Another ex-VW man to head Hyundai design

The succession plan at Korea’s biggest car-maker has become clear, with former Bentley design chief Luc Donckerwolke heading to Seoul to head the design team at Hyundai and Kia.

Insiders insist the Dutch designer is joining the emergent automotive superpower even though its lauded design boss Peter Schreyer has two years remaining on his contract.

Sources say Donckerwolke has been brought on board early to give him a two-year transition into the corporate culture of the Korean company before the 63-year-old Schreyer heads to retirement.

Donckerwolke, who left the Volkswagen Group this month, was most recently the design chief at Bentley after moving across from the same post at the Group’s Spanish mass-production brand, Seat.

The Dutchman made headlines earlier this year when he walked out of Bentley and called out Lincoln over its Continental concept car’s similarities to Bentley’s Arnage. He even went so far as to seek out the Facebook page of Lincoln’s design boss, David Woodhouse, and post “Do you want us to send the product tooling?”

He has been replaced at Bentley by the universally liked German interior and manufacturing-process guru, Stefan Sielaff, who was largely responsible for the interior of the current Mercedes-Benz C-Class and has been Audi’s design boss.

Like Schreyer, Donckerwolke’s CV is defined by building a career off a superstar showing. In Schreyer’s case, that was the first Audi TT in 1998, while Donckerwolke was chief designer at Lamborghini when the Gallardo was released.

Schreyer moved to Korea from Audi in 2006 and was widely credited with bringing a coherent, defined style to the Kia range.

He was promoted to be one of three presidents of Kia in 2012 and, within a month, moved to head the design departments of both Kia and Hyundai.

He is due to retire in 2017.