Arias Pistons 12.5:1 Compression 82mm Bore Honda B-series on 2040-parts.com

CCS - AISI project 2007

The college for Creative Studies (CCS) has been teaming up with the American Iron and Steel Institute (AISI) since 1989, bringing together imaginative automotive design and steel, the material of choice in the industry. As did last year's program, this summer also saw three engineering students from the University of Michigan (UM) join three CCS transportation design students to develop a concept car. Revolving around an 'Inside Out' theme, students conceptualized, rendered and created a concept vehicle based on a steel exoskeleton design.

MINI go Rallying: MINI WRC Video

MINI Countryman WRC ‘Old’ Mini – that’s Mini without all the capital letters – ‘owned’ rallying for a period in the 1960s. Particularly the Monte Carlo Rally, which it won in 1964, 1965 and 1967. Names like Paddy Hopkirk and Rauno Altonen – well, more so Paddy in the UK – became as well-known as Jenson Button and Lewis Hamilton are today.

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.