Yahoo Autos Former Rolls-Royce Design Boss Murdered in Germany
Rolls-Royce has paid tribute to its former design director, Ian Cameron, after the retired 74-year-old British executive was killed in a violent attack at his house in Bavaria on Friday night. Police in Germany are still hunting for his assailant, reportedly a lone man who attacked and stabbed Cameron when he answered the door of his house in Herrsching, Upper Bavaria. No arrest has yet been made.
“Ian played a significant role in shaping Rolls-Royce from when it was first acquired by BMW Group and moved to its home at Goodwood, West Sussex,” the company said in an official statement, “during Ian’s tenure he led the design team for all Phantom family and Ghost models, creating thoroughly contemporary motor cars that remained sympathetic to the marque’s design heritage. Our thoughts are with his family and friends during this very difficult time.”
Cameron’s early career included stints working for Pininfarina—on projects that included the Lancia Monte Carlo—and then European truck and van maker Iveco. He moved to BMW in 1992 as exterior design manager, working on the E46 3-Series and the Z8 among other projects. But it was BMW’s decision to acquire the Rolls-Royce brand (at the same time Volkswagen took control of Bentley) that supercharged Cameron’s career, being personally chosen by BMW’s then design supremo, Chris Bangle, to lead the team that would work on what would become the Phantom.
This was the creation of a new brand as much as a single model, and as part of the creative process, Cameron decided to immerse his team in an appropriately luxurious lifestyle, even opening an office next to Hyde Park in London as this reckoned to be the part of the world with the highest concentration of Rolls-Royce products. It worked, too—the Phantom VII, as launched in 2003, was both a spectacular piece of design in its own right and also a manifesto piece. More than two decades later, every current Rolls-Royce product is still clearly descended from it.
Back in 2005 I interviewed Cameron at the Geneva Auto Show and spoke to him about the then-new Phantom. “Certainly when we started the project there was a massive amount of awareness that we could easily fail and that if we did it would not happen again, that the marque would die,” he said, “with all honesty I have never, ever had the feeling since that BMW owns Rolls-Royce in the possessive sense. It is much more a feeling of custodianship. We’re not here to do whatever we want with the marque, we have to understand it and whenever possible move it on, to make sure that whatever happens is right for Rolls-Royce.”
Cameron left the design director’s role in 2012 and retired in 2013, subsequently running his own consultancy business and also working with high-value classic cars. Reports from Germany say that cables to security cameras above his garage had been cut, but no cars were taken and it is unclear if robbery was a motive in the attack. Cameron’s wife, Verena Kloos, former president of BMW’s Designworks studio in California, raised the alarm after the attack by running to a neighbor’s house. She was unhurt.
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