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It had to happen at some point and I’ve now gone and done it: I’ve made a podcast.

In true Coventry alumni tradition, it’s a bit rough-and-ready but by God we tried!

For this edition I chat – at length – with the erstwhile Joe Simpson about the production reveals from the Geneva Show. Sitting somewhere between a podcast and a vodcast, this slodcast (slideshow podcast, natch) slates and salutes the cars of note.

Next week, we’re aiming to bang out a review of the concepts for your audiovisual enjoyment. I’ll keep you posted.

Sassou begat Nagare;

and Nagare begat Ryuga;

and Ryuga begat Hakaze and his brethren Kazamai, Furai, Taiki and Kiyora;

And then Sassou invited his bretheren to a swingers party with a dude from Hyundai and they all got jiggy and begat the i-Flow.

As I’ve previously said, Hyundai is often a flatterer of the sincerest kind when it comes to their production cars. Their concepts, on the other hand, have always been deeply innovative, utilising new materials and developing a unique Korean aesthetic.

Although I’m unable to comment on technological innovation found in the i-Flow, it seems that developing Hyundai’s design identity certainly wasn’t on the agenda. Apparently, building on Mazda’s identity definitely was. I needn’t point out that the Japanese word nagare, the name of the whole Mazda concept series, translates into English as flow.

I think this must be the first case of a brand taking another brand’s productionised conceptual design language and making it conceptual again. My mind hurts as much as it boggles.

Something odd happened at the Geneva Motorshow today: Seat’s little IBe inherited some LED-powered glitz and glamour from big-sister brand Audi.

The question is, if these headlamps were behind you, could you tell which one was your granny in the Seat and which one was your Daddy in the Audi?

No, thought not.

Seat’s long been the “What the… ?” brand of the Volkswagen stable, battling it out with Skoda as the cheapest point of entry and popular with those wanting more sex in their C-Segment.

Often billed as a sports brand, it’s really nothing of the sort, having suffered  from a wave of failures-to-proceed with gorgeous-if-vaporous Walter da SIlva-penned concepts and titillated Golfs with suspensions of pure jackhammer.

Three different Seats. No, I can't tell them apart either...

Many of Walter’s styling cues did get carried over into more prosaic cars, yet the Toldeo, Leon and Altea all stick so dogmatically to the snouty, drop-waistlined theme that it can be impossible to tell them apart from some angles.

da Silva eventually left for Audi and Donkerwolke, fresh from taking an ice-pick to Lamborghinis, stepped in and took a machete to a Polo and produced the new Ibiza and a new house style. Then he turned the old Audi A4 into the Seat Exeo to produce a cheap D-Segment competitor. Now it seems Donkerwolke has been busy turning the new Seat IBe concept back into an Audi, from a lamp graphics perspective at least.

It probably wont be a bad thing for Seat, lending it some street cred with the tuner crowd (a core constituency) if doing nothing to help build a truly distinct image (which is what Seat truly needs).

But one really has to wonder what this kind of thing does to the image of Audi, a brand that, up until now, has had the warpaint LED look all to itself.

It’s all very odd.

So the wraps have come off the production-ready Cygnet at the Geneva Motor show and I’m as mad as ever with this cynical little marketing exercise (my previous take on the car is here). For proof of how off-zeitgeist the little Toyota-in-ready-to-wear is, Steve Cropley over at Autocar reports that Aston chief Dave Richards says the car will

sell the way a £3000 Hermès handbag does to rich ladies.

The comment rings with the same misplaced smugness that Ulrich Bez projected when suggesting that the massive Lagonda SUV concept was ideal for HNW individuals in eastern and developing countries. This was , presumably, because it could crush the proletariat as it steamed from oil well to arms deal to the House of the Rising Sun.

In his short piece on Autocar’s ever-interesting Design Language blog, Cropley goes on to imply that those rich ladies mustn’t have a good understanding of the Toyota range if they’re going to shell out for the Cygnet.

I go on to say that, Toyota underpinnings or not, Ason Martin’s product messages get more off track with every motor show.

Hermes handbags are passé (even La Beckham has stopped yapping bout her many-hundred strong collection) and surely, if any female fashion accessories will come to best represent the excesses of the pre-financial-cluster-fuck era, surely the Hermes Kelly and Birkin bags will be them.

To tie a car of questionable lineage and even more questionable taste to such a bête noire seems like marketing suicide when dealing with a core clientele that are now looking for dog whistle taste.

Yet to fight the dilution of the Aston Martin brand is perhaps a futile exercise. It was only last week that we saw their other brand association exercise come to market, the Aston Martin x Nike “Kobe Bryant” Hyperdunk.

I don’t know weather to laugh or cry.

P.S For a car that speaks to handbag hussies, this press shot looks way more H&M than Hermes.

Working in Germany I was thrown in the deep end of perceived quality research, taking more macro shots of headlamps, instrument panels and door cards than I care to remember. Yet I’m happy to come right out and say it: perceived quality fascinates me.

Gear shifter from the new Audi A8 (click to enlarge with caution, you might wet yourself...)

The way the tricks we use – from the amazingly detailed design of touch zones in a car interior to a superbly detailed tail lamp enclosure – coalesce to convince consumers that a product that feels good must be good, no matter the integrity of the engineering underneath the skin is a delightful thing. Take a look at the gear shift above and you might get an inkling of what I’m talking about.

Perceived quality’s a psychological game played by designers and engineers that reaps massive rewards for the companies that do it right. Just ask VW, who started on a head-long rush to improve the improve feel-good factor of everyday cars with a couple of otherwise unremarkable vehicles in ’96-’97.

Volkswagen Golf Mk IV

I still remember the column inches… no, miles generated by the Mk IV Golf and B5 Passat. Their flock-lined storage bins, silicone-damped grab handles and blue instrument lighting almost singlehandedly established VW as the mass-market quality king, no matter that the cars were as dull as ditchwater to drive and suffered some fairly serious reliability problems.

In an Icarian twist, so great was Volkswagen’s perceived quality success that they eventually fell victim to it. While interior quality standards continued to soar, bolstered by the almost-unbelievable feat of craftsmanship that is the Phaeton, something caused VW to take their eye off the ball – profitability, perhaps – and the wheels came off with a string of underwhelming products

When the Mk. V Golf came along, journos and consumers alike complained loudly about the dowdy, cheap-feeling interior. No matter that the car had a new, massively more expensive multi-link rear suspension that made it great to drive (unlike the Mk. IV), people were looking for – and failing to find – more soft-touch plastics, more cold-touch metals and simply more of what had made the Mk. IV so lovable on first touch.

Volkswagen Golf Mk V

Volkswagen Golf Mk VI

So stinging was the reaction that VW pushed forward the release of the Mk. VI, essentially a gussied-up, re-skinned Mk. V, just to keep sales on the boil. Despite, or rather because of a raft of largely  superficial changes, people started talking about VW quality again and the arrival of the new Polo last year confirmed that the company was very much back in the game.

In a segment where value is more often defined by the lowest price no matter the quality, the soft-touch plastics covering the entire door, the cold-to-touch door handles, the rubberised, bejeweled air direction controls and the fine tolerances all had me in a state of rare wonderment.

Yet the Polo’s time in the perceived quality sun is about to be cut short by it’s sister with a twist, the Audi A1.

And the twist is this: despite their shared mechanicals you’ll have to pony up (sorry…) only £10 grand to get into a beautifully finished 1.2l Polo, but you’ll need around £14 grand for the Polo-in-drag A1. Need I spell it out? Four grand. That’s epic money at this end of the market, no matter what your badge cachet is.

So what is it, apart from rather mundane, formulaic Audi styling and a turbo strapped to the common 1.2l three-pot  that will persuade people to pay that kind of supplement for the A1? You guessed it: perceived quality.

Audi A1

Volkswagen Polo

Comparing images of the two IPs, the once swoon-worthy Polo now looks dowdy and low-rent in a way I simply couldn’t credit this time last year.

Look at the way the A1s entire IP is one whole soft-touch molding. Now compare it to that of the Polo, which has a soft-touch top sitting on a hard lower half with a nasty flange covering the join.

Where the Polo suffers the indignity of a closure line around it’s passenger airbag, the passenger of the A1 sees nothing but an unbroken expanse of dash-top which, somewhat disappointingly, is leather textured but is far and away a more elegantly resolved surface.

Audi A1

There are no awkward parting lines in the A1s centre console, and the unique HMI panel is far better integrated into the surrounding forms, no matter that it necessitates a dicky folding screen on the dash top. A heavily sculpted spar beneath sprouts HVAC controls that wouldn’t look out of place in an R8, let alone the A1.

Volkswagen Polo

The HMI/HVAC controls in the Polo appears, by contrast, like a 90’s Sony – our should that be Sanyo? – stereo system.

But let’s leave the comparison with the Polo behind. It’s unfair to compare it to the A1 and I feel churlish taking aim at a car I still love.

Let’s step it up a notch and take a look at the pictures of the air vents below. One belongs to the A1, the other to the A1’s chief competitor, the Mini.

Audi A1

Mini Countryman

A1 vs Mini

One look at the Mini these days leads me to think that Fisher Price was brought in as the interior design consultancy. Audi has got BMW seriously trumped on perceived quality and the more I looked, the more evidence I found of a fanatical attention to detail.

Audi's WMD release

The vent was the first thing that blew my mind (satin aluminium, knurled knob, razor thin part lines), then I saw the stitched leather on the centre console. Everywhere you look, there’s perceived quality candy. My favourite touch, however, is that little lick of red light (it’s not paint, I checked…) peeking out from the gear-shift trigger. Clearly Audi thinks of the A1 as a WMD primed for release. And they’ve aimed it straight at BMW and their Mini.

I see so much of this stuff, time after time at the motor shows that I couldn’t help but giggle.

Still, the cartoon highlights the disconnect between a manufacturer’s reality (our cars are still made from oil and stuff dug out of the ground and run on same) and their marketing (or cars are BFFs with pandas, run on sun and happiness and blow green leaves out of their exhausts).

You can see more of the Coretoons here.

P.S Whatever your take on the exterior of the Toyota FT-EV II, the interior is an absolute cracker, cracker enough to make Citroen designers weep. Sadly Toyota only published one press shot of it so you’ll have to take my word on just how great it is… @EricGallina from Car Design News kindly provided some far better images for your enjoyment. Hat tip to Eric!

Never have two great automotive names been so resolutely underserved by their colaboration.

When I was a kid I was given a book packed to the rafters with images and descriptions of the output of the Italian styling houses up to the mid-80s. Apart from a couple of Pininfarina jobbies like the Ferrari Modulo and Pinin (don’t ask, I love barges hmmmkay?) it was always the sheer audacity and other-worldlieness of the Bertone cars that made me keep turning those pages until the book fell apart.

From BAT to Marzal (stylishly accessorised above) to Carabo to Camargue to Sibilo… the list goes on and on… Bertone was largely responsible for me wanting to become a car designer.

It’s only natural, therefore, that I expect a great deal of Bertone, and while they’ve wavered in the last couple of years, the news that they would be teaming up with Alfa Romeo for Geneva had my heart a-flutter.

Consider that heart shot out of the sky and in the mouth of a rabid dog. I’m hurt and I’m mad.

Allegedly penned by the now-departed Jason Castriota (he of the Bertone Mantide… oh yes), Penned by new Stile Bertone chief Mike Robinson the Alfa Romeo Pandion is such a lazy pastiche of Bertone history and other manufacturers concepts that it stings.

Now, if a picture speaks you know what, I’m about to unleash verbal diarrhoea:

Quite why Castriota Robinson felt the need to reference a Lamborghini, let alone BMW, Mazda and Saab, when designing an Alfa Romeo is beyond me, but hey, this is just my opinion.

At least he did something interesting, if not good, with the chaotic structure sitting under the tail before he turned out the lights and walked out of Bertone. Sadly it’s still so reminiscent of many other concept cars, especially those of the CGI variety that appear at student design shows.

The Bertone I fell in love with made trends or or thumbed it’s nose at them; the Pandion represents a shameless bandwagon jump. While I might expect such an approach from an upstart Chinese manufacturer or consultancy, the fact it this: Bertone should know better. Better than to be so lazy with their own image and, most importantly, the image of their client.

Alfa Romeo deserves so much more than this car, especially given the turmoil they currently face (Chrysler 300C-based 16-something, anyone?). Let’s hope that Pininfarina and Italdesign can bring something better to the Geneva show.

Oh how I love the run-up to motor shows! With Geneva but a matter of weeks away, Nissan has revealed the Juke, a productionised version of the cute Qazana @JoeSimpson and I raved about at Geneva last year. Sadly, the car above is not the Juke. It’s my fantasy Juke, with the suicide doors of the Qazana rightfully reinstated.

Although I moved the shut-line back all of 100mm, the difference (for me at least) is night-and-day, making the wonderful Juke just that little bit more insane by keeping a whole lot more coupé in the mix. It’s a subtle change in appearance – if not in engineering – that I sorely wish we could have seen in the real thing.

At the end of the day, it matters little. I love this little box just fine and, after the slightly awkward second-album-syndrome Cube, the Juke puts Nissan back on top of the small car game.

About 7 years ago, if my recollection is correct, we saw the beginnings of a design trend that would take the automotive industry by storm. The progenitor was the Mercedes Vision CLS Concept and the feature was a dramatic, plunging shoulder line that caused some to comment, unfairly in my opinion, that the car looked like a pressed steel banana.

Despite the common name that would be ascribed to the feature, it was actually an ascending shoulder that whipped from the from wheel arch and arced gracefully rearwards. Did it have it’s genesis in the Triumph TR-7? Thankfully, we’ll probably never know and in any case only the most ardent – and odd – automotive design watchers would ever try to make the link…

No matter, it was a cunning stylistic trick that allowed the Vision CLSs designers to add a wonderful sense of forward motion to the niche-defining 4-door coupe, simultaneously breaking up what would have otherwise been a rather ponderous body section. As sure as the Vision CLS became the production CLS, the plunging shoulder spread like wildfire throughout other brands’ studios, attaching with limpet-like tenacity to anything and everything concept and production designers sketched.

If the CLS was the original and the best interation of the distinctive feature, Mercedes scored a home-goal with the F700 – surely the nadir of plunging shoulderieness- while Hyundai, oft the flatterer of the sincerest kind, is having one of the last laughs with the 2010 Sonata. Hardly surprising, really, as I recall the effect the CLS had on that vehicle’s lead designer as he schooled me back in 2004…

Now, almost 7 years on, it’s hard not to feel a little… well… over the plunging shoulder and it seems to be in the final throes of death at the hands of numerous Chinese knock-offs.

But fear not, avid body section fanatics, a saviour – of sorts – is emerging, helping designers everywhere break up slab sides and add visual interest. I honestly don’t know what to call it but will settle on open ended door scallop for now. While it certainly doesn’t have the drama of a plunging shoulder, either in name or visual effect, it appears to be with us for the time being.

I first noticed it on the GMC Granite (which has the most “designed” version)…

then on the Peugeot SR1 (in true French tradition, seemingly the most superfluous-but-interesting iteration)…

and finally on the new Kia Sportage which predates both the concepts (does this make Kia a trend-setter?).

However the open-ended door scallop develops, it will be interesting to see how designers manage the odd, real-world  flow of light that it has the potential to generate. If you’re keen to hop on board, I know a master in breaking rules around light flow and his non-compete should be about to expire…

Third time’s clearly the charm with Kia’s baby SUV, the Sportage.

The first generation of the Sportage impressed with it’s cheapness, off-road prowess and… well that’s about it*.  The second one, if we’re honest, had even less to recommend it: in a nod to changing market expectations of small SUVs, it dropped any semblance of off-roadability and was simply cheap.

1st and 2nd Generation Kia Sportage (click to enlarge)

Yet given the strides Kia’s been making in the design department of late (the conservative but nicely resolved Koup, Soul and Sorento all come to mind), the new Sportage was always going to represent a significant stylistic departure from its dowdy predecessors. In fact, having looked over the press shots, I’d go do far as to say that the new Sportage is the best resolved Kia to date and another indicator of just how serious the brand is about conquering the middle of the market.

2007 Kia Kue

2009 Kia Sorento

Reportedly designed under Peter Schreyer in Kia Motor Europe’s Frankfurt studio, the car takes many cues, as does the new Sorrento, from the 2007 Kue (is that a reverse pun?) concept car, penned under Tom Keams at Kia Motors America. Unlike the Sorrento, however, the new Sportage sits comfortably with the dynamic form language it inherited from its rakish forebear.

Where the Sorento’s surfacing appears somewhat lifeless and undernourished, that of the Sportage is more fully-blown, lending the little sport ute a pugnacious air and a tension to it’s key lines that is so sorely lacking in the Sorento’s. The immeasurably cleaner treatment of the lower-body cladding and wheel-arches also help the Sportage sit far better on it’s wheels.

The rear end is far more sculptural than the somewhat abrupt butt of the Sorento, with the LED-filled lamps reaching forward arrestingly. Their shape is mirrored in the nicely integrated fog lamp/reflector graphic while the extent of the bumper profile is hidden within the black lower cladding, leaving the eye to settle on the trimmer composition of body-coloured surfaces above. The fact that there’s a touch of Infiniti FX about the rear hatch profile should certainly do nothing to dampen sales prospects even if it does create the mother of all blind-spots

The DRG is well resolved, with its full-length lower graphic bucking the trend for 3 part openings that has grown so tiresome, although opinion will continue to be divided on whether the tiger tooth grille is enough to distinguish the Kia brand in a market flush with “look at me” faces. There appears to be some jewellery in the headlamps (hardly a surprise with ex-Audi Schreyer at the helm) and the LED running lamps that I’ll hate but will whisper come hither to the target market like no RAV4 or CR-V currently can.

2010 Kia Sportage and Competitors (click to enlarge)

All told, Schreyer and his team have created a solid, well-prportioned, tightly surfaced vehicle that doesn’t do anything remarkably new or break any rules. Indeed, it’s by sticking so dogmatically to the rules of good car design that this new Kia succeeds. As a result, it has that whiff of premium-ness about it that all well-designed objects do, something that the Sportage’s competitors (Honda CR-V, Toyota RAV4 and, some would say, VW Tiguan) singularly fail to project. Of course, premium can evaporate in the detailing – which I won’t be seeing for a while – but it’s impossible not to think that there will be many an SUV downsizer wooed by this new arrival. With it’s combination of refined design, 5/7/10 year warranties, an attractive price tag and an interior that – hopefully – matches the exterior for perceived design value, Kia will have a serious mainstream hit on it’s hands.

* I’ve been told that the first gen Sportage has quite a cult following amongst financially challenged off-roadists. All I know is that the red one I used as a pharmacy deliver driver made me truly understand the phrase drive it like you hate it. I did and I did and to its credit, it always came back for more, despite the auto shift lever (oh yes…) knocking itself into neutral every time I launched the thing off a speed hump…