From flying cars to Thor’s Hammer headlights – meet the American behind the Volvo EX90’s Scandinavian look

From the moment he learned that all the everyday objects we see around us are actually designed by people, T. Jon Mayer was hooked. Decades later, a lot of things have changed: he’s grown up, he’s left the U.S. East coast – and he’s one of the people he was once so amazed by.

Today, he’s our head of exterior design, and with the new fully electric Volvo EX90, T. Jon and his team set a new design language for our company and our future products. ?

In this interview, T. Jon reveals his favourite design element of the new Volvo EX90 and we cover everything from how he still dreams of the flying cars that dazzled us in 1980s movie classics, to how a Volvo car is just like most Scandinavian people – cool on the outside but flickering with warm light on the inside.

Hi T. Jon, when did you join Volvo Cars and how did it happen?

It was 2010 and I was working at Ford which at that point was the owner of Volvo Cars. After five and a half years with Ford, I mentioned to a colleague at Volvo that I was looking for a new challenge and he said, “you should come to Sweden”. So in the spring of 2011, I came here on a trip with my wife and we absolutely fell in love with Gothenburg. Said and done, I joined Volvo Cars as a senior exterior designer.

At that time, Volvo’s design position wasn’t quite what it is today, so part of the excitement of joining the team was getting to be part of the company’s transformation journey. Our brand got stronger, the value of our products increased, and design was one of the key reasons. I love the teams here and I love being at the headquarters where the action is.

You've been the lead exterior designer for several of our concept cars as well as the S60 and V60 models. What are the main challenges and opportunities when now designing the new all-electric Volvo EX90?

When everything was designed around a combustion engine, the architecture of a car reflected this – it was very familiar and something we had been perfecting for decades. Now, with electrification, we have the freedom to play with proportions and architecture more than we did in the past.

One of our first challenges was around the front face of the car.?We’ve had a long tradition of grilles in our designs, which was perfectly suitable for a car based around an engine.?With a fully electric car, we no longer need to take in air in the traditional grille position, so we made a very conscious choice to change the face of the car to reflect that.?

The result is a quite striking facial expression resembling that of a mammal – not cold and robotic but rather humanistic, inviting and proud.?The eyes, the Thor’s Hammer headlights, sit up high, while the mouth – where we still need an ample amount of air – is down low. Between them, there’s a clean shield surface to prominently display our Volvo iron mark.

How do you and your colleagues take on a new car design?

We start by asking ourselves why we are doing this concept and whom it is for.?We want to understand the intent and purpose of a vehicle or whatever product we’re creating.?Then we begin sketching and ultimately formulating the answers to the brief. Our creative process is built up around iterative design reviews which are all about testing and failing and drawing the right conclusions.?Many concepts fail in the beginning, but this is a natural part of the process of getting to the best solution in the end.

Design is neither an art nor a science; it's a mix between the two. So much of the creative process in exterior design is based on opinions and taste. That's where it sometimes gets tricky to judge which way to go. But that's why we’re a team of experts. Adding to our knowledge from the past, we also need to predict the world of tomorrow and how we best can accommodate people’s future needs and tastes by looking into the trends of today’s society.

The Volvo EX90 comes equipped with lidar technology as standard. How did you take on that from a design perspective?

When we first heard about the integration of lidar, we immediately reacted by trying to hide it in the front lower.?But to quote our lidar development teams: “in the animal kingdom you don’t see animals walk around with eyes on their knees – they are up high on the head to see as far forward as possible”.?The same is of course true for lidar.?Since the whole point is to increase vision, then placing it high up on the roof was the clear option.?It’s been quite a challenge from an exterior design perspective, but the lidar’s prominent position is really an icon of 21st century automotive safety, much like the 3-point safety belt was in the last century.

Our next generation of fully electric cars progresses our Scandinavian design language. What does Scandinavian design mean for a born and raised American like yourself?

To me, it means well resolved, pure, honest and beautiful.?One of our principles when we talk about Scandinavian design is “form follows function”, which is all about designing for a purpose.

We’re especially inspired by the Scandinavian light: the abundance of light in the summer and the scarcity of light in the winter. It correlates directly to why we have a lot of glass in the cabin and a panoramic roof to let as much light in as possible. And in Scandinavia, where it's often cold during winter, you get a very clear image of an outdoor environment contrasted with houses with candle-lit glow on the inside. To play that up in our products as well, we’ve put a lot of effort into the illumination in the Volvo EX90 and our future cars.

Now, there's also a special aspect to Scandinavian society. Here in Scandinavia there’s a calm and understated confidence in society and in the posture of how people approach things. A Swede would probably call it “lagom”. You may perceive it as cold at first, but once you get to know people, you find that they're really warm and hearty beings. That very same calm and understated confidence is exactly what we’re trying to convey in the expression of our cars.

What design element of the new Volvo EX90 are you most proud of?

In addition to its overall confident and strong presence, my favourite part of the car is the new Thor’s Hammer headlights. We asked ourselves a key question: how can we improve this unique signature from where it is today, and create a more legible signature that is equally distinct as a hammer both day and night? The team came up with a clever solution. Now, the hammer is thicker and provides more of a digital start-up appearance rather than a straight line like before. During the day, it’s lit and closed, but at night, it opens up to get light on the road from the low and high beams. The result is kind of like an eye movement that delivers on that humanistic expression we always strive for in a more literal way. It’s a striking example of Scandinavian design where we solved a visual execution challenge with new technology.

How would you define “good design”?

Sometimes when designers sketch, they tend to overdo things. A design should be distilled down to its key essentials, and I believe a car should be drawn with no more than three lines. It's simple, it's pure, it's easy to take in, and it looks more premium as a result. In my opinion, that's good design. The best designs are ones that are so simple and pure that even a child could draw them after seeing them once.

The same goes for the inside. Our cars are extremely intelligent and do a lot of things for you. We could put a bunch of screens all over the place to reflect that, but is that really what the driver needs? It’s not. We always strive for purity in our designs, trying to reduce things down to the essential items that the driver actually needs. This philosophy creates a calm, inviting and relaxing Scandinavian environment.

Before we round off, what do you think the car of the future will look like?

The exciting part of the future is that it’s completely unknown.?I’m still waiting for the day of a flying car like in “Back to the Future II”, but I’m not sure I’ll see that in my lifetime.?In the near term, the world of fully autonomous drive is more likely than fully flying cars and that’s a very exciting frontier.?This will change the way we think of a car and what “mobility” means in general.

In a few years’ time, Volvo Cars will be fully electric which is extremely exciting.?It offers new driving dynamics and attributes that aren’t so easily achieved today. The evolution of technology is happening at such a rapid pace that I believe this will become easier to integrate as we go along.?I’m excited to further explore how we can integrate these things in a seamless way with the customer’s experience at the forefront.