Category Archives: NEW CARS

NEW CARS

Inside the DS Taylor made N°4 Concept

If you’ve ever wondered what happens when a carmaker hands the keys—creatively speaking—to a Formula E hotshoe with a gamer’s eye for detail, the answer is sitting under the lights at the Brussels Motor Show. It’s called the DS “Taylor made N°4 Concept,” and it’s part styling exercise, part motorsport flex, and part very French reminder that DS Automobiles takes its electric racing seriously.

Unveiled by DS CEO Xavier Peugeot at the brand’s Brussels press conference, the concept celebrates Taylor Barnard, the young rising star of the DS PENSKE Formula E Team, and it does so with the kind of theatrical confidence you’d expect from a brand that has spent more than a decade chasing trophies in Formula E—and winning four of them along the way.

At its core, the Taylor made N°4 Concept is based on the DS N°4, a compact premium hatch that DS considers central to its lineup. But calling this show car a dressed-up N°4 is like calling a Formula E car a modified commuter EV. The proportions are meaner, the stance is wider, and the whole thing looks like it escaped from a high-end racing game before the developers had a chance to tone it down for realism.

Front and center is an oversized, unapologetic “N°4” graphic embedded in the grille, framed by a light signature that stays faithful to the production car while dialing up the drama. The pixel-style headlamps lean hard into the sci-fi aesthetic, signaling that this is a car more interested in tomorrow than yesterday.

Designed by a Driver, Filtered by a Studio

What makes this concept more than just another motorshow sculpture is the process behind it. DS’s designers didn’t simply slap Barnard’s name on the fender and call it a day. Instead, the DS Design Studio worked directly with the driver, translating his preferences—shaped by racing and video games—into something that still feels cohesive and, crucially, believable.

Barnard asked for contrasts: dark, monochrome surfaces broken up by subtle color hits. He wanted something technical, something performance-driven, and something personal. The result is a car that looks less like a traditional concept and more like a spec sheet brought to life.

Aerodynamics play a starring role. The body is smoothed and tightened, the ride height is dropped, and the tracks are pushed outward, giving the N°4 a squat, planted look that wouldn’t be out of place in a digital garage menu. DS even admits the proportions take inspiration from video games—and honestly, that explains why it looks so aggressively “right” from every angle.

Barnard himself sums it up best: this isn’t a dream car locked behind velvet ropes; it’s a sports car he could imagine driving every day. High praise, considering most concepts barely survive the show stand.

Titanium, Four Ways

DS’s Colours, Materials and Finishes (CMF) team went all-in, treating the concept the way a Formula E team treats a race weekend: every detail matters. The unifying theme is titanium, interpreted in four distinct finishes that give the car depth without resorting to visual chaos.

There’s Pure Titanium, raw and precise, emphasizing the sharpness of the lines. Liquid Titanium adds gloss and reflection, highlighting the car’s flow and curvature. Then things get interesting with Craft Titanium, a crinkled, metal-like textile inspired by racing applications. It replaces traditional carbon fiber in aero-critical areas like the splitter and lower body, and it’s finished by hand—a nod to craftsmanship in a world increasingly obsessed with automation.

Finally, Black Titanium caps things off on the roof and spoiler, grounding the design and giving the whole car a more sinister edge.

Accents are handled with restraint, which is refreshing. Light Gold, the signature color of DS PERFORMANCE, appears on mirrors, wheel centers, and badges. Subtle purple highlights—Barnard’s favorite color—pop up inside and out, while his racing number, 77, is integrated almost as an Easter egg, illuminated in places like the diffuser lighting.

It’s detail-heavy without being desperate, which is harder to pull off than it sounds.

Motorsport Cred, Road-Going Relevance

DS is keen to stress that this concept isn’t just an art project. Displayed alongside Barnard’s DS E-TENSE FE25 Formula E car, the Taylor made N°4 Concept acts as a bridge to the newly launched DS PERFORMANCE Line Limited Edition, available on the DS 3, N°4, and DS 7.

The production N°4 itself backs up the talk with one of the broadest electrified lineups in its segment. The fully electric N°4 E-TENSE delivers 213 horsepower and up to 450 km of WLTP range, plus features like in-car EV routing, battery preconditioning, and remote charging control. A plug-in hybrid follows with up to 240 hp and 81 km of electric-only range, while a conventional hybrid rounds out the lineup with up to 1,000 km between fuel stops.

In other words, beneath all the titanium and pixel lighting, there’s a real car doing real work for the brand.

From Brussels to Roblox

Because it’s 2026-adjacent and reality alone is no longer enough, DS is also taking the Taylor made N°4 Concept digital. In partnership with Voldex, the car will appear in Driving Empire on Roblox, letting players buy, customize, and drive the concept in a virtual world sometime next year.

It’s a smart move—and a telling one. DS isn’t just chasing lap times or design awards; it’s courting the next generation of enthusiasts where they already live.

The Taylor made N°4 Concept may never hit a public road, but it doesn’t feel like a dead end. Instead, it’s a sharp, confident statement: DS knows exactly who it’s talking to—and it’s speaking their language fluently.

Source: DS Automobiles

NEW CARS

Alfa Romeo Giulia Quadrifoglio Luna Rossa: Sailing Lessons for a 300-km/h Sedan

Alfa Romeo has never been shy about blending romance with hard engineering, but the Giulia Quadrifoglio Luna Rossa takes that habit to an almost operatic extreme. Built to celebrate—and meaningfully collaborate with—the Luna Rossa America’s Cup team, this ultra-rare Giulia isn’t just a paint-and-badge special. It’s a full-throated exploration of what happens when Italian sailing obsession collides with one of the sharpest four-door performance cars of the modern era.

Only ten will ever exist. All are already spoken for. And yes, it’s the most extreme Giulia Quadrifoglio Alfa Romeo has ever built.

More Than a Sponsorship Sticker

Alfa insists this project is a three-layer cake: sports partnership, technical collaboration, and bespoke production. That sounds like marketing until you look closer. The Luna Rossa Giulia starts life as a standard Quadrifoglio at the Cassino plant before being transformed through a semi-artisan process involving a network of Italian specialists. It also lives within Alfa’s new BottegafuoRiserie universe, a customization and performance skunkworks shared conceptually with Maserati.

The result is a car that feels less like a limited edition and more like a manifesto—one that leans heavily on aerodynamics rather than raw power.

Five Times the Downforce, Same Top Speed

Under the hood, nothing changes—and that’s a compliment. The Ferrari-derived, twin-turbo 2.9-liter V-6 still pumps out 520 horsepower, paired with a mechanical limited-slip differential that puts power down with the kind of clarity modern electronically over-managed systems often lack.

The real story is airflow. Alfa Romeo claims the Luna Rossa generates roughly 140 kilograms (about 309 pounds) of downforce at 300 km/h, approximately five times what the standard Quadrifoglio produces. That’s not achieved by slapping on a barn door rear wing and calling it a day. Instead, every surface has been reworked to manage airflow with near-obsessive precision—boosting downforce while keeping drag low enough to preserve the car’s 300-km/h top speed.

Crucially, the aerodynamic balance remains almost identical to the base car, with a 40-percent front bias. Translation: it should still feel like a Giulia, just one that’s been mainlining espresso and reading CFD plots for fun.

Sailing Tech, Flipped Upside Down

The front end wears new carbon-fiber appendages that exploit accelerated airflow at the bumper edges, while underbody profiles generate suction via ground effect. Carbon-fiber side skirts seal the undercar airflow, improving efficiency rather than simply adding brute-force grip.

But the showstopper is the rear wing. Inspired directly by the foils of Luna Rossa’s AC75 race boat, it uses a dual-profile design supported by central pylons. Where the boat’s foils lift it above the water, Alfa flips the concept upside down—literally—to glue the Giulia to the asphalt.

The wing features variable incidence and carefully managed vortex structures to deliver high downforce with minimal surface area. It’s a rare example of aero complexity that serves elegance as much as function, proving you don’t need visual chaos to achieve real performance gains.

A Collector’s Cabin, Literally

Visually, the Luna Rossa Giulia leans into its nautical inspiration without tipping into costume. The body is hand-painted in an iridescent metallic finish inspired by the AC75 race boat, contrasted by red side graphics and “Luna Rossa” script. For the first time in Alfa Romeo history, the roundel wears a red background, matched by red-accented 19-inch wheels. Carbon fiber dominates the roof, mirrors, and grille shield.

Inside, the details get delightfully nerdy. New Sparco seats wear upholstery inspired by the Luna Rossa crew’s flotation devices, and embedded in the dashboard is a wafer-thin film taken from an actual Luna Rossa sail—machined and integrated as a genuine artifact. Carbon-fiber trim throughout, including the seat shells and center tunnel, reinforces that this Giulia is meant to be admired as much as driven.

The Ultimate Quadrifoglio?

With production capped at ten units, the Giulia Quadrifoglio Luna Rossa isn’t here to reset Nürburgring lap times or challenge supercars at track days. Instead, it stands as a rolling thesis statement: that Alfa Romeo still understands how to mix engineering rigor, emotional design, and cultural storytelling better than almost anyone.

It’s excessive, unapologetic, and deeply Italian. And like the best race boats—and the best Alfas—it exists not because it had to, but because someone believed it should.

Source: Alfa Romeo

NEW CARS

Ceer’s Radical Crossover Breaks All the Rules

Crossover design has become an exercise in creative risk management. Most automakers either sharpen the edges and call it “rugged” or soften everything into a jellybean and hope no one notices. The result is a global fleet of tall hatchbacks that blur together in traffic, differentiated mostly by badge placement and headlight signatures.

Ceer didn’t get that memo.

Spotted testing ahead of its eventual production debut, Ceer’s upcoming crossover looks like it escaped from a design studio that locked the accountants out. This thing doesn’t just stand apart from the segment—it barely acknowledges the segment exists at all.

The first thing you notice is the windshield. Actually, “windshield” might not be the right word. This is more like a panoramic slab of glass stretching improbably far up and over the front of the vehicle, creating a dramatic wedge-shaped profile that looks closer to a concept car than a showroom-bound crossover. Ceer has already confirmed it will be the world’s largest windshield, supplied by Isoclima, a company with experience in high-end automotive glass.

Dimensions haven’t been disclosed, but the technology baked into that glass tells you this isn’t just a styling flex. The windshield uses an infrared-reflective triple-silver coating designed to reduce solar heat absorption—an essential feature for a vehicle developed in Saudi Arabia, where the sun doesn’t mess around. An acoustic interlayer helps keep road and wind noise out, while a wide color band across the top acts as a built-in sunshade. It’s dramatic, sure, but also purpose-built.

Move past the glass and the design only gets stranger—in a good way. The crossover rides on triangular wheels, a detail that suggests either a bold aerodynamic experiment or a designer who finally got tired of circles. The doors appear to be butterfly- or gullwing-style units with integrated glass panels, reinforcing the futuristic vibe and making traditional crossover doors feel instantly outdated.

Thick side skirts and black cladding ground the design visually, while the lighting elements are slim and sharply defined. Digital side mirrors—still controversial but increasingly common—add to the high-tech look. At the rear, the crossover wears an angular tail with a sculpted liftgate and a shelf-like license plate recess that looks intentionally architectural rather than decorative.

In short, this is not a vehicle designed to disappear into a mall parking lot.

Details beyond the styling remain scarce, but the backstory is anything but. Ceer was launched in 2022 by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, backed by the country’s Public Investment Fund. The mission is ambitious: design, manufacture, and sell a range of vehicles—sedans and SUVs included—primarily for Saudi Arabia and the broader MENA region.

Rather than going it alone, Ceer formed a joint venture with Foxconn, best known for building iPhones, not cars. Foxconn was tasked with developing the vehicles’ electrical architecture, while BMW licensed component technology to the project. At the time, Ceer suggested its first vehicles would arrive in 2025. That timeline has slipped, but the broader plan remains intact.

Construction is underway at Ceer’s manufacturing facility in King Abdullah Economic City, and the company has continued to assemble a serious supplier list. Last year, Ceer announced a powertrain deal with Hyundai, which will supply integrated electric drive systems combining a motor, inverter, and reduction gear. More recently, the company revealed a separate agreement with Rimac Technologies for high-performance drive systems, hinting that speed—and not just sustainability—is part of the vision.

Exactly how those partnerships will translate into real-world performance remains to be seen, but the intent is clear. Ceer doesn’t want to be another regional EV startup quietly cloning established players. This crossover alone suggests the company is aiming for visual shock value first, differentiation second, and market acceptance third.

That approach is risky. Radical design can age poorly, and concept-car theatrics don’t always survive the realities of production regulations and cost targets. But it’s also refreshing. In a segment drowning in cautious conformity, Ceer’s crossover looks like a reminder that electric vehicles don’t have to be appliances—and that new players sometimes have the freedom to take risks legacy automakers won’t.

Whether Ceer can turn that ambition into a polished, competitive production vehicle is still an open question. But if nothing else, this crossover proves one thing: Saudi Arabia’s first homegrown automaker didn’t come to play it safe.

Source: Ceer; Photos: Baldauf