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Lincoln MKC – it’s an upmarket Ford Kuga: 2013 Detroit Auto Show

Ford has revealed the Lincoln MKC Concept at the Detroit Auto Show, a titivated upmarket offering based on the Ford Kuga. Despite strong sales on the other side of the Pond, Ford is struggling in Europe – just like every other mainstream car brand – and they’re probably ruing the day they decided to unravel their Premier Auto Group, selling off Aston Martin, Volvo and – their biggest mistake – Jaguar Land Rover. Which means that if Ford want to get back in to the – potentially very profitable – realm of premium cars again they’re stuck with doing it with one of their ‘brands’.

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.

Mercedes CLA & GLA will sell 60,000 a year in the USA

Mercedes are aiming to sell 30k CLAs in the US every year It’s not all that long since the only Mercedes car US car buyers actually took seriously was the Mercedes S-Class. But times have changed and the rise in fuel prices and the collapse of the US car market has seen US car buyers looking at more ‘compact’ cars as appealing buys. Which explains why smaller cars have suddenly become an appealing ‘must have’ for car makers selling in the US, even ‘premium’ car makers.