Watch: Skoda lighting designer Petr Nevřela

Lighting has become a cornerstone of modern car design and for years has been described as the ‘jewellery’ of the exterior. In reality, it now serves a much deeper purpose from a branding perspective, making vehicles stand out from the crowd and creating a familiar thread across the model range. But there’s much more to it than that.

One brand that has been pushing the envelope on lighting is Skoda, which with its most recent concept, the Vision 7S, revealed an all-new light signature to communicate its brand identity. At last year’s People Awards, it was Petr Nevřela and his team who took took home the award for best lighting, so ahead of this year’s show in December, Car Design News caught up with Nevřela to talk about the importance of lighting design and find out what’s coming up for the Skoda team in future.

Car Design News: Tell us about the development of the Crystalline lighting signature. What were you trying to achieve?

Petr Nevřela: You want to be unique and recognisable. To build a theme, which could work for years, so customers can recognise the car just according to the light signature.

But at the same time, we shouldn’t forget that we tried to build something which is also clever, because we didn’t have an unlimited budget where you could do crazy stuff. So from that point of view, it was very challenging for me and the whole team. We built something unique, simple and clean from a design point of view.

CDN: So how does that relationship work between the lighting design team and say the exterior team? How do you make that a successful collaboration?

PN: From the beginning we were very connected because we had the Crystalline design story. We were building something which was very precise – linked to crystal and Czech glass cutting.

These were the same principles the exterior guys were using. We took great inspiration from the glass-making history of the Czech Republic. You can always find a new effect. And we are still using this – it is not like we are finishing a chapter and starting something completely new. It’s a continuous process where we are using all this knowledge and experience.

CDN: As a lighting designer and a team of lighting designers, where you can draw on this incredible heritage?

PN: This is such a big source of inspiration in terms of effects, because we are not talking about the material itself or a super high-tech technology. You just need to understand what the effect is about what kind of miracle you can build in the expression of the car. We have our expression in our eyes, for example, and this is what we are trying to give to the car to build the relationship between the customer and the car.

CDN: How does this play out with the 7S concept?

PN: This is the new chapter of our development of the lamps. We have this successful story of Crystalline design, but now we have started this totally new design language, which we call Modern Solid. We were looking also for a very strong, wide-looking and precise signature. So, we said, ‘OK, let’s play with the T signature’ and this brought us another possibility to play with the centre stripe, which wraps around the front of the car.

CDN: Are we going see this signature on more and more production cars coming, or will it change slightly depending on the model?

PN: There is always the question – do you have a revolution or make step by step improvements? We decided to make a really big change. At the same time, we wanted to keep the family feeling, which customers like, but as a completely new modern interpretation. We want to build something which is futuristic and visionary, but at the same time, we must apply the same simplicity in the solution.