“It’s a cool job” – Volvo’s Jonathan Disley on designing trucks

With the sound of gentle waves lapping against the wooden platform of a waterfront café in, Jonothan Disley greets CDN with a smile, coffee in hand.

He possesses an air of calmness and warm-natured intelligence, which isn’t a surprise when you consider his long history of global design roles across Audi, Ford and Volvo Cars. 

But in his role as design director at Volvo Trucks, Disley is faced with new challenges when compared to designing purely cars. Disley shares his approach to truck design and explains why it’s such a lucrative and complex market. 

Car Design News: How has the market shifted over your years in car design? 

Jonothan Disley: When I left China, I thought that this industry is going to get really tough. You can see that it is getting tougher and tougher for Europe. But I think commercial is a big profitable part of Europe that the Chinese haven’t caught up with yet. It’s actually quite a big growth market.

Of course, I was a car designer for 25 years, so I’m not going to poo-poo it, but trucks are much more focused towards customers, business and profitability. If I knew this, I would have learned about trucks first because if a truck breaks down the customer is out of business. You have to care about stuff like that and make things able to be repaired within an hour. It’s designing for things like that which you never thought you would be. If you could do something similar with cars, you could have a great customer base.

Sometimes you can have a car that’s costing tens of thousands of pounds to get repaired – then you think about the Chinese and you think that’s a third of the price of the car. Is there enough in the brand anymore? Especially when you see vehicles that are half the price that do more. 

CDN: Obviously designing a truck is very different to designing a car – can you talk us through these differences? 

JD: It’s hard to design a product that’s got to be so multi-functional. You think customers are going to be the same as car customers, but these guys are more passionate about their products than something like a Ferrari because that’s their business on wheels and that’s their living space.

Then on top of that you’re designing for every single continent in the world. Who knew that there’s different types of dust? Then you have to be aware of the colour of the dust when you choose an exterior colour – it’s a purposeful colour that must do a job. You’re not just designing something nice; you’re designing something super practical. 

It’s the same for the interior, you’re designing a colour and you’ve got to take care of that dust from that particular market, so it doesn’t look dirty when customers climb in and out. The interior also has to be easy to clean and wipe down as well as being durable enough to exit and enter the cabin countless times. It’s a working product. 

When you buy a truck, it’s more like you are buying a Rolls-Royce: it’s built specifically for you, and you put all the bits together for it to do the job that you want it to do. All of these Lego pieces have to be designed at the same time, and they have to fit together. I thought it was going to be an easy retirement [laughs], it’s been a hell of a job. 

These vehicles are long-lasting. For example, they could be sold from the UK to Africa to last for another 10 years. I was watching all these old Volvo trucks driving in with the United Nations on the news, thinking – ‘that’s where they’ve gone’. So, they revamp them, sell them on and then those markets resell them onto another country – it depreciates like that. 

CDN: How often do you pull from your car design knowledge and what ultimately lead to your exit of the car industry? 

JD: I got to a point where I felt that automotive was starting to look a bit samey-samey but I’m still using all the knowledge from the auto industry as well as product design. I’ve also designed buildings so I’m pulling that in as well because trucks are somebody’s living space. 

CDN: What are some misconceptions about working in truck design? 

JD: A lot of designers don’t realise that it’s a cool job. I hired a guy a few years ago and he was told to not go into truck design and that it’s a dead-end job. But if you look at Ford, they make most of their profit from commercial and Renault just bought back commercial. There’s money there. 

CDN: How big is your team? What’s the pace of work like? 

JD: There’s around 32 of us. I’m quite hands on as we are so few people. Time’s always the pressure, so you have to make decisions based on calculated challenges. You have to listen to the team and then at the end of the day, someone has to make the decision. I’m proud of the team, we’ve done a hell of a job. When you see the future of what we’ve been working on, it’s good. 

Car design is becoming so much faster, where you’re blinking, you’re making decisions. China has pushed that quite rapidly and we work at a very similar pace to that.