This is how Luc Donckerwolke has contributed to car design
55-year old Belgian designer stepped down from top design job at the Hyundai group. Check out the most notorious cars he created throughout the years
According to an article from AutoNews, the designer resigned from the job on the last April 29th due to personal reasons. This puts an end to a four-year history with the Hyundai Group, where his work reached the pinnacle of leading the creation of the Genesis luxury brand. Before that, he contributed to every brand of the Volkswagen Group through concoctions from the Škoda Fabia to the Lamborghini Murciélago, including the revolutionary Audi A2.
Looking back, one can say Donckerwolke’s work had a penchant for opulence. While respecting the DNA of each brand, he made their visual identities more robust and expansive; even the superminis provided a size impression beyond what their actual dimensions suggest. That made them way more competitive in such a fierce market, while the luxury cars adopted a dominant personality and the high-performance models looked like they could conquer the world.
Hyundai Motors
The designer’s most complex achievement in the Korean maker was founding Genesis. The luxury brand started with two bland-looking sedans some years ago, but quickly rose to prominence with the strong identity established with the G90 limousine — there will also be an SUV, of course, named GV80. Those are the first models with which the group intends to compete with the likes of Audi, BMW and Mercedes-Benz or, at least, take on Acura, Lexus and Infiniti.
In the Hyundai brand, the Le Fil Rouge concept previewed the maker’s current visual identity, Sensuous Sportiness, which the Sonata already features. While it’s impressive to make any car stand out in today’s crowd, this task was made particularly difficult by the fact it had to follow Fluidic Sculpture, the one that catapulted Hyundai into worldwide success. Rather than revolutionizing once again, it makes the Korean cars as desirable as any of their main competitors.
Volkswagen Group
Donckerwolke’s previous phase was with the German automaker. Some of his first works were quite subversive. The A2 represented a whole new concept of city car, especially for Audi; had it been a tad more affordable, it could’ve been an early influencer of modern-day small crossovers. The Fabia, in turn, simply helped remove Škoda from automotive limbo and make it a solid contender in the generalist market’s value-oriented end, directly competing against Dacia.
The projects developed for Seat and Lamborghini were more evolutionary as a whole. The first saw the Ibiza become visually independent from the Polo and way more attractive to emotional drivers, while the other got a true successor to the Diablo: the Murciélago combined angular design trends from both the 2000s as a whole and Lamborghini’s tradition in such a simplistic manner that it only sets itself further and further from what hypercars offer in nowadays.
Concept cars
Of course, no high-tier car designer would build themselves a portfolio free of concepts. Beside the aforementioned ones, Donckerwolke’s Korean phase had the Essentia, which helped inspire Genesis’ design, and the 45 EV, which pays homage to the Pony supermini which Hyundai offered in the 1980s. The latter is expected to influence an all-electric production car in the next years, while the former will only be indirectly survived. It was merely a creative exercise.
Going back to the Volkswagen era, we can highlight the Bentley EXP 10 Speed 6, which was intended to be a super-sporty alter-ego of the Continental GT but ended up hinting the design which would be applied to the main model’s new generation three years later. Seat, on the other hand, had its current identity’s angular design previewed by the IBe: the ‘2010 concept would also spawn the IBx sibling year later, which influenced the array of crossovers it offers today.
