Ian Callum walks us through the 2012 Jaguars

Jaguar design chief Ian Callum describes the concepts going into the 2012 Jaguar fleet. The initial impressions I had of the newer designs - that they seemed to have raided Chrysler's parts bin for the circa-1996 headlamps and the 2003 Lexus for its overall shape - have vanished in these newer iterations. (Well, mostly vanished.)

These are quite beautiful cars, but some would say they lack distinctiveness and could be more "Jaguar-like" and evocative of earlier cars.

 There's always 2013.

 

Morgan 3-Wheeler brings classic style to the road

Car enthusiast Jay Leno test drives the new 3-Wheeler from UK car maker Morgan in the video below.

The car is admittedly beautiful, evoking earlier iterations of the Morgan "kit-car" style. It is a pre-production model, but it's unexplained why it goes veering off the road during Leno's test drive in the UK. The one-seater will reportedly run around $30,000.
Still, it looks comfortable, with classic leather seats and the long nose for which Morgans are well known. The chrome details, especially on the front, are stunning. From the side, one can't help but think the car is from the late 1920s or early 1930s, and the hindquarters look a bit odd to modern eyes, though in a classic way.
The three-wheel design, though unique, is both economical and head-turning, as Leno notes in a rather glowing review in this video. The company is already taking orders for the car, according to a company spokesman in the video.

Be sure to visit the Morgan 3-Wheeler website, where you can design your own Bespoke model with numerous color options for paint and leather seating and trim, as well as some neat decal work that's available. Mine is below, featuring 1940s-evoking decals and classic green and camel leather seating and trim. To save, hit "print screen" on your keyboard. There doesn't seem to be a way to save the design otherwise.

Ad Writers for the Chrysler 200 Need To Win An Award. The Razzie.

2011 Chrysler 200 Commercial - Why do the headlights have eyebrows?
by Stephen Abbott

“Why do the headlights have eyebrows? Why is the shape of the grille like the shape of the clock? Why do the gauges appear to be floating? Why does it seem like the grille is always smiling? Because the details are everything.”

Seriously? Seriously, Chrysler? This is actually what you’re presenting to the American public as a car commercial in the second decade of the Twenty-First Century?

Very, very sad. And insulting, frankly.

The new Chrysler 200 – for which this nonsense was written and was actually FILMED for a national TV ad – is far from a luxury car. Though, to be fair, it’s far from the worst car Detroit has ever made. Chrysler wins a few awards for those, too, especially the crap they put out in the 1990s. But let’s not go there. This time.

Let’s get back to this ad. Eyebrows? Really?

Okay, when I think of eyebrows on a car’s headlamps, I’m thinking about an Audi. And they do it beautifully. Even though it’s more like eyeliner when they do it. But that doesn’t matter. The LED lights on the A8 gently curve under the large, well-defined and well-designed headlamps, giving the front end at once a sinister and aggressive stance. Combined with a wide, aggressive grille, the Audi A8 looks like, and is, a force to be reckoned with. That’s even before the engine springs to life.

But the 200? It’s grille is admittedly meant to be “always smiling,” so right off the bat, one knows aggression isn’t supposed to be a trait of this vehicle. And the fact that these are happy eyebrows dancing above these plain-Jane headlights further signals that the target market isn’t men, it’s women.

And while it’s just peachy that the ever-grinning grille is shaped EXACTLY like the arguably pretty pearl-backed clock on the dash, I’m sorry, Chrysler, but those gauges do NOT appear to be floating. The ones I have seen, and as we can plainly see in the ad, are plain-Jane gauges. But their ad writers got paid to come up with some dazzling crap to write about this loser of a vehicle, and that’s what they came up with. Thanks, guys, for the 30 seconds of hype.

I could see these poor guys now, huddled midway through an all-nighter, scratching their heads about this bland, boring Blahmobile: “People, people, come on! It’s GOT to have a feature we can blow into something interesting.”

One finally must have said: “Wait, show me those pictures again. Yeah! The grille is kinda shaped like the clock. Let’s mention that!”

“That’s great!” says the head writer in relief. “And let’s throw in Bob’s idea about the grille smiling and Doug’s thing about beautiful eyebrows.”

One wonders: do they want ANY men to buy this car?

Chrysler may want to imply that their car looks like an expensive Bentley with its standard equally expensive Breitling clock inside that also sort of “matches the shape of the grille” but… no.

The ad fails to mention the only pleasant feature of the 200 - its rear. It instantly reminds me of the superbly handsome 2012 Ford Taurus, with its long chrome band that incorporates oval corporate logo. The tail lamps of the new Taurus were borrowed from the Ford Interceptor show car and instantly give it class. But let’s wake from that wet dream back to the nightmare of 200.

I do sympathize with the ad writers’ dilemma of having to “sell” this rather lame “luxury” vehicle, which is the replacement for arguably more beefy and attractive Sebring. That car had, by the late 2000s, begun to sport aggressive headlamps and large, IN YOUR FACE tail lamps, along with punchy, Crossfire-like creases flowing from the windscreen to the attractive front-end grille.

The problem was never with the looks, IMO, though they could have been toned down if that was a problem. The issue was always with the spindly, wimpy engines that were grossly unreliable, sending them by the hundreds of thousands straight into the fleets of Enterprise and National Car Rental lots in sleepy airports across the nation.

A new grille and fancy clock on the 200 is a bland answer to a “does the curtain match the drapes” question that wasn’t being asked by anyone.

Bangle Era finally ending at BMW with elegant M3 styling?

I must say, the new tail lamps of the 2012 BMW M3 are quite beautiful, and a vast improvement over previous models' designs. The "Bangle" era at BMW (named for chief designer Chris Bangle, who is now working in his own firm in Turin, Italy) was extremely controversial.

While the easy-to-spot swoopiness and curvaceous lines on BMWs alienated many traditionalists, one cannot argue that it was successful in raising the company's profile and standards of luxury during his 17-year tenure at BMW. Still, that polarization came at a price, and frankly, my view is that the brand suffered somewhat from it, in the same way other companies suffer when they go too far in the direction of experimentation and away from customer's tastes (the Ford Taurus of the mid-1990s comes to mind, as does the Pontiac Aztek and other follies.)

The new direction of the company, with less flare and more true, sophisticated style - as exhibited in the smart and handsome looking 3 Series - is the right direction for this company. Let's hope they can sustain it and expand upon it.

Range Rover's Gorgeous Evoque Coupe

Above is the launch film for the stunning Range Rover Evoque Coupe, set to debut later this year as a 2012 model. It is the smallest, lightest and most fuel efficient Range Rover ever produced.

The completely new model comes in a two-door coupe as well as a five-door version, which made its debut at the 2010 Los Angeles Auto Show last Nov. 17.

Both aim to "transform the premium compact SUV segment," says the international Land Rover site, landrover.com.

The curves and creases of this Range Rover model are undeniably sexy, though one could less charitably say that it looks like someone simply squeezed a previous Range Rover model between one's thumb and index finger. Still, both exterior and interior views seem to uphold the brand's high quality of luxury craftsmanship.

The one quibble one might have with the otherwise well executed design is with rear visibility. The slight rear window surely will give headaches to wealthy soccer moms backing out of the supermarket parking space. The same is true for certain Jeeps. We'll see if this(hopefully minor) problem prevents sales of this otherwise well-executed vehicle.

There's Something Horribly Wrong Over at Chrysler

It's pretty bad when the entire advertising and marketing campaign strategy for a car company's lineup of vehicles is based on the idea of keeping them in the shadows as much as possible.

That seems to be Chrysler's strategy, especially with its Sebring replacement, the 200, which debuted in a much-ballyhooed commercial during this year's Super Bowl. As you remember, rap star Eminem hyped the poorly photographed car traveling amongst the ruins of Detroit touting the benefits not so much of the car but of the city - which is about as prosperous today as is Kandahar or Benghazi.

The missing element was the car, which was filmed at night and in severe close-ups. At the time, I thought this was a "teaser" and that we'd get to see more of the car in future ads. Well, this ad was all we'd see, and shorter versions of it have been the sum total of what we've seen of the 200.

Good thing, it turns out. In one of our first blog posts here, we exposed the true and hideous nature of this car, which frankly looks worse than the Sebring, or at least just as cheap.

Surprisingly, though (or perhaps not, given the looks of the thing) the "shadow" campaign continues on the company's website, where it features the woefully small and pitiful four-car lineup for the "major" automaker photographed in shadows, making the black cars look dark and mysterious, but also strangely LESS elegant - and one assumes that's what the photographer was going for.

Even more oddly, in the "gallery" section for the 200 on the company's site, most of the photos are again in shadow, or in extreme close-up. It's incredibly difficult to get a handle on what the car looks like, or any of them, for that matter.

Is this deliberate? I think so. The four cars Chrysler is putting on the market in 2011 run from just over $19,000 for the 200 to just over $30,000 for the Town and Country minivan (rated one of the worst cars on the market by Consumer Reports last year.) All of them are shown in deep shadow and in solid black.

From a styling point of view, these are among the worst cars Chrysler has ever produced. They are bland, lack imagination and vision, and do not excite in the least. The new headlights on the 300, for example, are meant to be more elegant than the 2005 300, which was a rare hit for the company. Why mess with good, unless you're going to make it better?

I have a few questions for Chrysler:
What happened to your Glory Days? Chrysler has put more concept cars on the road than any other car company. To name just three: the PT Cruiser, the Pacifica, and the aforementioned Crossfire (which, despite that unfortunate name, outsold the Audi TT for a brief while in the mid-2000s.)

Where is your Vision? The Crossfire was a beautifully executed vehicle that took chances. So did the PT Cruiser, which sold millions. What happened to your mojo? It's sure not in the 200.

Where is your electric car? Chrysler was working on a secret weapon, the daringly styled ecoVoyager (see drawing below) which would have theoretically gotten 300 miles for each charge of its lithium-ion batteries, or even run on hydrogen (though we were promised this with the Chevy Volt, too, but never mind.) This was in 2008, when it hit the auto show circuit. Flash ahead to 2011, and Nissan literally cannot produce enough of its plug-in electric Leaf vehicles, nor can Toyota create enough Prius's to meet demand. Chrysler could have been the talk of the industry with this vehicle. But Chrysler blew it. Again.

New York International Auto Show: Mercedes, Nissan, Ford

The 2011 New York International Auto Show is underway, and there are a few stand-outs that merit comment.

There are, as usual for auto shows, a lot of pie-in-the-sky models that are simply "design studies" that are created to feature the ability of designers to do wild things.

There are, however, plenty of "do-able" models that conceivably show up on showroom floors in a few years - with some major, or even minor, adjustments, of course.

One of these is the Mercedes A-Class concept (below.) It's smaller size and European-approved high front end (to meet pedestrian-bumping standards. Seriously.) give it an aggressive and able stance. The headlamps, which look as if they are melting off the hood, are also aggressive, though are unlikely to make it to production in * precisely* that style. Oh, and it's unlikely Americans will get it. Europeans, and the Indian and Chinese markets have gotten a baby Benz for a decade or more now. For a bit of perspective on this photo, envision a car the size and shape of a VW Golf. Yes, it's a hatchback, but a gorgeous one.

The jaw-dropping Nissan ellure, below, can easily be seen as hitting the US market, since it has shades of current models within it already. The headlamps mimic what already exists in the Nissan Maxima and the front fascia is simply an exaggerated version of what appears on current models. The full-length, tinted-glass roof will likely not make it to production, especially if this is a future Maxima.

Ford's Vertrek is the company's concept for a sleeker, more energy-efficient SUV, and it looks like the1.6-liter EcoBoost engine may do the trick. In fact, the SUV even LOOKS thin, light and wiry enough to deliver great mileage. And in a market in which it looks as if gas is headed towards $5 per gallon, any appeal to energy efficiency will be welcomed.