VOLVO ECC
In August 1991, Horbury became Volvo’s head of design, and early in the job, he travelled to the company’s design base in California, where his “fantastic team” was working on an 850-based gas turbine hybrid car. He immediately saw this as the chance to investigate Volvo’s exterior design at the same time, a plan that led to the Volvo ECC (for Environmental Concept Car), which he now describes as “the car that allowed me to change Volvo forever”.
Horbury put his new design team to work on a suitable concept and one sketch by a designer called Doug Frasher stood out, picking up partly on Volvo’s heritage but proposing the body ‘shoulders’ for which Volvos have since become well known, and the ‘Volvo bridge’, which frames the front and rear side glasses from above: “When Volvo’s CEO, Mr Gyllenhammar, saw it, he said: ‘Well, I don’t like that’, but I promised him that eventually he would…”
The car was well received when shown in 1992, which freed Horbury and his team to use its principles for a radically different S80 executive saloon, eventually launched in 1998. “We had a lot of opposition,” Horbury recalls. “Somebody wrote: ‘If this Englishman thinks this is a Volvo, he must have mad cow disease.’” But with Pehr Gyllenhammar’s blessing, Horbury’s team set about designing a range of successors to existing cars that used the ECC’S and new S80’s design cues, which did indeed change Volvos. And boosted sales.