The following is a transcript of an interview I recorded with Andrew Dyson.

Andrew works for Gm Advanced Design and was the lead designer of the Saab 9-4x Biopower concept. We cover a lot of ground here and I’d like to thank Andrew for being so accommodating. Like all the Saab people I met at the Detroit show he is top shelf, and I hope you enjoy his insights into the 9-4x and the concept car process in general.

Andrew Dyson, can you tell us a bit about your role with this new Saab 9-4x BioPower concept car?

Yeah, I’m chief designer, working for Anthony Lo in the Advanced Design Group at General Motors Europe. I was responsible for the complete 9-4x BioPower concept that we’ve got here at Detroit. I led the team of designers, both exterior and interior to get the concept here that we’re seeing right now.

How big was the team?

The core group was myself and two designers: Clarence Kim and Ernesto Ruper, and we also had the support of some of the other designers, probably about 5 or 6 designers who helped us out with a lot of the detailing on both exterior and interior, and also the Salomon connection with the car, we’ve got the skis and the collaboration with Saab and Salomon, and also our brand center in Sweden, there was a lot of support from there in terms of colors, materials, execution of headlights, tail lights.

Over all, it was quite a big team that I had to co-ordinate to get this car completed on time and at the right quality level that we have to have, with Saab being a premium brand within General Motors. It’s been a lot of fun, and quite a lot of stress, too.

You just mentioned the Brand Center and I was chatting with Gunilla earlier about the Brand Center and what they do – this is the concept version and there’s a production version as well, so I guess you’d be liaising with the production people as well….what things are to be carries over, what things you can build into it?

We have a lot of components, even shared components – some of them are in the cockpit and in the interior - that we are sharing globally, so we have a component group in Russelsheim. We also have a component group here in the US.

So we have to look at sharing some of the components, but most of those are things that you don’t really see, or touch and feel. Occasionally they are but then it would be minor switchgear. We do that to save costs globally and so that we can estimate really good controls that we can use across the brands within General Motors.

But most of the car, like the exterior – every single millimeter of it is unique and specifically Saab, and we’ve done our best to make sure that Saab is represented as it should be, as a puristic statement. The whole body should look sculpted. It should never look like it’s borrowing panes off anything else. And it doesn’t. It is a unique car in it’s own right.

Because we are a global company, we’re pooling our resources in the US, some of the resources in Asia occasionally – not so much on this particular car – and obviously our know-how from Russelsheim, engineering wise, and from the Saab Brand Center specifically to ensure the car is a real Saab. All the elements, the materials that make a Saab a Saab, I developed at the Brand Center in Pixbo.

OK. How much of this will we see in production?

Well this car is a concept for this auto show. It does give an idea of where Saab would like to go with a crossover vehicle and I think it’s already been confirmed in the press that there will be a car coming out towards the end of next year, 2009. And that’s going to resemble the kind of direction we’re seeing here at this auto show.

Can we talk a bit about the process and the timeline…you’ve been working on this for how long? Is it the last six months?

The last six months we’ve made this particular prototype, this concept car, and it’s been quite intense just building the vehicle. There were certain times we’d developed the sketches and the clay model and then we had a lot of time just developing the body and the interior and combining those.

In fact, the interior sometimes takes longer than the exterior because there’s far more components, complexity of build and the interior’s really like a jigsaw of parts: making sure they all fit correctly and all look cohesive, that one [inaudible] panel and color and grade match the IP, the interface where the door gap is – things like that all very important to make sure you maintain the level of quality.

Can I just ask you, as a designer and a little bit divorced from this, what do you see as more important in a car – the exterior or the interior?

Oh, that’s an easy one to answer. They’re both equally important.

You’ve got to have a great exterior to be able to pull customers in and get excited about the car. You want to have a great looking car. That’s what Saab’s car, mainly today, you’ve got a good brand, and great styling, but not just styling, it’s functional design on the exterior. A design that means something. The lines and forms are there for a reason, they’re not just styled and end up being something from a particular genre or period.

Take a look at cars from the 1990s where they got very amorphous and very organic and you take cars from the 70s and they’re very square and boxy. You see a movement from one year to another.

This car, we’ve tried to keep it very much a true Saab in that it’s quite timeless. It’s got a combination of curved shapes and those are combined with tight edges. Those tight edges actually mean something, they’re not just styled like tight edges, they’re areas that wrap around the windshield, areas that wrap around the hood or a termination of the rear spoiler. They are all meaningful edges on the car.

So you’ve got a voluptuous shape but in its tight form, to keep it all composed and meaningful.

And interiors, your thoughts on interiors?

The interior follows the form language that I’ve just explained with the exterior. Very much curve shaped but well organized and logically laid out. Following the philosophy right back to cars like the classic 900 from the 80s and the 90s with it’s aircraft cockpit-inspired interior.

We’ve taken that horizontal theme, which includes the cluster and the air vents and some switchgear and we’ve wrapped it down into the center console. We’ve done that kind of feeling on the 9-3 here (we were sitting in convertible recording the interview) and a development of that for the show car where it’s wrapped it into a much more sophisticated shape and material combination.

We’re exhibiting what we’re calling the clear zone center stack, and the clear zone was inspired originally by ice block material, being literally a piece of ice, with that crystal look and that feeling of Scandinavian design, and that Nordic, cool appearance. So we’re trying to use that material to display our instruments. We’ve got a navigations screen integrated into that material as it is transparent, but we’re also using it as a way to show premium, to show a luxury brand in a new way.

Instead of using traditional materials like wood, for example, although we could use wood, but what we’re trying to do is be very Scandinavian, very true to the brand and stay very understated, very much in an intellectual way to show the brand off. I think that center stack material, the way we use it there in combination with the typical Saab air vents – it really makes a statement about our air vent system and the ice block material really typifies what Saab is all about.

The materials on the inside there, the acrylic with the ice block theme – that’s something that’s still in development? Or is it something that we could see and buy? Because it looks absolutely brilliant….

Yeah, we’re doing our best to try and get that same material, with some changes, into production. It’s the type of element that I hope we’re going to develop and see in production very soon.

We’re also using that material on the outside, on the headlights and the tail lights, so a consistency in materials is very important to make sure it’s very much a puristic statement inside and out so they all match. They look like they’re from the same hand, which is true. My designers were working interior and exterior and they know the car inside-out.

You work in Russelsheim?

Yes.

And the car was built in Russelsheim or built elsewhere?

Well this particular prototype is a one-off car and we made it in a prototype workshop where we can use, first of all, a clay model and a lot of traditional, hand crafted methods to sculpt the body.

And then we took moldings and we also used a lot of computer surfacing technology through Alias, which is a computer program. The designers sketches were transferred over into the physical clay model or into electronic data. These parts were milled and then formed up, and then that’s how we make the prototype, right through to the main body to details such as the headlamps, tail lights, interior, instrument panel, right down to small switches.

So it’s not as thought we’ve just taken parts and put them in the car, every single part in that car has been hand-crafted, sculpted, loved and taken care of and put into the prototype.

When was it that you first had a physical car in front of you that wasn’t a clay model?

It’s funny, when you’ve got a clay model you can put dye-knock (?) on it, which is a kind of film to represent paint, so you can paint a clay model and it all looks pretty good, but then you look through the windows and there aren’t any windows so you have to go through this big process of building a car.

You end up with a chassis, you build up all the panels and it takes a while until the last panels come together, then you have to make sure the panels fit and sculpt all the body side, make sure the sculpture you did in clay is now represented in fiberglass, or carbonfibre, steel or aluminium. There’s a combination of materials we use to make a prototype.

A lot of the process is being disciplined: using the creativity but staying really disciplined to make sure that the car has the right reflections on it, that the surface is good, you’ve got to make sure that finish in terms of door gaps and fit and finish on the interior….you’ve got a lot of parts coming together like a jigsaw puzzle and you have to make sure that they’re all fitting, and aligned correctly.

That would be the difficult thing about doing the inside of the car – you don’t have an inside of a car to work with, do you? You can do the clay, you can see the outside, you can do it to life size but you don’t have an inside of a car to work with.

Sometimes we actually make the interior of the car in clay or in foam millings so we can visualize it. That’s been done in the past, but with this particular prototype we did the whole interior electronically. We had milled some [inaudible], which were some very basic things like armchairs – you could actually sit in the vehicle to judge the basic proportions. But otherwise we didn’t have the time to develop really highly detailed models, so we just did that once.

After the data was milled we had some small modifications in the harder materials and then we have to represent everything the best we can ….with grain, the seats….trimming them in leather and getting the right stitching … One has to keep an eye on the whole craftsmanship of the car. I followed that right from day 1 right to the end, the last day before it moved here into the exhibition. Right down to the ski racks – no-one apart from me knew how to put the skis in the car so I had to go backstage and show the guys “the skis go in this order….this is how the load floor works…how to turn on the electronics…” – it’s only Andrew who knows how to do that.

Developing the electronic displays etc – who does that? Is that running on a DVD system, or ….?

Actually, the DVD - one of our support designers did that, so instead of fielding that out we spoke with the extreme skiers – the whole Salomon story – to develop a story that shows some skiing so we’ve got the connection with Saab and Salomon. We also showed how the ski rack works in the rear in that DVD.

All that was done inside General Motors, in our concept area we have a visualization group and one of our designers did a tremendous job with the DVD. She animated the whole thing herself and did a fantastic job in a matter of about three weeks to dvelop that closed-loop video we’re displaying in the car. Not only does it show some of the skiing activities and the ski rack, it also highlights the navigations system – how it could potentially work in the future, how you go through a menu in the car, how you control the heating. It just shows you how, even without looking at a production car, just a prototype, how much effort goes into it. How large the team is and how diverse the team has to be.

You do your clay model and you get your numbers, your data an you send the panels away to get milled …I assume you get a shell back, do you, in the shape of that concept vehicle? Is that when you start working on the interior?

No, you’ve already started working on the interior around the same time as the exterior ….

Sorry, I meant the installation of the interior….

The installation, yes.

You have to have the body first and then you can start to put the panels in and sometimes you think “Oh, is it really going to fit, you know, you’ve got the door panel fitting onto the door frame and then you’ve got the door glass, which drops in this prototype – to get all these things to fit and align is quite an ordeal. It’s not just “oh put a door panel on” – you want it to be perfect.

There’s high expectations in the car industry to be better and better with fit and finish. You’ve really got to go to the 9th degree. In a show car, you’ve got to show you best hand because that’s the expectation. You can’t relax and say “oh it’s just a prototype, it’s not perfect”. You’ve really got to aim to be …prototypes have to be perfect in their own right.

You were working on this right up until the day before the show, right?

The day before, we were finished. I’d say we were working on it for the final week, getting it painted…. It could have been finished a little earlier but there wasn’t a rush to do that. So we just finished it off, made sure the details we right so that we’d be absolutely happy with the car, and when it came up on stage in the presentation – when the snow came down on the exhibit and the Saab came out, it was a proud moment for everybody.

From afar…to actually see it moving …that’s what counts with a car. You don’t want to look at a car just static, they are moving objects and it’s a key thing. I always judge a car not on an auto show, but if it comes into production, then when it’s on the road. When you’re following it, or you see it moving…different lighting on the car…they’re moving objects. It’s a very different experience seeing them driving around.

A key element is seeing that the car has the right stance, that the wheels are big enough, that the proportions are correct, that you’ve got a good body to glass relationship, the play of the transparent materials and the body. It’s very important to get that combination.

With your intimate knowledge of this car now, one would imagine that you’d be of benefit on the production version, or are you moving elsewhere?

No, mainly because our team is dedicated to advanced design and show cars. We need a much larger team to develop a car into production. We use a lot of our resources, whether they’re in Sweden, in Germany or in the US to put that car into production.

So you move on to another show car now?

Yeah. Another show car. We’re basically developing a pattern of developing cars. You’ve seen the Aero-X, also the Opel concept that we showed earlier and the GTC and you’ve seen the 9-4x here, the Flextreme that was displayed in Frankfurt last year, and now the Flextreme is here in Detroit and you’re going to see more cars in Geneva this year.

Something that we should talk about as well, is the fact that you’re a multiple Saab owner from years past.

Yeah, yeah. When I was a student I had my first Saab. It was a 96, a 1972 model….and what inspired me about that car was that roofline, that teardrop shape. And then as I read more about Saab and became an enthusiast I realized how the aircraft manufacturer started to make cars, and how they basically made a very innovative car because they didn’t follow the industry norms. They just did their own thing and that car lived for such a long time.

And then they were courageous enough to break free from that and went on to develop the Saab 99. I bought a Saab 99….

A turbo?

No, it was just a standard, two litre, single carburetor, 100hp 1978 model. It was lime green. It was a used car but it had so few miles on it and I thought “that’s kind of unusual, that color…lime green, a 99, a two door, so I’ll kit it out as a turbo”.

So I go the turbo wheels, the turbo front spoiler, a turbo steering wheel….so it looked exactly like a turbo clone and everybody looked at it and thought “ooh, there goes a Saab Turbo but I never knew they did it in lime green….”

Have you got photos of it?

I’ve got photos of it somewhere. Anthony (Lo), when we were students he even saw that car, so he knows I’m a big Saab fan.

Then I moved on and the last Saab I bought was a 900 Turbo 16 from 1989. It’s got the lower cladding in grey, black body and grey leather interior. Completely standard. Three spoke Aero wheels. I bought it when it was around 5 years old and I’ve owned it now for around 12 or 13 years. I don’t use it as a daily driver now I just use it as a hobby car but I just love that car.

When it came out the 900 was still quite an aged design but with it’s vertical A-pillars and wrap around windshield and that fastback appearance and those solid body side…I was studying design at the time at the Royal College of Art in London and I remember seeing that car and it was a relatively new car at the time. I remember thinking how clean and how sophisticated it looked. I was so amazed how quite an old design could look so modern.

And of course it set a lot of the brand cues. It became the next 900 and the 9-3 and that car is influencing cars right up to this prototype now with the C pillar and the way we do the window graphics so it’s very much evolutionary design steps we’re seeing now.

Well alright, we’ll have to wrap it up there, but thanks very much for spending the time and speaking with us.

You’re welcome.