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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.

Hyundai ix35 FCEV: The go-to hydrogen fuel cell car

The Hyundai ix35 FCEV has been chosen for the second year running as the FCEV of choice for the European Commission-backed Fuel Cells and Hydrogen Joint Undertaking (FCH JU). As we’ve reported previously, the Hyundai ix35 FCEV (Fuel Cell Electric Vehicle) is the first proper production FCEV in the world, although the roll-out of Hyundai’s hydrogen-powered car isn’t exactly on a huge scale, at least not for the next couple of years. But as governments (perhaps) start to wake up to the fact that the BEV car is a road to nowhere  - or nowhere far, at least, with its limited range and the current state of battery technology – they are starting to see hydrogen-powered vehicles as a realistic future for a world that doesn’t have to rely on fossil fuels for transport.

BMW Vision EfficientDynamics Concept – Frankfurt catchup

BMW revealed the Vision EfficientDynamics Concept at Frankfurt CO2 targets – and the received wisdom that somehow the planet is dying because we drive cars – means car makers have to respond to the mood and produce ‘Eco’ cars. Which is a problem for makers of prestige and performance cars. How do they square the circle?