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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.

Mercedes CLS63 AMG (2010) first photos

This is the new Mercedes CLS63 AMG, the hotrod version of Mercedes’ sleek ‘four-door coupe’. And unlike its E63 AMG sibling, it uses a new twin-turbocharged 5.5-litre V8, good for a total of 550bhp and 590lb ft. That’s right.

General Motors reshuffles Executive Design leadership team

General Motors will be changing its Executive Design leadership team around in the coming months to accelerate global product development. The announcement came on the heels of news regarding the giant automaker being surpassed by rival Toyota in global sales. In an effort to bring itself out of the red, the company is reshuffling its design team in several areas.