Tag Archives: Automotive

A Designer turned Xiaomi’s Logo into a Multi-Utility Vehicle Concept

Posted on by

Side profile of the Xiaomi Horizon concept MPV in blue-to-lavender paint, parked on a white platform above still water.

You know that little rounded square Xiaomi uses as its logo? The one a Japanese design legend spent actual months tuning with a math equation just to get the curve right? Lucas Angelo looked at that shape and thought, sure, why not build a car out of it. The result is the Xiaomi Horizon, and I mean that almost literally. The tailgate is one giant glowing squircle. The wheels are squircles. The whole rear end reads like someone blew up an app icon to the size of a minivan.

It sounds like a gimmick until you remember Xiaomi’s entire EV strategy is basically “make our products feel like they all came from the same brain,” and a car shaped logo is honestly not the dumbest way to pull that off. Whether it should be a Multi Purpose Vehicle or something else entirely is a separate question, and we will get to it. But credit where it is due, this thing has more brand DNA baked into its sheet metal than most concepts manage with an entire mood board of heritage references.

Designer: Lucas Angelo

Front three-quarter view of the Horizon against a tall black louvered wall, with mountains visible in the background.

Rear three-quarter view of the Horizon at dusk, showing its illuminated red squircle taillight and the Xiaomi wordmark.

That squircle obsession is not Angelo inventing a bit for fun. Back in 2021, Xiaomi hired Kenya Hara, the design legend behind MUJI’s whole visual identity, to redraw its logo. He landed on a superellipse formula, dialed to a value called n equals 3, which is the mathematically precise sweet spot between a perfect square and a perfect circle. People online mocked it as three hundred grand for rounded corners. Angelo apparently took it a lot more seriously than the internet did, because Horizon’s entire rear fascia is basically that formula rendered at automotive scale, ringed in individually lit LEDs so it glows like a screensaver whenever the car is parked.

Front three-quarter view of the Horizon showing its illuminated Cascade Grille and squircle wheel hubs.

Straight-on rear view of the Horizon on a salt-flat-like surface, with its glowing red squircle taillight centered.

The front end plays a similar game with something Xiaomi calls the Cascade Grille, a full width lattice of tiny illuminated squares that fade in a stepped pattern across the nose. It is not a functional intake so much as a light show, which tracks for a brand that made its name on phones and smart speakers before it ever touched a chassis. Xiaomi’s actual head of automotive design, Li Tianyuan, cut his teeth on the BMW iX and the i Vision Circular, a concept that turned BMW’s kidney grille into a digital display. Angelo landing in almost the same conceptual neighborhood, independently, says his instincts are pointed in a direction the real design team already validated once.

Side view of the Horizon parked in front of a spiked black wall, taillight lit, with snowy peaks behind it.

Here is where things get spicy. China’s premium electric MPV segment has a body count, and the most famous casualty is the Li Auto Mega, a smooth, curvy one box people mover that the internet immediately nicknamed the hearse. One owner slapped high speed train decals on his because the jokes wrote themselves, and Li Auto’s own design chief was still publicly defending the car more than two years later. A big blank slab of a rear end on an MPV is basically an invitation for the internet to decide what it looks like for you, and it is never flattering.

The Horizon driving down a city street past a billboard

This is exactly the trap Horizon’s illuminated tailgate sidesteps. Instead of a flat dark void back there, you get a glowing signature the size of a barn door, something to actually look at instead of squint at. Whether Xiaomi ever builds anything like this is unlikely, especially now that the real Xiaomi has already picked its answer to the family hauler question with the SkyNomad, an EREV SUV with a fridge and a bed mode rather than a sliding door MPV. But Horizon is a fun reminder that sometimes the best way to honor a brand is to take its smallest, most mocked design decision and blow it up until everyone has to take it seriously.

The post A Designer turned Xiaomi’s Logo into a Multi-Utility Vehicle Concept first appeared on Yanko Design.

This Supercharged Grand Tourer Was Built Using a 90-Year-Old Metal-Shaping Tool

Posted on by

The GTX in Riviera blue, all splitter, vents, and a rear wing that towers over the roofline.

There is a tool called an English wheel that has been shaping aluminum car panels since roughly the 1930s. It is a big metal hoop with a roller in the middle, and you push sheet metal through it by hand until it curves the way you want. It sounds like something you would find in a blacksmith’s shed, not in the workshop of a car aiming for 1,200 horsepower. Yet that is exactly the tool Coventry Metalcraft used to hand-form the body of the new Jensen Interceptor GTX, alongside laptops running computational fluid dynamics software. Old-world muscle meets new-world math, and somehow both sides showed up to the same car without arguing.

Jensen International Automotive unveiled the GTX in early September, and it is a strange beast by design. It is Jensen’s first ever clean-sheet car, built to preview a whole new Interceptor lineup, and it gets there using ten English wheels worked by more than 30 artisans, alongside digital design data from studio Avant Design and mixed-reality checks nobody in 1966 could have dreamed of. The result is a 960 bhp supercharged V8 grand tourer wearing hand-beaten aluminum panels shaped partly by algorithms. Britain’s oldest car-forming trick just got a very modern wingman.

Designer: Avant Design

Under the hood: a 6.8-liter supercharged V8 from Late Model Engines, wrapped in carbon and gold foil.

Long bonnet, fastback roofline, and a wing that ruins the original Interceptor's silhouette on purpose.

Avant Design, based out of Royal Leamington Spa, is the studio responsible for translating the original 1966 Interceptor’s proportions into something that reads as contemporary rather than costume. The long bonnet survives, the tightly drawn greenhouse survives, and the wraparound rear glass that made the original such a distinctive shape is still there, even if a towering rear wing now partially blocks the view of it. What is new is the front end, with slim horizontal LED lighting and enormous carbon intakes replacing the old car’s chrome-heavy face. Interestingly, this is not Avant’s first crack at reimagining this exact silhouette. Back in 2023, the studio quietly published a concept called the E-Ceptor, an electric take on the Interceptor with reworked rear glazing and a fresh grille graphic. The GTX effectively took that speculative sketch and gave it a supercharged V8 instead of a battery pack.

Diffuser, quad exhausts, and a wing built for lap times.

A full-width taillight and a wing pulled straight from GT3 territory.

The aluminum decision, both for the chassis and the body, was not driven by sentiment. David Duerden, Jensen International’s managing director, put it plainly when explaining why the GTX skipped carbon fiber entirely. He does not want the car riding like “a skateboard,” which is a fair concern given how punishing a stiff carbon tub can feel on a road built for a Sixties grand tourer, not a modern track special. Aluminum chassis structures are also considerably cheaper to produce in small batches, since they avoid the expensive tooling that carbon fiber demands before a single panel gets made. For a car expected to sell in the dozens rather than the thousands, that economic math matters more than bragging rights about carbon weave.

No screen, just a MoTeC dash, roll cage, and switchgear built for business.

That economic logic is exactly why the English wheel earns its keep here. Hand-forming panels sidesteps the tooling costs that would sink a low-volume carbon fiber program before it ever reached a customer. Coventry Metalcraft’s artisans still shape every piece the old-fashioned way, but they are working from digital surfaces that Avant Design refined using CFD modeling, chasing the 350 kilograms of downforce the GTX needs to behave itself at speed. It is a genuinely odd combination of a seventy-year-old forming technique and simulation software that did not exist when the original Interceptor left the Kelvin Way factory. Jensen is betting its entire comeback on that combination holding together, and so far, from what we have seen, it seems to be working rather beautifully.

The post This Supercharged Grand Tourer Was Built Using a 90-Year-Old Metal-Shaping Tool first appeared on Yanko Design.

Ford Keeps Teasing an Off-Road Mustang. This Orange Beast Just Showed Up Instead

Posted on by

Porsche did it with the 911 Dakar. Lamborghini did it with the Huracan Sterrato. Ford keeps teasing an off road Mustang that may or may not ever leave the design studio. The lifted sports car has quietly become one of the most fun corners of the car world, proof that you do not need a crossover shape to go play in the dirt. Motomuzi looked at that trend, looked at the most famous orange muscle car in television history, and figured the General Lee deserved an invite to the party.

The result ditches the flag and the door numbers but keeps every ounce of swagger, riding on a widened stance with fender flares that look torn open just to make room for serious rubber. Cooper STT Pro tires wrapped in old school raised white lettering wink at the raised white letter rubber that actually rode under muscle cars back in the day. A roll cage, a whip antenna, and a dark sunstrip finish off the rally car cosplay. Somewhere in Hazzard County, Boss Hogg would have needed a lie down just looking at it.

Designer: Motomuzi

Look closely and the GL plays a fun little identity game. The long hood, the power bulge, and the hood pins all scream late 60s Mustang fastback, right down to a C-pillar quarter window that has no business appearing on a Charger. Then your eye drifts to the back and suddenly you are looking at a proper 69 Charger, thanks to that blacked out full width tail panel with a glowing strip running corner to corner. It reads less like a faithful recreation and more like a highlight reel of muscle car greatest hits, compressed into one orange body. Somehow it works, mostly because both cars share the same DNA of aggression and swagger to begin with.

Underneath all that nostalgia is where things get genuinely interesting. The front overhang has basically vanished, replaced by a stubby tubular bumper and a trapezoidal skid plate that hangs low enough to mean business. Peek behind the front tire and you can spot long control arms and a coilover setup that has nothing to do with a stock Charger’s leaf springs and everything to do with a desert racer. This is the kind of suspension geometry built for eating whoops and washboard gravel at speed, not cruising down a boulevard looking for a burger joint.

The cabin backs up the tough talk outside. A full roll cage runs through the side glass, and a window net stretched across the door opening tells you this car expects to catch some air occasionally. Add in the roof mounted antenna and that sunstrip slicing across the top of the windshield, and the whole thing reads like something that just rolled off a rally stage rather than a soundstage. Even the wheels lean utilitarian, more function first than showroom chrome, which fits a build that clearly prioritizes traction over polish.

What makes the GL worth a second look is timing. Ford has spent the better part of this year teasing an off road Mustang without committing to one, while tuners like Loder1899 keep building their own versions of the idea just to see who blinks first. Motomuzi’s General Lee slides right into that gap, less a fantasy render and more a preview of where muscle cars might actually be headed if manufacturers keep chasing the Dakar and Sterrato money. The General spent its entire television career getting destroyed trying to fly through the air. This version finally looks built to land.

The post Ford Keeps Teasing an Off-Road Mustang. This Orange Beast Just Showed Up Instead first appeared on Yanko Design.

Toyota’s $2,500 GR KART lets you own a real racing machine without the usual hassle

Posted on by

Owning a racing kart usually comes with a few less exciting considerations. You have to ask where to keep it, how to get it to a circuit, and how much maintenance it will need between track days. Toyota Gazoo Racing has designed its new GR KART around those everyday concerns, creating an entry-level machine that is meant to make getting into motorsport a little less complicated.

Priced at approximately $2,500, the compact kart is aimed at newcomers and families who want something more serious than a rental kart without taking on the usual ownership headaches. Toyota is initially offering it in Japan through 36 participating kart tracks and seven GR Garage locations.

Designer: Toyota

The GR KART uses a 215-cc engine and weighs 183 pounds. Its driving position is designed to work for more than one person, with adjustable pedals and a tilting steering wheel accommodating drivers between 135 and 185 centimeters tall. That means a single kart can be shared within a family instead of being set up around one specific driver. Transport and storage have also been a major consideration of the design, as the kart can fit inside Toyota’s Noah and Voxy minivans without being disassembled. This means taking it to a circuit does not require a dedicated trailer or transport vehicle. Toyota has also designed its fuel system and oil catch tank so the kart can be stored vertically without first draining the fluids.

Maintenance is quite straightforward as there is no chain drive commonly found on racing karts. Toyota uses a belt-drive system with an automatic tensioner instead. It is a small change, but one that removes some of the routine adjustment and mess associated with a conventional chain. Toyota has also built a small digital layer around the ownership experience. A dedicated GR application provides instructional material for drivers, while buyers receive a digital driver’s passport. The passport can be used at participating tracks, helping simplify access for people who may be trying circuit driving for the first time.

The idea behind the GR KART is closely tied to Toyota chairman Akio Toyoda’s interest in making motorsport more accessible. Rather than positioning racing as an expensive hobby that requires specialist equipment and considerable preparation, Toyota is treating the kart more like an approachable piece of recreational equipment. The company says the project is intended to help more people experience motorsport and develop an interest in driving.

At less than $3,000, the go-kart is still a dedicated track machine, but Toyota has considered what happens before and after the actual driving. For an entry-level racing product, those details may ultimately be what make the biggest difference.

The post Toyota’s $2,500 GR KART lets you own a real racing machine without the usual hassle first appeared on Yanko Design.

Aston Martin’s 130-HP road-legal bike brings its luxury design language to two wheels

Posted on by

Aston Martin has finally put its name on a road-ready motorcycle. Developed with Brough Superior, the AMB 002 Roadster is the first street-legal bike from the partnership, fusing Aston Martin’s sculptural design language and Brough Superior’s highly specialized approach into motorcycle engineering. Limited to just 300 individually built examples, it is intended for collectors and street riders alike.

Unlike the earlier AMB 001 and AMB 001 Pro bikes, which were created exclusively for track use, the AMB 002 has been developed from the ground up for road riding. Aston Martin’s design studio has given it a compact, forward-biased silhouette, with smooth carbon-fiber surfaces broken up by crescent-shaped cooling vents along the sides. The bodywork rises around the rider, while slim, stalk-like mirrors and an exposed mechanical structure keep the motorcycle visually light.

Designer: Aston Martin

There are also deliberate references to Aston Martin’s cars. The brand’s signature side-strake has been reinterpreted around the headlamp, while the twin oval exhausts feature ribbed heat sinks inspired by the exhaust finishers used on models including the Vanquish, DB12 S and DBX S. At the rear, thin light blades borrow their visual character from the Aston Martin Vulcan, Valkyrie and Valhalla. Even smaller details, including the backlit ignition button, keyless operation and hand-crafted saddle leather seat pads, reinforce the connection between the motorcycle and Aston Martin’s road cars.

Underneath that carefully shaped bodywork is an all-new 1,083cc water-cooled V-twin producing 130 hp and 110 Nm of torque. Rather than chasing an extreme peak-power figure, the engine has been tuned around strong low- and mid-range torque, giving the roadster a more usable character for winding roads. The engine is CNC-machined from billet and built in-house at Brough Superior’s Toulouse facility, where the motorcycle is also machined and assembled.

The engineering gets particularly interesting around the chassis. A titanium structural frame is milled from a solid billet and weighs only 5 kg. It forms the backbone of the motorcycle while helping achieve a 50:50 weight distribution. Carbon-fiber body panels and the fuel tank help keep the center of gravity low, contributing to a total weight of 190 kg. Up front, the AMB 002 uses Brough Superior’s Fior fork, a double-wishbone system evolved from the setup used on the AMB 001 Pro. By separating steering and braking forces, the arrangement is designed to maintain front-end geometry under hard braking while improving steering precision. Its anti-dive characteristics are particularly useful when braking while leaned into a corner.

The result is an unusually focused road motorcycle where materials and mechanical architecture are as important to the experience as outright performance. Brough Superior will build each AMB 002 by hand in Toulouse, with first deliveries scheduled for the third quarter of 2027. Orders are already being accepted, making this less a conventional new motorcycle launch and more a limited production exercise in Aston Martin’s design language beyond four wheels.

The post Aston Martin’s 130-HP road-legal bike brings its luxury design language to two wheels first appeared on Yanko Design.

This Porsche 911 was lifted and rebuilt into a Chicago-ready urban safari car

Posted on by

What happens when a Porsche 911 stops worrying about staying low to the ground? Tangent Design Group has an answer. Lift it three inches, widen its stance, add chunky off-road tires, and turn one of Stuttgart’s most recognizable sports cars into something that looks ready to escape the city rather than attack a racetrack. Built in Chicago, the Urban Safari 911 is an unusual exercise in rethinking what a modern Porsche can be.

The project began in 2019, when the Chicago-based industrial design studio decided to build a Porsche without the constraints of a conventional client brief. Tangent eventually started with a 2021 Porsche 911 Carrera 4, chosen for its all-wheel-drive platform. Finished in Porsche’s Paint-to-Sample Black Olive with a tan interior, the car already had a distinctive character before the transformation began.

Designer: Tangent Design Group

Tangent approached it like a product-development exercise. The original 992 was digitally scanned, including its bumpers, fenders, wheel wells, rocker panels, and rear engine cover. That data became the foundation for developing new components that could properly integrate with the factory body and its increasingly complex electronics. Full-scale parts were then 3D-printed and physically fitted to the car to refine proportions and attachment points before final production.

The most significant change sits underneath the body. Tangent developed a bespoke three-inch lift system while retaining the Porsche’s stock suspension architecture and avoiding software errors. The additional clearance makes room for larger off-road tires and fundamentally changes the stance of the 911. On a truck, three inches might be unremarkable; on a low-slung sports car, it transforms the proportions completely. Something similar to what Vagabund Moto did in collaboration with NINE ELEVEN OUTLAW and DakarGarage to transform a Porsche 924 S into an off-road-worthy ride.

The wheels received the same level of attention. Tangent designed them in-house and worked with Brixton Forged to produce bespoke forged aluminum wheels. Full-scale printed versions were used during development to judge how the design sat against the widened body before the final wheels were manufactured. Visually, the Urban Safari combines wide fender extensions, revised rocker panels, a custom front bull bar and a pronounced ducktail-style rear wing. Auxiliary lighting and roof-mounted adventure equipment reinforce its rally-inspired character, while the graphics package borrows from historic Porsche rally liveries without simply recreating one.

That distinction is important. Tangent’s project predates Porsche’s factory 911 Dakar, having been conceived in 2019, but it draws from the same broader history of Porsche competition cars built for surfaces far removed from a racetrack. Instead of copying a classic rally car or dressing the 992 in retro cues, Tangent has created something that feels contemporary and purpose-built.

The result is currently a one-off, but Tangent is accepting inquiries about the Urban Safari kit, leaving open the possibility that its design language could eventually find its way onto other 992-generation cars.

 

The post This Porsche 911 was lifted and rebuilt into a Chicago-ready urban safari car first appeared on Yanko Design.

Foldable Cubivan Camping System gives your van kitchen, bathroom, and rooftop bedroom

Posted on by

If your camping requirements are different from other adventurers, and your camper van is just not cutting the bill. Yet, you don’t wish to make a van trade-off, the Cubivan Camping System, which recently made its debut at the Düsseldorf Caravan Salon, is what you should be looking to get. With this hard conversion system, you are not getting a modular camper kit that’s flexible and flimsy, you get a hard conversion setup that pulls out of the back of the van and lets you set up a complete camp in a jiffy.

Offering a kitchen, wet bathroom, and a rooftop bedroom, the Cubivan Camping system is above and beyond the competition by a fair margin. Of course, the way the Cubivan system slides out of the back of the van is not much different from any other rear-integrated camper van expansion unit, but it’s what this foldable cube wonder unfolds into that really makes the difference.

Designer: Cubivan

The solid foldable camper box, in addition to sliding out of the back of the van, expands down to the ground to provide a stable system that you can use conveniently from the inside. For this, when the Cubivan Camping system is pulled out completely at the camp, its separate upper and lower modules can be expanded to create a clear standing height of about 6.2 feet. The space opens up to accommodate a kitchen and a wet bathroom and comes with a hard-sided rooftop sleeping area that extends out onto the van roof.

The kitchen falls into place by rotating back inwards to the van cabin and sits flush against the side wall. The slide-out toilet compartment is located in the lower cabinet just alongside. The kitchen comprises a stove, sink, and a fridge in a designated slot situated adjacent to the kitchen. When the kitchen jags pack into the cab next to the fridge, it opens up 35 x 37-in floor space for the portable toilet and the shower.

The most interesting aspect of the Cubivan Camping System still is the sleeping accommodations, which are not formed inside the cabin after pulling the slide-out setup, but instead have been moved onto the roof. A separate hard-shell module makes a 79 x 79-inch sleeping space, which when you are back in ride mode, folds flat down within the permissible roof height of the van, since it replaces the stock van roof. When you’re at the camp again, install it and the four-walled sleeping accommodation is ready to cuddle you under the stars.

The interesting hard-sided van conversion setup from Cubivan is made to be compatible with Volkswagen ID. Buzz, Ford Tourneo Custom, Volkswagen Caravelle, and Mercedes Vito. It is likely to launch in 2027 starting at €22,000 (approximately $25,550).

The post Foldable Cubivan Camping System gives your van kitchen, bathroom, and rooftop bedroom first appeared on Yanko Design.

How Xiaomi made connected living feel more believable at IFA Berlin 2026

Posted on by

At IFA Berlin 2026, Xiaomi’s booth made a strong case for how far the company has moved beyond smartphones. Phones and personal tech were still part of the picture, but the larger presence came from Xiaomi Auto and Mijia, the company’s home appliance brand, with TVs, air conditioners, and kitchen and cleaning products giving the space a distinctly domestic weight. For a company still often associated first with phones outside China, it was a useful reminder that Xiaomi now wants to be understood through a much wider lens.

Xiaomi framed the booth around its “Human x Car x Home” smart ecosystem, the company’s term for connecting personal devices, vehicles, and home products into one system. On a trade show floor, that kind of idea can easily remain abstract. What made it more legible here was not the branding itself, but a series of smaller demonstrations built around ordinary routines. They gave the concept a practical shape.

Designer: Xiaomi

One of the most memorable examples was a car-to-home demo where opening the car door turned the TV off automatically at home. It is the sort of interaction that sounds minor until you picture yourself leaving the house and wondering whether you forgot to switch something off. Another demo connected the dishwasher to the robot vacuum, so once the dishwasher door was closed, the vacuum would start cleaning the kitchen floor. In the bedroom area, Xiaomi showed a bedside lamp turning on when someone started reading in bed. None of these moments were staged as spectacle, and that was part of why they worked. They felt close to real life.

That sense of everyday usefulness carried through to some of the appliances themselves. A tower air conditioner could either follow your movement with its airflow or avoid blowing directly at you, a small adjustment that made the product feel more attentive to comfort rather than simply powerful. Xiaomi also showed a washer with three separate loading sections that could run at the same time, an idea that immediately suggested a different rhythm for sorting and doing laundry. Then there was a refrigerator with a zero-degree fresh-keeping compartment for meat, designed to keep food right at the edge of freezing so it stays fresh without actually freezing. These were not necessarily the loudest products on the floor, but they were among the easiest to imagine living with.

For a company showing such a wide range of products, Xiaomi’s design language felt notably controlled. The appliances and devices were clean and contemporary, but they avoided the kind of hard-edged minimalism that can make smart products feel distant or clinical. Nothing seemed desperate to stand out on its own. Instead, the products felt designed to live quietly in a room, which may actually be the more difficult thing to get right.

That restraint suited the broader ecosystem message. Xiaomi’s Human x Car x Home smart ecosystem, at least in the form shown in Berlin, was less about dramatic futurism and more about small reductions in friction. The booth as a whole showed Xiaomi’s range, but the more telling moments were the ones that suggested how the company wants its products to behave around daily habits. The TV switches off when you leave. The vacuum starts after kitchen cleanup. The bedside lamp responds to reading. The ambition is not hard to see. Xiaomi wants connected technology to feel less like a system you manage and more like a background layer that adapts around you.

The car is a big part of that shift. Seeing Xiaomi Auto presented alongside phones and home appliances made it clear that the company does not want its automotive business to sit apart as a separate identity. It wants the car to become another part of the same connected experience, linking what happens on the road with what happens at home. At IFA Berlin 2026, Xiaomi Auto also announced that it will enter Germany and other European markets in 2027.

Part of what Xiaomi seemed to be doing in Berlin was introducing European audiences to a version of the company that is already more familiar in China, one that extends well beyond smartphones into home living and mobility. That broader identity came through clearly on the floor. The scale of the booth showed how much ground Xiaomi now covers, while the smaller demos did the more important work of showing how those categories might start to connect in practice.

Trade shows often reward size, novelty, and noise. Xiaomi had scale, certainly, but the parts that lingered were quieter. They were the products that looked easy to live with, and the scenarios that translated a large ecosystem idea into something domestic, ordinary, and believable. If Xiaomi’s Human x Car x Home smart ecosystem is meant to describe where the company wants to go next, IFA Berlin 2026 offered a useful glimpse of what that future might look like when it is at its most convincing.

The post How Xiaomi made connected living feel more believable at IFA Berlin 2026 first appeared on Yanko Design.

The Bristol Fighter is back, and only 5 people can own this 600HP V10 GT

Posted on by

Bristol Cars has been on hiatus for almost 15 years, but now the self-proclaimed ‘enigmatic’ British brand has risen from the ashes to revive one of its most flamboyant creations. The Bristol Fighter, the last model produced by the eccentric British marque, is making a revival in modern times, and it is as exclusive as it gets.

Only five of them will ever be produced, using unused original chassis that have been waiting to be completed. One of these five has already been created and will be displayed at Salon Privé at Blenheim Palace. Bristol Cars will hand-build the remaining four to commission, drawing on the original engineering drawings and parts from the handful of Fighters that survived.

Designer: Bristol Cars

According to Paul King, owner and director of Bristol Cars, the remake of the Fighter is “far more than reviving a name; it is about bringing back the spirit of a marque that has always stood apart.” For Bristol, that spirit is inseparable from its aviation and engineering roots, which have influenced the company’s cars since its formation in the aftermath of the Bristol Aeroplane Company.

The most exciting bit is the return of the 8.0-liter V10, offered in its original 525hp specification, with a 600hp version also available. Bristol had claimed a 210mph top speed for the Fighter, making it an unusually serious grand tourer beneath its understated British exterior. The long, low body, distinctive gullwing doors and front-mid-mounted engine remain central to the design, preserving the visual character that made the original so unusual.

The first continuation car gets a black exterior paired with a tan cabin, creating a restrained contrast that suits Bristol’s deliberately unconventional character. The interior retains the aircraft-like detailing that distinguished the original, including an abundance of instruments and controls rather than the minimalist digital interfaces common in modern supercars. Even an engine-hours gauge was incorporated into the original cabin, reinforcing the connection to Bristol’s aviation heritage.

The Fighter was originally introduced in the early 2000s and used a V10 derived from the Dodge Viper. It was never produced in significant numbers; estimates suggest that only a small number of complete cars were built before Bristol entered administration in 2011. The new continuation series therefore serves a practical purpose as much as a nostalgic one: it allows the marque to finally complete chassis that were left unfinished when production stopped.

The remaining four cars can be commissioned in either right- or left-hand drive and will be personalised to their owners’ specifications. Bristol is working with a British manufacturing partner specialising in engineering and low-volume production, while Richard Hackett has returned as chairman after previously working alongside former Bristol boss Tony Crook.

The timing is significant, too. Bristol Cars is returning in 2026, exactly 80 years after its first production car, the Bristol 400, was completed in 1946. Rather than reinventing itself with a contemporary electric supercar or an entirely new design, the company has chosen to finish an unfinished chapter first. With only five Fighters planned, this revival is less about volume and more about restoring a very specific piece of British automotive history to the road.

The post The Bristol Fighter is back, and only 5 people can own this 600HP V10 GT first appeared on Yanko Design.

Unofficial Audi A8 Concept Keeps Classic Sedan Proportions and a Traditional Grille

Posted on by

The Audi A8 died in early 2026, quietly, the way flagships die now. Order books shut in Germany, production wound down, and the Q9 SUV inherited the crown after the A8 managed 1,406 US sales in a year the Q8 did 10,881. Audi swears a fifth generation arrives around 2030. Luca Serafini apparently decided four years is a long time to sit around, so he built one himself. His version borrows the Concept C’s monolithic surfacing and four-element light signature, then quietly refuses the vertical Singleframe, running a full-width horizontal bar with the four rings lit at center instead, plus twin exhausts in the diffuser.

Everything else on the car is doing less on purpose. Six-spoke wheels with cross-drilled discs behind them, blacked-out pillars, flush glass, a shoulder line so soft you have to hunt for it, and a titanium-silver finish borrowed straight from Concept C’s anodized aluminum look. Those illuminated rings front and rear go dark the second any regulator sees them, and the front overhang is shorter than crash structure would ever allow. Neither problem makes the renders less convincing. They just mark exactly where a designer stopped negotiating with reality.

Designer: Luca Serafini, LS Design

The vertical Singleframe remains the most argued-about thing Audi has done in a decade, and Serafini declines it outright. Massimo Frascella built that upright slab for the Concept C by reaching back to the 1936 Auto Union Type C and the 2004 A6, and when we spent forty minutes with the car in Munich it absolutely worked at roadster scale. Stretch the same face across five-plus meters of limousine, though, and authority starts sliding toward novelty toothpaste tube. What replaces it is a wide horizontal aperture with the rings glowing dead center, flanked by the four-element light graphic Audi now uses front and rear. Autoevolution called the result tame. I’d call it a designer knowing what a big car’s face has to do.

Audi built the slipperiest sedan on the planet in 1982 by bonding the side glass flush with the bodywork, hitting a drag coefficient of 0.30 and calling itself the aerodynamics world champion. Forty-four years later the same instinct gets rebranded as radical simplicity. Serafini’s A8 runs the C3 playbook almost literally, with flush glazing, no visible door handles, blacked-out pillars, and a body carrying zero character lines. The whole surface works on volume and reflection alone, which is the hardest thing to pull off in car design and the easiest to botch. Broad rear haunches and a near-vertical Kamm tail keep it from reading as a bar of soap.

Twin oval outlets sit in the black rear diffuser, which rules out any A8 e-tron reading immediately. That looks prophetic rather than backward-facing, given Audi scrapped its 2033 combustion cutoff and then dropped the 987-hp Nuvolari, a 4.0-liter twin-turbo V8 with three axial-flux motors and a 10,000 rpm redline, in the exact year it once promised to go electric-only. A green vertical accent in the lower intake muddles the story slightly, since it reads like a charge-status indicator on a car with tailpipes. Serafini has been running Concept C surfacing across an imaginary Audi lineup since last September, covering an SUV, a hot hatch, an A2 revival and an R8 Spyder. This flagship is his second run at the A8.

Frascella’s rule now is that Audi shows nothing it cannot build, which makes independent work like this the only place ambition still runs unsupervised. Serafini works in Blender, 3DS Max and Unreal with AI in the pipeline, so the images are staged rather than surfaced from production CAD, and a few details fall apart under close reading. His Ferrari single seater from yesterday had the same quality, gorgeous and structurally impossible in roughly equal measure. What this A8 proves is that the segment’s problem was never the shape. Audi walked away from the sedan because buyers did, and a car this composed makes that math feel like a shame.

The post Unofficial Audi A8 Concept Keeps Classic Sedan Proportions and a Traditional Grille first appeared on Yanko Design.