Il designer che più di ogni altro ha determinato lo stile dell’automobile moderna si “racconta” per alVolante.it. Tutti siamo saliti almeno una volta a bordo di una delle sue auto. Che si tratti della prima Golf o della Panda del 1980, della Punto del ’93 o della Grande Punto del decennio successivo, dell’Alfasud o della [...]

J. Mays doesn’t get to Chicago real often. But Ford Motor Co.’s (NYSE: F) chief creative officer has been here often enough to know it’s a powerhouse city in the realm of architectural design. As the person in charge of design for Ford’s entire vehicle porfolio, Mays looks at architecture a lot. And he’s ever [...]

I was new and experiencing my first design program of note. It was all like magic, as sketches, words and imagination all converged on the project and influenced what was going on in the studio. I clearly remember my participation and that of others in the room which follows. I was really impressed with the [...]

[...] we thought that it would be insightful to get in touch with J Mays, VP Design Director at Ford. While he wore the Audi legacy badge for a while after designing classics such as the Audi Avus Quattro concept car and VW’s revisit of the Beetle, it could be argued that he was typecast [...]

[...] To me it is a good thing that design schools seriously start forming young designers to learn and become passionate about the fascinating virtual 3D design world, design studios around the world need such professional profiles because virtual technologies are getting more important day by day into the design process. Autodesk and Maya 3DMAX [...]

10 years ago, we published an interview with a famous artist and designer Alexander Nikolayevich Zakharov. Then he talked about his creative path, engineering drawings and some projects [...]. Recently, we decided to meet with Alexander Nikolaevich again [...]

Dilip Chhabria has been described as an artist who assists engineers to ‘give soul to cars’, designing luxurious, hand-crafted cars which are made to order for the car enthusiast.

Sometimes I get messages or emails asking: “How much money designers make? How much do you earn? What is a designer salary?” I cannot answer to those questions because a part of the answer is very confidential and private, but also because I am not an expert about this topic. Salaries can variate from country [...]

“In hindsight I wasn’t at all ready for it, I was naïve. In a way it was like trying to compose without knowing how to play the piano.” This is how Renault’s head of design Laurens van den Acker looks back on his involvement in Bugatti’s EB110 supercar. After senior designers fell out he was [...]

[...] My desire to design cars for General Motors started at the age of eight. Like many other kids with the same goal, I was fortunate to actually see my dream come true. Employment came by way of Chuck Jordan in 1966 during my last week at Pratt Institute in New York. During my 35 [...]

When Lorenzo Ramaciotti retired as head of famed Italian design studio Pininfarina in 2005, the designer of some of the most iconic Ferraris was looking forward to spending time writing books about cars instead of drawing them. Two years later Fiat Chief Executive Officer Sergio Marchionne called, asking him to run the carmaker’s design center [...]

Chery Automobile Co., the state- owned Chinese maker of the low-cost QQ mini car, hired Hakan Saracoglu from Porsche AG to head its design center in Shanghai in a bid to improve its styling. Saracoglu, 47, joined Chery as design director in October, according to the Wuhu, Anhui province-based automaker. The Turkish-born German national worked [...]

[...] If you want to design cars, and your talent, drive, and sense of humor are sufficient to get you into design school, instructors will warn you that the opportunity to design an entire car—as you see it in your mind—will not happen. There are myriad obstacles that wedge themselves into the process of creating [...]

[...] It’s true that all-wheel drive became an option for some of BMW’s cars twenty-seven years ago, but until the appearance of this Concept Active Tourer at Paris last year, there had never been a BMW-branded front-wheel-drive vehicle. And despite my fondness for the dynamics of longitudinal front-engine, rear-wheel-drive BMWs, all I can say is [...]

[...] Just the seventh iteration since the iconic car’s inception in 1953, the redesign is all about moving the model, and the company, forward. Rather than playing it safe with some surface tweaks, the C7 evolves and, in some cases, removes some of the model’s most legendary design details—details that to executive director of exterior [...]

“You always have to stimulate the senses,” says Danish-born Art Center College of Design alum Henrik Fisker, of creative inspiration. The designer of sport cars, among them two James Bond automobiles (BMW Z8 roadster and Aston Martin V8 Vantage), speaks with the structural air of Corbusier about concerning his work with timelessness. He emphasizes the [...]

[...] At a recent event in Munich, we spoke with Hussein Al-Attar, the BMW designer in charge of the BMW 4 Series Coupe concept’s headlights and taillights, about what inspires him and the challenges he faced during the design process, which went from idea to reality in just a few months.

At an event like the Los Angeles Auto Show, it’s obvious that automakers spend millions (possibly billions) of dollars competing to get a new car buyer’s attention. From the elaborate auto show stands to the full-on multimedia presentations to the post-show new vehicle media drive events, everyone is spending big bucks to differentiate themselves in [...]