Sep 23, 2009
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From Russia with love, granted, not the best Bond film, but the title certainly describes this piece of automotive engineering and design. The car you see above is from the Russian company, MaRussia. It is a sleek and silky looking little monster which has at it’s heart some surprising credentials. Mainly it’s a hybrid. Yep, it’s a hybrid Supercar.
Unveiled last year, you can now order one of these motors, for a price of around €100,000. The car is an example of how the hybrid can be pushed to reach new limits, with it’s claimed 0-60mph of around 5 seconds, and a range of 400Km it certainly will be interesting to see if anyone can be converted from the traditional sports car powerbase of petrol to a mixture of electricity and fossil fuels. The insides are just as impressive, with wireless connectivity and digital video cameras all round, giving feedback to the driver constantly, and offering a whole host of entertainment options it could easily become the new choice of premiership footballer plaything.
The inventor/developer is a Russian fella, Nikolay Fomenko, who seems to have done most things in his life (he’s been a singer, news anchor man, theatre actor and racing car champion) is a bit of a renaissance man. He sees the car taking part in the FIA GT championships in 2010, which will add some great kudos to the car itself, as well as the hybrid genre in turn. Certainly an ambitious chap.
The design of the car looks familiar in many ways, glance from different angles and it invokes a look of the Lotus Elise, the Alfa R8 and McLaren F1 amongst others… But then that isn’t always a bad thing as these are some of the finest looking cars on the road today. As usual, take the mouse to clicky town to get more information on this, and maybe order one too.
So, whilst we’re still not huge fans of hybrid cars just yet, this might make us come one notch closer to that way of thinking, but we just can’t help thinking this is the Captain Drago to Ferarri’s Rocky Balboa. Yo Adrianne!
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Dec 06, 2008
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It’s been a long time coming and the Stuttgart car makers’ museum to themselves has been slightly delayed again. The Viennese architect-designer, Delugan Meissl, designed this masterpiece to showcase the history of one of Germany’s most iconic brands.
The whole building is intended to look as if it is floating above the ground when you are inside and houses some of the best examples of German sportscar design from the last 100 years of so. Everybody would love to give you more details about the museum, but it is a little hard to decipher the language used on the site. It’s probably best that you just look at the pictures and pop in to the actual museum next time you are in or near Stuttgart. As ever click the picture to see the site and the building works on it.
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Nov 14, 2008
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Not very often does a designer get an amazing brief. We seem to be lucky here at Everybody, we get some great ones, but we are open minded and remember that we have a commercial responsibility.
Now. When you are the head of design at a world renowned sports car company, you grab the chance to produce a piece which is ‘definitive’ and marks the mark as far as the future of the company and the whole sports car genre. That was pretty much the brief that was given to Marek Reichman by Ulrich Betz, CEO of Aston Martin. The idea was to inject all the beauty and emotion that Aston Martin can put into a car. Distil that further and you basically have to produce a piece of hand crafted Art. The Brand Essence poured into a bottle and sold as a car.
Before you rush out and buy one, there is a very limited edition of only 77 of these – which are probably already sold, even at the £1,000,000 pound price tag. If you want to make it even more perfect, you can tailor it to match your needs, tastes and driving style.
It is also worth noting that this is the first completely new, from the ground up Aston Martin since the brand was sold to the Ford group. The great thing for us as Brand designers is that Aston really understand the need to communicate their brand in the best way they can, produce the best car they have ever made and show off their abilities, simple as that. For now, though, Everybody will make do with looking at pictures of the car as it is a true piece of art in the truest sense of the meaning.
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Jul 03, 2008
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OK, when we were kids, cars of the future were different, right? We had visions in our minds about vehicles which went underwater, fired laser beams from the headlights and could shape-shift. (well the cars in my mind did anyway.)
Recently, BMW unveiled it’s GINA Concept car, which as the picture shows, is covered with a flexible skin which animates and folds as the frame under the car moves. Imagine switching the headlights on and the skin opening to reveal the lights, like a human eye revealing the iris. When the doors open the skins wrinkles around the frame and creates many a beautiful shape. Then the bonnet opens, the skin slides apart like a divers wet suit.
There have been many detractors from this piece of true design over the last few weeks, but they are forgetting this is a prototype to show what the future holds. If designers didn’t try things and show what is possible, we would never dream and other innovators would never be inspired.
Everybody says, well done BMW for thinking outside the normal bounds of car body manufacture. Well done for opening our eyes to the possibilities of the future, and most of all well done for doing something designers are guilty of in all fields… not looking at and developing materials which are not the usual way to solve a problem.
Click the image above to hear Chris Bangle (Design Director at BMW) talk about the GINA project and see the innovation in action. Thanks, Chris, for starting to make me remember what cars should be like in the future.
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