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Factory Five Body Design Competition

Following in the footsteps of Local Motors, Factory Five is set to launch an open-sourced design contest to design its next car. Up until now, the Massachusetts-based company is famed for its Type '65 Shelby Cobra Coupe replicas and its GTM racecar. Teaming up with Grassroots Motorsports Magazine, Factory Five is now launching the design contest to design the bodywork for its latest project: a Subaru Impreza-engined, rear-wheel-drive two-seater that is expected to sell for under $9,000 in kit form, or $15,000 as a complete car.

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.

Mazda Kiyora concept

Mazda has released these images of the Kiyora compact urban concept car the automaker will reveal at the 2008 Paris Motor Show. Based on an all-new platform designed to maximize weight reduction, the Kiyora is claimed to represent the harmony between driving pleasure and environmental and safety features. Meaning 'clean and pure' in Japanese, the concept of 'Kiyora' helped the designers to imagine a city car cutting cleanly through an urban landscape, with water as the design theme.