The International Car Design Award jury has named Volvo Cars as the winner of their Brand Design Language Award for 2016, beating out other nominees in the likes Jaguar, Mercedes-Benz, Kia, and Renault.
At the awards ceremony held in Turin, Italy, Thomas Ingenlath was there to accept the award on behalf of the company, and said: “We are proud to receive this recognition for the design work we have done in the last years. When we started work on the XC90 we knew that we had an opportunity to take the Volvo Cars brand in a new direction.”
Ingenlath is the Senior Vice President of Design for the Volvo Car Group, and can be attributed to quite a lot of the strides the automaker has made in the design front over the past few years, who joined Volvo after departing a long tenure at the Volkswagen Group.
“The Volvo family contains many different characters – the strong and refined types, the elegant and sophisticated, the dynamic and the youthful. What we have done with the brand design at Volvo is to provide room for each of these characters, these expressions, to shine through while still paying homage to our tremendous heritage,” he added. “Each car we design is unmistakably a Volvo, but it also has a unique personality.”
Looks are a very subjective matter, but design is as much a science as it is about an expression of pure aesthetics. Automotive design, in particular, must be function over form to be successful. And that’s not even getting into manufacturing limitations, cost concerns, brand identity, and so on.
Saying that there has been a unanimously positive response from the public and the motoring industry at the most recent crop of Volvos would not be a contested statement to make. Volvo has gained admiration for its clean design language that is punctuated with echoes of Scandanavian sensibility, its focus toward vehicle safety, clever packaging of its new hybrid powertrains, and designs that are at once commanding but also graceful.
For more on Volvo vehicles, including pricing and specifications, check out our Showroom.
