Pair Of Vintage Impala Emblems on 2040-parts.com

Interior Motives China Conference to explore new design directions

Chinese consumers are driving new design directions, and CDN's Interior Motives China Conference in Beijing next week is set to explore how. Titled ‘New brands and the search for a design identity', the conference features an impressive speaker line-up that blends the international (Chris Bangle and VW's Wolfgang Muller Pietralla) with the regional (GM PATAC's Friedhelm Engler, Ford China's Chelsia Lau and PSA-Peugeot/Citroën China's Robert Walker), with the domestic (Shan Wei of the Beijing Automotive Technical Center (BATC), and Ken Ma of SAIC). The annual conference is the third in China to be hosted by CDN's magazine Interior Motives, and will be held on Wednesday 21 April, and Thursday 22 April, just in advance of the opening of Auto China 2010 in Beijing on Friday (23 April).

The Great Texas Beer Run

For reasons still not clear, boatloads of German immigrants made Texas their home in the 1800s. What they thought they would find similar to their cold, richly forested homeland in the hellaciously hot, mes-quite-scrub, rattlesnake-filled Texas Hill Country is lost to history. Worse, they brought almost nothing with them from the Old World to remind them of home.

Who’s Where: Andreas Deufel, Design Director, Great Wall Motors

Since the start of the year, Andreas Deufel has officially been Director of Design at Great Wall Motors (GWM) in China. In his role, he is responsible for GWM's three design studios, all in Bao Ding, yet he still maintains his position as Design Director at TJ Innova Auto and Design & Engineering (TJI), where he is also responsible for three studios. Deufel's appointment to the position as Design Director at GWM was anything but conventional.