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A tribute to Ermanno Cressoni

Last week the car design community suffered a great loss. Ermanno Cressoni or 'Arch' as many of his designers affectionately referred to him, passed away on Thursday 30th June in Milan after battling with cancer for 13 months.'Arch' was a reference in car design and his contribution to our profession was much more important than stated in the press. As Alfa Romeo Centro Stile Director he directed the Alfetta berlina, the famous chrome GTV grille from the early seventies is attributed to him, as is the Giuglietta sedan of the late seventies, the Alfa 33, the 75, and many of the racing Alfas we adore from the late 60s and early 70s.

Peugeot 2008 DKR gets 340 bhp turbo diesel to fight the Dakar Rally

Peugeot 2008 DKR (pictured) gets 340 bhp turbo diesel to fight the Dakar Rally The days of Peugeot’s motorsport activities being integral to the brand’s identity are long gone, but Peugeot are still playing motorsports with a few headline grabbing projects like Sebastian Loeb’s Pikes Peak car. But Peugeot’s motorsport activities at the moment are extending a bit further than hitting Pikes Peak (and the Goodwood hillclimb) in a monstrous Peugeot 208 T16, and a 2008 to take on the Dakar Rally was revealed back in April. Then, we got to see the Peugeot 2008 DKR in all its Mad Max glory, but Peugeot were being a bit circumspect about what was underneath their Apocalypse-taming Rally Raid Monster.

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.