form of showing off, providing car buyers with a clear example of high-spec mechanical components and sexy engineering. Both designs can now apply equal force to the pushrod they're attached to.

Car: Renault Twingo Renaultsport 133 Cup

Pedal Arrangement: Bog standard top hingers with aluminum covers that mimic Playstation Buttons.

Why They're Cool: Playstation buttons! A little tacky, but still not something you see everyday.

What They Say About The Car: The Twingo Cup is fun, like video games. Young people these days like video games, right?

Car: Lotus Elise

Pedal Arrangement: top hingers that are incredibly small and close together. Built from wedged aluminum to save weight.

Why They're Cool: They're just so damn functional and spartan. You can barely drive with a pair of slim sneakers on, racing shoes are strongly recommended.

What They Say About the Car: I might have a poofy name, but I was built to do one thing and one thing only: go around corners.

Car: Ariel Atom

Pedal Arrangement: Tilton racing top hinged.

Why They're Cool: Not only are these high-spec racing pedals made for actual race cars, you can see them from the outside thanks to the Atom's tubular frame.

What They Say About The Car: I mean business.

Car: Spyker C8 Spyder

Pedal Arrangement: Aluminum floor hinged crazy things.

Why They're Cool: They're completely over the top, just like the rest of the car.

What They Say About The Car: If my pedals are this freaking crazy, just imagine how quickly I'm going to spin the first time you drive me.

Car: Lexus LFA

Pedal Arrangement: Two forged aluminum floor-hinged sex toys.

Why They're Cool: like the rest of the car, they're massively over-engineered, yet completely sober. There's no extra design flourishes here, just a component it took some Japanese engineer a decade to refine. The samurai sword of car pedals.

What They Say About The Car: I may only have two pedals, but I was made that way on purpose because anything that wasn't an ideal solution was engineered out of me over a 10-year long gestation.

A special note to girls that like to take videos of themselves pumping pedals: please stop obscuring our view of sexy-looking pedals with your high heels and your bare legs.

This is the start of a new semi-regular Jalopnik series we're calling "Auto-Erotic Design." We give you our favorite shot of a car part, you try to one-up us in the comments below by posting your favorite shot. To see if you can beat the hot automotive sex we've dropped atop the post we'll run our reader responses as a gallery the next day. (Note to starred commenters: Help us out by promoting the threads with pictures!)

First up, we're choosing foot pedals. You think you've got some hotter pedals than what McLaren's got? Prove it and show us the sexy below.

[via ColdTrackDays, Richard Thompson]

In a speech to the Motor Press Guild yesterday, Robert Davis, senior vice president of product development for Mazda NorAm says they plan to cut the weight in a way Tommy LaSorda can't, by using lighter-weight materials like aluminum and higher-strength steel, smaller vehicle footprints and new engineering processes. Davis claims that reducing curb weight by a man-sized amount will help to improve fuel economy by 3-5%. Also, to make sure the MX-5 will still be able to fit in the Miata's old dresses for the 25th Anniversary reunion in 2014. [via Automotive News]

Wikipedia does a pretty good job explaining the basic idea. You want to

create an area of low pressure underneath the car, so that the higher pressure above the car will apply a downward force. Naturally, to maximize the force one wants the maximum area at the minimal pressure. Racing car designers have achieved low pressure in two ways: first, by using a fan to pull air out of the cavity; second, to design the underside of the car so that incoming air is accelerated through a narrow slot between the car and the ground, lowering pressure by Bernoulli's principle.

So, although the jacked-up car above may look like flatter than a Ken doll, it's for creating some serious low pressure.

That leaves us with two questions. First, can you find a car that's got better under-body aero? Second, think you can tell us what car this is? [Wikipedia, pacepirate]

There were a few years around the turn of the millennium when a wild spectrum of appliance manufacturers were inspired by the translucent, colored plastics used by Apple lead designer Jonathan Ive for the original iMac. The future, as evidenced by a casual glimpse at household appliances, was about to turn bondi blue.

This did not happen, of course, mainly because Ive has since abandoned color and began to lead his team to create monochrome computers, like the latest iteration of his iMac, announced yesterday.

But Apple’s aesthetics creep through and define modern industrial design. Observe this info-display made by Toyota for last month’s Frankfurt Motor Show to advertise their new Prius: it is as close to an iPhone as you can get without actually manufacturing a handheld computing device with a multitouch screen.

I wouldn’t be surprised if our Ray Wert, currently prowling the Tokyo Motor Show, came across something very similar. Or perhaps a rapid-prototyped press freebie aping Apple’s new mouse. (Nope! Bupkiss. —Ed.)

Profile

The BMW X6 was the first SUV to address the needs of people who desire urban combat stockiness and a coupé profile in the same vehicle. The X6 has since become the most recognizable of this attempted creation of a new breed of vehicle. The ZDX appears to borrow both its roof profile and its side windows from the Bavarian monstrosity:

Look close and you can even see its slightly nipponized Hofmeister kink:

Rear Window

The huge, sloping pane of glass paired with a thin vertical strip at the back as a rear window was most likely invented by Marcello Gandini for his 1967 Lamborghini Espada:

It has since appeared on cars as diverse as the Pontiac Aztek:

—and the Honda CRX, showing that the styling is not alien to Acura’s mothership:

Gandini’s solution is an elegant way to increase rear visibility in a profile which tends to reduce it.

Rear Doorhandles

To steal from Alfa Romeo is forgivable, as they are without doubt the masters of styling details. Like many Japanese carmakers, Acura is no stranger to this practice. The inspiration for the ZDX’s rear doorhandles looks like it comes straight from the Alfa Romeo 156:

The 156, one of the greatest sports sedans ever made, is a 1997 design by Walter de’Silva, currently head of design at the Volkswagen Group.

Photo Credit: Acura, Balázs Fenyő (Lamborghini Espada), NetCarShow.com (Pontiac Aztek), Wiros/Flickr (Honda CRX), nordschleifenfan/Flickr (Alfa Romeo 156)

Try to be the first to match all twenty of these animals to the car that's named after them without checking out the answers. Only you'll know if you looked ahead and cheated. Good luck! (Hat Tip To David!)

[inspired by: HowStuffWorks]

Image Credit: Richard Day, National Geographic
Photo Credit: William Albert Allard, National Geographic
Image Credit: Rent Me Panama City Beach
Image Credit: Pete Oxford, Art.com
Image Credit: Chris Johns, National Geographic
Image Credit: Micheal St. George
Image Credit: Pavel Krasensky, Nature Photo
Image Credit: Anthony Childs, National Geographic
Image Credit: Captain Pat Green, Panama City Spear Fishing
Image Credit: btwood2, igougo
Image Credit: Travis Olson, canids
Image Credit: Carolina Bee Company
Image Credit: CLTV
Image Credit: LYNX
Image Credit: UWYO
Image Credit: A & M Shah, National Geographic
Image Credit: Mark Beeson
Image Credit: Absolute Divers
Image Credit: Daniel Pettersson, Wikipedia
Image Credit: Scott Bauer, Wikipedia

1. Nissan/Datsun Bluebird
2. Ford Bronco
3. AMC Marlin
4. Dodge Viper
5. Chevy Impala
6. Ford Pinto
7. Hudson Wasp
8. Shelby Cobra
9. Plymouth Barracuda
10. Chevrolet Bison Semi-Truck
11. Volkswagen Fox
12. Nissan/Datsun Honey Bee
13. Mercury Cougar
14. Jaguar
15. Cheetah kit car
16. Singer Gazelle
17. Plymouth Road Runner
18. Corvette Stingray
19. Studebaker Lark / Buick Skylark
20. Volkswagen Beetle

Drag a car-like contraption straight out of Minority Report that climbs down the wall from your apartment, has never seen a drop of gasoline and very probably drives by GPS in front of an audience of petrolheads and the Peugeot lion on its grille will experience a sudden role reversal. Unlike its live ancestors in the heydays of the Roman Empire which fed on Christians and gladiators in stadia, it will soon find itself on the other end of the food chain.

Except consider for a moment the utility of concept cars like this, designed by Roman Mistiuk for Peugeot. One of the main problems with the modern automobile is that the majority of them are purchased and used by people who couldn’t care less about cars. Yet they use up cubic miles of gasoline, take up all the space and create a market for annoying nanny-features.

What if the people who solve crossword puzzles behind the wheel, stuck in rush hour traffic, could have pods like the Peugeot Metromorph? They could focus their attention on 4-Down, Common British butterfly. GPS satellites could guide them to their destinations. And cars would become like horses, freed from the need to serve a vehicles of transport and transforming en masse into vehicles for fun.

Source: Yanko Design

How To Play
Click on the color and you'll get the name and a swatch of that color. Click the next button at the top to reveal the corresponding vehicle and some information about the strangely-named color. Let's begin.

Wicked Merlot Jewel Metallic

2009 Pontiac Solstice GXP
We're not sure how "wicked" merlot truly is unless you're coming from the perspective of a judgmental oenophile. Despite the strange name it accents the car quite well.

Bronzit Beige Metallic

1988 BMW 6-Series
Found on numerous BMW models, Bronzit Beige Metallic will always be remembered by us for its time spent adorning the long 6-Series from the 1980s. It's not just color, it's a command: Bronze-it!

Photo Credit: Bimmer Forums

Burnt Orange

1973 Ford Pinto
Burnt Orange is the official color of The University of Texas and therefore has some level of accept as a name. However, It doesn't get anymore ironic than giving a car with a history of fires a color called "burnt."

Anti-Establish Mint

1970 Ford Maverick
In the 1970s, as the Vietnam War began to wane, Ford and Chrysler battle over who could come up with the silliest name. Credit goes to Ford for Anti-Establish Mint, which captured the sentiment of the day with a really stupid pun.

Root Beer Metallic

2008 Honda Element SC
There's something unappealing about the idea of metallic-flavored Root Beer and in the realm of soft drink-named colors it doesn't quite match up to Cherry Red or Orange Julius. Still, what better place for a strange color than on a strange car like the Element SC.

Assuan Brown

1983 VW Vanagon
Assuan Brown isn't a color name you can say out loud in mixed company. When you hear, or read, the word Assuan it already sounds dirty. Couple it with the word "brown" and there's only one thing we're thinking. The name of the Egyptian city the color is named for changed it's name to Aswan for a reason.

Photo Credit: The Samba

Egg Yolk Yellow

2005 Ford Focus
Car companies have gotten in the habit of naming car colors after food and we have to credit Ford for correctly matching the name closely with the way the color looks. The Focus truly makes us think of egg yolks, which don't make us think of anything about driving.

Photo Credit: Eyermonkey @ flickr

Plum Crazy

1970 Dodge Challenger
Plum Crazy is a strange name, but it's appropriate for the vehicle. Ford had its Anti-Establish Mint Mavericks, but the Dodge Challenger was — well, Plum Crazy.

Photo Credit: Classic Muscle NJ

Scorched Penny

2006 Scion xB Series 4.0
This is another one of those cases where the car color name is just a little too on-the-nose. Yes, the Scion does look like what we imagine a scorched penny would look like but we're not in the habit of burning currency.

Squeeze Green

2010 Ford Fiesta
Automakers have gotten in the habit of reserving green for the color of choice for strange names and we almost went with the Kia Soul special green color Alien. But whereas Alien reminds you of animated aliens, Squeeze Green doesn't remind us of a color at all. It reminds us of trying to squeeze into a tiny European car.

Here's how it works, starting from the first page you're given an image of the hood ornament, you'll be asked a question about the ornament and the answer will be found by clicking on the next page, where another ornament and question will exist. And away we go...

Question #1: What's the year, make and model of this hood ornament?

Answer #1: That handsome art deco piece belongs to the 1941 Packard 110. The basic elements of the design had been in Packards for some time, but it was the addition of the glass wings which really sends this particular example over the top.

Question #2: What's the name of this famous Rolls Royce Mascot and for bonus points, name the partner who didn't approve of its inclusion on the company's cars (it's 50/50)?

Answer #2:: The name, of course, is "The Spirit of Ecstasy," and has adorned Rolls Royce motor cars since 1911. Believe it or not, Henry Royce, the engineer who began building the cars and partnered with Charles Rolls for sales didn't approve of the Mascot, believing the decoration obstructed the view of the driver.

Question #3: Here's a tough one: What's the year, make and model of this early depression-era limousine from a manufacturer which would go on to live another 36 years?


Answer #3: This gorgeous ornament belongs to the 1931 Studebaker President, a vehicle designed and introduced just as the Great Depression was hitting its stride. It was intended as competition against the likes of Packard and Cadillac, and spared no expense, though it was not as commercially successful as hoped.

Question #4: Though this hood ornament died at one point, a logo inspired by it was reborn in the 90s, only to die with the brand it was attached to. What's the company, and for extra points, the year and model in this example?


Answer #4: The brand in question is Plymouth and the vehicle behind the ornament is the 1948 Plymouth Special Deluxe Woodie Wagon. Depicted is the the Pilgrim ship the Mayflower, get it? Plymouth... Mayflower.

Question #5: First of all, although practically a gimme, what's the name of this logo? More importantly, when was this leaping cat decoration first available as a factory option?


Answer #5: The Jaguar leaper was first made available in 1938, after Jaguar founder Sir William Lyons noted the successful aftermarket accessory, bought the rights and modified it, offering it as a factory option.

Question #6: We'll give you the make and model on this one, it's a Hudson Terraplane, Now — what's the model year? (they changed it slightly almost every year)

Answer #6: If you answered 1937, you're a freakier brand of car nut than we are. It evokes speed and style and foreshadows all the rocket and jet-age gee-whiz styling to come. Picking a best-of from Hudson is darn near impossible, so we went with a deco standard.

Question #7: If you can even name the brand this radiator ornament comes from we'll be majorly impressed. Here's a hint, it's still around though not by the same name.


Answer #7: This whimsical badge belongs to the 1929 Willys Knight 66A Varsity. Yes, that Willys which went on to become the brand we know today as Jeep. This car used a Knight engine, thus the dual naming convention. We just like it for the extreme pedestrian unfriendliness.

Question #8: This one is thoroughly iconic, and if you don't know it you've been living in a cave, the question here isn't the make, it's the meaning behind the three points to this star.

Answer #8: Gottleib Daimler designed the points of the star to represent the land, sea and sky, which is where Daimler's engines were utilized and the ornament is still in use with his company's flagship brand, Mercedes Benz.

Question #9: This example is perhaps the most surreal example on the list, a jet plane with a face in place of a cockpit — creepy, and yet, really cool. The make and model might be easy, but what year is this car from?


Answer #9: 1955 Pontiac Star Chief, it's basically the Pontiac version of the higher volume Chevy Bel Air, but the snazzy bits make it unique and desirable. The Indian's face was interpreted many times over with this as probably the strangest and most interesting version, and if that's not enough for you, it lights up at night.

Question #10: This last hood ornament is plucked straight from a Jules Verne alternate reality and resides on the prow of an ultra-rare French collectible, name that car!

(And since we're out of pictures...) Answer #10: 1931 Avions Voisin C20 Mylord Demi-Berline. Nothing says badass V12-powered French awesomeness like a steampunk eagle.

For someone untrained in the language of vehicular design, it’s not easy to describe what makes a car particularly Pininfarina or Bertone—but suffice to say that once you’ve seen examples of both, you will be able to tell them apart at the blink of an eye. An easy metaphor would make Pininfarina the designer of jet planes with Bertone in the business of sci-fi spaceships.

Think Bertone and you think Marcello Gandini, the man whose forehead the Lamborghini Miura sprang from like Pallas at the incredible age of 27. Gandini joined Bertone in 1965 and—following the Miura and the wonderful Espada—he went on to design cars which crave, simply crave ion drives and proton cannons, first amongst them the Lamborghini Countach.

The news last fall that Pininfarina’s Jason Castriota was to leave his employer of many years to follow in Gandini’s footsteps at Stile Bertone was quite a shocker. Pininfarinas and Bertones just don’t mix. Add to this that the cars Castriota had worked on at Pininfarina—the Maseratis Birdcage 75th and GranTurismo, the Ferraris 599 GTB and P4/5—are very Pininfarina, their aggression expressed not by sharp angles but flowing lines that hit you like an aikido throw.

Yet six months later, Castriota unveiled the Mantide, a car Bertone to its core. And while it has not become easier in the past three paragraphs for someone untrained in the language of product design to describe what that precisely is, there is one design element very easy to pinpoint: the angular rear wheelarches.

Like most things Bertone, this is from Gandini. As far as I know, he first used it on the Lamborghini Countach LP500, the prototype which served as the basis for the first production Countach, the LP400. Over subsequent iterations, the Countach lost the angularity, but the motif cropped up in later Gandini designs like the Maserati Shamal—and this Quattroporte IV that was parked the other day on the very street I live on:

By Gandini’s outrageous standards, this car is a subdued Q-ship, especially in the neutral Germanic silver this example—one of only 1,138—was painted in. The Quattroporte IV was produced at the tail end of Maserati’s doldrums, before the company was acquired by Ferrari, and this is their last car that was built in the old Maserati factory, before the Ferrari people threw out all the old machinery. There was a lull of four Quattroporte-less years at the reborn Maserati until they began building the Pininfarina-designed Quattroporte V—the latest version of which we recently drove in Italy.

It’s comforting to see how quickly Castriota has grokked the essentials of Bertone design, as evidenced by this reference to Gandini’s last car for Bertone. I can’t wait to see how he will manage over the years to balance on the shoulders of the giants he’s standing on—and what he’ll add to the Bertone canon. Based on his work at Pininfarina, one is compelled to think he will do just fine.

Photo Credit: Lamborghini, Cartype, 25ora.ro, Stile Bertone and the author

Arieff writes:

In discussing his often fantastical, sometimes silly, sometimes visionary concepts, he has said, “If I could use two words to describe what it is that I enjoy it is that I love to be sneakily outrageous…[It may be that] I have decided an idea has no practical worth and would never be likely to be adopted seriously (like most of my ideas), but I like it anyway.”

A latent inventor, Johnson discovered his “ability” only at age 36 in 1974, when he was the editorial cartoonist for The Sierra Club Bulletin and the editor, Roger Olmsted, asked him to invent whimsical recreational vehicles. Olmsted asked for 16; Johnson gave him 109. “I had never invented anything before,” he told me in an e-mail recently, “because no one had ever asked me to invent anything!”

Do click through for more wacky inventions, like the Automobile Snack Conveyor Belt, the Self-Shortening Sedan or Johnson’s Automobile Abandonment Zones, built along superhighways with permanent traffic jams.

Source: The New York Times → By Design

The program puts Audi engineers together with students to imagine the future of the brand as a sporty, premium brand with unique technology and eye-catching designs. The result is a selection of design concepts for Audi to draw from, but more importantly an engaged student base interested in working for Audi in the future. That's all well and good, but we want to get our hands on that S1 Quattro inspired race-car concept. Is it getting hot in here?

Just because an idea can be modeled in 3D does it mean it will work in the real world. DAWS is one of those ideas. There are many things which are technically difficult to begin with, but there are two we'll point out which are engineering non-starters. First, we realize this isn't absolutely central to the concept, but the suspension would topple the car before the fancy wheel would even have a chance to transform. They've mistakenly designed control arms which place the roll center outside the car. Turn hard into a corner and the mass of the car acting on the control arms will turn the wheels on their edges. Oops.

Okay, pedantry aside, let's assume they design a roll center in the center of the car where it's supposed to be, those transforming wheels are going to be awfully bumpy through a corner and aren't going to help the handling anyway. The premise of the design depends on overcoming the limiting factor of all tires - friction. You get a dollar's worth of traction on any wheel, spend it how you like on cornering and acceleration, but you only get a dollar. This design assumes there's an extra dime floating around on top of that dollar. Let's say you're at maximum cornering load, using all the available friction and then this system kicks in, pushing the car in the opposite direction, and thus overdrawing the traction account. Instant understeer. So again, it looks pretty, is shiny, and will never be coming to a sports car near you. Feel free to dissect the many other unfortunate foibles below, and head over to the designers website to watch the animated video where the suspension remains perfectly still through a cornering event. [DAWS Homepage via Yanko Design]

The 1955 Citroën DS took the lead vote by a 20-strong panel of judges comprised of the most influential people in the automotive industry including Giorgetto Giugaro, Ian Callum, Paul Bracq, Marcell Gandini and Gordon Murray. The DS narrowly beat out Ferrari as there were just too many beautiful cars to choose from, proving once again that the French really know how to stick it to the Italians.

The only thing we're sad about is that we wish that Citroën's designers would have taken this into account before mucking up the Geneva-bound Citroën DS Inside Concept.

Press Release:

What's the most beautiful car of all time? A multi-million pound Ferrari or the curvy Jaguar E-type perhaps? No, it is now officially Citroën's humble DS, the car most famous for saving President De Gaulle from assassination.

That was the verdict when Classic & Sports Car magazine polled a jury of the world's leading car designers to nominate the most gorgeous cars ever.

The 20-strong panel ranged from Car designer of the Century Giorgetto Giugiaro – the man behind the Maserati Bora, VW Golf, Fiat Panda and Lotus Esprit – to current Jaguar director of design Ian Callum, and each picked their top three beauties.

Although Ferrari secured the most votes as a marque, they were spread across nine different models, leaving the Citroën to scoop the honours as the single most beautiful classic.
Citroen DSThe top 10

1. Citroën DS
2. Jaguar XK120
3. Ferrari 275GTB
4. Cord 810/812
5. Ferrari 250GT Lusso
6. Ferrari 250GT Short-wheelbase
7. Jaguar E-type
8. Lamborghini Miura
9. Lotus Elan
10. Lotus Elite (1957)

James Elliott, editor of Classic & Sports Car, said: "The Citroën is a benchmark design, but we were still astonished that it came out on top when you look at the sexiness – and values – of some of its rivals.

"Apart from the Mini, it's by far the most affordable car to get any nominations at all, which probably means it's a great investment!

Citroen DS"Petrolheads everywhere are forever arguing about the most beautiful cars and we hope that this will put an end to the debate once and for all, though we suspect that it might just be lighting a rocket under it. I don't think anyone has ever asked this many great designers what their views are, so who better to pick the official winner… even if they all missed my favourite, the Alfa Romeo T33 Stradale?"

"It's great to see the iconic DS getting such recognition amongst such an august group of car designers , and with the amazing news that a new DS range from Citroën will appear over the next few years, it's clear we have lost none of our styling panache or instinct for innovation," commented Citroën spokesperson Marc Raven on hearing the news.
What they said about the Citroën DS

* Giorgetto Giugiaro: "The only example of a car really conceived ‘outside the box'. It is just impossible to imitate."
* Leonardo Fioravanti (former Pininfarina design chief and the man behind Ferrari's Daytona, Dino and 308GTB): "A real road car that, at its time and perhaps still now, has represented the ‘dream' in its extreme progress."
* Citroen DSPeter Stevens (British great responsible for the McLaren F1 and second-generation Lotus Esprit): "I have always considered the fact that this car was first drawn in 1955 to be extraordinary."
* Marcello Gandini (Bertone stalwart responsible for Lancia Stratos and Lamborghini Countach among many others): "At the time I think it was complete folly, madness from a business and industrial point of view… but it was a really innovative car in 1955. A few people may have thought of all those beautiful ideas, but it was real bravery to implement all of them in one car."

About the Citroën DS

Citroen DSWith its name derived from Déesse (French for Goddess), this innovative design was styled by Italian sculptor Flaminio Bertoni and launched in 1955.

The futuristic shape was an instant design classic and over the next 20 years more than 1.5 million cars were sold in a range of specifications.

But it wasn't just the shape that revolutionised automotive design: the complex self-levelling suspension, plus powered steering, clutch and brakes were otherwordly compared to rival cars of the era.

While regarded today as a technical masterpiece – and a potential nightmare for the home mechanic – it was of pioneering construction for its day with unitary ‘tub', bolt on panels and a plastic roof.

Citroen DSBut the appeal of the DS is as much as a cultural icon as a car with a long list of celebrity owners and fans (Alec Guinness, Peter Cook and Will Self among them), plus regular appearances on film and in design museums and art galleries.
About Classic & Sports Car

Founded in 1982, Classic & Sports Car is the UK's market-leading classic car magazine and Britain's third best-selling motoring monthly.

The "most beautiful classics" feature coincides with an extensive redesign of the magazine and is accompanied by a free A2 poster featuring Lamborghini Miura and Jaguar E-type, plus the definitive buyers' guide to the Citroën DS.
About the panel of designers
On their own designs:

* Peter Stevens (McLaren F1): "I always intended that the design should be timeless rather than ‘of the minute', and that is something that I would use as a measure of other designs."
* Ian Callum (Jaguar XF): "It is the biggest challenge I've faced, but I think we pulled it off. I don't think people appreciate how well proportioned it is, given that it's a five-seater."
* Gordon Murray (McLaren F1): "Designed as a road car, but went on to win Le Mans, which in my opinion is more difficult than F1."
* John Heffernan (Aston Martin Vantage): "When I borrowed one, it was much appreciated by 'bikers of the Hells Angels persuasion, which I liked."
* Patrick Le Quément (Renault Twingo): "Some love it, some hated it. I wrote to the president of Renault and said: ‘I think you have to vote for instinctive design rather than extinctive marketing.' He wrote back: ‘I agree.'"

And on other peoples' cars:

* Steve Crijns of Lotus on the Ford GT40: "It's so sexy and has so much presence without really being aggressive."
* Paul Bracq, former head of design for both Mercedes and BMW, on the Aston Martin DB9: "It's more beautiful than the current Ferraris. I don't understand modern Ferrari design: the new California looks like a big VW Karmann-Ghia."
* Julian Thomson of Jaguar on the Lamborghini Gallardo: "I love the proportions… It's a tiny modern interpretation of a supercar: things like the Bugatti Veyron are totally irrelevant to me."
* Martin Smith, executive design director of Ford of Europe on the Lamborghini Countach: "It was like a spaceship, something totally new combining smooth curves with geometric forms. I remember thinking ‘I'll never be able to do something as good as that!'"
* Ian Callum, Jaguar director of design, on the Ferrari 250GT Short-wheelbase: "A blend of beauty and aggression… I just drool over them, and I can draw them with my eyes closed."
* Marcello Gandini on the Cord 810/812: "It was an impressive design for the 1930s, with solutions that could be seen in cars of 20 years later."
* Tom Tjaarda, former head of Ghia's studios, on the Jaguar E-type: "A gorgeous car. It looks narrow, like a woman in high heels. It doesn't have the stance that cars have today."

The jury

* Citroen DS - Inteiror Adams, Dennis
* Axe, Roy
* Bracq, Paul
* Callum, Ian
* Carr, Russell
* Crijns, Steve
* Fioravanti, Leonardo
* Gandini, Marcello
* Giugiaro, Giorgetto
* Heffernan, John
* Karen, Tom
* Le Quément, Patrick
* Martin, Paulo
* Murray, Gordon
* Okuyama, Ken
* Smith, Martin
* Stevens, Peter
* Thomson, Julian
* Tjaarda, Tom
* Winterbottom, Oliver

All the cars that received votes

Citroen DS

* Alfa Romeo Canguro
* Aston Martin DB9
* Audi A6
* Bentley Continental GT
* Bentley R-Type Continental
* Bertone BAT 5
* Bertone Marzal
* BMW 328 Mille Miglia
* Bugatti T41 Royale Coupé Napoleon
* Bugatti T57SC Atlantic
* Buick Riviera (1963-'65)
* "Cadzilla"
* Citroën ID/DS
* Cord 810/812
* Delage D8-120S
* Ferrari 166 Barchetta
* Ferrari 250GT Lusso
* Ferrari 250GT swb
* Ferrari 250GTO
* Ferrari 275GTB
* Ferrari 330 P3/4
* Ferrari Dino 206S
* Citroen DSFerrari Dino 246GT
* Ferrari P6
* Ford GT40
* Hispano-Suiza H6 (Tulip Wood)
* Jaguar E-type
* Jaguar XJ6 S1
* Jaguar XK120
* Jaguar XKSS
* Lagonda Rapide
* Lamborghini Countach
* Lamborghini Gallardo
* Lamborghini Miura
* Lancia Stratos
* Lincoln Continental (1961)
* Lotus Elan +2
* Lotus Elan S3
* Lotus Elite (1957)
* Maserati Boomerang
* Maserati Khamsin
* Mercedes-Benz 500K
* Mercedes-Benz Gullwing 300SL
* Mini
* Pagaso Z102 ‘Thrill'
* Phantom Corsair
* Triumph TR4

[via carbodydesign]

The survey of 4,000 people in eight countries, primarily in Europe, but also including the U.S., China and Japan, by consultant Bain & Co., claims high-income buyers are ready to buy all-electric vehicles as a second vehicle for short trips. “Consumers would be buying now if there were products,” says Gregor Matthies, a Munich-based partner at Bain specializing in the auto industry.

Of course, as you'd expect, demand is highest among people who already own luxury cars, but feel guilty and want to show the world they really, really, really do care about the environment. Actually, not the world so much. Really they only want to show the people who live on their street and anyone they happen across in their travels.

What the survey also found was customers are eager to buy an electric car from familiar names such as Toyota, Daimler, Volkswagen or BMW. (Respondents weren’t asked about the U.S. carmakers.) “The consumers are expecting trusted brands to deliver these products,” says Matthies.

But, there's another challenge for carmakers — differentiating their products from the competition. Electric motors are much less complicated to build than internal combustion engines and don't use the same gearboxes, have the same engine noises and torque curves that have sold BMWs, Lexus and Mercedes as unique.

So design may be the key competitive factor. As we're already seeing with the Volt, Prius and new Insight, there's little you can do with the exterior of a car on a hybrid when you're attempting to minimize wind resistance to maximize fuel economy. Luckily, electrics aren't truly in a real-world competition mode yet. They don't need to maximize wind resistance because the desire with an electric is not to truly maximize fuel economy, it's to look green and look good doing it. Thus, the Tesla Roadster and Fisker Karma can look fast and cool because they're not designed to be appliances like the Prius, Volt and Insight.

Some automakers may decide to form partnerships with companies known for superb product design. Thus, the reason the Bain survey asked people whether they would buy a car from Apple (also, Thomas Friedman, but he can suck it). Only 21% of Europeans asked said they would, vs. 48% who said they'd be willing to buy an electric car from BMW. Still, Apple’s score was surprisingly high considering they've never made a motor vehicle.

Despite the response rate, they shouldn't be designing an electric car exterior, or even partnering with an automaker on one. Here's why. As the market for electric cars matures, design may be the key competitive factor. And since the exterior of most "appliance" electric cars will eventually mature to take advantage of wind resistance needs, there won't but much room for toying with design. But the interior? That'd be a place to play around with.

Apple has long been known for producing some of the most popular and user friendly gadgets and computers on the planet and they’ve excelled in creating a usable human machine interface (HMI) with the iPod scroll wheel. They’ve also gotten pretty close to perfection with the iPod Touch and iPhone touch-screen interface that would surely do a lot of good if their methods replaced the crappy touch screen navigation systems installed in most cars today. BMW, Audi and Mercedes have all tried their hands at creating their own HMI experience with their wheeled control devices, but we all know how that’s panned out.

If Apple were to give Jonathon Ive and his design team the task to design the interior of an electric car, how could they really make it better? For starters, they would likely integrate all HVAC, navigation and media control functions into one simple, usable interface not unlike the iPod scroll wheel. Haptic touch would be a necessity to allow the driver to concentrate on driving the car while interfacing with the secondary controls, but how would this information get transmitted? It’s likely that a large 7-8” infotainment screen would remain, but the current gauge cluster of today’s cars would go the way of the dodo, instead, it would be replaced by a large format LCD display that would match the center stack’s infotainment display. A simple icon-based navigation layout would be likely a.k.a. the Apple OS dock, but would be simplified for use while driving. These are just a few of the obvious ways that Apple could improve on the interior of electric cars and would hopefully trickle down to more mainstream cars.

There’s no lying when we say Apple knows how to build a consumer product but they should never even think of building an electric car. However the interior? Well, quite simply put, Apple could potentially revolutionize the way we see interiors, much the same as they’ve done for computers, mp3 players and cell phones. We just hope that doesn’t mean gloss white plastic everywhere we look.

[via BusinessWeek, Bain & Co.]

“When investing in a new passenger car, you're talking about billions,” the head of EFS Consulting, the firm conducting the research, told MSNBC. “If you get the wrong styling, you get problems."

MSNBC goes on to explain that, until now, car design has been more an art than a science. Designers can go after a certain emotion with known styling features, but they have no set of parameters to apply to a shape to make it behave in a certain way when viewed by humans. It’s that data that EFS is trying to gather.

The first step in the research was to gather information on which cars evoked which emotions across a wide range of people. A group of participants was asked to rate passenger cars (SUVs were excluded for fear of skewing the results) on a sliding scale of traits. Age, for example could be ranked from “infancy” to “adulthood.” Other traits were maturity, sex, attitudes, emotions, and personality; all things humans can recognize in each other’s faces.

That group’s preferences were then ranked, resulting in a marked preference for vehicles that evoke power like the BMW 5-series. Other traits such as arrogance, fear and agreableness evoked more mixed reactions.

EFS is now hoping to employ eye movement-tracking and brain wave-measuring technology to further tap into their subjects' subconscious. The company also plans to conduct future studies in Ethiopia, a country where modern car design is totally alien, in an effort to collect unbiased results. We presume all this data will then be compiled and made available to car companies. We can also envision a bizarre future industry for developing nations: selling the sheltered psyches of their citizens to be used in automaker focus groups. [MSNBC]

We've seen nanotech help devise anti-fog glass and play a part in fuel-cell technology, but some of the German Ford designers have even gone as far as creating nano-particle spray-on coating for cylinder liners that reduce friction and more. [Autopia]