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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.

Smart for-us

The latest addition to the Smart conceptual range is the for-us pickup, which follows on from the forspeed convertibe of Geneva, and the forvision hatchback that was unveiled Frankfurt, delivering another twist on the iconic city car platform. Despite the increase of size to 3547mm in length, traditional Smart iconography such as the tridon safety cell, three-spoke wheels and product-like execution – such as the inner lamp graphics – retain the brand identity. Squarer lamp and grille graphics and knobbly rocker surfacing add a twist of robustness.

Is the Jaguar XFR-S on the way?

Is the Jaguar XFR-S on the way (2012 XFR pictured) New reports suggest that the Jaguar XFR-S – a more powerful XFR with the output of the XKR-S – is close to production. Last summer we reported that a Jaguar XFR-S was being planned (actually, we also said a Jaguar XJR-S was in the planning too) in order to take the fight back to the Germans, with the latest iterations of the BMW M5 and Mercedes E63 AMG now offering more power than the XFR can muster. The idea of a more powerful XFR wasn’t just wild speculation (or an educated guess as to what Jaguar needed to do to keep in touch with German rivals) but was also based on Adrian Hallmark’s comments that it would be nice to take the power upgrades on the XKR-S and extend them to the XF.