Meet the ex-BMW designer shaping Kia's future

Seoul

KARIM Habib speaks English, French, German and Italian fluently, but it's the language of design that keeps him busy. The Lebanese-born car designer has been senior vice-president and head of Kia Design Center since October 2019, and is now based at Kia's global design headquarters in Namyang, South Korea, working alongside thousands of engineers.

A trained mechanical engineer himself, Mr Habib has been working on creating Kia's "design language", shorthand for the way a carmaker's styling efforts are guided by coherent principles, recognisable elements and the myriad things that go into making a new car look distinctive on its own, yet a familiar member of a product family.

On March 30, Kia finally showed off its new design language - dubbed "Opposites United" - by showcasing it in a striking new electric car called the EV6. The bold-looking mid-sized crossover is expected to arrive in Singapore next year, with an estimated price of around S$200,000 at today's Certificate of Entitlement premiums. It's the first of seven new pure-electric cars that the brand will roll out by 2027.

Kia says Opposites United takes inspiration from the contrasts found in nature and humanity. That might sound a bit airy-fairy, but Mr Habib explains that it just means Kia wants its future models to look and drive like cars that people are familiar with, rather than high-tech machines with complicated functions that can intimidate the average folk.

"We want our designs to be human-centred," Mr Habib tells The Business Times in a video interview. His stated mission is to create "original, inventive, and exciting electric vehicles".

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Mr Habib certainly knows a thing or two about exciting cars. The 51-year-old Canadian national spent the majority of his career with BMW (his last job there was as its head of design), with brief spells at Mercedes-Benz parent Daimler and Nissan' upscale Infiniti division before he moved to Korea.

He designed the 2008 BMW 7 Series but started out with car interiors, and was responsible for the one in the 2003 BMW 5 Series. Given that career trajectory, there's no surprise that Mr Habib thinks about design from the inside out, and thinks that function should come before form.

"Design is not just about aesthetic styling," he says. "The user experience is important as well, and we want our cars to be able to improve the lives of our customers."

In spite of his past, Mr Habib isn't intent on creating Korea's BMW. He says he would rather have Kia become a leading automotive nameplate in its own right.

"Kia is a mainstream brand, not a premium brand. We're not fighting with the premium carmakers, we have our own market and consumer base," he says. "But that doesn't mean we cannot bring premium design and technologies to them."

It also doesn't mean that Kia cannot build cars that, at least according to the stopwatch, can challenge the best. The range-topping EV6 variant, called the GT, packs in an astonishing 584 horsepower, and can rocket from 0-100km/h in 3.5 seconds. That makes it the fastest Kia production car ever made, and one that's quicker than a Porsche Taycan 4S.

The EV6 is the brand's first model built on a dedicated EV platform, in this case the Electric-Global Modular Platform (E-GMP) that is also used by sister brand Hyundai for its new Ioniq 5 model, and will underpin a swath of new Korean EVs by both brands in the years ahead.

The ongoing switch to electric cars worldwide gives Kia a chance to leapfrog past other mainstream brands, Mr Habib believes. He points out that South Korea is right up there in consumer electronics and pop culture. "Koreans are actually quite progressive and forward-looking," he notes, adding, "There are many things we can learn from their culture, and how they have led the way in the tech world and K-pop."

While trying to reinvent Kia design, however, Mr Habib has one challenge that many chief stylists face: the need to push things forward without losing touch with a brand's lineage.

Till now, the feature that most defined Kia's designs has been the cars' "tiger grille." The shape was developed by Peter Schreyer, Kia's former design chief (now president of design at Hyundai Motor Group) and another designer poached from a luxury brand, in this case Audi.

Mr Habib calls his update the "Digital Tiger Face", which expands the sleek shape across the front end of the EV6 instead of keeping it within the grille.

Ultimately, Mr Habib envisions Kia as a brand that consumers will aspire to own. "Cars are functional consumer products but they are also aspirational, and at the end of the day we want our cars to be able to raise the quality of life for our customers," he says.

"We want our customers to say that, yes, owning this Kia has made my life better." Those are the words he hopes to hear, in whatever language they're spoken.