Patrick le Quément

Patrick G. M. Le Quément (born 4 February 1945 in Marseille) is a retired French car designer, formerly chief designer of Renault. Born in France but brought up in the United Kingdom, Le Quément holds a BA Hons. degree in Product Design from Birmingham Institute of Art and Design, and an MBA from Danbury Park Management Centre.

Le Quément joined Simca of France in 1966 after graduation, but left and set up his own design business which failed. He returned to England and joined Ford in 1968 as a designer. Here his signature products included the Ford Cargo truck, and 1982's seminal Ford Sierra, ridiculed at the time for its jelly mould shape. The latter car was designed at Ford´s engineering and research centre in Merkenich, near Cologne, Germany. Promised promotion, he went to Detroit but returned to Europe in June 1985 when Carl Hahn, Chairman of the Volkswagen-Audi Group, invited him to set up a centre for Advance Design and Strategy.

In light of poor and declining sales, Renault then-chairman and CEO Raymond Levy recruited le Quément on a hunch that French design could jump-start the company. But before he took the job as Vice President, corporate design in 1987, le Quément demanded structural changes in the role of design at Renault, telling Levy: his department would no longer answer to engineering; outside consultants were removed; the design team was doubled to more than 350 people; the department took a seat on the executive board; and personally, le Quément answered to no one but the chairman. His team's products since have included Twingo, Mégane and Mégane II – which he later admitted in an interview with Automotive News Europe magazine, was too much of a bold design; Scénic; the Espace models of 1994 and 1998; Kangoo; Laguna models of 1994; Avantime and the Vel Satis of 2002.

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