Balancer/pulley Assy Platinum# 2622052 on 2040-parts.com

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.

Saab secures investment from China et al

China's Hawtai Automotive invest €150 million in Saab As you can’t have failed to notice, Saab has stopped production because it’s run out of money. And despite the best efforts of Vladimir Antonov to throw money at Saab, the EIB and the Swedish Debt Office seemed unwilling to move quickly to allow Saab to get back in to production. But things they are a-changing.

Performance Car of the Year photo gallery - day 1

CAR publishes its Performance Car of the Year 2010 supplement this week. It's a 36-page standalone mag charting our 2500-mile European road trip to thrash out which is the best sports car of the year. We'll have a full microsite launching later in the week, video, competitions and more - plus we'll upload a gallery every day with some of the out-takes, extra photos and background to our PCOTY road trip.