How the next Corvette could be designed in the UK

Thomson has no doubts about his usefulness. If you run a multi-branded car company such as GM, he contends, more than anything else you need good ideas. And plenty of them.

“It’s no longer good enough to design cars for one territory or another,” he says. “Your designs must be understood everywhere. You need diversity among designers too – different backgrounds and ages.

If you had a studio in just one area, you would get a very strong viewpoint reflecting specific trends, aspirations, lifestyles. GM knows this, and it knows it needs to gather influences from Europe. That’s why we’re here.”

Other foreign locations leave no doubt that GM’s global intentions are as strong as ever: there are two studios in the US (Detroit and California), plus one in South Korea and another in China.

The establishment in Ashbourne Drive seems to have been driven by when Thomson became available and the empathetic relationship he has developed with Michael Simcoe, GM’s vice-president of design.

Thomson is very experienced: he trained at the Royal College of Art in London, where he was sponsored by Ford, then joined Lotus, where he took the top job after Peter Stevens left, and famously designed the original Elise.

After a couple of years at Volkswagen advanced design in Barcelona, he moved to Jaguar Land Rover, where he formed a happy partnership with Ian Callum, taking the top job when Callum departed. Then came GM.

“They said I could put this place anywhere in Europe,” says Thomson, leaning back  contentedly in his Warwickshire office, “so I suppose we could now be in Nice. But I like this area. It’s a real hotbed of car design talent; there are half a dozen other big studios in the area.

And I wanted to get things up and running quickly, to make a good impression. I had friends in design here who I absolutely knew were the best in the business so I was able to put a team together quickly. We’ve got 35 people – designers, engineers, digital designers and clay modellers – and we’re a great team.”

Thomson acknowledges that he’s no architect, but he devised the studio layout himself, using prior experience of other studios, advice from experts and by talking to designer friends in the pub. He sent a detailed proposal off to GM and the bosses agreed to build something very much like it – a decent start.

“Of course there were some tough times,” says Thomson. “I remember being in Thailand once, turning on a Teams [video conferencing] call late at night and being confronted by a grid of about 10 angry builders wanting to talk about drains and electrical supply. But we worked it out. That was just a low point. We’re really happy with what we have now. It’s working brilliantly.”

Easily GM Design Europe’s best-known piece of work so far is their concept for a Corvette C10 – one model beyond the C9 that is approaching production as a replacement for today’s C8. It is one of three concepts commissioned by Simcoe as a way of influencing the C9. It’s an unusual way of doing things, but the UK effort has evidently been well received across the pond.

One of the challenges for Europe is dealing with the issue of Americanness, says Thomson: “When we did the Corvette, some people thought we would just do a European car with a Corvette badge on it.

"But that would have completely missed the point. Corvette has a tremendous history; it’s the world’s most successful sports car. We had to respect that – but hopefully give it some freshness and some features that would make people think.”

The key to this new challenge of doing American cars in Europe, believes Thomson, is to recognise the things Europeans value in American design: “Everyone watches American films and TV and buys American clothes. Ideas of optimism, of confidence, of entertainment are seen a lot of American design.

"You see it in engineering projects like Nasa’s Apollo programmes. Our job is to present this from a new viewpoint and not to be stuck in a groove.”

The fact that Thomson has been involved in advanced design for much of his career – at VW, at Ford and now at GM – makes him more confident than most might be about the British studio’s job of presenting designs that probably won’t make production but will probably affect those that do

“We need a certain naivety to be valuable,” he explains. “We don’t know what a [Chevrolet] Silverado is like the Americans do. It wasn’t bred into us. We have an impression, but that’s a different thing. Our value, part of our brief, is to play the role of the customer and look at the product with fresh, questioning eyes.”