Another alleged lookalike: Lincoln and Bentley

With Jaguar Land Rover finding that Chinese law doesn't really help them when it comes to stopping Landwind and their Evoque lookalike, Bentley have also been complaining that the new Lincoln Continental Concept looks a bit too much like their Flying Spur. The story, with photos of the cars, is on Automotive News here. Here is the Lincoln Continental Concept website and here is the Flying Spur one, where you can see for yourself how similar they are - or aren't. The simple fact is that the constraints under which car designers are obliged to operate mean that cars are inevitably going to look more and more alike. There is still a reasonable amount of design freedom, of course, but the designers of these two cars were no doubt working to similar briefs and were bound to come up with something similar. And anyway, who cares much whether their car looks similar to another? The badges are far more important.

Jaguar Land Rover forced to concede Jiangling's Evoque look-alike

Automotive News Europe reports that Jaguar Land Rover has been forced to accept a Range Rover Evoque lookalike made by Chinese manufacturer Jiangling. The Financial Times also has the story: it also has a story about US warnings about the effect of weak intellectual property protection in China. It seems like a simple matter of inadequate legal protection: here, and in much of the world, there would be copyright, design and trade mark infringements and either passing off or unfair competition claims. Surely some of those would run in China too? If not, one might ask what on earth a European manufacturer is doing, exposing itself to that sort of risk in the Chinese market - to which the answer is, no doubt, that they can't afford not to be in the Chinese market. In any case, absence from that market would not prevent copying - indeed, it would have left a gap that the copyists might have filled even more readily. And at least JLR have secured a slice of the action: the cachet of having the real thing might sustain them a bit longer, too.