Michael Vernon Robinson is Brand and Design Director at Gruppo Bertone, an Italian firm known for its iconic and inspiring designs. Motortrades Insight’s Danny Hewitt spoke to the American-born designer about the importance of emotion in car design and to what extent emotion affects the final design of a vehicle. 

It’s like, well, how important is emotion in a relationship between a man and a woman? It’s of great importance. No emotion, no automobile. You can’t have a car without emotion on it. And some people think the clients are stupid enough to buy automobiles with no emotion and they say ‘just put it out there, put it on the road’ and then all of a sudden, it doesn’t sell. And why not? Because it’s a dog. There’s no character, no lines, no interesting things for people out there on the road. 

Ian Callum''s Jaguar F-Type is a good example of how beautiful a car can look when the designer is passionate about creating a moving object that inspires and excites imaginations.

And of course, the air conditioner works and the turbo works and the disc brakes work. Everything works just fine. But it’s a dog. People don’t look at it and feel something for it. You have to find ways of what we call magnetic attraction.

Magnetic attraction in a car sticks out from the crowd and it’s like the big screen at the cinema. Something jumps out at you and you just say ‘wow, this is beautiful’. So our job is to do the same thing for automobiles and you can only do that with emotion.

When we design a car, it’s always a challenge. Car designers live for challenges. Those challenges can be time-oriented, technically-oriented; they can be visually oriented, because the issue is that they may have this same project and the competition might win the project and you might lose.

And so, anytime we put pencil to the paper, it’s a competition. We are always battling with our competitors and in this case, other design service houses around the world and they are doing their best to compete against our best and only one best proposal wins.

So the competition may come up with six proposals for the client. The client then has three or four or five other companies. So imagine 120 records on the wall and they choose one. So every time we start a new project, we know that’s going to happen. So it’s a giant challenge.

I used to play basketball when I was in college and so I grew up with a scoring approach and a gentleman’s approach to sport, where you can’t win every single game, even though you want to win every game, but you’re respectful of your competitors because they’re very talented and they’re doing an excellent job but doing everything possible to win that presentation and when you do win, that’s just wonderful. But we work our arses off for that.

So we really work hard and these guys we’ve got are very young, very talented and very hard working because I buck their tails.