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College Exhibition: IED Degree Show 2009

Graduating students from the three-year post-graduate Transportation Design course at the Istituto Europeo di Design (IED) in Turin, Italy presented a tribute to the Aston Martin brand for their graduate theses. Called "Aston Martin 2025", 17 students in the post-graduate course - led by Fulvio Fantolino, IED's Transportation Design Course Coordinator - employed exclusivity, elegance, sporting style and the idea of sharing and emotion as their design keywords, developing a theme which ultimately saw 13 projects created in Alias or in clay. Aston Martin Design Director Marek Reichman provided the students with useful indications for the final development and a further selection led to the short listing of eight projects that were then produced in 1:4 scale models thanks to collaboration with Cecomp.

Domagoj Dukec on BMW's 2 Series [w/Video]

Following last week's reveal of the BMW 2 Series Coupé, the carmaker has released a video featuring head of exterior design Domagoj Dukec, in which he talks us through the car's design. The video, which also features BMW product manager Thomas Ebner, sees Dukec explaining how the three air intakes at the front – which also integrate the Air Curtain technology – set a marker for the car's "sportivity", before he explores the way in which new design features such as the grille and headlamps differ from those of its predecessor, the 1 Series. Moving on to to the side profile, he discusses what makes the silhouette typically BMW and what separates it from bigger coupés, while identifying the DLO as a special feature of the 2er.

Kia Soul EV revealed at the Chicago Motor Show

The new Kia Soul EV (pictured) has been revealed in Chicago The Kia Soul EV is Kia’s first effort at a proper mass production EV, and if you’re looking for an electric car it does look promising. Due to go on sale later in 2014 in the US – initially in California, New York and Oregan because of their charging infrastructure – and, Kia promised, the UK and Europe later in 2014 or early 2015, the Soul EV offers a real world driving range of 80-100 miles from a recharge taking half an hour for 80 per cent on a rapid 50kW charger or up to 5 hours for a full recharge from a UK 240 volt supply. The range is helped by Kia’s third-generation regenerative braking system which manages to capture 12 per cent of the car’s kinetic energy, feeding it back in to the battery as electricity during braking and coasting, with four different regeneration modes.