At a spectacular launch event last week, Shanghai-based Human Horizons showed us its first production-ready protoype, a shooting-cross

Is the crossover MPV the shape of the future? Human Horizon’s is banking on it. At the unveiling of the company’s first production-ready prototype the HiPhi 1 on July 31 the company COO and co-founder Kevin Chen made the bold claim that there were in fact 69 types of car designs and that the new vehicle was the seventieth. At Human Horizons Shanghai studio, chief design officer and founding partner, James Shyr explained more with the aid of a chart. Many of the different styles such as estate, station wagon, Avant and even arguably shooting brake could be seen to owe as much to language as design.

Mark Andrews has written about everything from Japanese houses to heli hikes on New Zealand glaciers, test drives of Chinese cars to bar and restaurant reviews. He currently specialises in travel articles and reviews of Chinese cars plus articles about the Chinese auto industry.