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Aston Martin drops Cygnet city car

Autocar is reporting that the diminutive Aston Martin Cygnet has been dropped from the company’s portfolio. The automaker, now owned by Prodrive and private equity firm Invenstindustrial, will focus on its “core product range,” also known as “good cars.” Autocar posits that the justification for the Cygnet was to continue producing V8 and V12 cars, while keeping its average CO2 emissions down. The Cygnet shared bones with the Toyota iQ city car and used a 97-hp, 1.3-liter engine and got 58.9 mpg using the U.S.

Who's Where: Satoshi Wada to open independent design studio

Satoshi Wada, former Senior Designer at Audi AG and Nissan Design Japan, is set to open his own design studio. Called SWdesign TOKYO, his ambitious plan follows on from a growing line of design managers who have left successful OEMs to establish their own design practices. Wada, who resigned from Audi AG in Ingolstadt earlier this month, told CDN he is aiming "to create a new vision with my own independent design studio in Tokyo".

Skoda Fabia (2015) unveiled: first pictures of Czech supermini

By Tim Pollard First Official Pictures 19 August 2014 08:00 Czech HQ has issued this pair of pictures of the new 2015 Skoda Fabia. They reveal a conservatively styled supermini in the vein of a shrunken Octavia with a dash more sophistication than today’s workaday hatch. The new, third-generation Fabia sticks with the crisp, defined surfacing that has come to represent Skoda’s ascetic formality.