Style

The Men Behind the Wheels

Creativity and brash style are back in automotive design as a new, purer breed of stylists with a lustful passion for cars is reshaping the future of the road

By: Robert Cumberford
[ Updated: Jul 14, 2008 - 5:00:14 PM ]

Automobiles have been with us for at least 125 years. Someone designed each model ever made, and their shapes often reflected their times. Today, we are in a watershed moment for car design. In recent years, the average consumer has become increasingly brand- conscious, and by extension design-conscious. Style is no longer the sole domain of the wealthy when you can find the Michael Graves teapot at Target or Karl Lagerfeld designing for H&M. New hotels are stylized. New airlines—Song and JetBlue—are, too. So it was only a matter of time before consumers started demanding better design for their cars, and not just for luxury models

This Henry Ford-meets-Tom Ford moment is happening at a time when the designers, men who used to toil in anonymity behind drafting desks, are now rock stars, or close to it. Whereas marketers once dictated what cars would look like, stylists are calling the shots now. "Our job is no longer about just making vehicles look modern and appealing," says Geoff Upex, design director for Land Rover. "The designer is a lot more high-profile. We have a lot more impact on how the company moves forward and how the brand is projected into the marketplace."
 
Upex isn't the only one who feels that the global interest in style has made his job more important and more competitive. "Consumers don't buy clothes just to keep warm anymore. They buy them because of the way they make them look. It's increasingly becoming the same way with cars," adds Henrik Fisker, design director for Aston Martin.

In my 50 years in the car-design game, I've found that auto designers tend to be wonderfully eclectic conversationalists, aware of the world, interested in many things far beyond their daily work. You might even think of them as philosophers. And that makes sense, in a way, because good auto design is an amalgam of influences.
 
Many people believe Japanese professionals are totally devoted to their companies, with no other concerns. Not in car design. Shiro Nakamura, design director of Nissan Motor Co., Ltd., is an accomplished musician steeped in traditional Japanese culture. I once was riding on a bullet train in Japan and recognized Kazuo Morohoshi, then head of all Toyota design. When he noticed the airplane magazine I was carrying, he became effusive about his quest for a man-powered aircraft and showed me photos of the many full-size aircraft he and his fellow enthusiasts had built, graceful structures light to the point of intangibility. Nothing to do with cars; everything to do with art, creation, and adventure, which is finally what design is all about.
 
Take aside any car designer and raise a question, and you will get more answer than you ever imagined possible. Peter Horbury, the Englishman who revitalized Volvo design, now in charge of Ford North American design, is a case in point. Not only will he give you an intriguing discourse on the subject but he will also illustrate it with wonderfully concise little drawings that make sure you understand his point about architecture, food, travel...whatever you like.
 
Horbury was brought to the United States to perform his magic on stodgy Ford, which has suffered from excessive design reference to its glorious past. There's a wide range of personalities in car design. Some men are compulsive chain smokers; others calm as the Buddha. Some are jokers; others solemn. Some drink, some are family men, and others are hedonists. One of the constants in the profession is that it's fairly difficult to rise in the corporate ranks.

General Motors, the first corporation to have its own internal design department, has had only six design leaders in the past 78 years, and the first two men, Harley J. Earl—the father of corporate car design—and William B. Mitchell, accounted for 50 of them. Many of the men who were starting out as young designers in the '60s have retired or soon will, and a new generation of design leaders is taking over the industry worldwide, bringing new enthusiasm to their companies.
 
Take GM's Ed Welburn, for example, a lover of cars (and martini shakers—he collects them for their designs). Welburn sketched his first car in crayon at age 2 (his mother still has the drawing). After graduating from Howard University, Welburn caught the eye of Bob Lutz, the charismatic car-loving executive who in 2001 was brought in to infuse some life back into GM. Welburn had cajoled his Chevy SSR pickup, a styling if not sales success, through a byzantine "antidesign" product-development system that resulted often enough in disasters like the Pontiac Aztek. However, GM is the better for that experiment.
 
Consider BMW Group design, led by American Christopher Bangle. "One sausage, three lengths," was the standing German joke about BMW design. No more. The 6- and 7-series cars created by Bangle's colleague Adrian van Hooydonk have incited anti-Bangle rebellion among some conservative BMW owners, but sales are up and lesser lights are already copying what Bangle calls flame surfacing. (The term refers to the way ridges and concave scoops on the body of a car cause parts of it that you would expect to appear dark to appear lighter, and vice versa.) When the result of his passion and vision elicits an Internet campaign to have him fired, you know that the spirit of car design's tailfin era is back—with a vengeance.
 
The Gods of our Chariots...

Photographed by Dennis Kleiman at the Ford Conference and Event Center in Dearborn, Michigan THE MAN: J Mays, 50, Design Vice President, Ford Motor Company
THE WHEELS: Ford Shelby GR-1 Concept

J Mays is one of the world's most influential automotive designers, overseeing Ford Motor Company's eight marques: Aston Martin, Ford, Jaguar, Land Rover, Lincoln, Mazda, Mercury, and Volvo. Before joining Ford in 1997, the Oklahoma-born Mays worked for Audi and BMW, and developed the new VW Beetle. Mays credits his success to focusing on impressing the public rather than his peers. "Designers aren't easily able to think as customers. And, because they tend to socialize together, dress the same way, and have the same black furniture in their living rooms, they tend to have a very isolated—and inaccurate—view of the world," he says.

As a result, he encourages his design teams to pay attention to trends influencing pop culture, and he even broke with industry tradition by commissioning Marc Newson (an interior designer with no automotive experience) to create a concept car, the Ford 021C. Here, Mays poses with another concept car—the Shelby GR-1. This "supercar" reunites Ford with Carroll Shelby (the father of the Mustang Shelby Cobra), and it is Mays' way of putting Ferrari and Lamborghini on notice that Detroit is ready to roar. Photographed by Dennis Kleiman at the Ford Conference and Event Center in Dearborn, Michigan
 
Photographed by Gerald Forster at DaimlerChrysler Headquarters, Auburn Hills, Michigan THE MAN: Ralph V. Gilles, 34, Director, Interior/Exterior Product Design and Specialty Vehicles, Chrysler Group
THE WHEELS: Chrysler 300