Industrial design that survives contact with manufacturing

The traditional model — design finishes, engineering starts — produces vehicles that look excellent in renders and get value-engineered into something else on the way to production. Every strong small-EV program we have worked on ran design and engineering concurrently from the first architecture sketch.

Draft angles, parting lines, radii under 3 mm, and tight panel gaps are where design intent turns into tooling cost. A single undercut on a large exterior panel can add a slide, a cycle-time penalty, and a five-figure tool cost that nobody notices until quoting.

CMF carries the same trap. A painted finish that requires a controlled environment and a three-stage process is a different business case from a moulded-in colour with a texture that hides flow lines.

On an EV, the battery is the hardest geometry in the vehicle. Designing a silhouette first and then finding space for the pack is how programs end up with awkward proportions and poor thermal performance. Start from the pack envelope, the service access, and the crash structure — the proportions that follow are almost always more honest.

Before we sign off a design direction, one question gets asked: can this be quoted by three suppliers without an explanation? If the answer is no, the design still has cost risk in it.