Alfa Romeo Milano

The prototype pictured below and other images recently found show the new Alfa Milano as a not-new car. Basically it’s just a Fiat Bravo with not-enough changes, even inside. But if it looks really good that might do the trick and bring more profit to Fiat. Still, I love the Bravo’s design, particularly the rear. Can’t see how the Alfa will improve on that.

If the reader looks closely at the images it appears that there is no multilink at the rear suspension. Normally I would bitch about that, but in the current economic conditions who cares… just make it look good and move some metal with profit!

EV Future: EDAG Light Car

An electric prototype for the Geneve show. This one looks amazing and brings some innovation in the use of lights. But it's just a study, for now...

EV Future: Ford Battery Electric Vehicle

This is a prototype of a Focus EV. Driving with no talk, almost no noise... and showing some of the internals. This is for real, and hopefully when it arrives it will look better than this US Focus design.

Auto-future on twitter

The thing on your right is a twitter widget. It serves to show stuff I write on twitter... auto-future related or maybe not!

So besides the regular (Not!) auto-future content I will be writing short stuff and/or comments on this twitter thing. That could be good because most of the occasions I find something interesting I can't write it properly on auto-future due to lack of time or just simple lazyness. So please follow my twitter page on http://twitter.com/autofuture, I might even give some previews of stuff that will appear later on auto-future.

EV Future: Rinspeed iChange

iPhone onboard! In this concept the car's body adapts to the number of passengers on board. But it always looks ugly!

Ford B-Max (NOT!)

The image shows a photoshop of the Ford B-Max, a Fiesta-based minivan. Well, actually it doesn’t because the car was cancelled. This is not being officially announced for good reasons… but that’s what I got to know. And anyway, the car was never acknowledged by Ford. It’s a pity because the car in the image looks really nice for this sort of vehicle. Ford of Europe is very good at designing sporty-looking minivans.

BMW Concept 5 Series Gran Turismo

Again, the "New Crossover" concept explained. BMW will have a lot of stuff to explain about this car... but in real-life it will look really nice. But I was hoping it would look less like a big hatchback.

VW Polo

Looks like a mini-Golf... what did you expect? More mature than a Seat Ibiza or Skoda Fabia, we will know everything about the new not-so-small-VW very soon. Sorry for the picture, not the greatest quality but it's the real thing.

EV Future: Mindset prototype first drive

This is a project for an electric car with on-board generator... just like the Chevy Volt. I guess they could try to sell it in EV-mode only since it should be very light and looks more suited to cities.

But anyway, the promoters are still looking for funding.... Do you think it looks ugly?... it was designed by Murat Günak, a designer famous for hurting VW's profitability... he is better at designing this sort of things than real cars.

2010 BMW X3

The smaller-than-X5-SUV. And bigger than X1, and taller than new PAS-crossover-thing... it's becoming difficult to put all this new crossover-SUV-BMW-things in their right place. Still, this will be a proper X3, the image below shows some design lines despite all the visual noise. It will look great and even more sportier than the X5. Expect also class leading CO2 emissions from improved efficient dynamics technique.

EV Future: Audi A?

German magazine Auto-Zeitung presented a recent article on future small cars from BMW and Audi. If BMW is going forward with a new brand within the "i-mobility" concept, Audi will have to uses its own rings for the job in a series of new cars. One of the proposed concepts for possible electrification is a revival of the A2, a car that could have more chances of success today. The CGI below shows how a A2-based new city-car could be and it looks really nice.

EV Future: Ford Escape Plug-In Hybrid

Ford announced today that when it starts building its first series production plug-in hybrid in 2012, the lithium ion battery packs will be supplied by Johnson Controls-Saft. JCS has already been supplying the prototype packs for current test fleet of PHEV Ford Escapes as well as packs for some of Ford's experimental vehicles such as the HySeries drive Ford Edge.

It would be nice to have the Escape PHEV sooner than 2012 but we reckon it will probably be available with the new car-like body structure expected for the next generation Escape.