Designing the Future

The problem for Matthew Beaven, chief exterior design at Range Rover, is that customers like his vehicles too much. Drivers tend to want Range Rover to keep Range Rovers just the way they are because, well, they’re excellent. Unfortunately, that puts Beaven and the rest of design team in a tough spot; their job is to design the future of Range Rover, to shepherd this iconic British marque through the next half-century, but nobody really wants it to change?

“You’re kind of blessed being a Range Rover designer, but it’s also a massive responsibility with all that heritage behind you,” says Beaven on a video call from the brand’s British home base. “I think the secret is you need to respect the history but not become harnessed by it,” he says. Easier said than done.

But, ever since the first two-door Range Rover in 1970, the brand has managed to walk that very fine line: respect history without being held back by it. In fact, it might be the key to Range Rover’s ongoing success.

“Range Rover is a progressive company,” Beaven explains. “There’s a really fine balance there. We’re not into retrospective design. We want to do something modern and relevant to the future, not necessarily harping back to the past too much.”

Remember that the flagship Range Rover has gone from being a two-door SUV for England’s landed aristocracy and their muddy hunting boots to a global status symbol beloved by rappers, artists, business tycoons, celebrities and Muskoka cottagers alike. And it’s still the de facto mode of transport in and around any good English country estate.

It helps that the design team is small by auto-industry standards. It’s not a design-by-committee situation; the team has plenty of freedom.

“On a big project – on a big car line – the designers will come up with a lot of ideas, and they’ll be at every bookend. We explore everything,” says Beaven. “But then the hard part is deciding the right direction for the brand going forward. That’s the bit I’ll be very, very careful about.”

All those sketches go up on a big wall to get whittled down into the final design. “When we’re looking at them, it’s about a feeling. These sketches are hand-drawn, and people’s emotions are all in there. You have to have really good judgement,” says Beaven.

Evaluating potential designs always involves two key questions for Range Rover’s designers. “First of all, does it meet our values? We want to have this reductive design. It has to be visionary. It needs to be emotional. It needs to have an emotional response. It needs to be authentic.”

The second question is: does it move the brand forward? “Is it really pushing the brand in the right direction, or is it just another version of what we’ve got? That’s the other thing we’ve got to be careful of: not designing for design’s sake. It has to say something. It’s a very tricky position to be in; you’ve got to make sure you’re making the right choices at the right times.”

Range Rover customers are, as you’d imagine, a rather discerning bunch. Move the brand too far forward too fast and it won’t work. Don’t move forward enough and the product will feel old.

“Range Rover is always strongest when we go our own route and don’t just iterate,” says Beaven. “We’re creating products relevant to our brand values, not just following a marketing chart.”

It’s a brave strategy. Take the Evoque, for example. Before it debuted as the LRX concept in 2008, Range Rover had never sold a true compact SUV. Back then a small luxury SUV was a rather novel idea.

“When the Evoque came out, there was always a question about what it means to be a Range Rover,” Beaven remembers. “And I don’t think anyone expected the Evoque to be so popular and so well received. It really broke a lot of barriers between length [of a vehicle] and price. The car looks so valuable and so prestigious – a lot of that had to do with the proportions, which the customer may not notice straight away – but that’s what made it different from anything else on the market,” he says.  

Now, a small luxury SUV is no longer a novel idea; the Evoque was ahead of the curve. Almost every brand is pushing into that space. The point is that Range Rover saw an opportunity to try something new and seized it, taking lessons from the past without being held back by it.

“That’s why we do have to be strong on our direction,” Beaven says with obvious conviction. “We’ve got to navigate our own way through this. We have to understand customer needs and make our product relevant to the future, but we also have to understand what makes an innovative product and how we can stand out.” It’s not easy, especially when you consider billions of dollars are at stake with each high-profile new model.

It makes us wonder though, what’s next? We know there’s a Range Rover EV coming. Could there ever be another Range Rover convertible? Or perhaps even a station wagon or sedan? Is anything off limits for Range Rover’s next 56 years?

“Well, obviously we can’t talk about future products,” says Beaven, before continuing. “As long as we hold our brand values, and we have a department focused on strategy and predicting where the future is going, we should be able to manifest those brand values in whatever form it takes.”

Whatever comes next, he and his design team will be asking those same two questions: does it meet our brand values, and does it move the brand forward?

“The last thing we want to do is just follow the market,” says Beaven. “That’s not where we want to be, and it’s never where our success has come from either.”

In other words, expect big things to come from Range Rover. But drivers can rest easy; their beloved SUV is in very capable hands.

Top of page: Early design study for the 2019 Range Rover Evoque – a bold reimagining of proportion and stance that proved the brand could redefine luxury at a smaller scale without compromising its identity.

The post Designing the Future appeared first on Sharp Magazine.