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Pforzheim University - Honda F1 'off track' project

Students of the Masters in Transportation Design course at Pforzheim University in Germany have been working on a rather special project: to create designs for ‘off-track' cars for Honda's F1 drivers Jenson Button and Rubens Barrichello, incorporating Honda's environmentally conscious fuel-cell technology. Sponsored by Honda R&D Europe, the project has been running for the last three years. This year the vehicles had to be designed with a theme based on a GP host country of each student's choice.

Mercedes-Benz B-Class

The rather unloved yet brilliantly packaged Mercedes B-Class will enter its second generation at next month's Frankfurt motor show. Gone, sadly, is the ingenious sandwich floor construction, replaced by a conventional front-drive platform. The result is a reduction in height by 48mm to 1557mm, while length has grown by 89mm and width by 11mm.

First Sight: Mercedes-Benz SL

The new high-tech, low weight Mercedes SL roadster receives its official global unveil next week in Detroit but Car Design News got an early peek of the final production car and had a chat with its designers at Mercedes' US advanced design studio in Carlsbad, California back in November. "We want to get back to clean, long-lasting design," director of Mercedes global advanced design and SL project leader, Steffen Kohl told CDN at the exclusive preview of the sixth-generation model. "So the new SL is long, sleek and still full of tension in the feature lines but less wedgy." In a short presentation Kohl felt all SLs became successfully iconic in their times because they followed two key rules – ‘sensuality' and ‘cleanness' – but alluded that the first rule may have been lost in more recent eras.