Peter Horbury, a car designer who had worked for almost 50 years, died suddenly on the road in China. Most recently, Horbury was Group Lotus’s senior vice president of design. Horbury worked for or was hired by several car companies, including Ford, Chrysler, and more specialized companies like Bentley and Rolls-Royce. He also helped change how the London taxi and motorbikes looked. Horbury is best known for making Volvo’s cars look better and more expensive than they used to. Peter Horbury, a well-known car designer who worked for Volvo for many years and was most recently the executive vice president of design at Lotus, has died. In the business world, he was best known for being the first person to make the change from boxy to curvy. He was 73. Even though no one knows what caused the death, it seems to have been sudden. A Lotus statement said that Horbury died “while visiting colleagues in China, doing what he always did: leading, inspiring, and mentoring others to challenge conventions and be the best they can be.” According to a touching obituary on Car Design News, he has always designed a wide range of vehicles, such as cars, bikes, buses, vans, and London taxis, for an equally wide range of companies, such as Volvo, Ford, Chrysler, Geely, Lotus, Bentley, Triumph, Rolls-Royce, and others. After finishing London’s Royal College of Art in 1974, Horbury went into business. When he was named head of design at Volvo in 1991, he had a huge effect there. He is credited with moving the company away from the boxy shapes of the 1970s and 1980s, starting with the ECC concept car in 1992 and moving on to the S80 and then the XC90. In 2002, Horbury was put in charge of design for the Premier Automotive Group. He was in charge of companies like Aston Martin, Jaguar, Land Rover, and Volvo. In 2009, Horbury went back to work at Volvo and was given the job of vice president of design. After Ford sold Volvo to a Chinese company in 2010, Horbury joined Geely as its senior vice president of design. During his time at Geely, he worked on Lynk & Co, Proton, and Lotus, among other companies. The Lotus Eletre electric SUV, which came out in October, was one of the last cars that Horbury worked on. Horbury’s coworkers in the auto business have sent him their condolences. Former Aston Martin CEO Andy Palmer said that Horbury had “extraordinary talent.” Jim Farley, the CEO of Ford, said he was sorry to hear about Horbury’s death and praised him for using “the power of design to transform and modernize Volvo globally.” According to an official statement from Lotus, the colorful Horbury spent more than 50 years creating “some of the most important and groundbreaking cars in history.” Lotus CEO Feng Qingfeng said in a statement that people admire Horbury’s creative impact, which “can be found on roads all over the world today, enjoyed by millions of drivers.” Social media and individual tributes show that Horbury’s life was full of different things.
