Antenna Mast Dorman 76856 on 2040-parts.com

Arizona auctions: Early days filled with optimism

The sun kept shining--both as a metaphor and in reality--while the cars were selling at the Arizona auctions. As of late Thursday, Barrett-Jackson had completed three of its six days of sales. Preliminary numbers assembled by on-site reporters indicate total sales of $20.2 million at the halfway mark, with 100 percent of the 656 cars on offer sold.

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.

Ford to reveal 'post-kinetic' design in Detroit

It appears the NAIAS in Detroit will not be a complete wash in terms of new designs. Ford, for example, is poised to reveal the next phase in its global design language at the automaker's press conference on January 11th. According to J Mays, the automaker will unveil a new mid-sized vehicle which will 'be a big step in the global design DNA' for the company.