How This Automotive Path Hooked Me for a Long Career

If you’ve read this column in the past, you likely know it’s primarily about automotive design.

But have you ever wondered how someone becomes a designer in the first place? It’s not like it’s a typical career path—one that your guidance counselor suggested because you weren’t doing so well in trigonometry.

In fact, it’s a career that most are unaware of, and if there is some recognition that vehicles must have been designed at one point, well that’s what engineers do, right?

Ask any number of automotive designers what attracted them to the field, and you’ll likely get an equal number of answers. There is no single path to who and how one gets involved.

The one common denominator though, seems to be a passion for automobiles. But even here it’s not always the same. Some are true gear heads who like nothing better than to wrench on their car. Others tend to be walking encyclopedias of all things automotive.

And others who always drew cars in the back of their school books.

Those who do make the connection that they can actually make that passion a career may eventually find their way to the few schools that teach transportation design, many already with a degree before they come to that realization.

With a design curriculum, some will realize that their passion is better directed to an engineering approach. And others may find they simply don’t have the ability, or the commitment to the rigorous studio course load. Because it’s here where a student learns to express design ideas visually.

The ability to draw and illustrate (now by software) is as important as the ideas themselves—after all, images are how the designs are judged. But the designer’s process, how they approach a design, how they think, is even more so.

As a child of the ‘60s I was fascinated by the space program, rockets, and anything that could be called a spaceship.

In the early part of that decade, American cars still had tailfins so it wasn’t a stretch to see them as road-going extensions of NASA because designers had been leveraging aircraft themes for decades and then the jet/rocket age.

How could a kid’s imagination not be captured by this shiny, rainbow-colored eye candy?

It was around this time that my aunt had contacted General Motors about her car-crazed nephew and because of this I received a vanilla envelope of 8×10-inch glossies of their concept cars of the day—cars like the Cadillac Cyclone, the Firebird III, and some glass topped Corvette that predated the Stingray.

Also included was at least one image of a designer’s rendering of a futuristic landscape of an ultra-modern building behind some fantasy vehicle.

It’s hard to describe how much of an impact this had on me (I think I was around 8 or 9), but I do remember coming away with the thought that these guys knew what the future looked like!

And I wanted to be one of them.

I don’t know if that’s typical of aspiring automotive designers, but the thought of creating what the future looked like, at a time when the future was always going to be better, was so compelling to me that I was hooked. At that age I was determined to be a car designer.

(Note: on the recent occasion of her 104th birthday, I thanked my aunt for having such a large impact on my career. She of course remembered the whole thing.)

And perhaps because of those photographs, or maybe because my parents drove their cars, I also wanted to work for General Motors.

By the mid ‘60s I was convinced that GM simply led the industry in design (I still feel the same about that period, perhaps GM’s high-water mark), and this only furthered my desire to one day work for them.

And so I did. You can only imagine what it felt like to my 9-year-old self to ultimately be made the head of GM’s Global Advanced Design.

I sometimes think back and wonder what path I would have taken if I hadn’t been so fixated on designing cars. I’m not sure being so directed was a good thing, and what I might have missed out of because of it.

Yet at the same time I realize my good fortune in actually achieving what I wanted to do. And because I was lucky enough to know that you could make a living doing this.

I suspect there are still talented people out there who have the potential yet may never make the connection that there are automotive design careers out there.

And that’s a loss for the individual whose talent may never mature, as well as the industry.

Our educational system doesn’t always encourage disciplines that fall outside traditional pursuits.

But those with a passion seeking an alternative path may well find their journey begins not in the pages of their school books, but with the sketches in the back.

Dave Rand is the former executive director of Global Advanced Design for General Motors.