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I shot this picture at Jaguar’s Castle Bromwich plant last week. On the left is a rear door from the new XJ saloon. On the right is a rear door from an XF saloon.

This little hands-on demonstration was designed to show us just how much weight can be saved through the use of aluminium. The XJ door weighs just 8.9kg, while the XF door weighs 13.9kg. That’s a massive 5kg saving, making the XJ door nearly a third lighter.

Fascinating trip to Russelsheim (which is still the home of Opel) to see the new Meriva – or rather to see how and why Opel ended up equipping this mini-MPV with rear-hinged doors.

Now you may see the Meriva as just the kind of car you would never buy, and it is aimed at young families and older, retired types, but the process of developing any car is much the same and the one thing that always strikes me when I meet the engineers involved in taking a car from an idea to a real, tangible object is the total immersion these people put themselves into.

Late last year I went on a rare trip to the Peugeot-Citroen styling studio, on the south side of Paris.

It was very interesting if rather frustrating day. We went over for a closer look at the dramatic Citroen Revolte concept. We also had a chance to talk directly to Carlo Bonzangio – Citroen’s head of concepts and advanced interior design.

Well, that’s not quite what we were led to expect.

The pictures of the new Mini Countryman show a pretty logical five-door extension of the established Mini. A polished mainstream model and an aggressive Cooper S hot hatch.

When I managed, a couple of weeks ago, to clap eyes on the new SR1 concept car in the inner sanctum of Peugeot’s design centre just outside Paris, it wasn’t so much the car’s Aston-like profile that delivered the shock. It was the scale of the company’s ambition for its future designs.

Here was a car, unrecognisable as a Peugeot except in the broadest terms, which both of the company’s design bosses - PSA group chief Jean-Pierre Ploue and newly appointed Peugeot design head Gilles Vidal - reckoned was a reliable guide to the design features and philosophy we’ll see applied to much more prosaic Peugeot models of the future. Starting, evidently, with the 207 replacement (probably to be called 208, though it’s not absolutely certain) we’ll see in 2011.

In this week’s Autocar magazine, we revealed the results of our Hot Hatch 2020 Design Competition.

The winner was Minwoo Hwang and part of his prize was spending the week at Ford’s Dunton Technical Centre in Essex, where I caught up with him, helping sculpt his design out of clay.