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December 2008 / January 2009

AOD:
How did you get into the realm of design?

PETER HORBURY:
At the age of seven, that’s what I wanted to do. Around my mid-teens, I wrote to car companies and asked how to go about it. Because career advice in England in those days was rather thin – you either joined the Navy or the Army or insurance or banking. Beyond that, the imagination had run out. So, I had to do it myself. I discovered that I had to go to art school and design school and followed the advice that I was given. And presto! Became a fully-fledged designer in 1974.

AOD:
What school did you attend?

PETER HORBURY:
I first went to Newcastle-Upon-Tyne College of Art and Industrial Design, in the northeast of England, and received my undergraduate degree in 1972; then to the Royal College of Art in London, where I received my Master’s degree in Automotive Design in 1974.

AOD:
How did you get your start at Ford Motor Company?

PETER HORBURY:
In 1991, I was head of design for Volvo. I was brought in to change Volvo’s identity to something safe and exciting. So, having done that, when Ford bought Volvo, they asked me to come over to America and help out by doing a similar exercise in Ford, Lincoln, and Mercury.

AOD:
How many people in your team? How does the design process work within the team? Do they each have an area of responsibility?

PETER HORBURY:
The creative team makes up of a chief designer, a manager exterior, a manager interior, and each of them will probably have two or three designers to help them. There are color materials, of course, which is another two people. So the creative team is around eight to ten designers.

AOD:
When designing the 2010 Mustang, were you given a blank canvas or were you given set guidelines and design criteria to follow? What was the approval process? How long was this project? When did it start/end?

PETER HORBURY:
I think in my entire career – spanning over 34 years – I have yet to see a clean sheet of paper. And a whole vehicle is a rarity because often you’re basing it on something like the previous model or something from another model. What we call a ‘platform’ may be common but the ‘top hat’, in other words everything you see – the body and the interior – would be new. But it’s all based on known entities. So there are certain dimensions that are given.

In the case of the Mustang, we carried over the roof and the windshield, but the rest was new. Albeit based on internal sheet metal. In other words, the inner sheet metal was an outside ‘A’ surface and there’s an inside ‘B’ surface. And much of the ‘B’ surface is carried on from the previous model. So again, it’s a great challenge to make something look quite different based on what was there before. 85% or 90% of what you see on the outside is new. And 100% of the inside – the visible items – are new.

AOD:
How do you decide what to keep and what to change?

PETER HORBURY:
It’s a business decision, definitely. But within that, the design department has a big say because we are the judges of what is necessary to move from the current model to make sure it looks new.

AOD:
How do you know when the design is completed and ready to market?

PETER HORBURY:
We do a lot of research and, to be honest, the timetable is very rigid. It’s so disciplined that we are working to such strong constraints based on timing – it’s a three-year program. Week-by-week is calculated as to what should be done when and when we should be finished with one part and the next part. And all the time narrowing down the design options to one – eventually – where we’re sure this is what the customer is going to want – three or fours years from now.

It’s really a combined decision from a number of different disciplines – manufacturing, marketing, design, engineering, and finance. It’s a very, very complex thing. The number of parts, for example, of an interior – the visible parts – we will calculate somewhere around 400 separate items which need to be designed, engineered, tested. Re-engineered, re-tested. And then sourced to our manufacturers and then tools made to manufacture them – and eventually put together in a confined space of a car interior in a factory.

I don’t think there’s anything in the consumer market, and that includes buildings, I have to say. Houses are not such a complex piece of design work, in my mind. And that’s just the interior.

AOD:
The design for the 2010 Mustang has a lot of masculine, sport-racing influences? What type of buyer were you designing for?

PETER HORBURY:
We almost identify a customer by name, age, and then we look at their likes and dislikes. We then interview them. We do invite a number of this customer type to discuss their desires and their thoughts on automobiles and design. We find how they live, what they finish their homes with, how they dress, etc. So you build up a picture of this customer, who you then design more specifically for and then check with on the way. And sometimes it’s a man and sometimes it’s a women. We know there are a lot of women who love their Mustangs. Convertibles are a very popular purchase with many women. The macho image of the Mustang is only one part of it. Free living, free spirit is also a major part of Mustang and we know there are a huge number of women purchasing it.

AOD:
How did you decide on the color offerings?

PETER HORBURY:
Our color experts do have their finger on the pulse of trends throughout all industries such as fashion, furniture, and house interiors. So there’s a definite trend in each area for color. Reds one year will be a yellow type red or more orangey red. Then it gradually may change to a bluish red. And sometimes both are popular. So we do have a trend analysis running all the time.

The development of a color will take about two or three years to get the paint absolutely right for our paint system. We make sure all the pigments are right. There needs to be consistency, of course. You don’t want the color to start to vary through the life span of a vehicle. So, that in itself is highly complex. But we do have color reviews, rather like fall fashion review, each year with dealers. We narrow it down to say four new colors a year for a particular model.

It’s not by chance. There is some gut feel, I suppose, when it comes to design itself, but with colors especially. But, a professional approach is, by far, the best because we will come up with a color for two to three years from now which many people today may think is hideous – we can’t do that. But by preserving and keeping it going, it’s absolutely right for the moment it’s launched…whenever that might be.

AOD:
Will Ford produce a Hybrid Mustang in the future?

PETER HORBURY:
That’s not in the plans.

AOD:
Do you have a future project you are working on that you can share with us?

PETER HORBURY:
No. I have lots of future projects I’m working on. We’re always busy – working years in advance, of course. In fact, we have a lot of new products coming out; 45% of our product range will be new or freshened.

For more information about Peter Horbury and to view more of his work visit:

2010 Mustang Press: digitalsnippets.ford.com

Profile: media.ford.com