Pinky Lai
| Pinky Lai | |
|---|---|
| Born |
March 20, 1951 British Hong Kong |
| Education | Istituto Superiore per le Industrie Artistiche (ISIA) of Rome |
| Occupation | Automotive designer |
| Years active | 1980–2014 |
| Employer |
Ford of Europe (1980–1983) BMW (1984–1988) Porsche (1989–2014) |
Pinky Lai (born 20 March 1951) is an automotive designer. During his tenure at Porsche AG from January 1989 until his retirement in 2014, he was chief designer responsible for the exterior designs of both the Porsche 987 Boxster and Cayman, as well as the 996 series of the Porsche 911.
In 1972 he moved to Rome, where he later gained a BA in Industrial Design at the Istituto Superiore per le Industrie Artistiche. When studying he saw an advertisement from Ford of Germany for a car designer and in 1978 he ended up receiving a two-year full scholarship on transportation design at the RCA Royal College of Art in London.
In the Spring of 1980, he was declared the Winner of the John Ogier Memorial Design Bursary of the Royal Society of Arts.
After his graduation with a MA from RCA in 1980, he started working for Ford Werke in Cologne, Germany. In 1982/83 he went on a joint venture project to work in Ghia Studios (Italy) and Mazda in Japan where he worked on a specialty car program as a result of winning the internal competition. Overall he worked on the Sierra, Fiesta, Escort and Scorpio projects.
After returning to Germany he joined BMW in 1984 as a senior designer. He won the Design of E36 program (the BMW 3 Series). In 1989, He was invited by the president of R&D of Porsche AG to join the design team (Porsche Styling) as studio chief. Since then, he has worked on all the models from the factory, from the Boxster to the Cayman including the revolutionary 996, the first major departure from Ferdinand Alexander "Butzi" Porsche's original design for the 911 in four decades.
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