Automotive Exterior Design World: Shifting Landscape

I’ve sat on both sides of the table. As a juror. As a mentor. As a designer. In the past eighteen months, I have been fielded enough midnight DMs from graduates asking why they are being ghosted, when they applied to companies, to know exactly where the gap is. Here is the one conversation nobody is having with you as a student or a fresh graduate of automotive design world.

This is Part I of a three-part series written from Gothenburg, Sweden – where I work as an automotive exterior design expert. Part I is the geography. Part II is the portfolio. Part III is the truth that nobody says out loud.

Why You Should Hear This From Me Specifically?

I want to be transparent: I am not a design director. I am not a chief designer at a legacy OEM. I am a working exterior design expert, which is precisely why what I am about to say is worth your time. Design directors will give you the polished version at symposiums. I am giving you the version that is actually true.

I have been invited to sit as jury at automotive design colleges – evaluating final-year portfolios, graduate projects, concept submissions. I have mentored students from institutes across India and Europe. I live and work in Gothenburg, which means I am geographically embedded in an ecosystem that includes Volvo Cars, Polestar, Lynk & Co, Zeekr and the quiet orbit of consultancies and global satellite studios that orbit them. I see the market from inside it.

And in the last twelve to eighteen months, the market has moved faster than at any point in my career.

Right Now:

Let me tell you what is happening, because most design schools are teaching you for a world that already changed.

Europe is no longer just European. You Should Actually Be Targeting where the new studios are. Not where they were ten years ago.

The most significant structural shift in automotive exterior design hiring across Europe is the new arrival of Chinese and Korean OEMs building serious, permanent design studios on European soil. This is not a pilot programme. This is not a PR exercise. These studios are staffed, scoped and competitive.

Hyundai’s design presence in Europe – through both the Hyundai and Genesis brands, centred around Rüsselsheim in Germany – has matured into one of the most sophisticated exterior design operations outside Munich and Coventry. These studios hire and they hire from European design schools.

Bugatti Rimac continued integrating: Bugatti’s luxury craftsmanship, Rimac’s EV platform engineering, high-performance software architecture. The significance for Europe: Croatia emerged as a legitimate high-performance mobility innovation center.

JLR – Jaguar Land Rover, now operating under Tata Motors ownership – remains one of the most prestigious exterior design environments on the planet. Their Gaydon studio in Warwickshire is not a subsidiary outpost. It is where the creative gravity lives. Mahindra has also been expanding its design operations, though I am less certain of the specific European studio footprint and would encourage you to research current announcements directly.

NIO’s Munich studio houses over 140 designers from 29 countries, with Kris Tomasson – formerly Head of Exterior Design for BMW i – as VP of Design

Li Auto’s Munich design studio opened in July 2024 ; ONVO is also in Munich starting mid 2026.

GAC’s Milan Tortona studio is led by Stéphane Janin, a former Renault and Nissan designer, with nearly 20 designers from different backgrounds

BYD’s European Style Centre in Milan (Via Quadrio) opened with over 50 open-space workstations and a virtual design room

LeapMotor Europe Innovation Centre in Munich, Germany. AVATR and Huawei are other notable mentions there.

Chinese brands are now physically embedding themselves into Europe’s design culture rather than simply selling into Europe.

What the Geography Is Actually Telling You

New studios mean blank pages. Blank pages mean new design language being written. New design language being written means exterior designers being hired to write it.

The Chinese studios now established across Munich and Milan are not looking for designers who will defer to formal precedent they do not have. They are looking for designers who understand European proportion sensibility – the relationship between greenhouse and body, the discipline of surfacing resolution, the restraint that separates a composed haunch from an overwrought one – because that is precisely what they moved to Europe to develop.

The question, which Part II of this series addresses with full specificity, is whether your folio communicates that understanding.

And the answer – for most of the student work I have seen in jury settings and mentorship reviews over the past eighteen months – is NOT YET.

Part II: 40 Pages. 4 Projects. Zero Excuses – The Folio Architecture That Actually Gets You Hired.

Part III: After All That Work, It Still Comes Down to This.

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