[...] 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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

[...] Born on 7 August 1938 in Garessio, northern Italy, he started his career with Fiat in the mid-1950s, aged 17. Joining Bertone in 1959, his first signature cars included the 1963 Alfa Giulia Sprint GT and 1964 Alfa Canguro concept. After a brief stint at Carrozzeria Ghia from 1965, he co-founded Italdesign with Aldo Mantovani [...]

Lexus says the Japanese brand’s lack of a rich design heritage is a huge advantage over its German rivals that are generally bound by traditional values. Speaking to CarAdvice in Melbourne yesterday, Lexus’ Californian-based senior creative designer, Edward Lee, a former Audi designer who joined Lexus in 2007, said design flexibility is one of Lexus’ [...]

BMW’s first front-wheel drive vehicle made its world debut at the 2012 Paris Motor Show. To learn more about the challenges in designing a FWD vehicle while maintaining BMW’s core values, we sat down for an interview with Michael de Bono, the BMW exterior designer responsible for Concept Active Tourer. The UK-born de Bono is [...]

The butcher’s boy at the cutting edge of car design His dad is a butcher, but the young Galwayman has found a meaty role as the head of the new Peugeot design lab Citroën has undergone a design revolution in the past decade, reviving the DS range while creating an avant-garde appeal to the French brand. [...]

At September’s Paris motor show, CAR interview Seat Head of Design Alejandro Mesonero-Romanos, quizzing him on the new Leon, Toledo, future SEAT concepts, and his design inspirations.