Britain's car industry is now mainly foreign owned, but we continue to produce world-class car designers, as Peter Dron reports

Britain's top car industry designers

What is the state of car design in Britain? Following the collapse of MG Rover and the closure of the UK studios of both Ford and Vauxhall, you might be forgiven for thinking that it's all over, yet Britain remains an extremely important centre of car design, and not only because it has two of the world's leading vehicle and transport design courses, at Coventry University and at the Royal College of Art (RCA) in London.

Leicester-born Ajay Panchal penned the Nissan 350Z sports car at the company's studio in San Diego, California

Of the foreign car companies that have installed or taken over factories in Britain - Toyota, Nissan, Honda and BMW (the MINI plant) - only Nissan has set up a design studio here. But the styling of cars built by British companies now under foreign ownership - Jaguar, Land Rover, Bentley, Rolls-Royce, Lotus and (for the time being at least) TVR - is all or mainly created in Britain. So is that of Aston Martin, now Britain's largest independent car maker (who would have bet on that?).

In addition, there are countless low-volume car, replica and kit-car builders, and several specialist design companies carrying out contract work for major manufacturers. Beneath the styling, cars are complex and sophisticated machines, and one should not forget all the people who design the oily bits, the electrical and computer systems, the interior trims and fabrics or indeed the production lines.

So there is still quite a lot going on in this country. However, the future is uncertain. Ford, for example, set up an international design "think tank" in London called Ingeni, where designers from the Blue Oval's international brands would meet and bounce clever ideas off each other. When you are losing one million dollars per hour, ideas like that soon feel the knock on the head, and the Ingeni building at present seems to be little more than somewhere for J Mays, Ford's vice-president in charge of design, to stay when he is in London.

Of course the car industry is a global one, so Brits need not necessarily work in Britain. Later we'll look at ways into this fascinating world, but first let's look at the current state of car design in this country, company by company:

Aston Martin
Its design studio is in Gaydon, Warwickshire, where the company now has its head office. Marek Reichman is director of design. Five people work in the design team, of whom four trained at the RCA (including Reichman) and one at Coventry. (See page 4 for our first impressions of the new V8 convertible.)

Bentley
The design studio is at the Crewe HQ, where (Belgian) director Dirk Van Braeckel has a team of 17 designers among a headcount of 84 people. All Bentleys are designed there.

General Motors
Vauxhall production cars are designed by Opel in Germany, but GM has a "secret" studio in Coventry where Simon Cox has done most of Cadillac's recent show concepts, and also the 2003 VX Lightning (which has become the new Opel GT, shown at Geneva this year).

Jaguar
All design work, under director Ian Callum, is carried out at Whitley (apart from some concepts). There are two studios. Advanced, with 15 people, does the initial work. The 100 employees in Production take over once the splendidly named Programme Start Gateway (formerly known as sign-off) occurs.

Land Rover
All models are designed at Gaydon under Gerry McGovern. Of the staff of 130 (including model makers, surfacing, support etc) there are about 40 designers, mostly trained either at Coventry or the RCA, McGovern, like his predecessor Jeff Upex, having graduated from both.

Lotus
All design work is carried out at Hethel in Norfolk, and this will apparently continue whatever happens to its troubled Malaysian parent company, Proton. In addition to its own range of cars, the Lotus design team undertakes work for other manufacturers. Design director Russell Carr (ex-Coventry) heads a small team including five designers. Outside contractors are brought in as necessary.

Nissan
Its European design activities used to be shared between a small studio at Cranfield Technical Centre (home to 700 of the motor industry's leading engineers) and another facility near Munich. Global design chief Shiro Nakamura decided to establish a new facility and chose London because he considered it to be "the trend centre of Europe". The building was originally a British Rail lorry depot (and winner of some design awards for "creative use of concrete"), then an illegal rave venue before being reborn as Nissan Design Europe. NDE competes globally with two other main design facilities for commissions. The first Nissan to be designed in Britain is the Qashqai, although we shouldn't forget the role of British designers overseas, most of them graduates of the RCA or Coventry. This includes Leicester-born Ajay Panchal who, while still in his 20s, penned the 350Z sports car at the company's studio in San Diego, California.

Rolls-Royce
Chief designer Ian Cameron (ex-RCA) joined BMW in 1992. He was appointed to the R-R job in 1999, following the German takeover. His team consists of 10 people, with design offices at Goodwood and in Munich and California, but the Phantom was designed in a former bank near Hyde Park, London. Security was never a problem - drawings were locked away at night in the old vault. Another secret facility in the capital, a modelling studio in Holborn, has the internal codename "Bookshop". The new Phantom drophead coupé was mainly designed at yet another secret facility, in West Sussex.

The Lightning concept produced by General Motors

The independents
Thomas Ashton of CGI (Concept Group International) believes his company "is now the most complete and technically advanced design, development and manufacturing facility available anywhere". CGI currently has partnerships with GM, Nissan, Jaguar and Land Rover, as well as numerous original equipment manufacturers.

Automotive work by Arup (in Solihull) includes the Ford GT, delivered in less than half the time of a traditional vehicle programme.

Design Q in Redditch, founded by two ex-Jaguar designers, Howard Guy and Gary Doy, was responsible for the attempt to revive Jensen, and has also carried out work for Ferrari and Maserati.

Seymour Powell is another well-established design consultancy, some of whose work is in the automotive industry.

Peter Stevens also remains much in demand as an independent designer.

How good is British car design?
The large number of British designers in senior positions in the motor industry (there is insufficient space here to list all of them) indicates that they are up to the required standard, but there is no evidence to suggest that a British designer is necessarily better than any other nationality.

However, there is undoubtedly a particular design culture in Britain. It has a reputation for creativity, for all sorts of social, economic and cultural reasons, but its pre-eminence in automotive design is probably due to the foundation of the RCA's course, which in turn created an opportunity for Coventry.

David Browne, director of Coventry's course, says: "You could say that all those British designers high up in the industry now date from the 'golden years', when British design was ahead of everywhere: in graphic design, product design, television, fashion and pop music." The car design culture was all a part of that, and the RCA and then Coventry became internationally renowned. Since then other British undergraduate courses have been founded, in Huddersfield and Swansea. There is now far more international competition for the same jobs, but Browne doesn't think the amount of car design in the UK has shrunk significantly.

"What has changed over recent years is the truly international nature of the business," he says. "It's quite clear that graduates applying for jobs need to look at opportunities not just in the UK but throughout Europe and beyond, and need to be able to compete for those jobs with the best graduates from other car design courses throughout the world. Similarly, to progress up the ladder, they can't sit around and wait to be 'appreciated' wherever they are. They have to be prepared to move, both company and country." Indeed, many of the world's current leaders of car design are graduates of either the RCA or Coventry, in some cases both (notably Jeff Upex, who retired recently as head of design at Land Rover). The RCA's leading lights include Peter Horbury, executive director of design, Ford/Lincoln/Mercury in the US, before which he was head of design of Ford's Premier Automotive Group, having previously transformed the design culture of Volvo; Martin Smith, now the chief designer of Ford of Europe, previously with Opel and Audi; Ian Callum, design director at Jaguar and formerly of Aston Martin; Ken Melville, design director at Renault; Moray Callum (brother of Ian), formerly design director at Mazda, now at Ford; and Steve Mattin, head of design at Volvo.

World class: the Royal College of Art has led the way in transport design.

Peter Stevens, one of the first graduates of the RCA's automotive design course, taught most of those previously mentioned and is still a visiting professor. His career has included stints at Lotus (he was responsible for the FWD Elan and Lotus Carlton), McLaren (he designed the F1 road car) and MG Rover, where he was director of product and design in its final years.

Coventry's leading alumni include Anthony Grade (brother of cigar-puffing Sir Michael), vice-president of car design programmes at Renault; Dale Harrow, director of vehicle design at the RCA; Kevin Rice, project director of the BMW 1-series; and Russell Carr, chief designer for Lotus Cars.

You want to be a car designer?

Starting young is rarely a handicap, and a number of useful school- and university-based schemes have been set up to boost the number of youngsters going into engineering. One of the best known is the Greenpower electric car races, sponsored for several years by The Daily Telegraph (read our reports at www.telegraph.co.uk/motoring), in which school-based teams design and build battery-powered vehicles and compete in regional heats and a final at the Goodwood circuit; see www.greenpower.co.uk for details.

Another longstanding contest with an international reputation is the Shell Eco Marathon (also reported in Telegraph Motoring) in which teams build exceptionally fuel-efficient vehicles; go to www.shell.com. More economical that anything yet devised for the Eco Marathon are the gravity racers that starred for several years at the Goodwood Festival of Speed, until their speed became too high for comfort; competitions now run at other venues such as Brooklands.

However, such contests are mild compared to the battle for places in further education. RCA students are all graduates, either from art school or technical college, and have a body of work to present as evidence of their skills. Many are sponsored by manufacturers, but that is not a requirement. Coventry now has, in addition to its Automotive, Transport and Vehicle Design course for undergraduates, a postgraduate automotive course. Competition to get on these courses is fierce, and you cannot simply buy your way in. Undergraduates are drawn from a foundation course, or straight from school if they have particular talent.

"What we look for," says Browne, "is evidence of self-motivation, determination and a passion to do our course and work in the industry. Exam results are important, but the key factor is a portfolio, with evidence of being able to render complex three-dimensional forms." Browne emphasises that, once in the industry, a designer cannot expect to complete a career with just one employer and must be prepared to move on frequently. "You wouldn't go career-hunting in the UK," he says, rather ominously.