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Video: Jaguar's Julian Thomson on the importance of design values

Jaguar's Head of Advanced Design, Julian Thomson, appeared at this month's PSFK Conference in London giving a talk on design values. Thomson's talk, ‘Concepting Dreams, Making Reality Happen', dealt with questions of creating a design story as well as how Jaguar uses the value of its heritage while keeping things original and new. Thomson – the man behind the 2010 C-X75 and the recently revealed F-Type – said, "You can't get a good design story if you don't look at your heritage, where you came from, where your values came from." He went on to discuss the ‘sad years of Jaguar', from around 1968 to 2004 where Jaguar was too timid to develop and "essentially made the same-looking car." He put this down to a reluctance on Jaguar's part to move too far away from its successful models and, quite interestingly, because "not only did we start doing market research, we started asking Americans what they wanted." Watch the full video on the left.

Citroen DS3 hits 200,000

The upmarket Citroen C3 – the very appealing Citroen DS3 – has hit the 200,000 production mark this week, a little over 2 years from launch. But we had to do a complete volte face when we finally had the new Citroen DS3 in for review – it’s an absolute cracker. In fact, so impressed were we with the DS3, we thought it probably the best car we’d had in during 2010, something Top Gear ended up agreeing with us on when they made it their car of 2010.

BMW 5-Series GT to get xDrive – BMW 740d xDrive announced

BMW are adding xDrive as an option across the 5 Series GT range We really don’t ‘Get’ the BMW 5 Series GT. To be fair, we haven’t driven one so it’s a viewpoint from afar. But we can’t deny it fills the gap between the 5 Series Estate and the 5 Series Saloon,  we just hadn’t realised that there was a gap that needed filling.