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Anthony Lo is the Director of Advanced Design based at GM Europe’s Design Center at Russelsheim.

We know him as the guy who assisted Michael Mauer with Saab concept vehicles earlier this decade and more prominently as the designer who led the team responsible for the Saab Aero-X.

He’s done some other recent Saab stuff, too, but as you’ll see below, the Aero-X really does take the cake. Nowadays he’s doing more melLo stuff for Opel (soon to be renamed Lo-pel) and I’m left here hoping that such a mundane brief won’t Lo-wer his skill set too much. If Saab split from GM then we want him back as a Local in Sweden again, not hanging out with those interLopers in Germany.

Here he is giving Auto Motor and Sport’s Par Brandt the “Lo-down” on the Saab 9-4x in Detroit last year.

Car Design News have interviewed Anthony Lo and the article appears in their latest members-only section. Luckily, one of the CDN members has seen fit to pass the interview along, so I’ve reproduced the Saaby bits here because hardly anyone else here is a member either and we’d never get to know this stuff:

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Anthony Lo, Advanced Design Director at GM Europe, has had a wealth of experience working for automotive manufacturers the world over since he graduated from the MA Automotive Design program at the RCA. Lo studied industrial design in his native Hong Kong, before being accepted into the postgraduate program and, gaining a position at Lotus upon graduation, began his automotive design career. In a recent interview, Lo opened up to Car Design News, telling us about the paths he took and the future he is designing for….

…..CDN: So you went from working with a British company, to two German companies, to working for a Swedish company that had been acquired by GM. How was that?

“Saab operated fully independently; at that time it had its own advanced design group that I was leading and Mike Mauer was the Design Director. We had a sub-brand design team, which was very different. It was a similar situation to Lotus – the group was quite small and there was no hierarchy. In Sweden everybody is equal so we were on a first name basis with the CEO, the Managing Director, and it was all very personal, which I enjoyed very much. And we would get quick feedback, there was the CEO [Peter Augustsson] and Michael and myself sitting in a room saying; ‘Let’s do that this way or that way’. From a work-flow point of view it’s easier, but from a financial point of view the company needed some help to become a more profitable business. The world has changed and in the end it made good sense to integrate all the functions. Structural costs are everything in the car industry, and you have to balance that with the business.”

CDN: So in 2004 when GM integrated Saab into GM Europe you became responsible for Opel as well?

“Yes, when we consolidated the two design offices, I was running GM Europe Advanced Design for Opel and Saab as well as trucks and commercial vehicles; everything we need to look at. It’s a mixture of creating a vision for each brand and looking at future architectures – what kinds of cars are going on these architectures and are we able to create enough bandwidth within that to make cars that look different? You can’t get more different than Saab and Opel from an exterior styling perspective, and we needed to ensure we were able to do that. Overnight my workload increased four times. It was a big challenge.”

CDN: You really defined the future direction of Opel with the GTC, which gave way to the Insignia. What will we see as a unique visual identifier in the future for Saab?

“We started working on that vision when I started at the end of 2000. The first step was to identify the type of products we should do for the brand and have a good design vision. For example, we identified in the first 9-X concept car that the wraparound windscreen is something that is fitting for the brand. It’s aircraft inspired but not retro, [even though] the 900 and other models already had that. It was very obvious that we should do that. At that time the curvature of all Saab windscreens – production 9-3 and 9-5 – was something that we didn’t see in mass-produced cars. That already gives it a slightly unique proportion, with the A-pillars quite far back. We’d like to see that further developed.

“The biggest interpretation was on the Aero-X concept car shown two years ago, which was very well received. It’s no doubt fitting to the brand. This was a pure vision show car, not one we intended to do in the future and people understood that. But it’s a car that combines the Scandanavian heritage and the aircraft heritage. We continue to build on that. Some of the features of the Aero-X are living in the proportions of the car, so you cannot just copy and paste these directly onto another car. So the next step was: ‘How can we take the essence of this car and turn it into a variation of products’, which I think we’ve been doing for some time. On the 9-X BioHybrid, which shows how it can be done in a compact format, you can see the connection but it’s not a replica of the Aero X. That’s the key to creating a strong vision – now we need to apply that vision to reality. What you see on the Aero X and the 9-X BioHybrid is a sign of things to come for the Saab brand. The 9-4X also shows the similar cues of the Aero X but in a different format altogether, using the crossover body style.”

CDN: When you’re creating the future of these brands, what creative stimuli do you value?

“These days we have an overload of information on the Internet. We are constantly observing trends around us, not only in the car industry but outside the industry as well, in architecture and product design for example. Product design has a very strong link to the car industry. We started working on environmentally-conscious concepts such as the Flextreme three years ago. That project existed as an internal study for some time. And these real-life issues are what affect us. We need to come up with the right solutions. We need inspiration. We need to understand the needs of the consumer. These are things we get through research, but also from observing and participating in the green revolution going on right now. It’s given us a lot of opportunities to create things we would not have thought about a few years ago.

CDN: Over the span of your career you’ve had the opportunity to design a multitude of different vehicles. If you had to pick one, what would you say has been your greatest achievement?

“For me it’s fairly easy. If I look simply at the concept cars, the Aero X was particularly successful. It’s a concept that’s so simple and, like every good design, as a designer you say ‘I wish I would have designed that’. A lot of designers came to me and said ‘this is like a dream car for the designers’, yet nobody had designed it. I led the team that designed that car, so this was particularly satisfying, to actually achieve that. I spent my whole life always looking at other people’s work in the product world and saying ‘I wish I had done this or I wish I would have designed that coffee maker, the functionality is so great’. And it’s so simple. The few lines that define that car you can just draw from memory. This is the great thing about it. It’s not relying on multiple features and lines and so on; that’s what makes it most memorable for me.”

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