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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.

Hoon Small! Fiat 500 Abarth to start at $22,000

Fiat's U.S. arm is hoping that the Abarth-tuned antisocial edition of its diminutive 500 will inject some heat into the model's disappointing sales figures. Pricing it starting at $22,000, not including destination charges, should make the heated, tiny Italian more compelling to hot-hatch enthusiasts.

New Kia Sorento at Frankfurt

The new Kia Sorento will get its debut at the Frankfurt Motor Show The new Kia Sorento – a seven seat SUV – is longer, lower and more aerodynamic than the current model. Its length has increased by 18mm and its drag coefficient drops to 0.38 – down from 0.43 – which will help with economy. And Kia says that the new Sorento has been set up to be more road-biased, without losing any of the Sorento’s off-road ability.