Car Design Fetish

Local Motors has just completed its latest competition, the Chicago Motors comp.  This competition managed to accumulate over 80 unique designs from students, professionals, and lovers of car design.  While many chose to focus on Al Capone’s gangster history others drew inspiration from Art Deco themes, Chicago’s modern architecture, and even the “Windy City” nickname.

Take a look at the attached images and press release, or head on over to Local Motors’ website to see the complete portfolio of entrants.

Above: 1st Place, Socom AC Baptisto by Giulio Partisani

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(Image courtesy of Audipassion.com)

With the 2009 Detroit Autoshow well underway,  Audi has added to their repertuar of hotness with the Sportback concept.  Read the rest of this entry »

As you can see the website  is going through a bit of an update.  Please bare with us, the auto show is stalling the progress.  We are still digesting all of the unveilings from this years show.  There certainly isn’t a lot of new product (as expected), but what showed up is some real quality work.  We will bring you design reviews on our favorites throughout the coming weeks.

For now we want to share with you some of our favorites with quick thoughts on them.

Cadillac Converj

This Caddy is one hot piece of ass, bringing back in your face American Styling with a fuel sipper attitude.  Who says these new efficint cars have to look like a vanilla Prius?  With this car being based off of the Volt, it makes you wonder what happened to the Volt.  Did they try to hard to reinterpret the Volt Concept theme?  Perhaps they should have abandoned it and started fresh.  Sorry for all the questions, but could this be the new Caddilac CTS Coupe?  I hope they don’t ruin it and make it a 4 door.

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Our awesome friends at Local Motors are launching their next monthly-ish competition, the Chicago Motors Competition.

I, for one, consider Chicago a second home.  So, I am anxious to see how designers interpret the city onto four gangster wheels.

Al Capone would be proud!

LM’s full contest release after the break.

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Could you believe it?  We actually found a shred of good news about the auto industry.  Lets hope this is true, we aren’t sure how much more of this we can take.

Could there be hope for the auto industry?
More stability is seen after tough first half

Despite some dire auto sales predictions for 2009, automotive analysts say there are glimmers of hope that the market might begin stabilizing after a tough first half. They expect consumers, who are still wary over the shaky state of the economy, to buy between 10 million and 12.4 million new cars and trucks this year.
That figure is down substantially from the 16.7 million in annual sales the industry has averaged during the past decade. And it’s even lower than the dismal 13 million or so in sales expected for 2008.
But there are bright spots. More than US$23 billion in U.S. Government assistance now is on its way to General Motors, its lending arm, GMAC, and Chrysler. The money for GMAC, in particular, could begin thawing the credit market, which has been rejecting auto loans in droves. And that could help loosen consumer demand for cars and trucks, which has been pent up for months by the lack of credit and general caution over the U.S. economy.
“The first half is going to be quite a struggle, with some improvement in activity starting around spring,” said Jesse Toprak, a senior analyst at Edmunds.com. He says the things that need to be done to jump-start demand in the marketplace are happening little by little.
Most analysts still expect auto sales in 2009 to be almost as bad, or worse, than in 2008. For 2008, analysts predict that light-vehicle sales will drop to between 13 million to 13.2 million, which would be a decline of at least 18 percent compared with 2007 and mark the worst sales year since 1992.  (Detroit Free Press)

Sure enough a couple days after the photos have been released she comes out for all to see.  The new Cadillac SRX which will make its debut at next weeks North American Auto Show.  Here are some shots taken by our very own Johhny B caught in the wild.  It will be fun to see how this new CUV does compared to BMW, Infiniti, Mercedes, Audi,……..all the other luxos out there.

The new SRX looks pretty decent.  Overall a kind of generic design but does have some truly Cadillac design features that allow it to stand out from the rest of the pack.  One nice form feature is a lot of plan view excitement, getting away from the blocky square front ends of the original Art & Science themes.  The theme is definitley maturing throughout the years.

This Caddy sure looks better than the Scion it is parked next to!