“You don’t need to love cars to really love car design,” says Anthony Lo. Of course he would say that – he’s a car designer. But he has a point. There are few products in the world that have such a big impact on the lives not only of the people who use them, but of everyone around them. “It even changes the scenery and landscape of the city, he says. When you see that, that’s the moment where you feel you’re doing something very impactful. So you’d better not make a mistake.”

 

Lo was born and raised in Hong Kong, but he has spent most of his life living and working overseas for brands as varied as Lotus, Audi, Mercedes-Benz, Saab and Ford. The last time he spoke at Business of Design Week, in 2011, he was Vice President of Exterior Design for the Renault Group in France. He is back to speak at this year’s design summit, but with a job for a very different car company: he is now Chief Design Officer & Vice President of Global Design at the Beijing Automotive Group Company (BAIC), China’s sixth-largest carmaker.

 

 

He has only been in the position since October and he is still finding his footing. It’s a chance to rethink the design strategy of an ascendant car company in what has become the most important market for cars in the world. Not only is China now the world’s largest producer and consumer of automobiles, its companies are making inroads in many other countries thanks to their prowess in electric vehicles.

 

“They have the ability to make cars with a lower price and battery technology that is really advanced compared to other markets,” says Lo. “Suddenly in the streets of Beijing and Shanghai and Chengdu, the majority of cars are from local brands. This has changed completely from not so long ago. And you’re starting to see those brands appearing outside China as well, like MG and BYD.”

 

For Lo, a situation like this is a designer’s dream. The average consumer might think a car designer is basically a glorified stylist, dressing up a machine according to the latest trends. But it’s far more complicated than that. “If you design a speaker, that’s one project. But in a car, you have many little projects going on at the same time,” he says. “There’s the safety aspect, the materials, the infotainment, ergonomics. And in the last 15 years we’ve also worked on the digital aspect, the interfaces that give you feedback on your driving. All that has to be designed. You work with different disciplines. That makes it interesting as a designer.”

 

It all goes back to a childhood fascination with cars. “A lot of young boys love cars for different reasons,” says Lo. “For me, it’s an object of beauty, but it’s also an object of performance – it’s technical.” Lo would pour over car magazines, noting the latest technical innovations, trying to understand what made one car faster and more powerful than another. He hung posters of the various Ferrari models on his wall.

 

And in no small part because of that, he developed an interest in drawing. “My favourite subject at school was art class, and I took some classes outside of school too,” he says. “When I saw something nice, like a car, I would draw it, sometimes based on my memory, sometimes by copying a picture. By drawing you discover the lines and curves of each car. You understand why there’s always a reason this curve goes like this, why it stops there, why the side window — what we call the daylight opening — is a very important element of design. It sets up whether the car looks good and proportionate. That fascinated me. I started doodling all the time and it was mostly cars. My mum kept some of them.”

 

It helped that Lo grew up in Hong Kong. Although just 6 percent of people in the city owned cars when he was a child in the 1970s (even today, the rate of car ownership is only 8.8 percent), Hong Kong’s concentration of wealth and love of conspicuous consumption has long meant there are some truly remarkable vehicles on the road. “As a child I would cycle out to some places with my brother and go car spotting,” he says. “And my father had friends who always had nice cars. They would come by our house and it wasn’t about showing off, just sharing.”

 

He remembers when one of his dad’s friends bought a Lotus Esprit S2 when it first came out in 1978. The year previously, the car had been featured in the James Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me, starring Roger Moore. “There’s this scene where they drive into the sea and it turns into a submarine,” recalls Lo. “Now this car was sitting in front of me. I couldn’t believe it. I thought, if one day I could become a car designer, that would be a nice job.”

 

His first step to achieve that was to study industrial design at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. “It helped me learn about how things are made, how they can be mass produced or handmade, how you build prototypes, how you test them, experience them and step back and learn from them – all the design process,” he says.

 

 

In his final year, he landed an internship at Ogle Design, a British firm that specialises in transportation design. “Trucks, buses, tractors, anything with wheels that an individual person wouldn’t own,” says Lo. While there, he heard about a degree show for the automotive design programme at the Royal College of Art and decided to check it out. He was captivated. “I was sitting there watching students give a presentation and [renowned Italian automotive designer] Giorgetto Giugiaro was there giving feedback,” he recalls. “I thought, ‘This is heaven.’”

 

That convinced Lo to apply for the college’s automotive design programme. When he began his studies, one of his tutors was Peter Stevens, known for designing race cars for McLaren, Lamborghini and others. Stevens had recently worked as chief designer at Lotus and he encouraged Lo to take a job there after graduation. Lotus not only makes luxury sport cars like the Elan and Esprit, it serves as a consultancy to other car manufacturers who need help refining or correcting vehicles that aren’t performing well. “I worked on truck interiors, concept cars, production cars – all in a very short time, three years,” says Lo.

 

All the while, Stevens was still looking out for Lo. “He actually found me my second job,” he says. “He said, ‘You need to work for a big car manufacturer to learn the whole process, not just the design part but also the business part and the planning part, because designing a car takes a long time, you have to plan it out.’” Lo began working at Audi, which kickstarted what would be a long and fruitful career designing for many of the world’s top car companies.

 

“Over the time I’ve built up a library of best practices,” says Lo. “At Mercedes, they always said you need to look at a car from a distance. “You can make a lot of mistakes if you don’t have a chance to see the car far enough away, 30 to 50 metres away, so you can check the lines and proportion and the general attitude of the car. You may want to create a sporty looking car but at a distance you realise it actually looks a bit sad because the angles are wrong. A few degrees can change everything.”

 

Lo has reservations about the current state of car design around the world. In North America — and increasingly in other parts of the world too — sport utility vehicles (SUVs) have come to dominate the market, thanks to consumer perception that large cars are safer, but especially because car manufacturers earn more profit per vehicle with large SUVs and trucks than with smaller cars. It’s a phenomenon that David Zipper, a fellow with the MIT Mobility Initiative, has called “car bloat.”

 

 

“There’s no safety advantage of driving an SUV versus a low-riding car,” notes Lo. (In fact, SUVs are more dangerous to those outside the vehicle, as their size creates poor sightlines, and their high clearance means a pedestrian is more likely to be killed on impact than with a sedan or station wagon.) “They use more materials and there’s more aerodynamic drag which means you have less gas mileage or if it’s an EV, less electric range. We need to think about the resources used in creating SUVs. I would love to see this trend reversing so we start seeing more efficient cars.”

 

But the world of car design is one of constraint and compromise. One of the first lessons Lo learned when he began working in the industry was that ordinary, unglamorous, mass-produced cars are much harder to design than the kind of attention-grabbing supercars that a child might pin to his bedroom wall. They need to meet stringent safety standards and engineering requirements, they need to appeal to consumers, and they need to fit within a brand’s image, which is why a Mercedes is usually recognisable as a Mercedes, or a Volvo as a Volvo.

 

“But it’s more satisfying to design a mass market car that people like not because it’s cheap, but because they love the design, because it has personality while also serving their basic needs,” says Lo. “Some designers find so many constraints difficult, but the fun part begins when you work with an engineer to find a solution together, so that you can really execute the look, shape and feel you’ve been dreaming about. That’s the most satisfying part. When you see a new product on the road you’re proud like a new parent.” 

 

Anthony Lo will speak at the Business of Design Week Summit on December 6, 2024, discussing how design and disruptive technology allow newcomers to leapfrog traditional boundaries and shape a design-driven future. Click here for more information.

To see more details: https://zolimacitymag.com/what-is-so-satisfying-about-designing-a-car-hong-kong-bodw/

 

Writer: Christopher DeWolf

Photos: Courtesy by May James of Zolima CityMag

 

This column is produced in partnership with Zolima CityMag, an online magazine that explores Hong Kong’s arts, design, history and culture.