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Mini Cooper first pictures (2013) BMW’s new Mini goes back to the future

By Phil McNamara First Official Pictures 18 November 2013 09:00 Here comes BMW’s third new Mini since it relaunched the brand in 2001. But its appearance seems resolutely stuck in time, like John and Jackie Kennedy in Zapruder’s film of the Dallas motorcade, or like the fans who berated Bob Dylan for going electric.   There are no design surprises: the bodysides are curvy and more crisply pressed, the rear lamps supersized, otherwise the floating roof, wraparound chrome piping and wheel-at-each corner stance are all present and correct. ‘We need to be careful,’ BMW Group design director Adrian van Hooydonk told CAR.

Early cars, fashion on display at the Petersen

Automotivated, a new exhibit at the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles, traces the evolution of clothes worn in cars--from the bulky circus-tent stuff people had to wear to keep from freezing to death in the jangly, open-topped conveyances of 100 years ago, up to the height of the European Concours in the 1920s and '30s, when what you and your date wore was just as important to winning best of show as the styling of your Delahaye/Delage/Talbot Lago. “In the earliest days of the automobile, you were sitting on the car, you weren't sitting in it,” said Leslie Kendall, curator at the Petersen. So the first section of the exhibit shows people (mannequins dressed as people) in heavy, practical overcoats, scarves and goggles.

Los Angeles auto show design contest seeks Hollywood's next hot car

Designers from the United States, Germany and Japan will compete in the 2011 Los Angeles auto show Design Challenge to create Hollywood's hottest new movie car. The event is part of the Design Los Angeles automobile designers' conference, held annually during the L.A. auto show press days, Nov.