Meet Fiat Chrysler’s head of design
Dubbed ‘King of Bling’ for work on the 300C, Ralph Gilles raised in Montreal is auto royalty
Automotive designer Ralph Gilles’ life story has all the elements of a Hollywood tale. As a young lad growing up in Montreal, Gilles, the son of Haitian-American immigrant parents, spent hours sketching and dreaming of cars. An aunt, impressed with his talent, sent samples of his drawings to Chrysler’s then chairman, Lee Iacocca, never imagining they’d get an answer. Instead, Gilles received a reply that recommended four top industrial design schools.
After completing high school, Gilles enrolled in engineering at Vanier College, his childhood dream forgotten, the letter long misplaced. It wasn’t a good fit. Unhappy, Gilles dropped out and spent the next few months in his parents’ basement, in a selfdescribed “funk.”
Upset at seeing such talent going to waste, his family rallied behind Gilles, encouraging him to apply to one of the design schools recommended in the long-gone but not-forgotten letter. He was accepted, he excelled and was hired immediately after graduating in 1992 by Chrysler.
“Ironically, the man who replied to that letter, is the same man I ultimately ended up working for,” says Gilles. “It’s a full-circle story.”
Gilles shot to the upper echelons of automotive designers with the overwhelmingly successful Chrysler 300C (winner of Motor Trend’s 2005 Car of the Year) and was dubbed “King of Bling” for the car’s daring and aggressive styling. He’s since held such top ranking positions as design director, vice-president of design and president and chief executive of the Dodge car brand. He was also president and chief executive of the SRT brand, helping to spearhead the short-lived, yet doggedly successful SRT racing program.
In April of 2015, Gilles was named head of design for FCA (Fiat Chrysler). He’s a busy guy, yet he was happy to sit down with us and tackle these 10 topics by filling in the blanks.
1) Automotive design is … looking for the white space in the market, which is increasingly more difficult as segments are being created and filled, but that’s usually our approach. Even if there’s an existing format, we try to “disrupt ourselves” — start from a clean sheet of paper, ask the right questions of our customers, ask them over and over again. You go at it from a humble approach and typically the results are better that way.
2) The car that inspired me to become an automotive designer was … the Porsche 928. I first saw it on the streets, and then again in that famous movie Risky Business.
As a designer, I love how it was ahead of its time; it was the first car with true pop-up headlights, fascias instead of bumpers, extremely aerodynamic shape, aluminum doors, flow-through cockpit … I forget the name of the designer (Wolfgang Moebius), but it was really ahead of its time. It didn’t so much inspire my designing, but the idea of designing, and how one car could look so different from another. Back then, the ’70s, was a pretty tough time for car design. I had models of it, a telephone of it … I was obsessed with that car.
3) My first car was … a 1981 Volkswagen Scirocco, by one of my favourite designers, Giugiaro. I loved it. It was one of those cars I saw as a young boy, seven years old, when I lived in Montreal, and I made a promise to myself it would be my first car when I had enough money to buy one.
4) The first automobile I designed was … I don’t believe one designer is responsible — it’s kind of “a village raises a child” — but I worked on the 300 and the Jeep Jeepster; I worked on the interior in that. And I worked on the Concorde interior, but that was more of a contributing role.
5) My favourite Mopar design is … the Viper, the current generation, and it’s for many reasons. I own two of them, a GTS and an ACR in the new body style. I just love it.
6) If I could develop any vehicle for the FCA brands, it would be … We’re doing it; it’s not a dream, it’s happening. The Alfas that we’re doing right now are beautiful. There are things in the hopper which I can’t talk about, some gorgeous machines. It goes back again to one day being a kid, when those vehicles are posters on your wall, to now, having a part in making them come true — I pinch myself every day.
That’s the toughest question for a head of design, what we’re working on next. I don’t want to spill the beans to our competitors but there’s some cool stuff, cool and relevant. We’re not as chatty as the other OEMs; there’s a lot of discourse out there about future product and autonomous cars — and we are working on that — but for our own reasons we’re not sharing it because we don’t think we should. Why should we? It will be ready when it’s ready.
I’m a little annoyed that people think we’re not concerned about it — we just don’t talk about it like everybody else. I think people are talking about their solutions prematurely. There’s a lot of vapourware out there.
7) The hardest part of designing an all-new automobile is … time. The market is moving quickly; we want to stay relevant. Cars take longer to do now than they ever have. We spend literally 300 per cent more time in the wind tunnel. We’ve compressed (digitally) with huge gains in surface development using digital technology, but we’ve replaced it with attention to detail. The interiors are much more labour intensive, safety regulations, durability testing, but aerodynamics is where we spend a lot of our time. And lighting has become its own monster; it’s hugely complex.
8) What riles me is … when I hear the Wall Street analysts say, “They’re giving up on fuel economy; they’re just doing trucks because they’re riding these fuel prices.” No, this is something we strategized when we thought prices were going to be high. C’mon, we don’t react to something that’s been in the market for a year. This is something that’s been strategized for a very long time — and, there are a lot more extremely efficient crossovers coming.
We’re living in a great time where you have compact crossovers. Look at the Renegade; it didn’t exist a year ago. And that is considered a truck, in our minds. A lot of people are opting out of sedans. It’s not something we decided; the market has decided this. The compact-sedan segment is gradually shrinking. It’s lost 10 per cent in the last two years, yet the crossover’s gained even more than that. But we’re not forcing people into trucks, or thinking only about trucks; we’re producing the lightest, most efficient trucks we ever have.
People love the utility, and they’re really not that much of a premium over sedans. If you go back 10 or 15 years ago, they were body-on-frame trucks, or stick-axle. They were extremely heavy; you would drop almost 30 per cent fuel economy by going to a truck. Now, it’s in the single-digits difference. So it’s really a different time, and now we’ve put it within reach. We’ve made more affordable, more compact vehicles getting the same mileage as a sedan did a few years ago. So let’s not attach fuel economy to the decision; it’s a market-driven thing.
9) My favourite classic FCA car designs are … the old Challengers, the E-bodies. Those things still turn your head — they’re timeless designs. And the ’Cuda — when I see a ’69-’70 ’Cuda, I become like a child. (Chuckles.)
10) In my garage right now I have … Well, I trust the auto collection market more than I do Wall Street right now, so I went on a bit of a spree last year: I bought a Hellcat Challenger, which I love; I splurged and got a Ferrari 458, and a Viper ACR. And my other childhood favourite, a 1969 Alfa Romeo GTV Junior — I’ve always lusted after it. I was at Design Auto Show and there was one on display and when I walked by it, I could feel my heart beating. I jokingly asked if it was for sale, and they said it was owned by a church. Technically, they said, if I bought it, I could write it off as a donation. So my wife bought it, and next thing I know, the car was in my garage.