Former Mazda designer for Renault
April 12, 2009 by David Twomey
Former Mazda and Ford designer Laurens van den Acker will succeed Patrick le Quement as head of design at French carmaker Renault.
Mr Van den Acker, 43, seen above explaining his Kazamai Concept, quit as head of design at Mazda earlier this month and will join Renault on May 15 before assuming Mr le Quement’s full responsibilities starting on November 1.
Dutch-born, Mr Van den Acker, is an experienced designer who had led Mazda’s corporate design since 2006, and visited Australia in December last year to extol the virtues of his newly designed Mazda3.
Before taking the Mazda post, Mr Van den Acker was chief designer for Ford’s Escape platform and was based at Ford’s design centre in Dearborn, Michigan. He has also done exterior design work for Audi in Germany and worked with specialist design companies in Turin, Italy and California.
Mr Le Quement, 64, who is retiring, leaves a contrasting history after 22 years steering Renault’s design activities.
On the positive side, the French designer was responsible for some of Renault’s design successes such as the Twingo city car and the first-generation Scenic, which launched the European compact minivan segment.
However, some of Mr le Quement’s designs won fans and critics in equal numbers and his second-generation Megane compact hatchback had a bulging rear end that horrified many people, but the car still sold well.
His Avantime and Vel Satis luxury cars had distinctive designs that equally did not go down well with buyers.
Mr Le Quement likely will be most clearly remembered for creating a global network of design centers to help Renault tailor the design of its cars to local markets.
Print it: 
If he signed off on the smilie face mazda 3 he should be fired.
So a German made some of the best car designs in history…no surprise really. Now the Frenchies want a German too.
Tim ,
If you are referring to Van den Acker then he is DUTCH, not sure he would want to be called a German.
Tom: get ready for lots of smiley Renaults as he invented the style at Mazda!
The 1st gen Mazda3 released in 2003 looks better and that was designed by Moray Callum. So it was Mr Van den Acker that gave the late Mazda cars smiley faces.
Looks like Renault might finally produce some decent looking cars.
So Renault will now get the Peugeot/Mazda front end and keep the bump rear end.
Should be good for uglier cars than Ssangyong.
Thank god Audi threw him out before he could do any damage…just had a browse around the Audi yard and the VW yard – beautiful stuff. The Golf VI looks good in the flesh, and there were a few MKV GTIs and Pirellis there as well.
Mazda’s loss, Renault’s gain. They need him. Desperately.
This guy did the Mazda Furai Le Mans racer which is possibly one of the most amazing looking vehicles of all time. Car Advice you should post a photo of the Furai in the article?
heh wonder why so many ppl are against the smily face. I actually liked it!
The smile is hard to pick out when actually seeing the car…but stocks out like dogs b*lls in pictures/designs.
I’m a little worried… I don’t know if Laurens van den Acker will be able to translate his design language to mesh well with Renault’s. Does this mean that the Laguna and Megane III willboth have a different look to the rest of the future Renault family?
Its not a good time to have one of their designers go to a rival, just as Mazda is designing cool and flashy cars,
About time given the latest designs coming from Renault. The latest Laguna and Megane are amongst the foulest looking cars this side of a Ssanyong.