Don’t mention the 911…

Both the best and worst thing about being a car designer is that you’re not allowed to do the same thing twice. Or you’re not supposed to, anyway. Everyday, as you sit behind your sketch pad, the job description demands that you draw something new, something never seen before.

So when some blogger bleats from their bedroom that our latest design was obviously copied from last month’s new Toyota, it’s demoralising, but also impossible since both were sketched out secretly four years ago. We don’t actually copy stuff, but we’d be foolish not to take the occasional glance at the competition. In the industry, we don’t call it copying but benchmarking.

Every major vehicle manufacturer has a facility where they painstakingly drive, measure and analyse competitor product. This goes as far as taking cars down to their bare parts so every single component car be weighed and costed. The major German manufacturers even have an agreement that they donate an early production car to each other as soon as they’re launched.