Chris Svensson, Designer of the Ford GT, Has Died

From Road & Track

Chris Svensson, a lifelong Ford design employee and the man who oversaw the styling of the newest GT, has died this past weekend after a battle with cancer. He was 53.

Born in England and educated at Coventry University and the Royal College of Art, Svensson spent his entire design career with Ford. The original Ford Ka, a revolutionary European city car when it was launched in 1996 and a huge sales success in England, was based on a design Svensson penned in 1992 for his design school graduation thesis, a design he brought with him to his first job at Ford's design center in Cologne Germany.

After that auspicious start, Svensson made his career at Ford. He worked in the automaker's design centers in Germany, England and Australia, rising to the title of Design Director of Asia Pacific & Africa, before relocating to the United States to work at Ford's headquarters in Dearborn, Michigan. There, he served as head of Ford design for North & South America and, as of January 2014, as, Global Design Director for trucks, SUVs and commercial vehicles.

But it's Svensson's role in shaping the Ford GT that he'll be most remembered for. The GT project was undertaken in complete secrecy at Ford, with designers shaping the now-iconic supercar in a little-used basement room at the automaker's design center in Dearborn. The GT's debut at the 2015 Detroit Auto Show was a complete surprise, the project somehow avoiding the leaks and spy photos that seem to presage even the most mundane vehicle debut. Even some top-level Ford executives were barred from seeing the vehicle before its 2015 debut.

I first met Svensson in 2014, when Ford invited me to join him and design director Moray Callum on a Detroit-to-NYC road-trip in the two designers' vintage Mustangs-Svensson's a '65 fastback, Callum's a '67. The trip was timed to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the original Mustang's debut at the 1964 World's Fair in New York City.

It was the first feature-length story I ever wrote-a two-part piece published on Gizmodo that you can read here and here-and over the course of 650 miles, I'm certain I asked Svensson enough rookie questions to wear thin the patience of any human being. He was gracious and forthcoming throughout, gloating ever so slightly that his freshly-restored '65 was proving more reliable than Callum's '67, which needed a battery swap with every refueling.

Ever since that trip, Svensson was a reliably friendly face-an increasingly rare thing in the automobile industry. Relationships between automaker employees and journalists are naturally laden with skepticism on both sides, and it's hard to imagine a top-level designer committing to memory the names and faces of the thousands of journalists he or she might encounter professionally. But Svensson was the sort to do just that, offering a genuine smile and a friendly, sincere conversation whenever we would cross paths at international auto shows or Ford vehicle debuts.

And while Svensson described himself as "an artist first and a car guy second" in a 2015 interview with Car Design News, those who knew him understand this to be a characteristic bit of self-effacement. Svensson was a gearhead through-and-through. All it takes is a cursory scroll through his Instagram profile to see that the man was passionate about cars in all shapes, sizes and origins. In addition to his midnight black Ford GT-a super-spartan Competition model with no stereo or GPS that he took delivery of early this year-Svensson loved German cars, including a Porsche 356 road racer that he'd spent years restoring and a 1957 Volkswagen Karmann Ghia purchased as a gift for his wife, Sonia.

But above all else, Svensson was a family man. In the images and notes he posted on social media, and in every conversation I ever had with him over the years, it became apparent how much he loved and cared for his wife and their two daughters.

Ford Motor Company provided the following statement on the news of Svensson's death:

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