The Designers Pt1 - Gorden Wagener, Daimler

At this year’s Geneva Motor Show, Car Design News launched its second Car Design Review yearbook, featuring the production and concept cars our judges voted as best designs of the past year.

As last year, we’ll be publishing world-exclusive interviews with the 13 design judges who decided on the recipient of each of our awards, featuring their individual votes, their views on the year just gone plus their hopes for the year ahead.

If you’re interested in buying a copy of the yearbook this interview appears in, alongside trend reports, bespoke car design infographics and a special feature on our Lifetime Achievement Award winner, Giorgetto Giugiaro, Car Design Review 2 can be purchased here.

Name Gorden Wagener
Role VP design, Daimler
Age, nationality 46, German
Location Stuttgart, Germany
Education Essen University & RCA

For Mercedes, the situation is almost 180-degrees different from 2013. We’ve really changed, not just in terms of profit and sales, but in perception - and a big part of that has been through design. We had the C-Class, S-Class Coupé launch and the S-Class become fully on sale and now we have the youngest portfolio in the market. The public and media suddenly realized the homework we’ve done over the last five years.

This success strengthens the position of design within the company, so now we not only focus on car design but also advertising and showroom architecture. Everything you see and touch goes through our hands and follows our guidelines. I think that’s a big achievement.

I think the industry as a whole is starting to recover too. The Japanese are back with Toyota and America with GM doing quality products. The entire US economy is up which pushes the world up. Forecasts say China’s double-digit growth will continue and the Western part is still undeveloped, which means a lot of potential.

We opened our new Chinese studio in November 2014 after looking for years. It’s a brand-new industrial building in the artist quarter of north-east Beijing. It’s part of the R&D center but we have separate studio areas for our joint-venture projects as well as Mercedes ones, full-size plates, space for 50 designers and an outside viewing space. In Beijing that’s unique. Overall, I’d say it’s five times bigger than the Tokyo studio. It’s a big deal.

It’s also the first prototype for a new design center that will work for different divisions within Daimler and also for different design units. Typically all our foreign studios have belonged to our advanced organization, but in the future they will work for exterior, interior and advanced. Digital design will also be undertaken there because the Chinese have a different way of approaching things so it’s important to understand that better. These designers will report to a new head of digital design with facilities in Germany and Sunnyvale, California too.

We are looking at bundling our activities. We closed the Tokyo studio in 2014 in order to concentrate everything in Beijing. From a management point of view it’s important to involve yourself personally and if you have too many places that’s difficult.

“The key is to make
the car link to the
entire digital world”

We still have our separate truck design places though. I was in Portland recently and got to drive the full-size stunt version of the Optimus Prime truck from The Transformers which was great. The autonomous driving future truck concept we showed in Hannover in September was quite different but still futuristic with graphic lights shining through the paintwork. It’s completely clean when all the lights are out.

In 2015 we expect continuous growth. New products create growth and we will launch more cars in 2015 than in 2014, which in turn was more than 2013. The big thing for us this year is SUVs. We started in 2014 with the GLA and the Concept Coupé SUV and soon you will see a new GLK in right- and left-hand drive and a re-invention of all our big SUVs. If you look at our SUV line-up currently there’s a lot of diversity from edgy to round. With our SUVs, the larger they get, the cleaner they get.

Digital really will change the car in the next 15 years more than it did in the last 50. The next generation of cars will not be fully autonomous but they might drive autonomously on the highway. That will change the meaning of the car, especially on the interior, because you can do all these other things. This is why Google is so interested. They don’t want to produce cars but they are interested in that side. In between the motor companies we’ll see new players like them. We have the Apple CarPlay system in our cars now and we are in talks with Google and others.

It’s an interesting situation because the car industry has to recruit people out of other fields of business - graphic and interaction designers and software engineers - who are not typically ‘automotive first’. We have problems sometimes finding the right people and we can’t recruit as many as we already need which for us is the biggest growing field.

Of course we will be in competition with all these companies but we have the advantage of making the car, Apple doesn’t have access to forward data about the car. We see Apple CarPlay more in the entry, not luxury segment. When somebody buys a Mercedes you want an onboard system. The key is to make it link to the entire digital world, to your mobile devices and then program it from home and so on. Again, the more you can go on autopilot, the more you’ll be able to take advantage of these functions. One day, sooner or later, that will happen.

Sometimes you don’t need a broad spectrum of ideas. You simply think about what the right solution is and execute it. We didn’t do that five-to-10 years ago. There was a broad variety and we chose from that. Now we think about the best solution and take a good small team of talented guys and execute it. That’s what we did with the GT. We couldn’t design this car on paper. We had to take a few sculptures and develop it in 3D because literally, it has no lines any more, it’s pure shape. It’s an extreme execution of our philosophy.

Then there’s Smart. We had a dated product but wanted to keep the brand alive. We paved the way with a few concepts and now we’ve shown the new cars. Smart is interesting because it’s such a young, urban, trendy brand and we have a really cool creative team under Kai Sieber. I could see the designers designing cars for themselves and I think you can see in the final product the fun they had in the design process. We made it more grown up, but kept sympathy with its old face and added a playful interior. It’s great to have those products coming to the market too.

Gorden’s cars of 2014

Concept

1. Infiniti Q80
2. Maserati Alfieri
3. Lamborghini Asterion

Production

1. Lamborghini Huracán
2. Ford F150
3. Renault Espace