The Greatest Automobile Designers To Have Ever ..
Mays - He was instrumental in bringing retro back into car design in the 2000s. Mays went from Audi (where he helped get the Audi TT started) to VW to Ford in '97 as their global VP of design. Peter Stevens - You know the McLaren F1? It wasn't Gordon Murray who designed the looks of it, but rather Peter Stevens. Nobody does clean, beautiful lines like him, and you'll be surprised to see so many modern classics with his name next to them in his resume. You can thank Shiro Nakamura, current Senior Vice President and Chief Creative Officer of Design and Brand Management for Nissan and their luxury brand Infiniti. He is not strictly responsible for all of their designs, but he's a hands-on director and a big part of California's growth as a center for car design. Frank Stephenson - Stephenson has been all over the car industry and is certainly one of the more influential designers of the past few decades.
He can put his name next to the new Mini, the new 500, and the X5. He also oversaw the development of the Ferrari 430 and 612, the Maserati Quattroporte and MC12, and most recently the surprisingly restrained McLaren MP4-12C. Walter de Silva - Volkswagen Automotive Group has head designer Walter de Silva to thank for their progress ,to a great extent. This is the man who can make people think about buying a SEAT when it's nothing but a cheap VW, and then turn around and pen the Audi R8. Few car designers can so successfully make classic designs that still comply with today's constrictive safety standards and few have done so well as Fisker. Ian Callum - The head man for Jaguar, Callum can draw cars that are as gorgeous as Fisker's, but he's also extremely successful in managing a staff and a brand. He got his start with Ford in '79, contributing to the RS200 and the Escort Cosworth, then he went on to racecars at TWR and Nissan.
Then he went to Jag, stating by making the X-Type palatable with the X-Type station wagon, and you know the rest from there. Jason Castriota - Born in White Plains, New York, and raised in Greenwich Connecticut, Jason Castriota is one of the best designers America has produced in a long time. He dropped out of the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena to get an internship at Pininfarina. There he got obsessed with aerodynamics, making the Ferrari 599, the P4/5, the Maserati GranTurismo, and the Maserati Birdcage concept, surely one of the most gorgeous cars of the last few decades. He went on to Bertone from there and is now making the cars at SCC . Peter Schreyer - The German car designer made his name at Audi and Volkswagen, working on their late 鈥?0s revival. Most importantly, however, is his move to Kia in 2006. It's Schreyer who made the little Korean cars look not like crapy knockoffs a half-step ahead of Chinese copyright-infringers, but rather classy, desirable machines.
He began his car designer career working with two of his brothers, and by his early teens was designing airplanes for the Italian military. His designs though, were so great that he eventually worked with all the major Italian car makers: Fiat, Lancia, Alfa, and, most memorably, Ferrari. A car enthusiast, he knew early on that his life鈥檚 work would rely on auto-makers to design the motors and chassis, while he designed the bodies. His curvy and aerodynamic designs heavily influenced the automobile design industry for years to come. So much so that his style still graces many current models of Alfa Romeo and Ferrari. His Cisitalia 202 GT is actually on display at the MoMA in NYC. But his design flair goes beyond cars. For 3 years, he was the director of DesignworksUSA, BMW鈥檚 product consultancy group. His works include the Lamborghini Miura, Marzal, Countach, and Diablo; as well as the Alfa Romeo Carabo - the first car with scissor wing doors, aka LSDs. He changed the supercar design landscape forever. As chief designer for a company like that, you can鈥檛 really pin any specific designs as being the greatest. They all follow his philosophy, and are all amazingly stylized. Some notables are the S-Klasse, the C-Klasse, the SLK roadster, and the first M-Klasse.
