The Range Rover Evoque is supposed to be posh… so in 2012 it was launched by Posh. Posh Spice of course, the infamous Victoria Beckham. At the time the event and project that was organised by JLR to launch the car gently raised a few eyebrows when Mrs Beckham presented a special edition of the new Evoque ‘designed’ by her. Little did we realise that one of the very people who orchestrated this event, and this special edition, was not particularly happy at the time. Quite strangely this story has resurfaced 5 years later, with comments from design director Gerry McGovern.
Mr McGovern said at a publicity event last week: “She didn’t design the car… I’ve forgotten more than that woman will ever know about [car] designing – to be a car designer takes years.”
This could be aimed at boosting current Range Rover publicity? Who knows what Gerry’s motivation is to appear in The Sun, but it’s currently being reported by the British tabloids such as The Sun and The Daily Mail, who call it an “extraordinary row”. It is certainly unusual, especially as the main complaint is coming 5 years after the incident. It opens up a debate around the attributing of design originality to specific designers. Credit for certain designs is a complex issue and 7 years ago I wrote a post here on this subject. Design Directors and chief designers are the public face of any car design story, and often they seem to be claiming work they didn’t do as their own. They are of course responsible for an entire design department and must take the good and bad comments about any design, sometimes directly. The headlines and articles from the tabloids contain very inaccurate (as usual) statements such as a claim that Gerry McGovern MADE the Evoque. The Sun journalists seem to think that a design director gets out his spanners and welding equipment, to personally construct every one of the 1000s of Evoques that the Range Rover factory turn out.. Terrible lack of expert knowledge or research. The reality is of course, that even Gerry McGovern did not design the Evoque. His very talented and large team of exterior and interior designers, plus clay and CAD modellers, colour and trim designers and even digital GUI designers DID. The teams that work together to create any vehicle are large, and that is simply the design stage. Then there is engineering teams that number in the 100s sometimes 1000s to get a vehicle ready for mass production. finally the factory starts production and another entirely different set of robots, and people, begin to bolt the cars together at astonishing rates. Design leaders protect their hard-working teams from negativity, and we might suggest that McGovern is annoyed in this instance for Victoria Beckham claiming credit for his teams work. Victoria Beckham has her own fashion label- and therefore counts herself as a fashion designer. In this capacity she ‘designs’ clothes and accessories, and that process involves zero engineering – but it does involve design decision-making. When she was asked to create a special edition Ranger Rover she of course contributed in a way that she was familiar with, and one which she has learned to call ‘design’ (because it IS design). She choose unique colours and material choices for the factory to piece together into her limited edition Evoque. To all intents she was right to say that she ‘designed’ her VB edition car, that she then stood in front of in 2012. It is of course, almost impossible for the depth of the automotive design business to be explained in a simple soundbite or tweet- to enable JLR to explain the difference between what Mrs Beckham did, or what Gerry McGovern did, or what his fabulous design team did. Words should be chosen very carefully, and indeed, Gerry is upset that she went off-script at that time- when we can imagine that the word ‘collaboration’ was something the Range Rover team had in mind? Much like Gerry’s own design collaborations… with the fashion world.
tabloid articles.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4700192/Victoria-Beckham-centre-Range-Rover-row.html
thoughts on automotive design 
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