Former colleagues and industry executives paid tribute to Lotus design chief Peter Horbury, who has died at age 73.
Horbury, probably best known for turning around Volvo design, died on Thursday in China, according to multiple sources.
“He was a proper giant in car design. Everybody knew Peter. There will be a pain felt throughout the industry because of this,” Sam Livingstone, who is director of consultancy Car Design Research, told Automotive News Europe.
“Peter was one of very few designers who maintained momentum throughout their whole career,” Rolls-Royce design boss Anders Warming, told ANE.
Ford CEO Jim Farley tweeted: “Peter was a remarkable design leader, perhaps best known for using the power of design to transform & modernize Volvo globally.”
At Volvo, the British designer oversaw the transition from the Swedish automaker’s long-standing boxy shapes to incorporate the now-famous “shoulders” below the window line that retained the practicality but broke up the boxiness.
Cars such as the first-generation XC90 large SUV that arrived in 2002 proved popular with customers and revitalized the company.
Horbury pushed through revolutionary design at Volvo through his powers of persuasion over skeptical executives, a former colleague said.
“He was extremely gifted when it comes to explaining why you should change a design. That was how he was able to get such a dramatic change through at Volvo,” the former colleague told ANE. “He could explain design better than anyone.”
Horbury started his career in 1974 at Chrysler UK. His first job in nearly a half century of working in automotive was designing the grille, headlamps and bumpers of the Chrysler SIMCA Horizon small hatchback, which went onto to win the 1979 European Car of the Year award
He moved to Ford UK in 1977 and two years later became a consultant designer to Volvo, based in Sweden. In 1981 he worked for Volvo as a consultant designer based in the Netherlands. In 1986 he was named design director at the MGA consultancy in Coventry, England, before moving to Volvo in 1991 as its design director.
In 2002, Horbury became design head of Ford’s Premier Automotive Group, which included Volvo as well as Aston Martin, Jaguar and Land Rover.
Two years later he moved to Detroit as Ford’s executive director of design where he was tasked, along with design head J Mays, with creating a global “One Ford” styling theme for the automaker’s next-generation cars.
He returned to Volvo in 2009 as vice president of design. A year later the Swedish automaker was sold by Ford to Zhejiang Geely Holding, and 2011 he moved to the Geely as senior vice president design. His successor at Volvo was Thomas Ingenlath, who is now CEO at Geely subsidiary Polestar.
At Geely, Horbury oversaw the design of Geely’s Lynk & CO brand.
He was replaced as Geely head of design by former Bentley design chief Stefan Sielaff in 2021, but despite promising to take a step back Horbury stayed on to guide Lotus design following Geely’s takeover of the British sports car brand.
“I must say the Lotus projects that we’ve started, I am going to find it hard to let them go. They are so exciting,” Horbury told ANE in 2021.
“You can imagine that having the chance to design a new Lotus is something I would like to stay with a little while longer.”
Douglas A. Bolduc contributed