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Rethinking Scion: Quirky goes mainstream so brand adapts with a sporty coupe, hip music

If Toyota's Scion youth brand had stuck to its original premise, the third generation of the boxy xB would be rolling into showrooms today. As envisioned by Toyota, Scion products would be quirky, uber-cool and not around long enough to get stale. Its first-edition products were replaced after just four years.

Johnson Controls engineer presents 'Driven Mavens' free design tutorial videos

Free online video tutorials on the car design process are being presented on an interactive blog launched by a Johnson Controls lead engineer. Arvind Ramkrishna, who has worked in the automotive sector for over 10 years, set up ‘Driven Mavens' to teach students and enthusiasts how to design cars using both traditional methods and the latest digital software. Two full free courses are offered, one of which is ‘How to Draw Cars: Drawing in Perspective'.

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.