Jaguar XJ Ultimate iPad

Jaguar XJ Ultimate, a new line in Jaguar’s biggest car XJ. During the Beijing Auto Show, Jaguar revealed the Ultimate. It may not sound that different but the interior received a serious upgrade and became one of the best interior on market. Actually, the level of craftsmanship and quality look quite similar to Rolls Royce and Bentley. 

Like its competitors (Mercedes S-Class, BMW 7 Series and Audi A8), Ultimate offers individual two seat at the rear, so you don’t have to get close with the other passenger. And best part is champagne chiller! I don’t know why the automotive industry is obsessed with champagne chiller, each luxury brand offers this features. So, if you are very rich and driven by a chauffeur, you have to drink champagne not water or anything else, champagne.

Jaguar also follows the trend of placing iPads inside car and Ultimate come with two iPads with wireless keyboard. The only problem will be, when people see the sharp screen of iPad and then they see the blur navigation and instrument panel screens of XJ, they might be disappointed with this. Because, Jaguar’s navigation and instrument panel screens are below the contemporary technology standards in terms of pixel per inches. When you have opportunity to compare with iPad, you will understand the difference.

I hope Jaguar will replace these screens soon!

If you want to know what is this pixel per inch, here is the answer! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixel_density
Last generation iPad has 264 PPi!

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Jaguar

Bentley Mulsanne Technology Centre

Recently Bentley announced Mulliner version for the Mulsanne and if this did not satisfy your needs and you still want more. There is a new option! Mulsanne iPad Edition, sorry new interior option. Bentley offers state-of-art technology centre at the rear seats of the Mulsanne. You have chance to order one roof mounted 15,6-inch LED screen, also you can two 8-inch screens mounted to front headrests. Still you want more? You can have two iPad with keyboards mounted on the picnic tables and if you find iPad too big, you may order an iPod Touch with a unique application to control everything inside the car.

Lastly, there are some old school technology such as Tibaldi fountain pen yacht inspired wood trim and champagne cooler with crystal flutes.

I don't mind about the screens or the Apple products, but I really like the yacht inspired wood trim, they should offer this for their whole car range.

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Bentley

The Best Car on Earth! The Most Complicated Question

The best on earth is the most complicated question on earth! Everyone has a different opinion, even every nation has its unique opinion. Most of the time, people never agree on a single brand for the best! The conversation starts with Mercedes, jumps to BMW, later on Land Rover, just pass by Audi, moves to Aston Martin, quickly ends up with Bentley! In the meantime, someone says something about Bentley and we start overall again.

In order to resolve this very important issue, I end up with making the best car on planet from the brands that we know. First of all, all electronics are made by Bosch and Siemens. You cannot change this, and I am moving on.

Here are my categories for the best car!

Exterior Design | Engine | Transmission | Chassis | Suspension | Interior Design | Safety | Computer Interface | Ignition Key

I start with Exterior Design; I suggest Frank Stephenson as the best designer. His work can be spotted anywhere on earth and probably his designs are more popular than the Da Vinci’s paints! Welcome to world of social media.

Engine should be designed and manufactured by BMW. They offer the lowest CO2 level and efficiency with the best power output. Also, BMW has Formula 1 racing history. Don’t start saying, Ferrari is better. I am trying to find the best of everything.

Transmission should be manufactured by Ferrari. Their new double clutch gearbox is a state-of-art technology, which combines the comfort of a conventional automatic gearbox with the aggressiveness of Formula 1 shifting speed.

Chassis is really important and should be done by McLaren. They introduced the first carbon fibre technology in Formula 1 races and they always use this material for their road cars (Such as; Mercedes McLaren SLR and MP4-12C). In addition, nobody can manufacture the carbon fibre faster and better than McLaren.

Interior Design, this category has one option and it is called Rolls Royce. They are the best in interior design and comfort. All their cars are beyond extreme comfort. You have to experience it, before judging it.

Safety is the job of the Mercedes-Benz. They introduced the ABS, ESP, ASR, crash prevention systems. Nearly every three or four years, they introduce state-of-art road safety technologies and the competitors cannot keep most of the time.

Computer Interface! Unfortunately, automotive industry still is not good when it comes to design user interface for cars. I cannot ignore the improvement, but still the screen quality is low, menus are sometimes complicated, touch screen may not be that good at sensing the touch. So, there is only one company left for this and it is Apple. Just look at the iPhone, iPad or iPod; they all easy to use and work seamlessly.

Lastly the ignition key! I cannot think any other brand than Aston Martin for this job. They are doing amazing job with their crystal ignition keys.

In the end, in order to manufacture the best car, you need to combine many different brands that would lead to destroy the excitement of driving a car! Each brand has its own unique characteristics, which makes them unique and diversifies from others. So, the best car is the best one that satisfy your need, not others!

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Apple, Aston Martin, Rolls Royce, McLaren, Ferrari, BMW

Long Term Test: Ferrari iPhone Case

I just remembered that, I didn’t write anything about my Ferrari iPhone case, which I bought more than one and half years ago from Greece. I started to use this case every day since I bought it. So, it was under heavy usage period! So, I decided to take pictures of the current condition of the Ferrari iPhone case.

Despite it looks old, it is still excellent :)

You can buy it from here;
http://store.ferrari.com/en/accessories/leather-and-bags/wallets-small-leather-goods/leather-mobile-phone-holder.html

 

Published at: http://uygarr.blogspot.com http://carsandlife.net

Designer Interior

This month’s GQ magazine placed different types of iPad covers. I am not going to discuss about each brand but some of them were quite interesting! Hermes and Louis Vuitton. These two luxury brands have very royal consumers, they buy everything for these brands. This can be understood the from the price tags iPad cases, LV is £250 and Hermes is £540.

Hermes iPad case is technically more expensive than the product which is supposed to be protecting. This totally weird and unusual conditions created an idea for automotive industry. If people are ready to pay more money to accessory than the main product, why we don’t use this model for automotive. But it may not be working this well, you cannot offer Hermes leather interior for BMW 7 Series at the price of £100,000! That would be totally pointless and ends up with financial accidents.

However, it is extremely clear that people are ready to pay extra money for luxury brands regardless of their functionality. And I think brands like Land Rover, BMW, Mercedes, Bentley, Aston Martin and etc. can offer Hermes or Louis Vuitton leather interior. Bugatti did this with limited edition, it can be transferred to other brands also.

One of the other incentives to create this idea came from Google search results. I noticed that many people are looking for something special for the car interior leather. And I can assume that, they can pay extra couple of thousands for branded leather :)

My suggestion, Louis Vuitton interior may not look that good!

Pictures' Copyrights

LV, Hermes, BMW, Rolls Royce, Land Rover

Published at: http://uygarr.blogspot.com http://carsandlife.net

BMW 5GT Tragedy

I don't like to write these types of articles but recently I noticed that, I should do it. Last year, there are two things were revealed to humankind! Apple iPad and BMW 5GT. For both of them, it was unclear why you need one these things. Apple has the iPhone and Macbook series, why a tablet? Because, they found a very good niche market to fit their product and also Apple has consumers who are addicted to Apple. This is a very very very very big plus for introducing new products, because your customers are ready to consume. Anyway, iPad became a phenomenon and created a new segment and other brands also followed it. It is similar to Mercedes M Class in 1997, they created the SUV and BMW made the money :)

Let's go back to BMW 5GT case! BMW also thought that, we can introduce a new car and people can buy it. There were very solid reasons but on paper! There are some people who don't like normal 5 Series, because it is too low and they also don't like X5 because it is too high. They want something in the middle. Something like car and SUV, something very unclear. And they did it and called 5 GT which totally collapsed with Grand Tourer concept. GT means, a luxury coupe for long journeys, not a car with a huge boot and raised up suspension.

As I mentioned it was great on paper but unfortunately those people are only on paper. 5GT was a very unclear car and people could not identify its purpose, similar to Mercedes R Class and Audi A6 Allroader. These cars are excellent machines but their potential customers are extremely niche. I am not saying there is a no demand exists and BMW created a parallel universe for 5GT. There are some existing demand for this type of cars but it is extremely niche. And the problem is the gap between 5 Series and X5 and 7 Series are not that big and people are not researching about cars on Google (We know what they search on Google). So, they cannot identify the 5GT and it ended up with a very weak demand.

Recently, BMW announced that the demand for 5GT was far below the expectations. Honestly, nobody was surprised with this news. We were expecting to hear this. I don't like to say this but I said this exactly one year ago. And I am sad to see that 5GT is very close to failure.

My opinion, consumers perceive a vehicle based on its physical appearance and design. When they cannot position the vehicle properly and if it does not offer something extremely different, people don't buy it! 5GT is more comfortable than 5 Series and easier to drive in city than X5 and 7 Series but people does not think this deep and this way. They mostly think, ohh 5GT looks like an SUV but it is not as good looking as X5 or X6, so why I should buy it? Moreover, it looks similar to 5 Series, again why I should buy it? In order to success a car, consumers should have a clear meaning or identification for it and they should not find it too similar to other cars with the same brand.

Mercedes did these types of mistakes with R Class, B Class and Smart series and failed! Unfortunately, automotive industry does not have Apple style brand addictive consumers. Even though, the existing the people most of the time cannot afford to buy the product.

(BMW 5GT in US market moved some of the demand from 7 Series to 5GT.)

http://uygarr.blogspot.com/2010/05/film-by-inspired-by-bmw-5-gt-apple-ipad.html

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BMW

Published at: http://uygarr.blogspot.com http://carsandlife.net

Brushed Metal Exterior

In case you are planning to buy a new house with contemporary design, you might have seen some interesting interior designs. In my opinion, some of them are really creative and altered the traditional interpretation. Some of these new design concept change something really fundamental!

We used to have houses with walls covered with colour, this is what we all expected from a house. It was not usual to see a house interior with no colour, I mean no body was willing to have a house with a plain concrete walls. Nowadays, this idea starts vanish and people pay lots of money to have houses with a no proper colour on their wall. Actually they buy houses with plain concrete walls! 

Honestly, I first saw this design concept in TV series 24 and I liked it. It took time to get used to it but it looks nice.

As the traditional walls are replaced with concrete walls, why don't we have plain metal cars! I would like to have a car with brushed metal, I do not mean this as a colour. I don't wish to have a colour coating, I wish plain metal, sure with protection coating and etc. But I don't want any colours. People might think this will look weird and odd but it may look nice though. I think many people can remember that, DeLorean DMC was like this and it wasn't looking that bad! I am pretty sure that car designer may introduce this option in few year’s time.

It is already available with Macbook Air and Macbook Pro. They both look exquisite.

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Mercedes, Apple, DeLorean

Published at: http://uygarr.blogspot.com http://carsandlife.net