Nio appoints new advanced exterior design director
Adil Benwadih has been named as advanced exterior design director at Nio and will be based in Munich
A former Nio designer will return to the start-up after three years at Opel. Adil Benwadih first joined the Chinese carmaker back in 2016 as senior lead exterior designer, before being snapped up by Opel for the assistant chief designer role in 2020. As of February 2023, Benwadih is now the advanced exterior design director at Nio and will work out of the Munich studio under the guidance of Raul Pires Jr., VP of design for this new strategic business.
According to the announcement, this is a new strategic division within Nio. If it is like any other advanced studio, the team will be tasked with pushing the boundaries of design, trying new things and rapidly knocking out prototypes. Design directors often refer to their advanced studios as providing creative fuel or “nutrition” for the production teams.
This kind of work will not be foreign to Benwadih, who has previously been involved with advanced design projects at Toyota, Lotus, DS and Citroen. At Nio, he was responsible for the design of the EVE Concept, which launched at SXSW festival in 2017 (shown below). He also worked on the ET7 preview.
There has been a bit of a shuffle around at Nio. In January the start-up lost studio director Alister Whelan to ‘stealth mode’ start-up Forseven, and this month it was revealed that the team’s other studio head, Joaquin Garcia, would be Italdesign’s new head of design (Garcia had left Nio earlier in April 2022).
VP of design, Kris Tomasson, recently spoke to us about how the brand is building out a ‘unique’ design team as it focusses on the car as an experience and not just a product. ”We have a very different approach to design,” he says, ”all the way from how we work to our team mentality and core philosophy.”