CAR interviews Mazda design chief Ikuo Maeda (2010)

By Tim Pollard Motor Industry 02 September 2010 13:30 CAR has been out to Italy to see the world premier of the new Mazda Shinari concept car. It's the car that ushers in chief designer Ikuo Maeda's new Kodo design mantra, a sharper, faster stylistic treatment that will take over from Laurens van den Acker's Nagare vision. Maeda is the first Japanese design boss for a generation – it seems that Mazda has looked within after a series of European creative brains who each stayed for five years or less, arguably not long enough to see through any substantial aesthetic change.

McLaren plan to make windscreen wipers obsolete

McLaren plan to make windscreen wipers obsolete Much of the ‘clunkiness’ in cars – stuff like wind-up windows and a cranking handle – have been made obsolete in cars as technology arrived to make things work better, but one thing that remains on modern cars from the dawn of the motoring age is the windscreen wiper. Invented by Mary Anderson in 1903 after she realised drivers of the first motor cars were having to lean out of the window in rainy conditions to see where they were going, it became a standard fitting on all cars within a few years. Windscreen wipers have certainly improved over the years as technology has developed, but they’re still basically a strip of rubber moving across the windscreen to clear rain.

2013 Land Rover Freelander 2 facelift coming

Land Rover are working on a mild facelift for the Freelander 2 for 2013 as it comes towards the end of its shelf life. It’s almost two years since Land Rover last facelifted the Freelander 2, a car that’s been with us since 2006, when they threw in some minor cosmetic tweaks, the first FWD Land Rover and gave us a more powerful diesel option. Somewhere prior to that Land Rover had quietly dropped the V6 petrol engine (in the UK, at least), so adding a more powerful version of the 2.2 litre diesel made sense as did providing a lower price entry point in the FWD Freelander.