Design language

Keeping an open mind on the Aston Martin Cygnet

Steve Cropley — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 10:28:26 GMT

This Aston Martin Cygnet is going to polarise opinion like no other Aston model in the marque’s 96-year history.

To some, the idea of dressing a baby Toyota with Aston Martin clothes, leaving the mechanicals unchanged, putting the famous old winged badge on the bonnet, doubling the price and selling it as an Aston Martin model to existing customers will come across as an abuse of some great traditions.

Read the full Aston Martin Cygnet story here

See the full Aston Martin Cygnet image gallery here

However, we believe the enterprise deserves a fair wind, for three key reasons.

First, the initial styling studio pictures appear to promise a remarkably good-looking little car. And given that the first rule of acceptability for any prestige machine is that it must look great, the Cygnet seems well on the way to acceptability.

Second, the underlying car’s mechanical package and road behaviour are quite good enough to survive the examination of well-heeled Aston owners. When we first drove the Toyota iQ, it struck us immediately as having genuine premium pretensions, and the impressions of good breeding and huge breadth of capability have stayed with us as the mileage on our own iQ has expanded beyond 5000.

The biggest factor in this project’s favour, we believe, is that nobody’s ever done anything like it before. The Cygnet will set out a completely original course through automotive history, and how it fares will fascinating for us all.

Only one thing about the future is certain: the Cygnet is going to require unprecedented levels of open-mindedness of Aston Martin traditionalists. Let’s hope they’re up to it.

Technorati Tags: Aston Martin, Cygnet, Aston Martin Cygnet, Toyota, Toyota iQ,

New Citroen C3 - a supermini you'll want to buy

Chas Hallett — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 09:03:00 GMT

Amazing to think now about the hullabaloo surrounding the launch of the current Citroen C3. Because of its quirky looks a lot of us were talking about a 21st century 2CV. I was guilty of adding to the hype myself. What a load of rot.

In actual fact the current C3 is a miserable device, not worthy of being feted for anything. It’s crassly styled, pretty grim to drive and feels like it’s built from egg boxes next to its much more modern rivals.

I was thinking all of this whilst sat in a pre-production version of the new one, due to make its first public appearance at the Frankfurt motor show. Never mind the next generation C3, this new one is so tangibly better it feels like Citroen has come on several generations at once.

See more pictures of the new Citroen C3, and read about its technical details here

Styling and quality are, for me, the most obvious achievements and what should get us all start considering Citroen as a credible supermini maker again. No it doesn’t have too many flourishes (leave that to the near mechanically identical DS3) but it looks extremely handsome in the metal. Even more so on the inside, especially with the optional panoramic glass roof fited.

We’ll have to wait a while to find out but Citroen claims to have made great strides on the dynamic front too. The company’s product boss Vincent Besson told me that noise reduction and comfort were the top priorities. That fills me with some hope, I must admit. It’s great to hear a car company boss talking about comfort for a change rather than a fruitless pursuit of sportiness. And if the C3 Picasso is anything to go by the supermini should be a smooth riding, quiet car.

It’s also good to see Citroen joining Ford and Mazda in coming up with a 'mini that’s not more bloated than its predecessors. The target, according to Besson, was to make it the same weight and no longer than four metres. Two objectives he and his team have accomplished.

So it’s not the new 2CV. But we don’t want one of those. We just wanted Citroen to make a supermini that we may actually want to buy. At first glance it looks to me like they may have pulled it off.

Technorati Tags: Citroen, Citroen C3, C3, C3 Picasso, Citroen 2CV, 2CV, Mazda, Ford, Vincent Besson

Car design has a bright future

Hilton Holloway — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 10:33:00 GMT

Yesterday afternoon was a quietly important time for the future of the automobile.

The Royal College of Art’s prestigious vehicle design course opened to the great and good of the global car industry.

Over a few hours, established designers from most carmakers descend on Kensington Gore in central London to view the work of the latest graduates.

It’s the chance for the students to impress the designers and snap up work experience or even a full-time job with an automotive company.

In recent years, some of the vehicle design graduation shows were almost apologetic about the role of the car, overwhelmed by the hate turned towards personal transport by the rampant environmental movement.

This year – the 40th anniversary of the course – was very different. Even though nearly all of the 15 projects addressed green concerns in some way, they also reflected a great love of the car.

Key themes included, recyclability, alternative materials (including wood), low impact running and quite a few projects were concerned with the new emphasis in the industry on aerodynamics.

High quality models and revival of stunning artwork also bodes well for the future of car design. Indeed, while I was at the show, Ralph Tayler-Webb’s beautiful Halcyon concept (which promises near-silent running, inside and out, and is pictured below) was being eyed admiringly by Aston Martin design boss Marek Reichmann.

The really good news for us is that the class of 2009 clearly loved the car and were unapologetic about it. One student said he was reacting to the unfair level of enviro-blame being reigned down on the car industry.

Judging by these graduates, in five or ten years from now, cars will be just a sexy and desirable. It’s just that the technology under the seductive skins will be even more recyclable and much less thirsty.

Technorati Tags: Aston Martin, Marek Reichmann, Royal College of Art, Hilton Holloway

What's gone wrong with Subaru design?

Peter Nunn — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 06:15:00 GMT

It’s early 2002 and Subaru is launching the new Forester in Tokyo. I go to the press launch and meet one of the Subaru head designers, an affable bloke who’s been at the company for years.

Not sure everyone’s going to go for the look of the new car, I venture. My designer friend rolls his eyes. “People always complain about Subaru design,” he sighs.

Judging by the early reception for the new Legacy, that still holds true. The car’s only just broken cover in Japan but its looks have already been crucified in cyberspace. Yikes.

See all the latest Subaru reviews, news and video

Love it or hate it, one thing’s for sure. The roll call of visually challenging new Subarus (New Legacy, Impreza (second and third generations), Tribeca, R2 etc) seems depressingly and unnecessarily long. You just wonder what they’re playing at….

I can tell you that like all Japanese car companies, Subaru doesn’t lack for design talent. It’s with design management that it often hits the buffers.

Read the Autocar verdict on the new Subaru Legacy

Case in point, Subaru may be the only car company in the world to have appointed a crash test engineer (a man with no design experience) to head up its design department. You couldn’t make it up. That particular gentleman has now moved on but his Legacy, er, lives on. ‘

Oh, and if you want to know why the outgoing Legacy and Outback have lasted so well (the Outback in particular), it’s because the design was started at Subaru then finished off at Porsche Design in Austria, so I was told. Looking at that clean, high quality design, I can well believe it.

Subaru’s top management in Japan is not too worried, or even unaware of, the design angst its cars often cause around the globe, according to word.

Subaru, after all, is a small, engineering-led company and the focus instead is on developing those wurry flat engines and Symmetrical 4WD, the tech that still gives Subaru its edge.

Fine, but with its designs often giving people the jitters, you wonder how long this particular saga has to go on. It could and should be so different.

Technorati Tags: Subaru, Legacy, Impreza, design, Tribeca

There's nothing to see here

Ollie Stallwood — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 16:50:53 GMT

There was a buzz of excitement in the office this morning building up to the new Bentley Arnage pics and details being released.

Bentley isn’t the kind of manufacturer that puts out nine press releases a day, keeping us up to date with every new windscreen wiper design, it is much too grown up for that and moments like these don’t happen very often.

So it was with tingling anticipation we refreshed our screens waiting for the press release on the replacement to a proper Bentley to drop. And then it did, and I nearly choked on my tea. It was so uninspiring.

New Bentley Arnage pics and video

That’s not to say the new Arnage won’t be something very special, but the black and white pic made me wonder whether this whole “teaser” thing is getting out of hand. As I stared at the screen trying to work out if there is anything that is worth reporting on you start to wonder why they bother, it practically tells us nothing.

Sure, the bonnet is clamshell and the design appears to keep true to the classic appeal of Arnages of yore, but that’s about it. The two lines of text to go with the release told us even less.

See all the latest Bentley reviews, news and video

But as I sit here wondering what the point of this whole exercise is I realise that I’m still thinking about it. The picture and short video are now being seen across the world, people asking more questions about the car than they did yesterday. It’s frustrating but as car nuts we will hang on any detail we can get. It’s frustrating but it works.

Technorati Tags: Bentley, teaser, Arnage

Why Aston's One-77 is worth the money

Steve Cropley — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 11:24:06 GMT

There was a time when I thought the Ulrich Bez-driven revolution at Aston Martin, though remarkable, might have run its course.

That was a year or two ago, when we started noticing how easily people could confuse a DB9 with a Vanquish and a Vantage V8, and when early claims of Aston quality to match a Swiss watch started being torpedoed by reports – though nothing like the monstrous Aston quality issues of yesteryear — from owners reporting less-than-perfect reliability.

It seemed that Bez might, understandably, be running out of puff.

Then, in the middle of the recession, he defiantly launched the Aston One-77, the £1.2 million pound Aston supercar which claims new success at combining tomorrow’s technology with yesterday’s craftsmanship.

See our exclusive Aston Martin One-77 pictures here

At first, it seemed a suspect idea: Aston has previously reserved launches of its most eye-wateringly expensive cars for moments when it was in the deepest financial doo-doo. But then they showed us the actual car, first at Geneva this March and just the other day outside the impressive new Gaydon design studio.

When you see the car in the flesh it takes only a second (but can occupy a subsequent, absorbing half hour) to appreciate how brilliantly Bez and his head of design, Marek Reichman, have taken a collection of well-recognised Aston design cues an re-expressed them in a modern, magical and totally distinctive shape.

I never thought I’d say this, but the car’s look — inside and out — is fundamentally successful at conveying how special it is, even with that enormous price attached. If we take this design success as an indicator of how well the One-77’s performance and driving qualities will be developed (and remember, every owner will have unprecedented input into stuff like seat shapes, control locations and effort-levels, suspension rates and handling bias) then this is going to be a machine that truly breaks new ground for supercars.

It is the nature of all progress, however, that while he’s enjoying the plaudits, Bez, who turns 65 this year, must face up to a tough question. After One-77, what on earth does he do next?

When one Aston Martin One-77 just isn't enough

Steve Sutcliffe — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 11:04:00 GMT

So apparently there’s this customer of Aston Martin – he might be famous, he could be in the fashion industry, he’s definitely into his cars, he’s very obviously rather rich – and he turns up at the factory recently, takes a quick look at the One-77 that’s pride of place in the foyer and says; “I think I’ll take two of them, if that’s alright with you.”

Once Dr Bez, the boss of Aston Martin and who has just shown the customer around the car, picks himself up off the floor, he replies; “Of course, and can I ask why you want the second car?”

Turns out the customer isn’t just an aesthete with a mad rug and an enormous bank balance, he’s a bit of a techno-head on the quiet as well, and by that I don’t mean he goes to the Ministry of Sound at the weekends. This bloke is so impressed by the design of the One-77’s carbonfibre monocoque, he wants to hang it on his wall and stare at it – and to do so he’s quite prepared to buy another One-77 and strip it bare so he can display it within his ‘living space.’

Which is quite some display of wealth, given that Aston Martin is only ever going to make 77 One-77’s, each of which will require a deposit of £200,000, with a further £850,000 plus local taxes being payable on delivery. In the UK that means £1.2 million a pop. Or, in the case of Monsieur Monocoque, £2.4 million for one whole car plus a somewhat extravagant box of bits.

So far Aston Martin has sold just over half of the 77 cars it intends to build between now and the end of next year. The first car will be delivered in March next year, and each customer will be offered a personal set up session with Aston’s chief development engineer, Chris Porritt, the idea being that Porritt will sit next to the customer as they drive and find out what sort of ride they prefer. Assuming, of course, the customer intends to actually drive their One-77 once it’s delivered – and according to Dr Bez, as many as half of them probably won’t.

Secretly, Dr Bez would like all his owners to take to the road and enjoy their car’s 7.3-litre, 750bhp V12 engine and, occasionally perhaps, see how well its push-rod suspension copes when it is leant on through a quick corner. It’d be a bit of a shame, after all, not to take your One-77 out from time to time and nudge it somewhere towards its limits, or to let rip in it down an autobahn where it will reach at least 220mph, still with something in reserve.

But in truth only half the people who hand over their cheques will have the balls, or the inclination, to venture on to the road in their One-77. The rest of them will either try to sell their cars at a profit or place them in air-conditioned museums and just gawp. Which is fine by Aston Martin, sort of, because the customer with £1.2 million to spend is invariably always right.

And if you can afford two – one to drive and one to hang on your wall and ogle – that just makes you the perfect customer in 2009. Not even Dr Bez is going to argue with that.

Technorati Tags: Aston, Aston Martin, One-77, Dr Ulrich Bez, Steve Sutcliffe, carbonfibre

Wowed by the Citroen DS concept

Chas Hallett — Fri, 29 May 2009 08:52:00 GMT

I came away from the Geneva motor show completely revved up about the Citroen DS concept. I like what Citroen is trying to do – making the brand more upmarket with a credible Mini rival – and I liked the concept itself; it’s fresh, funky and refreshingly free from any retro design cues.

But I came away from Paris yesterday even more impressed, after seeing the latest iteration of the concept. This time round we got to see the inside of the car and a cabin which, give or take a couple of items, will be what we get on the real thing when it goes on sale next March.

In short, it’s lovely. Probably even better, in fact, than the exterior styling. And if the quality and excitement of the whole thing do make it onto the production car as promised (and I’ve got no reason to doubt the Citroen big cheeses) then plenty of DS3s could easily be nestling next to Minis in the car park of a luxury apartment block near you.

Technorati Tags: Citroen, DS3, Inside, Paris, Chas Hallett

Car makers to get an Intel inside

Hilton Holloway — Mon, 18 May 2009 17:10:30 GMT

The news that Magna – one of two bidders for General Motor’s European arm – wants to turn Opel into a contract manufacturer will echo around the global automotive industry.

Perhaps it has taken a contract manufacturer to point out the obvious to the mass producers, but the plan to offer Opel’s Delta and Epsilon platforms – and space on the production lines - to other car makers has been a long time coming.

Magna’s logic is rock solid. Designing and engineering a new platform is extremely expensive. That means that a car maker has to build huge volumes of vehicles based on the said platform to make a profit.

General Motors grasped the volume nettle with its global platform programme, which would have seen the Delta and Epsilon II platforms being used globally by a number of different brands. Ironically, GM has fallen to pieces just as the global project was being rolled out.

Now Magna has picked up the pieces and extended the logic of platform sharing. Instead of building huge global auto companies, just share the technology between smaller, independent carmakers.

This logic has been used for years in other areas of product manufacturing. Computers increasingly use the same central processing chip. The differences in computers now lie in the operating system and exterior design.

20 years ago, when I was involved in the mountain bike industry, cycle design had been revolutionized by the near-universal adoption of alloy-steel and aluminium tubes and TIG welding as the main methods of construction. Meanwhile, Shimano supplied almost all a bike’s main components.

These flexible construction methods allowed frame designs to change slightly every year, and most mountain bikes were made under contract by Taiwanese factories. Each bicycle maker would have its own production slot, where a year’s production run would be built in just six weeks or so.

So while all bikes were made up from the same basic building blocks, manufacturers could differentiate their output through relatively simple tweaks in frame design (including suspension systems), the particular mix of components and through colours and graphics.

This kind of production logic also means that global mountain bike companies could, for example, be based in a small industrial unit in Northern California.

The HQ would concentrate on design and component specification, marketing and distribution, while the manufacturing was contracted out to specialist factories. And these factories would always be humming, because they had contracts with numerous brand names.

However, while few car buyers could care less about the difference between the rear axle designs of a Bravo, a Megane or a Kia Cee’d, you can be sure that many senior car company executives will.

Recently, Daimler made strong public hints about the sense of Mercedes and BMW combining many of their engineering operations.

BMW bosses hit back, insisting that the BMW brand was worth billions and they would not risk that by ‘diluting’ the brand by sharing too many components with another car maker, premium or not.

In truth, car companies will have eventually had to follow the industrial logic that underpins most global product design.

Customers value design, style, reliability and innovation. They don’t care about the differences in BMW’s and Mercedes’ respective rear axle designs. Magna should be congratulated for pointing the way forward.

Technorati Tags: Opel, Magna, Bravo, Megane, Cee'd, BMW, Mercedes, Opel, Delta, Epsilon

Horbury returns to Volvo

Chas Hallett — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 16:51:45 GMT

There are going to be some pretty happy people at Volvo HQ tonight knowing that the former head of design Peter Horbury is coming back.

Plenty of high-ups at Volvo that I’ve been speaking to have privately sounded off about the company’s current direction. Their feeling is that the Swedes have now spent a decade chasing BMW and Mercedes and failed miserably. Witness the losses, falling sales and the fact that parent company Ford wants to sell them, probably to a Chinese car company.

The glory days, they reckon, were when Peter Horbury was radically changing the look and image of Volvos in the early 90s, giving them a unique character and they want it back. It looks like they’re going to get their wish.

Whether the undoubtedly talented and extremely personable Horbury can help change the company’s fortunes in this environment and under new management is another matter. But I, for one, am looking forward to finding out.

Iosis Max: is it what you were expecting?

Matt Saunders — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 10:02:23 GMT

If concept cars didn’t surprise us, I guess there wouldn’t be much point in coming to a motor show. However, I think it’s fair to say that the Iosis Max isn’t the car we were expecting to see from Ford at this year’s Geneva show. Which, of course, makes it all the more interesting.

It’s a size too big, for starters. During the tail-end of last year, all the information said that Ford would show a B-segment sized MPV this week in Switzerland; a Kia Soul, Citroen C3 Picasso rival. But this certainly isn’t the Fusion replacement everyone was expecting. Ford execs hint that the ‘B-Max’ has, in fact, been canned.

Neither is this the car that unifies Ford’s global design language, again as everyone expected. “A compact MAV like this would be the wrong kind of car for such a big mission,” said Stefan Lamm, Ford of Europe’s chief exterior designer, when I asked him about the ‘global harmonisation’ of Ford’s design languages. “The next Focus will be a global car, sure, but a Focus-sized MPV will never be popular all over the world. No, the car you’re referring to is still a year away.”

Read more about the Ford Iosis Max

So what should we ‘focus’ (sorry) our attention on about this attractive monobox? Well, the fact that it’s attractive at all, for one. Ford’s clearly looking to pull off the same feat with the next C-Max as it has with the S-Max; to serve up a practical family car that you can really admire.

The car’s complex rear doors and boot hatch are fantastic but, as design boss Martin Smith admitted, trick solutions like that are still too expensive for cars like a Ford C-Max. “This car is a technical showcase,” Smith explained. “It shows you some of the things our R&D boys are working on at the moment. But with a lot of this stuff, all they can do is work with our suppliers, and keep working until the unit prices for these sorts of components are right. We can’t just click our fingers and make the sums add up.”

The car’s pillarless construction, Smith later admitted, is something he really wants to make work for a future four-door Ford; he wouldn’t say which, and it would be a fool who’d predict that it would appear on the next Focus. But it’s great that he’s so confident about the possibility.

Technorati Tags: Ford, Iosis Max, Martin Smith, Stefan Lamm

In defence of the BMW 5-series GT

Dan Stevens — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 17:03:03 GMT

Yes, I know what you’re thinking and yes, it’s definitely a bit weird, but the BMW 5-series GT looks about 100 per cent better in the metal than it does in these pictures.

Really, it does. A lot of people are not going to like this car, like a lot of people do not like the X6, but you know what? It works.

See more pics of the BMW Concept 5-series Gran Turismo

Please believe me, because I know everyone is going to have a right old go at the BMW 5-series GT, but I’ve seen it and it is nowhere near as ungainly and awkward as the pictures make it look. It is much more finely detailed than the pictures suggest, and that saves it from becoming a big blob of a car. It is, and I am so very aware of what the reaction will be to this, quite elegant.

Inside it is airy and spacious and feels bigger than a 7-series. And you can store the parcel shelf under the boot floor sensible (at last! An end to lost parcel shelf misery), which is not really a reason to like a car but strikes me as being one of those beautifully simple solutions that you just know will be copied.

Then again, I like the Mercedes R-class and I appear to be in a minority of one with that. But at least BMW is trying something new at a time when innovation and risk taking are under extreme threat. You might not like the GT, but you can’t call it boring.

Technorati tags: BMW 5-series GT, BMW Concept 5-series Gran Turismo, Mercedes R-class

Why Citroen needs to get creative

Richard Bremner — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 09:48:01 GMT

It’s quite possible that Citroen’s plan to produce a sub-set of DS-labelled niche vehicles using its mainstream hardware has been part-triggered by its inability to break its discounting habit.

The company appears to find it near-impossible to sell a car without a juicy incentive attached to it. Since Citroens aren’t that expensive in the first place, it’s easy to see that substantial profits are hard to come by.

So building some more desirable, lower-volume models sounds like a good way to improve its profit margins - provided we want them badly enough that Citroen doesn’t need to pay the VAT on the car to induce us to ink the cheque.

We might have to pay a little more for these Citroens, but we might want to, not least because they may encourage the company’s increasingly inspired design department to direct its creativity towards models that we can actually buy.

True, the C4, C4 Picasso, Pluriel and C6 are pretty stylish - strangely, the company seems to get little credit for that - but look at concepts like the Hypnos, the GT, the beautiful C-Metisse and C-Airdream, and it seems reasonable to get a little excited about what might come next.

Especially given the heavy hints that it is going to build something similar to the excellent C-Cactus. This is a quirky-looking car, like so many Citroens past, but unlike the company’s offerings of the past 20 years or so, it promises the possibility of innovations that go to the very core of the car.

These include reducing the number of components to cut weight and complexity, as well as the use of new materials and new propulsion systems. Citroen’s new slogan is ‘Creative Technologie’.

If it fully realises the potential of the C-Cactus, it might just earn the words. And there’s reason to be hopeful. Buried in the history section of the new website is a section on heritage, entitled ‘Different is Everything’ which also showcases some cars for tomorrow. The C-Cactus is there, with the line ‘if we build it we’ll be promoting 100mpg and the fact that its MP3 player doubles up as the starter key...’ So come on Citroen - create it, please.

Technorati tags: Citroen DS inside, C-Cactus, Hypnos, Pluriel, C6, C-Metisse, C-Airdream

Design of the times

Julian Rendell — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 17:09:44 GMT

It looks like we’re in for a few years of cautious and bland US car design, if some of the models on display at Detroit are anything to go by.

Chief offender of these is the Chrysler 200C, a ‘mid-size sedan’ in US-speak, aimed to sell against the Toyota Camry and Honda Accord.

Sized to sit between the bulbous-looking Sebring and retro-inspired 300C, the 200C looks like it dropped out of the same mould used by every other car maker for their family four-doors.

The victory of the Hyundai Genesis sedan in US COTY 09 will only strengthen the hold of that style on mid-size sedan design.

What’s particularly disappointing is that Chrysler has always prided itself on breaking the design mould – one of the advantages of being the smallest of the Big Three.

It’s what saved the company in the 1980s, when it risked all by inventing the minivan segment. It's also what created a golden period of car design in the 1990s when design chief Tom Gale created cars like the Viper, cab-forward LH-family and later design boss Trevor Creed oversaw the 300C.

Of course it’s not surprising that, in today’s vicious downturn, in which Chrysler is the most threatened of the Big Three, 'conservative' is the fallback design position.

Chrysler shut its Pacifica design studio in California last year and the 200C was created at Auburn Hills in Detroit.

A building is just a space, of course; it’s the talent, creativity and company culture that it houses that’s important. But Chrysler is in real need of a transfusion of all these things, and soon.

Technorati tags: Chrysler 200C, Hyundai Genesis, Toyota Camry, Tom Gale, Trevor Creed, Chrysler 300C

New Z4: enticing or challenging?

Hilton Holloway — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 12:01:45 GMT

The BMW Z4 was not exactly a runaway success. Indeed, it was easily outsold by the Mercedes SLK throughout its lifetime.

The uncompromising styling - perhaps the purest expression of Chris Bangle's theories about surfacing - made it a hard sell.

The Z4's looks were also said to have put off a great proportion of the female buyers who helped make the Z3 a success.

The Z4 was also noticeably more expensive than a Z3 and was never sold in a more affordable four-cylinder version.

So while the Z4 was clearly a far superior car to the Z3, and a better driver's car than the SLK, it seemed to fall between two stools.

It lacked the handiness, hard-top security and chic looks of the SLK, but it also never gained a reputation as a serious driver's roadster in the manner of the Porsche Boxster.

So when I saw the new Z4 in the metal for the first time, I was taken aback.

BMW had done little to change the recipe. It retained the extreme long-nose proportions of the old car and although the styling has been softened, it is still strikingly atonal, shot across with odd cutlines and ridged panels.

The hard top might offer the security many buyers want (and the it solves the problem of over-the-shoulder vision of the old cloth top) but my first impression is of another BMW roadster that is determined to challenge, rather than entice, buyers.

Technorati Tags: BMW,Roadster,Z3,Z4,Chris Bangle,SLK,Merc,Mercedes,Porsche Boxster