This is the first of a two-part Q&A with Karim Habib. The second part will run tomorrow, Friday, Feb. 21 at 11 a.m.
With the upcoming launch of the Kia EV6, a vehicle the company dubs “transformative,” TheDetroitBureau.com had the chance to speak with Kia’s Karim Habib, senior vice president and head of Kia Design Center in Namyang, Korea.
Habib has held the post since 2019, after stints with Infiniti, BMW and Daimler. Born in Lebanon, Habib studied Mechanical Engineering in Canada, as well as Transportation Design at the Art Center College of Design in California.
This interview is the first of two parts, and begins with a discussion of the EV6. Tomorrow, Habib talks about Kia design as well as his thoughts on what the future holds.
The interview have been edited for length and clarity.
TheDetroitBureau: You’ve been at Kia now a couple years and certainly the brand’s design language has started to evolve. Talk about the design approach for the EV6 and the EV line because it seems as if the styling has taken a turn.
Karim Habib: I would put it under the umbrella of the brand and the technology as we are going towards EVs. The architecture and the technology behind it are allowing us to do different things in design. So that is one reason why we are shifting and changing and evolving.
The second one is obviously the brand itself. We did relaunch the brand; we’re trying to make it more relevant for the future. So I guess both of these things have influenced why we’re changing in design. And what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to work with contrasts. We’re trying to make clean and simple design, but not minimalistic necessarily. We want to work with certain elements that one would not necessarily think belong together, but trying to harmonize them and bring them together.
TDB: So what elements don’t necessarily go together that you wouldn’t expect to go together? Because I know you’ve been talking about the “opposites united” design language. So what doesn’t go together?
KH: Well, I guess in the end, we try to make it go together. But, you know, on the EV6, it has a very lean front and has a very muscular body side, shoulders, hips and wheel arches. But then, the rear is basically just cut off and that’s been done in history, kamm tails and all these things have been done. But we wanted to do it in a modern way and that sectioned off quality is a contrast.
TDB: You don’t see kamm tails too often. And on the EV6, you don’t see the tiger nose grille. It’s so identifiably Kia; there’s so much brand equity built up into it. Are you now evolving away from that?
KH: Well, yes, yes and no. I would say I guess we are testing the shapes that it can have. Right. And granted, on the EV6, it’s maybe not as visible as it could be, at least from the first impression. But I definitely want to keep it. You know, what’s nice about it is that as a delineated grille, it’s a very clear pattern. But we’ve been experimenting with it. I think on the EV9 that concept that we showed, it is, in my opinion, a more recognizable pattern, but not in a classical grille way. So I think it’s a very flexible sort of principle to work with. So yeah, it will be there in the future, in different shapes and forms.
LP: When you think about the EV6 and EV9, and the technology from a flexibility standpoint, you’re not necessarily weighed down to the traditional automotive forums anymore because there’s no need for a huge front end. Is it hard to resist going too far when you at least start an initial sketch? You can’t get too far out front of your audience, but it must be hard to resist going out a bit off the edge design wise.
HK: It varies project to project. But for a project like the Concept EV9, we purposely wanted to stay with something that felt very familiar, but more for the authentic quality of SUVs rather than trying to do a crossover. So we purposely wanted to do something — I don’t know if I should say that — but a little unsophisticated in silhouette, just very clear.
And then, have the sophistication come more in the second read in the surfaces and the graphics and so on. But on the other hand, we’re working on projects now where we’re trying to, to understand, the future of the sedan. And there I think it’s great because we’re not bound by anything, really. Whether it’s technology or even the fact that people want sedans because the market is showing that people don’t really want traditional sedan, so it’s really allowing us to try something completely different.
TDB: There’s a lot of renewable materials in the interior of the EV6. Does that give you a broader palette to work with, just because the very nature of renewable materials used in the vehicle and they’re different from something that’s newly manufactured?
KH: Yeah, I think it opens new possibilities. It doesn’t necessarily take away some of the things that we’ve been using in the past, but there’s definitely just many more things. If you think of recycled plastics, for example, that is something that’s being developed and we see it from suppliers and different companies that are developing these really interesting ways of using what used to be considered the disadvantages of recycled plastic.
The texture, the speckled feel, the difference in color and tone. We’re finding, at least for us, that it can have a warm connotation to it. It can bring some tactile feel. It’s the same thing with fabric. We’re using fabric now. Fabric used to be the lowest thing you’d want to get in the car. And now, we’re going back to a way from the ’20s where fabrics were about craftsmanship and beauty and so it’s really opening a lot of a lot of possibilities for us.
Tomorrow: Habib talks about the future of Kia Design
