BYD: New Era with Global Design Centre

• Chairman Wang: ‘Technology is BYD’s hard strength, design the soft strength of the company’
• BYD design chief Wolfgang Egger worked for leading Italian and German automakers

17th October 2022  BYD is pushing into a new era with the launch of its new Global Design Center at its global headquarters in Shenzhen, China. BYD believes the launch of the new Design Center will help take the company from its past as a technology and components supplier to a future where it sells more products directly to end users and consumers.

“Technology is BYD’s hard strength, and design will become the soft strength of the company,” said Wang Chuanfu, President and Chairman of BYD. “Both technology and design must be grasped firmly, to transform BYD’s products from being solely powered by ‘technology’ to leveraging the combined power of ‘technology + design’.”

The 12,600 square meters large BYD Design Center is the warm beating heart of design for the company and is responsible for future automotive, rail, and other transportation designs. BYD's design team is led by Wolfgang Egger. The Oberstdorf (Germany) born designer has worked on numerous award-winning vehicles in previous roles with leading Italian and German automakers including Audi, Lamborghini and Alfa Romeo. Wolfgang Egger explains: “I came to BYD in 2016 as I was attracted by the opportunity at the company. Together with my team we can push BYD into the next era of EV-mobility. I like it when people start to smile when they see our vehicles. It means that we have created an appealing design with passion."

At BYD Egger works together with a team of more than 600 designers from over 10 countries including Italy, Spain, Switzerland, and Germany, carrying out design in multiple locations around the globe for BYD. BYD Global Interior Design Director Michele Jauch-Paganetti complements his leadership team forming the core of the automotive design team at the new facility. Relying on its Global Design Center, BYD has established an entire set of world-class new systems, new processes, and new standards for design from creative divergence, digital design, and clay model production to virtual reality (VR) evaluation, ergonomic validation, as well as quality control and validation.

The design facility was created to facilitate an open, communicative, and creative work environment that BYD believes will provide fertile ground for its future designs to grow out of. It will feature cutting-edge design tools for its team to utilize in the creative process including Italian five-axis processing equipment for clay modeling, German clay-cutting tools that can modify designs in less than 24 hours, and a virtual reality (VR) system that enables 1:1 comparisons of full-sized virtual models.