The compact, open-leading SUV was unveiled at the 2009 Detroit auto show. At the time, Kia mentioned the automobile was purely a concept.

In 2010, Kia sources said the Soul’ster would not make production due to the economic circumstances, pointing to the simple fact that it would need the development of a new platform.

Kia has now exposed production could go ahead. In a current press release, the South Korean company explained the Soul’ster is “currently underneath final evaluation for production”.

In concept type, the Soul’ster comes with a two-piece flip back roof that opens the front and rear sections independently, exposing roll bars and the rear cargo area.

The production edition is anticipated to come with a one.six-litre four-cylinder engine making all around 103kW as nicely as a 2.-litre engine creating 122kW, borrowed from the Hyundai Veloster and Kia Sportage, respectively.

Auto Guidance

Damian Kulash Jr. sits in 1 of the editing suites of a media-production property in downtown San Francisco, viewing clips on a pc screen of a silver Chevy Sonic doing hand-brake turns in a dust cloud. The vehicle is festooned with what appears like forks, hockey sticks, Television antennas, railroad horns, shark spears, and a couple of dead Persian cats, which are in fact large microphones fitted with furry windsocks. Within the auto, 3 guys plus Kulash—each in a driving suit and matching helmet of a diverse lollipop color—pull levers, finger little pneumatic keyboards known as melodicas, and mouth the words to a song referred to as “Needing/Obtaining.”

If the sound weren’t turned off, we’d hear guitars getting strummed, pianos staying thwacked, basses staying plucked, and tubas staying blown. The Sonic, in a type of percussive drive-by, is actually making the music. The desert dust billows, and tumbleweeds tumble. It is all extremely . . . odd. Maybe it will not be in a number of months, after it’s eventually edited and packaged into a 3-minute 50-second YouTube vignette and a shorter ad for Chevy. Or maybe it will be.

After again, automobile advertising, so extended a effectively-polished mirror of contemporaneous trends in America, adjusts to suit the altering instances.

Kulash is the lead singer of a band called Ok Go, or as any fan of its official YouTube movies (137 million hits and counting) may say, “the treadmill band,” “the band that does that point with the canines,” or “those Rube Goldberg guys.” Formed in 1999, Ok Go is as well-recognized to its largely virtual, viral audience for its video clips as its propulsive and typically upbeat power pop.

Guitarist Andy Ross, bassist Tim Norwind, and drummer Dan Konopka join Kulash in the elaborately choreographed video clips, which display the band dancing in a backyard, frolicking with wise canines, drumming with the Notre Dame Fighting Irish marching band, and, most famously, swinging on fitness center treadmills in a 2006 residence video shot in Kulash’s sister’s basement. “Here it Goes Again” won a Grammy award for greatest brief-form music video, has been downloaded tens of millions of occasions, and spawned dozens of amateur and professional imitations.

Some rock artistes would recoil at staying recognized as “the treadmill band,” but it doesn’t appear to bother Kulash. “Every band has songs. Not each band has movies like this,” or, certainly, a music-market backstory like this. It requires Okay Go divorcing its huge transnational record label—EMI—in 2010, commencing its own label, and joining
the great media democratization motion on the net.

Given that the separation, Okay Go has rather much completed as it pleases artistically, distributing it all cost-free at web sites this kind of as YouTube, 1 of the Tahrir Squares of the music-business revolution, although relentlessly touring and partnering with corporate sponsors to pay out the bills.

Proving that Brown University does not hand out degrees to just anyone, the lanky, Mick Jagger–like Kulash is a manic thinker. His speech is so flushed with philosophical abstractions and conceptual idealism that it all keeps collapsing on itself as he functions to convey anything at once. To wit: “The excellent side from a creativity and productivity standpoint is that we do not have to abide by any of the—not only the principles but the definition of what final century or final decade, you know, what a musician does does not have to only be to make recordings, it is not to make a 7-inch, 45-rpm piece
of plastic, you know?”

The essential point is that Okay Go peddles not singles or albums but audiovisual art intended to develop “joy and wonder and shock,” as he puts it. Firms want to be involved, and that does not bother Kulash, both. “If you want to devote your day making stuff, somebody is going to have to support you pay out for it.” So far, Land Rover, Samsung, and State Farm Insurance have all paid to play along. “The crazier our suggestions, the a lot more likely we are to have interest” from sponsors, says Kulash.

Ideas such as figuring out how to make music with a vehicle.

The authentic concept for “Needing/Getting” grew out of a 2010 video for the song, “This Too Shall Pass.” In it, the so-referred to as Rube Goldberg video, the band sings off a soundtrack while dominoes topple, balls and tires roll, umbrellas fly, TVs smash, and paint splatters in a single constant three-moment 54-2nd take, all of which was underwritten by State Farm (look closely for the logos).

But Kulash wished to take it a step more and do a video wherever colliding objects make the actual music: “I like the idea of carrying out movies that are live recordings. It aids break down the thought that these are all distinct types of art.”

At first, he envisioned a vehicle circling a banked oval although striking and running above instruments and rumble strips in a way that would generate some type of rhythmic narrative. Eventually, it was deemed unattainable to do a musical quantity this way and in one take, so the concept morphed into a rally-design program. Each stage would comprise a section of the song [see map]. The sound and video would be recorded in several will take and then assembled in the editing lab.

Enter Chevrolet, whose new Sonic sub-compact not only requires its title from sound waves but is targeted right at Ok Go’s predominantly millennial-generation audience. They are not hearing you if you are not on-line, says Kevin Mayer, Chevy’s director of marketing and sales promotion. “They consume so a lot of their media in the digital space that we have to communicate with them on their terms.”

Employing musical acts is practically nothing new in the automobile-advertising company, from Dinah Shore’s 1952 rendition of “See the U.S.A. in Your Chevrolet” to final year’s Eminem spots for Chrysler. What is fairly new and slightly brave is handing the band the “creative keys,” as Mayer puts it.

“If we have been to force our own suggestions and values on them, it would have smoked out their audience fairly quickly,” he says. So after taking a shine to the standard notion, Chevrolet stuck its quarters into Ok Go’s jukebox and stood back. In truth, enough quarters to get an “average Tv commercial” says Mayer, or, apparently, somewhere in between $ 500,000 and $ 1 million.

Chevy paid for a couple of Sonics, like 1 modified by an L.A. film-automobile shop with a range of outward-swinging arms that are operated by a pneumatic trunk cylinder, plus a mechanically deployed T-bar on the roof to jangle overhead chimes. It also paid to set up the band in a Van Nuys, California, warehouse for two months although they and an acoustical engineer from MIT worked out the instruments, cadence, and program layout. Plastic drums were pounded, kitchenware was tortured, glass was tinkled, and vehicles had been driven at different speeds down Van Nuys Boulevard with sound tubes making deep moaning noises. Kulash was also sent to stunt-driving school to find out how to hold speeds, do hand-brake turns, and stop on marks.

After looking for a suitable area, the production company rented a remote canyon ranch off the highway connecting L.A. with the Mojave Desert for four days of filming on a dirt program just shy of two miles extended.

To hit the marks on time and properly “play” the song, one particular of the band members wrote a pc system to convert musical bars into miles per hour. The speeds had been not higher: about 35 mph during the chorus and 17 to 22 mph on other sections of the track. But Kulash wasn’t viewing his speedometer as he drove. He had a visual downbeat reference in dropped beanbags marked with flags, plus a metronome in the vehicle.

Problems? Oh, yes. Each and every fourth or fifth take, an arm or a fishing rod broke off the vehicle. Also, the worst Santa Ana winds to hit Los Angeles in a decade arrived just in time to flatten elements of the program with 70-mph gusts. The large video crew worked gamely by way of the storm and got its photos, but as of this writing, Kulash was uncertain of how much of the audio would have to be bumped up by personal computer enhancement.

“We’re still making an attempt to figure out what we received and what we didn’t,” he says. “We will definitely have to goose it. If a microphone didn’t catch a piano, I’m not going to really feel guilty including back in a tiny bit of  low finish so you can hear it. I will start feeling guilty if the complete issue is fake, nevertheless.”

Even if the video goes viral and becomes a YouTube record breaker, the income stream stays murky. Okay Go might get far more gigs all around the globe, perhaps even land one particular in Uzbekistan since a promoter there noticed the video and liked it. Or not. Chevy could market more Sonics because of it. Or not. Kulash says he is not bothered by the funds query, both.

“If you have to connect inputs and outputs also directly, you’re going to swiftly get stuck in a 20th-century model [of accomplishment primarily based solely on record sales]. From in which we stand, it has constantly created much more sense to invest in excellent ideas and figure out how to monetize them later.”

Effectively, at least one particular factor about automobile advertising continues to be unchanged: There is no guarantee any of it will work.

View Photo Gallery

Car and Driver Web site

But despite Australia’s expanding demand for little autos, you won’t locate the Fiesta-based mostly compact MPV in local showrooms in the short term, with Ford Australia admitting the B-MAX is not on its agenda at this stage.

Ford Australia’s Sinead McAlary explained the local firm was focusing its efforts on the similarly sized EcoSport compact SUV, which is also based on the Fiesta platform. The EcoSport is expected to go on sale in Australia close to the middle of 2013.

The B-MAX will at first be sold in Europe wherever there is a more substantial market for tall, MPV-type compact autos.

Like the B-MAX notion (above), which was first noticed at last year’s Geneva display, the production model has no fixed B-pillars. Rather, the structurally integral vertical supports are integrated into the edges of the doors. The front doors open conventionally while the two rear doors slide backwards, allowing unhindered access to the five-seat cabin.

The B-MAX will be readily available with the new 92kW/170Nm one.-litre 3-cylinder EcoBoost petrol engine as nicely as a quantity of Duratorq diesel powerplants

Ford says the automobile will set new specifications in style, provide very best-in-class technological functions, and give a versatile seating program and class-primary load space.

Vehicle Assistance

The video gives us a clear look at the A-Class’s front-end styling and the thorough character lines of the side panels.

Mercedes-Benz’s first conventionally styled hatchback will be officially unveiled at the 2012 Geneva motor present in March, ahead of it goes on sale in Australia early subsequent year.

The car was spotted on the Canary Islands, seemingly as portion of a photo shoot ahead of its launch.

The A-Class shares its MFA platform and key styling capabilities with the new B-Class, which arrives in Australian showrooms in April.

The new premium hatch sports LED-infused headlights, an upright chrome mesh grille with single crossbar and big 3-point star badge, and a robust bonnet.

The automobile in the video seems to function an AMG Overall performance package deal, sporting an aggressive front bumper and AMG alloy wheels.

Mercedes is but to reveal the A-Class’s powertrain specifics, even though it is expected to inherit a quantity of the engines from the B-Class. The taller, lengthier B-Class will launch in Australia with two tunes of a 1.6-litre turbo petrol engine – 90kW/200Nm and 115kW/250Nm – as well as a 100kW/300Nm one.eight-litre 4-cylinder diesel.

Mercedes has also confirmed an AMG edition of the A-Class will be provided, even though it is probable to be exposed sometime after the launch of the core range.

Auto Advice