BMW X3 for the locals

BMW’s Australian designer Calvin Luk has been handed the responsibility to pen one of the most important models in the premium car company’s line-up.

Sources at BMW have confirmed that Luk was charged with creating a new version of a key platform in the brand’s SUV strategy, the all-new X3 due in 2017.

The X3 finds about 160,000 new owners a year for BMW, outselling the X5 by about three-to-two globally. The new version, which is codenamed G01 and is already out testing in prototype form, will have a longer wheelbase than the 2810mm of the current car.

With four- and six-cylinder petrol, diesel and plug-in hybrid powertrains on the agenda, the new G01 X3 will sit on a heavily modified development of the current architecture and suspension systems, which it will share with 2019’s second-generation X4.

The G01 X3 range will be topped by the X3 xDrive M40i M Performance variant, which will use a high-output version of BMW’s modular 3.0-litre in-line six-cylinder petrol engine with almost 290kW of power.

There are also whispers of a full-blown M version of the next X3 to counter Porsche’s ragingly successful Macan Turbo, but sources at BMW differ on the likelihood of it ever reaching production.

It’s a clear sign that Luk, who grew up on Sydney’s North Shore, continues to impress the bigwigs at BMW’s Munich headquarters.

Luk, whose lifelong dream was to design cars for BMW, has already designed the 1 Series facelift and shepherded it into production. The car had its international launch in Portugal two months ago.

The 29-year-old designer follows in some impressive Australian footsteps in being handed the responsibility for new models with global car companies.

The Holden design machine has churned out international success stories Mike Simcoe (former executive director of design at General Motors), Richard Ferlazzo (Buick and Chevrolet), Max Wolff (Daewoo, Cadillac and Lincoln) and Andrew Smith (Cadillac and Buick).

Other success stories include Ford Australia's chief designer, Tasmanian Todd Willing, who did Ford’s latest GT, and Peter Arcadipane, who was a senior designer at Mercedes-Benz (and did the original ML-Class and the W215 CL) and is now the design boss at Chinese car company BAIC. (His most famous car never went into production, though everybody knows it as was the Mad Max Interceptor.)

As revealed for the first time here at motoring.com.au during the 1 Series facelift launch, Luk’s introduction to the BMW brand came when his family bought a BMW E36 3 Series when he was a child. Although he had always sketched cars and ideas to improve cars, the arrival of the BMW focused Luk’s ambitions to become a professional designer

“My family had just bought an E36 3 Series, so I sketched that every day for years,” Luk said, after presenting his new car to the media in Lisbon.

“I would focus on different details, then the overall look, then things I would do to change it. I know that car intimately.”

Luk wrote to BMW’s design boss, including some of his sketches and asking him what he’d have to do to become a BMW designer. BMW wrote back, giving him scholastic and work-experience paths to follow, which he did to the letter.

He studied industrial design at Sydney’s University of Technology for a year before moving to the Art Centre College of Design in Pasadena, California, at the age of 18.

He graduated with honors (hey, it’s an American college…) with a Bachelor of Science, Transportation Design in 2008, and immediately joined BMW’s Advanced Design Studio.