Bryan Nesbitt: between soul and system

Born in Phoenix in 1969, Bryan Nesbitt grew up with American car culture all around him. His father’s garage rotation included a ’63 split-window Corvette and a ’68 Stingray, machines that served as a guiding star for later life. Though some way removed from the automotive heartlands of Michigan that were to become central to his later life, cars nevertheless became an obsession, largely owing to his father's job. "He worked for Ogilvy & Mather and had the Hot Wheels account. He was always bringing these Hot Wheels cars home."  The young Nesbitt, a "pretty geeky kid", could recognise and name the various models on the road pretty much instantly. 

It was arguably a more legible era. The machines of that era were untroubled by the myriad of modern constraints that contemporary designers must deal with. Life was freer. Few things defined that freedom more than the open road. People were experimenting with alternative approaches to living that preciptated a convergence of hippy idealism and libertarianism. Both paths a rejected the current system of being and the car, and by extension the road, offered a literal and figurative escape. 

This was true for Nesbitt whose potentially straightforward suburban origin story was disrupted by his parent's separation. His mother packed him into an green AMC Gremlin and headed for Sedona. "She was pretty fearless and very much a hippie – she joined a commune for a while."

“We lived in that car, basically,” he continues. “It gave me a gritty, early view of the country.” That panoramic view become foundational. Cars were never objects in isolation. They were infrastructure for identity, freedom, instability, escape. A father’s intervention sharpened it into direction. A father-son visit to ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena came with a blunt instruction: this is where car designers are made. From then on, the journey was set.

You learn proportion with your hands before you understand it in your head

Nesbitt entered the profession at a moment when automotive design was still analogue, hierarchical, and dependent on physical making. After graduating from ArtCenter in 1993 into a weak US job market, he landed in the Chrysler Pacifica advanced design studio — then defined by high-output concept programmes and outsourced show car fabrication.

“It was the dream,” he says. “They were doing the Portofino and the Viper. Six show cars a year. Everyone wanted in.” The reality was slower, more physical, and more disciplined than the mythology suggests. Seven years of skill-building followed — drawing, clay, surfacing, iteration, correction.

“You learn by doing,” he says. “You learn proportion with your hands before you understand it in your head.” What emerged during that period was not just craft, but a second-order curiosity: how design behaves inside a business. Why some ideas survive production. Why others die quietly.

That became a recurring preoccupation: the “death of a thousand cuts” — the incremental erosion of intent as programmes move from sketch to road. Even then, the question was not style but the ability to persevere under intense pressure. To understand and make your case. To win the argument. 

Nesbitt's early life meant he was never afraid to travel. Following solid stints at Chevrolet and Chrysler (more on that later), the designer moved to Germany in 2004 to lead the GM Europe design studios until 2007. Amid well-received work for Opel came the Saab Aero X concept by a young Anthony Lo – a bio-fuelled performance car tha is the most notable project Nesbitt oversaw. 

There was also an invaluable four years in China, which saw Nesbitt experiment with everything from electric mobility pods to affordable crossovers,  

Today "geeky kid" is now operating at the top of GM’s design structure, having taken over from the Michael Simcoe as VP of global design in 2025. Only the seventh person in the company history to hold the title, Nesbitt is embedded in an institution that does not just participate in automotive history — it helped define it.

The Warren campus itself, designed by Eero Saarinen, still carries the logic of mid-century ambition: controlled, rational, quietly monumental. It is a fitting container for a company that once invented much of what the industry now treats as orthodoxy. Under figures like Harley Earl, GM effectively industrialised modern automotive design. Clay modelling became a discipline. Concept cars became strategy. Public-facing design events became predictive tools rather than marketing exercises.

The Buick Y-Job — widely regarded as the first true concept car — still functions as a reference point for how far ahead of production design can operate when unshackled. For Nesbitt, this history is not nostalgia. “The company has a long lineage of defining what comes next,” he says. “That creates responsibility.”

There was a moment where electrification had its own identity. We’ve moved past that

Now occupying the legendary Saarinen-designed office, Nesbitt is more conductor than soloist, overseeing multiple brands, each with their own distinct identity. At least, that is the ideal. In an era of shared platforms and efficiencies, maintaining a unique character is tougher than ever. 

Perhaps promising then, that when Nesbitt was focused purely on creation, he drafted two of the most compelling interpretations of 00s retro-futurism. The PT Cruiser, launched by Chrysler in 2000 drew heavily on 1930s hot-rod and panel van proportions, translating them into a compact, high-roof production car with exaggerated fenders and a distinctly nostalgic silhouette. Its success was rooted in emotion: it was visually distinctive, and deliberately unconstrained by aerodynamics. However, its retro references were largely surface-led — styling cues applied to a fundamentally modern platform, designed to evoke heritage rather than reinterpret it structurally. It proved incredibly successful, shifting well over a million units during its production run. 

Nesbitt took things further at GM with the Chevrolet HHR as the retro trend began to mature. Instead of referencing a specific past vehicle, it distilled a broader idea of American utility design: upright proportions, strong wheel-to-body relationship, and a boxy, space-efficient form driven by packaging logic. 

Nowadays, Nesbitt’s leadership philosophy is deliberately more restrained. He is explicit about avoiding early influence in design reviews. “If you speak too early, you distort the conversation,” he says. “You might miss the better idea.” It is a position rooted in scale. GM’s global design network is too large, too distributed, and too technically complex for directive leadership alone to be effective. Instead, the priority is to create conditions where ideas survive contact with the organisation intact.

That means something more subtle than “freedom”: psychological safety, clarity of intent, and protection from dilution. “The more content the workforce, the more creative the output,” he says. “Emotional security drives creativity.”

It is a notably unromantic framing of creativity — less muse, more stability. But it aligns with how GM now operates: design as an industrial capability, not an isolated studio practice. If the last decade was defined by electrification as a design signal, Nesbitt is clear that the phase is ending. “There was a moment where electrification had its own identity,” he says. “We’ve moved past that.”

The risk is that vehicles become appliances

The implication is significant: the design language of “EV futurism” is no longer sufficient as differentiation. Instead, brand identity must reassert itself across powertrains — ICE, hybrid, BEV — without visual fragmentation.

“Powertrain is powertrain,” he says. “What matters is brand consistency and value proposition.” Design must now operate across variability rather than around it. Where the real disruption sits, Nesbitt argues, is not propulsion but computation.

“There’s huge compute power coming into the vehicle,” he says. “That unlocks multi-sensory experience.” This shifts design outward — from form-making into system orchestration. The car becomes a touchpoint in a larger behavioural ecosystem: app, interface, interaction, ownership lifecycle.

GM has already reorganised around this. Human interface and digital design teams now sit alongside traditional studios, with hubs in Palo Alto, Sunnyvale, Austin, Zurich, Seoul and Shanghai. “These are designers,” Nesbitt says. “Just in a different medium.” But the centre of gravity remains physical. Software may extend the experience, but it does not replace the object. “The sculpture of the car is still the emotional anchor,” he says. “That doesn’t change.”

GM’s position on tools is not binary. Clay remains central — but no longer sufficient. For exterior design, full-scale clay is still the benchmark. “Proportion, stance, down-the-road presence — you can’t beat it,” Nesbitt says. But interiors have shifted decisively into hybrid validation: digital modelling, VR environments, and increasingly virtual-first concept communication.

In some markets — particularly China — full interiors are now presented entirely in virtual form alongside physical exteriors. “It lets you communicate experiences that are otherwise impossible to capture,” he says. AI enters this ecosystem as accelerant and distortion risk simultaneously.

“There’s confidence in AI output,” Nesbitt says. “But sometimes it’s false confidence. The fundamentals aren’t there.” The warning is clear: fluency in tools is not the same as fluency in form. Nowhere is the compression of cycles more visible than China. “It’s incredibly dynamic,” Nesbitt says. “Brands rise and fall quickly. It still feels early.”

For GM, the anchor remains Buick, which continues to outperform expectations in-market. Vehicles like the Buick GL8 illustrate how regional typologies evolve independently of Western logic — in this case, the luxury MPV as a status object. “It’s almost indigenous,” he says. “Like full-size trucks in the US.”

In China, some behaviours remain local. Others inevitably propagate. Despite the scale, the technology, and the organisational complexity, Nesbitt returns repeatedly to a single concern: loss of emotional signal. “The risk,” he says, “is that vehicles become appliances.” As cars become software-defined, feature-dense and interface-heavy, the danger is not lack of capability — but lack of character. The counterweight is design discipline: clarity of proportion, restraint of surface, and insistence on emotional connection.

“That’s what good design does,” he says. “It changes how you live.” Nesbitt’s story ultimately resolves where it began: inside the car as lived space as well as designed object. “Cars still need to have soul,” he says.