Horbury Brushing Up Geely Design

GENEVA – Newly appointed Peter Horbury already has left his mark on China-based Geely by taking markers away from the auto maker’s designers.

Markers, pens and pencils make simple lines. But there is nothing simple about developing a new design language, especially if Horbury is leading the effort.

The former Volvo design chief swiped the standard drawing tools from his charges and gave them calligraphy brushes of the kind used by their ancestors to compose stories and poems.

“You can imagine the sort of flow and exquisiteness of the painted lines from a calligraphy brush, rather than drawing from a marker,” Horbury tells WardsAuto.

By tapping such inspiration, Geely’s recently named senior vice president-design hopes to instill in the auto maker’s design staff a commitment to reflect China’s culture in their work.

“Chinese culture is 5,000 years old,” says Horbury, a plain talker as much a deep thinker: “There must be something we can pick out.”

The 61-year-old “Geordie,” as natives of England’s Newcastle-Upon-Tyne are known, is credited with imbuing Sweden-based Volvo’s design with a sense of its Scandinavian heritage. He recalls thinking: “They’re using it. But they’re using one part of it. They’re using the functionality.”

Prior to Horbury’s 1991 arrival at Volvo, the brand’s designs were distinguished by austere, boxy straightness.

“The box is very Swedish, in a way,” he says. “It’s a functional element that carries the family and all their belongings in a most efficient way. But then (Volvo) started to persuade people, inadvertently, that if a car’s going to be good for you, you’ve got to suffer.”

Horbury changed that attitude by introducing the organic lines that define Volvo’s look today.

Among his top priorities for Geely is to help the auto maker establish face value. “The face of the car is extremely important,” Horbury says. “We see faces in cars. Look at the movie Cars.”

He recalls a conversation with movie mogul John Lassiter, whose studio, Pixar, developed the Cars franchise that personifies vehicles.

“We both agreed that we see (eyes) in the windscreen because that’s what you look through,” Horbury says. In the movies Cars and Cars II, windshields are replaced by the characters’ eyes. “The headlamps are redundant.”

But in Asia, the perspective is different. “You’ll find that the face is the headlamps and the grille,” Horbury says.

“Why is that? I don’t know. But one of the things I suspect is that in China and Japan, animals are a big part of their culture. Look at their calendar. You have the Year of the Snake, the Year of the Rat and whatever.

“Look at a snake’s face,” he adds. “The eyes and the mouth are much more closely juxtaposed than the human face. They have a different proportion.”

Informed by cultural icons, Horbury imagines Geely designs that evoke images of dragons or raptors. “It’s such a shame that very few, if any, Chinese car companies (leverage) their own culture,”
 he says.

Horbury remembers one occasion when his vision for Volvo was challenged by a colleague. In typical fashion, he defused the tension with humor.

“He said, ‘Aren’t you going a bit too far, Peter?’ And I said, ‘Look, the trouble with you Swedes is you always think the best medicines are the ones that taste the worst.”

Horbury does not expect such pushback at Geely. “Certainly, the chairman (Li Shufu) was excited when I started talking about using Chinese culture.

“He’s heavily into music and writes poetry,” Horbury says, adding Shufu also is an avid star-gazer. “He talks about (celestial imagery) as being influential in design, so I think he’s totally in tune with the idea that you don’t need to pick up the latest line of a Mercedes or BMW. We will look elsewhere.”

Horbury says his mission to establish a design language for Geely, which has three brands, will take up to four years. “If I start now,” he says. “We need to take some time to research.”

However, this timeframe might be compressed. “Things seem to happen in China,” he says. “There’s no waiting.”

For the time being, Horbury will commute between China and his home in Sweden.

Geely, which completed its acquisition of Volvo this month, has said its goal is to introduce “several” car models for global distribution by 2015. Of these, five will be hybrid vehicles.

He has left the heavy lifting at Volvo to his successor, Thomas Ingenlath. “Thomas is a capable guy. Let him get on with it.”

[email protected]